Giveaway

This is pretty much my new FAVORITE jewelry site...I want to win something!

They're doing a giveaway over at The Vintage Pearl. Go check it out! :o)

Something new to love :o)

YAY!!!

I'll try to make this short! I'm just so excited!

I was at D.I. last night and found a sewing machine!!

It's beautiful.

In fact, it's vintage cream and brown.

I don't think anyone else would've seen it as anything to stop and gaze at, but I've been DYING without one!!

I didn't sew that much at home, but now that i'm trying to decorate things (and mending pants for my man...) i've been quite anxious for this machine.

My mom was going to send one to me with a friend who's coming out this weekend, but she opened it up and it was a dinosaur. So, it didn't make it to cold, frigid Rexburg.

I love this thing :o) I can't wait to get started! Appropriately, Mitch ripped more pants yesterday...these were brand new, actually, and he has no idea how it happened...he's blaming the "big, fat guy who tried them on in the dressing room, bent over, and ripped them..."

He'd kill me if he knew I was talking about this to all of the HUNDREDS that read this....yeah right!

Your secret is in no danger here, sweetie :o)

I'll post pictures soon!

For now, here's a fun one from our apartment!

I don't have a ton of pictures uploaded yet because I keep changing things (and liking them better after I shift them around a bit...). However, I did get all my prints from shutterfly this week! So, the photo collage in our dining room is finally done! Exciting :o)

Okay...finally...

Time for some pictures!!

This is what I have edited so far...plus i'm always tweaking things and finding that I like them better that way, so i'm afraid to post some old pictures! Right now it'll just be a sneak peek because we've changed a lot of things. (New washer and dryer, more kitchen and room decor, etc.) This is the RELAX sign I made awhile ago...let's see if I can find a better picture of it...I wonder if Microsoft took it with everything else....ahhh, there it is! The one on the left is it hanging in my apartment before I got married. I needed a project one day, so I walked to the craft store and picked some of the stuff up; some I already had. PS--the curtains in the first picture are like a sage green...not pukey like in the picture!

This is the curtain we put up in our kitchen to separate it from the "laundry room"...if you can call it that! If we didn't have it there'd be a small wall (kind of) separating the fridge from the washer...they're right next to each other! We found it on sale at Target, where we had gift cards, so that was fun! It has red and green and blue and yellow, my "kitchen colors."

Here's the last one for today: this is a really cool shower gift given to me by Diana Chambers. She's always ahead of the upcoming trends: i'd never seen anything like this before, but it says DOOLEY! How cool is that!? Now i'm seeing them everywhere and I feel COOL to have the "first" one! We think it'll look really cool in Mitch's office one day (you know, in 203948 years when we're out of school and he's an optometrist!) But for now it has a new home above our entertainment center :o)

Well, that's it for now...i'll try to take some more soon!

Sorry, Microsoft deary, you FAIL!!!

So on Thursday/Friday (can't remember which!) we had MAJOR problems with my computer.

I took it to our school's computer help desk (yay, free services to students!!) and they asked me if some warning they saw popped up a lot...I told them YES!! My computer runs so slow!!! WELL, it turns out the warning said something like this...
MICROSOFT EXPLORER HAS ENCOUNTERED A PROBLEM AND MUST CLOSE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPORT THIS PROBLEM?

(This is normally when I slam NOOOO! for the ummmteenth time and go steal Mitch's laptop...)

Anyway, this warning apparently triggered the sweet nerdy man helping us to say something like this...
YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM IS FRIED, and the only solution is to reformat your hard drive, erasing everything and restoring it all to factory settings……

FAIL, Microsoft. F.A.I.L.

I was thinking some other choice, 4-letter words at this point.

So, $100 later, we'd come back to the help desk and back to the sweet nerdy man with an external hard drive so we could save my stuff before they erased EVERYTHING.

Plus, they told us if we left our computer it would wait in a great, big, long line behind several others...if we stayed, they'd fix it with us right then and there.

Much to Mitch's despair, we waited. For FOUR hours. Count 'em, four. From 1 to 5.

On laundry day, of all days!!

