Oh Vacation You Are So Beautiful To Me

Okay I like my job, but let's just be honest a much needed vacation every once in awhile is so, so nice. Although I still have a hard time turning my organizing little brain off. Maybe I'll make that a new year's resolution: stop and smell the roses!!

So thanks to some abnormally warm weather in t-town, we've been busy. Okay Spencer's been busier than me, but I helped :). The roof is done on the shed!

Thanks to a coworker of mine who had an ancient compressor and nail gun the job was not quite so miserable, but still roofing by floodlights since the sun goes down at five is not fun, okay I'm postulating here since I never actually did any roofing haha. All I ever did was cook dinner or buy joe mammas for the troops :).

Here's where my part came in: the cleanup! So yesterday it was a balmy 65 degrees in Tulsa, so we went to work on all the shingles and decking and random pieces of wood that were all over the yard. (See I'm really not so good at chilling on my vacation days haha). We took a load over to the dump, which by the way those people have made a couple hundred bucks off us during this whole process! Who knew it was 30 bucks to dump shingles! Something about their weight makes it more expensive to haul off. haha probably TMI :)

So after a couple hours of clean up and listening to blitzy bark at the broom in the shed ;) here's the progress! Okay I know it looks like an abandoned building with an oddly new roof, but it's all winterized in case Tulsa decides to ever enter the winter season this year :). And the yard is almost entirely free of shingles! I have a little more work to do in the corner, but that's by the crazy neighbor dog and I was getting tired haha.

So we also bought this book for Christmas called The Backyard Homestead for my sister since she's about to learn how to run a small scale farm. We loved looking at the book so much we bought ourselves a copy and I think I've almost read the whole thing already, well apart from the chapter on raising your own livestock haha I do live in the city thank you very much. But anyway it tells you how to use your quarter of an acre (which we actually have thanks to our corner lot!) to grow thousands of lbs of veggies and plant fruit trees and nut trees and have chickens ha not so sure about that one yet, but who knows maybe I'll raise chickens someday. One of our neighbors has them! Anyway so I might be asking around for veggie recipes this summer when I get tired of sauteeing them ;).

Alright so I'm bound and determined to make a list of resolutions, mostly just because I like to make myself dream big about what could happen in the next year :). We'll see what crazy things I come up with for 2011. Last year's list had get a dog on it and what do you know? haha we have a dog! And she is losing teeth haha. Spencer stepped on one this morning!

Okay just some mini highlights from vacation:

- seeing the fam, playing speed scrabble, drinking two cups of double shot before eating on Christmas morning (talk about distracted!), catching up with highschool friends, meeting possible future spouses :)

- seeing the other side of the fam, eating thai cafe, seeing evelyn!!! haha and shane and sherry in aspen coffee shop (the smallness of stillwater never ceases to amaze me), getting a kitchenaid mixer!!! haha I feel like a real housewife now, too bad I still have to go to work every day instead of staying home and baking haha please read sarcasm into that ;)

- hanging out at home in t-town, cleaning the yard, playing with our puppy, drinking topeca coffee and not having to rush because I'm on an impromptu break from work, getting our 8000 dollar home owners tax credit finally!!! woo hoo!!!!

I love vacation!!!!

Breaking the China

Okay make that breaking the china in. I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition. So you know how you register for china when you get married? And then you wonder when am I going to use this?! I mean I'd love to use it at thanksgiving but I only have six sets of it and we had 12 people. And I'm sorry but mixing and matching fiesta ware and china is not my style :). So we decided why not just break it in on a random wednesday night with some friends?



So I got all set up for our fancy meal with our neighbors David and Kat and our other neighbors the lovely gelzergovatoses who also live less than half a mile away from us. And no we don't have a weird neighborhood click, sometimes we just like eating together :). Ha I just realized Blitzy is in the background of this picture.

So I slaved away for hours on end in the kitchen to make a lovely dinner to match the occasion of using our wedding china for the first time.

And yep did you guess it? We had take out pizza. And we broke out the cyrstal glasses and filled them full of yep you guessed it, okay maybe not, miller high life and dr. pepper. What can I say we are just that classy :).

And in case you've been worrying about our poor little dog out in the cold, suffering on these long windy lonely nights you can STOP your worrying. She loves her little dog house, and she loves her wood shavings. Now we call her our little gerbel dog because she smells like a gerbel all the time!!! Only problem is she does not love it when we hang out in the house without her. She is such a whiny baby sometimes! Always wanting to hang out with us ;). Dogs are definitely good for your self esteem.

There you go Alisha :). It was a little later than the weekend, but it was close!!

'Tis the Season

'Tis the season for tearing down roofs and littering the yard with nails.

'Tis the season for building up dog pens so your 4 month dog doesn't jump a four foot fence.

'Tis the season for teaching your 4 month old dog how to "shake" guys it's about the cutest thing. Ever. You should come and see.

Oh yeah and 'Tis the season for Christmas!! And Sufjan Stevens' version of Come Thou Fount! And the smell of a freshly (I know I'm romantizing here haha considering we shop at Lowe's) cut Christmas trees and garlands. And a million Christmas parties. And spiked apple cider. And leaf candles. And pizza and china. More on that later :).

So yeah Spencer's been hard at work on the shed. All the demo work is done, and he's replaced most of the beams already. Then we had a crew from TU come and help us last weekend which was AWESOME. They had been doing habitat for humanity all semester long on Saturdays and were done with the habitat house for the semester so they came and helped us!! They got all the decking done on one side!! All while I laid in bed and was lazy okay actually I had the stomach flu, I would have much rather been roofing than well you can guess. They said they might be able to come this weekend too! So our job for the week is to clean up as much of the torn down roof and shingles and beams as possible so they can work on the other side of the decking.

Here you go: the lovely decking on one side. I'd take pictures during the day but it is always dark these days, I guess 'tis the season for gloominess. Ha no I do not hide my emotions well.

Okay I was trying to get a picture of Spencer's awesome beam cutting handiwork, but it's not the best shot. These are all wood pieces he cut to size with his myriad of tools :). Good thing he knows how to use them all!

Oh yes and Blitzy likes to help too. Ha actually she cries the whole time we work on it because she wants to be part of the action and we don't want her stepping on nails so we put her in the pen instead of letting her out. So then once the work is over and we let her out, where does she go? Yep you guessed it, sniffing around the nail ridden, dust infested shed. Oh well :).

The lovely temporary sky light on the side that isn't decked yet.

Okay this is our giant puppy. And we love her so we had to put a pic of her up. She's already 40 lbs!!! And did we mention she does shake now? :)

Okay so on to other news, we've been decorating for Christmas!! I still need something for the top shelf, but for now this'll have to do :). I'm just excited to be getting to put up all the decorations in our new house!! Okay we had it last Christmas but you might recall last Christmas all it was, was a bunch of studs, so that's not so fun to decorate :).

And of course the Christmas tree!!

Okay I'm getting tired, so the pizza and china story will have to wait for tomorrow :). Okay probably more like this weekend haha.