Tomato Smackin' Dog Lovin' Graduation

We wanted to post a quick update (like you haven't been waiting with baited breath). Really, this is just a way to give Olivia an excuse to post a few pictures of the first tomatoes in our little victory garden out back. This garden was started a little early this spring and has come along with sporadic TLC and a surprising amount of waiting around for a handful of produce. Edgy Gardening Tip:

I was starting to think we might have to give up on tomatoes after watching the plants get bigger and better looking for the past 2 and 1/2 months. Then, I read in an online forum on organic gardening (plan on hearing about this type of thing a lot) about the potential for literally beating your tomato plants into production. Yes, that's right, some gardeners believe that if you smack your tomatoes around a bit, they go into a state of distress and quickly bloom to try to reproduce before conditions become so harsh that it is too late. This soon resulted in my smacking our four tomato plants around like they owed me rent! I believe they may have quickly realized that I wasn't quite right and thought that if they didn't start giving up the good stuff quick like, I was crazy enough to get medieval on their (edited for content)! They might have just needed a little more time and a timely watering, though. You be the judge... Though our tomato's are just getting started, we have picked a few squash and zucchini already. We have also picked one green bell pepper so far.

Now, one of these is from our local grocery store and the other is from our garden. One is large and lovely, the other withered and repugnant. Can you guess which we are responsible for? Whatever, it tasted like victory. Tomatoes weren't the major developments around the Johnston house this week. Madison officially graduation from 5th grade on Wednesday, June 3rd. Wow! She received seven awards, one of which was for "Best Attitude". Now we have to put up with all that extra ego this summer. She's BIG TIME now.

Last day of fifth grade!!

Seriously though, we are so proud of her and can't believe she's going to be going to middle school next year. Belton Middle School, Tigers...Holla!!! Sorry, my wife tells me that I should throttle back on the exclamation points but, she doesn't realize that sometimes you simply must REPRESENT!!!

At this point, as I warned you earlier, please avert your gaze/gouge out your eyeballs quickly...its the first annual Bella Love Fest! The following pictures were sent from our family to the good people at the Williamson County Humane Society (where we adopted Bella) to give them an update on Bella's first year in her "forever home". Enjoy!

You just threw up in your mouth a little bit, didn't you?

Grand Opening...

Welcome,

This is our family's first blog although this has been something that we've been planning diligently for months. That is just the way we do things around here. We like to go back and forth on things like a blog name until we are so sick of even thinking about it that we wonder why we ever wanted a blog in the first place. By the way, have you seen how clever some people's names for their blogs are? That's just too much pressure. Anyways, we decided to use a name that symbolizes the many wishes, dreams (simple though they may be) and procrastinations of our life.

I think we should take a few lines to introduce this family before we get too far. This blog is the brainchild of my beautiful and very motivated wife, Olivia aka, Livvy Fay, aka, Little Mommy Poopie-pants. I am her sidekick and reluctant writer-husband, Jack aka, John, aka, the Kid.

Our daughter, Madison, aka Madi, aka, Madi-Girl,

who is a crafty scrapbooker/Guitar Hero Rockstar will chime in from time to time.

The silent partners (at least as far as what you'll see written here) are our two idiot cats, Tex and Cassie,

and our goofy dog, Bella aka, Beans.

You'll see so many pictures of them on this blog that I feel obligated to give this disclaimer:

WARNING: If you don't really love sappy pictures of other peoples pets you should probably look away now. Seizures or at least irritable bowel syndrome may result. Enjoy!

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I am a real hoot. Or at least, some sort of a moron. My wife is a budding wiz at photography and we hope to be able to share some of her hobby with our friends here.

So, that's the crew here and now your probably wondering about the name for our blog. The creative and symbolic explanation for our name is that the idea of a purple door represents a small step in reaching our dreams of making a life of our own for this family, of making our mark on this life and this crazy world, and, it represents a forum for sharing those dreams with friends, family and millions of random internet strangers. Or, it might be that we just painted our front door a really cool purple shade and that we are not very clever. Surprisingly, it actually was the first and as of this past weekend, the second is also true.

Before

a work in progress~

For the most part here at The Purple Door though, we'll keep things fairly straightforward (Sorry, deep thinkers). Maybe Olivia's photos will dazzle you enough that you'll be willing to check back now and then to deal with whatever I've been told to write about as well. It might come across as somewhat pretentious to suggest that our weird interests are important enough to post for all to see but, this blog will also serve as our forum to post on what we like, dislike, and think is simply fantastic. Again, for Olivia this will mean pretty pics, some school and other life events. For Madison, there's really no telling...but prepare to be AMAZED!!! And from me, you'll probably have to put up with Organic Gardening, Notre Dame Football, and an unbelievable number of idiotic projects. Hopefully, digging holes in the yard to bury dog and cat feces won't keep me away from the keyboard too often but, you really never can tell.

That's probably more than enough for now. If this hasn't driven you screaming in sheer terror from you monitor, we'll see you back here next time. Thanks for stopping by.