Hello, it's us (we've been wondering if after all this time you'd like to read about our house still).

Hey guys, just wanted to say that we're still here and we still talk about the blog and you guys and working on the house and hopefully someday soon I'll post some "real" content again. We keep bumping into old friends who want to know what we've been up to on the house and since I've officially left my day job (hooray!) to work on Lamphouse full-time, I might have a few minutes here and there to do some actual work on the ol' girl. It is her 99th year after all, so she deserves a little extra care and maybe, just maybe, some paint. No promises, though ; ) 

In the mean time, here's a round up of what we've been up to in the year and some months since I posted last: 

For my birthday last April, my folks agreed to work on building a little "patio" for our backyard. Call me crazy but I do NOT like sitting around the fire pit, feeling all the little creepy crawlies on my feet so it was "Goodbye grass!" and hello pavers, edging, and mulch. *Sorry in advance for the cell phone pics y'all*

First, we measured, dug a hole, leveled everything out...

...then the rains came and...unleveled things. We put gravel and sand underneath the pavers and then added new edging and mulch, along with a little half wall and a mini berm. 

Here's a crap shot I took from our sunroom windows (are they dirty? I can't tell). 

And yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, that is an ABOVE GROUND POOL. Listen, when you live in Kansas and you don't have central AC, you do what you gotta' do. And I gotta' pool. It cost about $150 and we spent almost every.single.night. bobbing up in down in there, smelling the moonflowers, and bringing our body temperature back down to a reasonable level before going to bed. 

Sure, it makes me want to listen to High Life every time I look at it and sure it looks like a little eyesore in this photo (the grasses on the berm have grown considerably since this was taken) but man, it's a treat. 

Conan built my little boardwalk you see there out of scrap wood we had lying around and it helps keep the dirt out of the pool. 

I still want to do some type of lighting underneath the little bench edge and maybe paint or affix some fake stone to those cinder blocks but it's our little oasis and now...get this...we actually USE our backyard instead of just staring at it from the laundry room windows all summer long! 

Which is awesome because...MOONFLOWERS!! They are by far, the best part about summer in Kansas. They love the heat, don't mind the dry spells, and they smell like perfume. 

Around the same time, Conan got a wild hair (no pun intended for that wild hair pic down there lol) and decided he was sick of our basement being a totally messy, unusable space so he cleaned the whole thing out, drylocked the walls, and built work benches and shelves. There's even a little spot for the mini fridge! (Oh, and Shorty "helped"). 

Next up, we headed to Estes Park for our 7th summer of hiking until it hurts. Or, as we call it, ~a very relaxing vacation~ lol. 

Here's Conan on our descent from Mt. Chiquita 

It was pretty hazy this year which was a bummer for summits but it did make for some incredible, sort of Great Smoky Mountain-style sunsets. Here's Conan in Moraine Park, near our campsite. 

The rest of the summer and most of the fall was devoted to Lamphouse and all that photobooth-ery but we did manage to make it to our friend's wedding in Philadelphia and have a 16 hour whirlwind tour of New York as well. 

We left Wichita and drove to Kansas City at 3 am and when we arrived at Newark, we immediately just went to Penn Station and started walking. The whole day was incredible but also like a weird, half-asleep, half-awake dream. 

We walked from Penn Station to the Freedom Tower then across the Brooklyn Bridge and then trained it back to Newark. Phew! 

Philly was beautiful. So much history and neat buildings. We pretty much had the same game plan as New York outside of the wedding-y stuff: walk and walk and walk and walk. 

On our last afternoon, we walked down to Independence Seaport Museum and blew Conan's tiny, boyhood mind but WALKING AROUND IN A SUBMARINE! If you look closely, you can see him actually losing it : D 

For Conan's 35th birthday in February, we went out to Estes Park with our Philly friends for a two day run around RMNP. It was so neat to finally see what the park looks like in winter after seeing it in only the summer for so many years. 

The past couple of months have been spent getting back to photo booth stuff. We took the "Lampy" camper out for a run of photos last month. It's the first time she's left the driveway in a couple of years and she handled it like a champ. You can see all of the portraits we took and developed here on our Facebook page. 

And last but certainly not least, we added another Birdie Booth to our fleet! Now we officially have two indoor photo booths, the Grand Wagoneer Photo Booth, and ~occasionally~ the Lampy camper.

Here's Birdie #2 in our dining room this past Saturday before her first event <3

I think that pretty much brings things up to speed. 

Just a couple of low lifes, livin' the high life

travelin' all over

buildin' photo booths like it's compulsory

still NO paint on the house since we started prep like, two years ago ughhhhh....

Until next time, 

Keep Smiling! 

~ Katherine