The Two Weeks of Winter in Los Angeles (and chandelier pictures, finally)

Whatever semblance of a Winter we had here in Southern California appears to have come and gone. It's March 3rd and shorts weather, so my hubby and I set out on a productive afternoon about the Valley.

After getting up at 9 to work out and then cleaning up around the house for an hour or so, we ran out to Nissan to drop Tim's car off for its very first oil change.
Then Tim suggested we venture through parts of the Valley he'd never seen before. So, we essentially drove my old commute to Northridge, which has its fleeting moments of "oh, that looks interesting", but is mostly brown and ugly. Tim had not had Chik-Fil-A since college, so we decided to have lunch at the one that had recently opened near my old place of work.

Then we ran to Target to see if they had something Tim wanted to get his dad for his birthday, and while there got started shopping for patio furniture. That ended up being our project for the day. On our way back from Northridge, we got a call from the folks at Nissan and ran back to pick up his car.
After that, we only went to another Target, Walmart (which I whined about), Home Depot, and Costco to look at things for the patio, and made a short run to the mall to see if we could find some birthday gifts for our siblings (which was successful, by the way).

We were in the market for something inexpensive and small, since we only have a patio and not an actual yard. We ended up finding (but not really loving) these:

Too high and a little more than we wanted to spend

Cute, but super flimsy feeling

At Costco, we actually found some reasonably priced bistro pieces. Of course they don't have any pictures of them on the website, but they are surprisingly cute and SUPER reasonably priced. They also had all different types of fruit trees at Costco today. We decided to get a small lime tree to put out on our patio. When would it ever hurt to have a supply of fresh limes?
We had to be careful not to buy too many big things that they wouldn't fit in the car, so we skipped getting a pot for the lime tree and decided to go to Home Depot a little later.

I'd decided earlier that we should take Panda to the park today, so we made a quick trip out to the park to play fetch before we lost sunlight.
Then it was back out to Home Depot for a giant pot and some other miscellaneous patio items - like an awesome planter box  to grow my own root veggies (yum).

And then we were home for the night, mostly because I was knocked out by a totally awesome stomach turning migraine for about two hours, but after my hour long nap, I am now I am feeling a little too awesome and awake for almost 1am and trying to decide if working out tomorrow morning is a good idea.

Totally separate from the above, but I don't feel like posting a whole separate post for this: After we had the dining room painted, we decided it was time to hang the chandelier we'd had in the garage for over a year - a Christmas gift from my parents in 2010.
At the end of January, I went to Portland to visit my sister and came home to a new chandelier and chain hung from our terrifyingly high 20 foot ceilings by my husband and father-in-law. I'm so glad I wasn't home for that. I might have had a panic attack. Anyway, here's what it looks like:

I can't believe how long it took me to post this. I literally just stood up from my desk to take this picture and came back to load it. *sigh*

Off to bed with me. Hopefully this blog makes sense. It's late and I'm not sure how coherent I am.