Anyway, I lost something like 2100 pictures. Shoot me in the foot. The only pictures that transferred to our external drive was everything past our engagement pictures...so I have all the ones with my sweetie in em, but nothing before him! (And we only dated for like 15 minutes before we got engaged, so.... :o)

So that's my excuse for not uploading pictures yet. I've been crazy busy reinstalling Microsoft Office, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft PhotoSuite, Picasa, etc., with the product keys they searched my computer for and FOUND!

My little laptop works SO much better and faster now, but i'm still a little bitter about how much I lost...it's like going home and walking into a hotel with the 2 suitcases worth of stuff you brought waiting for you instead of being home!

And i'm complaining about all these things while the poooor people in Haiti are suffering indescribably worse! Oh man, have I got work to do!!

Didn't I have a blog once?

So i've forgotten about my poor, little, unread blog! Oops!

I'm posting pics of our new apartment this week: it's almost all done except the 2nd bedroom (our study/whatever doesn't have a place room...it's all the complex had and we spent 2 semesters looking for a home!), and I have a few pictures to put up...well, the frames are up, the pics just aren't printed yet.

So we'll see how for how long the fake family with model faces entertain us.

My favorite rooms are the kitchen and the bathroom...and our WALK-IN closet!!

(Hello!? Girl + her 528238512 shoes and 39395209678 clothes = great appreciation for a huge closet--well the biggest i've ever had!)

So, we'll see what pictures I can take and upload with my FABULOUS new camera (yay Christmas presents!) and get on here for all of you...well, for the 4 people that ever read this! :o)

School started yesterday and we're both dreading the routine but looking forward to the learning and getting closer to graduating...at this point we both feel like we're on one of those ten-year plans for a Bachelor's degree....smack in the middle, no end in sight! :o)

I hope everyone's Christmas and New Year were wonderful. I'll hafta post pictures of that too!

Happy Birthday, Mitch! :o)

Okay, so i'm a little late on this...Mitch's birthday was December 2nd. I was so lucky to have the day off so I could make his cake! It's one that i've wanted to make for someone for years but never have! (And now i'm fresh out of original cake ideas...)

Here are some pictures :o)


Here are the rest of the ingredients I used--pretty simple, really!



And the finished product:



Now for a top view:

I had so much fun making it! It was a near disaster until I started frosting it...turns out cakes need something like 300000 hours to completely cool!

All he asked for were church clothes, so that's pretty much all he got, plus some movies. Nothing exciting!

Love you baby! Can't wait to spend many, many more birthdays with you! :o)

Eight Special Guests

About a week ago, we (my in-laws and our family) had a family over for dinner and fun. They usually don't get invited many places and were thrilled to come!

It's not like any of them are weird or unsocial...it's just that they have

4 Quadruplets, who happen to be TWO years old, plus a 6 and 8 year-old. So, needless to say, they're quite the houseful!

We decided we could handle them and got ready for them to come over.

Mom and Dad Dooley made dinner and got activities ready, Ethan provided the jungle gym (he's going to be a great uncle to climb all over someday!), and the rest of us just served as the "big people" that the mom and dad of these special 6 would need.

We started the night by listening to Brooklyn, their oldest, play a song on the piano, then listened to Jayna play a song on the harp. One of the little quads was just mesmerized by the harp and tried to sneak off to it and touch those strings all night (she succeeded many times...)


Then we made peanut butter playdough! They loved it and it was all completely edible! We sent it home in baggies so we could get ready for dinner, tater tots and chicken nuggets, with steak for the adults. :o)

Then we led them all downstairs to watch a Disney movie they'd never seen. They picked "A Bug's Life." None of us had seen it in a long time: what a cute movie! Ethan got attacked by 4 two year olds, over and over and over, and was such a good sport by letting these little ones climb all over him!

Afterwards, we had cake and ice cream for dessert, played some more, discovered Ethan and Jayna's Halloween candy (woo hoo!) and after getting to know them all very well, they went home.

We all let out a sigh of exhaustion, wondering how these parents did this EVERY day!! They are so wonderful and a great family to share the ward with.

That night I doubled up on my birth control :-P