Ode to Yesterday

Birdie, birdie, in the sky
Dropped a turdie in my eye.
Aren't we glad that cows don't fly?
Birdie, birdie, in the sky.

True story, but with an added bonus.

So we went to take out the trash yesterday, Emerson & I.  I didn't lock the door because I'd be as fast as possible now that it feels like 1000 degrees out there.  Anyway, upon arriving home, I found a lovely note on my door saying "Your apartment was sprayed today. - Pest Control."

How nice.  They come monthly so I wasn't surprised at all.  What wasn't so nice, however, was that they had locked me out.  Of my own apartment.  That wasn't previously locked.  GRRR.

So I was stranded in an oven AKA Mississippi.  My wheels kicked in gear and I marched the three flights of stairs back down to the office and explained the situation. 

On my way back with new key in hand, something wet splashed in my eye. And it stung like crazy.  So I figured it must be a little turdie, but after wiping my eye found nothing that resembles that stuff.  Nothing white, nothing black.  Just nothing.  So my subconscious guessed dew or sap or who-knows-what from the tree.  But it still stung, all the way up the roasting three flights of stairs back to my house.

It was only 2 hours later at home that I noticed I had turdie on my shirt.  So I knew the truth.  But I still didn't know how it splashed into my eye.  I mean, I wasn't exactly looking up when I was hit and I thought it was weird that it would've splashed off my shirt all the way up into my eye.  But whatever.  Gravity does weird things I guess. 

Well at dinner, Will kindly asked what was on my glasses. 

"Oh, that's just the poop that ricocheted into my eyeball causing stinging and seemingly imminent eyeball death."

In sum, I and my shirt and my glasses sustained birdie turdie while being locked out by no doing of my own.  As my mother pointed out to me via a sympathetic text, at least the day could only get better :)

Vacaaaaaaaation!

The last time Will and I vacationed somewhere other than to our parent's homes was years ago.  In fact, we've only done it twice: our honeymoon to SLC and then Disneyland, and then a quick weekend trip to Six Flags.  Other than those, we have always planned our vacations to visit family.  We prefer it that way.

This year, however, we decided to splurge a little bit (while still saving every cent we possibly could since we're on a tight student budget) and planned for ourselves a Tour of the South.  We figured we should explore the southern states while we're here because, let's be honest, we know we don't want to settle here and we don't plan on coming back to visit anytime in the upcoming years.  The west is where we want to stay after we're done with our Mississippi spree.

Mass amounts of photos will follow in later posts, but first a quick itinerery for you:

Day 1 - Talladega (race track tour that made Will giddy) and mostly just driving to Atlanta
Day 2 - the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola
Day 3 - Peek into SC while heading to Charlotte for the Nascar Hall of Fame
Day 4 - Stay in North Carolina and stop in Asheville to remind ourselves how poor we really are in comparison to those who can afford a tour of the Biltmore mansion ($59/ea = ya-right-not-in-this-lifetime)
Days 5 & 6 -  Can you say choo choo?  Chattanooga for a great stay that made us not want to leave.
Days 7 & 8 - Nashville, the home of country music.
Day 9 - Memphis, Beale Street, and the Mississippi River
Day 10 - Drive 6 hours home & commence lounging
We made it back with a day to spare.  After a trip like this, we figured we should build in a day to rest from our vacation (and do laundry before Will has to get back to work).

We had such a fantastic time and learned a lot about a lot.  Future posts will provide all the details including some pics and a list entitled "Things we never EVER thought we'd see."  Stand by for that beauty.

New furniture!

Well, kinda.  I decided to give our old furniture a face lift.  I love the look of white on dark and vice versa.  The contrast is refreshing, so I thought I'd give it a try on two of our useful-but-darn-ugly furniture items: a lamp table and a coffee table.

Before shots:

I first had to sand everything.  I took pictures of the sanded pieces, but they don't look much different than the originals so I'm going to forego posting them.  The tops were slated to be white and the bottoms a dark stain.  I sprayed the tops first so that I wouldn't have to spray after already staining.  By the way, I'm a complete novice, so luckily Will was able to walk me through buying and using the products.  Later in the process I also put a call in to my MIL and received some great advice.  Here are some 'in progress' photos:

This is after paint, before stain.

After 1st coat of stain.  I used Minwax Dark Walnut.

Will took apart the coffee table, making the whole process much easier and worry-free.  Here is the sprayed table top:

An I-need-you-mom love for my legs:

Taking a break for a little cuddling. 

Here are the legs after stain.  Cans of beans were the props.  They were sprayed and dripped on and now they are first in line to be used from the pantry.  I only used one coat of stain on the legs since they were already pretty dark to begin with.  Another coat would've made them look almost black.

I left the lamp table plain, but I wanted the coffee table to have a little character.  I picked out a stencil from Hobby Lobby and, after some great advice from Patty (like practice on a box beforehand, which I did), got to dobbing a dark gray pattern onto the table top.  Here it is before removing the stencil. 

Here is the first half of the stencil done.  We measured and measured and measured again to make sure we had it straight and centered and even.  Try to get something straight on an oval.  There are no corners from which to measure so we spent almost as much time measuring as I did stenciling. 

We did well, though.  It's straight.

Before doing the other half.  I kinda like the negative look - it's pretty nifty.

Final product after days and days of waiting and drying and waiting some more because of all the humidity and a rainstorm in the middle of the process.

The table top from above:

The final product in some bad lighting:

They both got a few coats of spray lacquer to protect the surfaces. 

And now here are the before and after shots so you don't have to scroll all the way up

and back down to see them.

I love them.  They are so much more current than the previous versions of themselves.  They were a fun project and turned out well for being my firsts.  I hope to do some more furniture updating in the future. 

Easter 2012

For Easter this year, we decided to dye eggs, although Emerson was still a little young to be participating.  He had a lot of fun and we had a lot of laughs. 

Our table sustained only a little pink stain.

Emerson was in charge of putting the eggs on the spoons. 

He did so well although he really just wanted to play in the dye. 

 Waiting for them to be finished was hard, too.

Egg on deck.

E was also in charge of putting the finished eggs in the carton. 

His hands were sure colorful at the end of the evening.

He had fun moving them from place to place when we were all done. 

He was fascinated by them.

1st Quarter Update

Remember when I laid out my goals for 2012?  Well, I initially planned on doing quarterly updates but forgot until now.  So although I'm a month late, I'm doing a 'quarterly update' anyway. 

Here's a quick list of the goals along with the update for each goal:

1. Get prego.  Nada. Don't even get your hopes up because I'm trying not to either.
2. Update personal history.  I still need to find it (I have it saved on a cd) before I can update it.  But last time I updated it I had just finished the 10th grade so I need to hurry and find it and get started.
3. Food storage.  We bought a 20lb bag of rice the other day.  Does that count?
4. Compile Emerson's 1st year.  I had a major brain fart when we were packing and decided I wouldn't need my scrapbook/craft supplies, so I'm trying to figure out a way to do this.  Possibilities include digital scrapbooking, creating a separate me-only-access blog to at least get the information down and maybe print a book later, or buying new supplies and starting fresh.  Any other suggestions for how to do this (relatively inexpensively, please) would be greatly appreciated.
5. Read the 4 books listed.  I finished The King's Cavalier (historical fiction set in 17th century France) and am plugging my way through The Name of the Rose (medieval murder mystery).  I highly recommend the former novel, although it's out of print so maybe Amazon is your best bet (?).  I borrowed a copy myself. 
6. 72 hour kits. We have them. They need updated (Emerson would suffer greatly in a disaster - no diapers, no pacifiers, no chocolate chips).  I'll just get on that already because, especially with hurricane season rapidly approaching, we should have them ready to go at any time.
7. Blog weekly.  Boo-ya.  Still going strong.
8. Workout 3 times/week for 20 min.  Um...I started out really well.  P90X was my best friend.  Then our good 'old dvd player from the Goodwill only let me do 24 min out of 60 min before it froze up.  A few days later it was only 17 min with interruptions which dragged it out to 40 min of frustating bicep curls.  My cardio workout was more like a really lame warm up.  So we're trying to come up with a way I can workout at home (no jogging stroller for us).  Until then, my exercising has been put on pause.
9. Take one name to the temple.  I did better.  My parents and I were able to take a few family names to the temple while I was in Utah.  Great experience with them.  New temple goal:  Go to the temple (it's a 3 hour drive one way which equals a full day trip - not an excuse to never go, but more planning required now).
10. Finish Ensign conference issues.  I've finished the issue from the last conference and just received my new issue this week.  After I review a few of the talks that honestly went over my head from the last issue, I'll start on the new one.  Can't wait.

After a quick analysis, I'd say I'm doing pretty well with my goals.  I have some areas where I could improve (ahem, working out even a little bit would be better than admitting defeat because of the dvd player, right), and of course I'll keep at them, but overall, so far so good.