Bring Thy Harvest Home

I was home this past weekend in St. Louis. God is good, all the time right? Well this was one of those weekends where it was just really obvious that God is good, even to my limited, tired brain.

I saw my best friend from high school get married. She was glowing and it made me cry - more than once. So many good memories there.

I rode up to StL with another one of my good friends from high school and talked all about being married and trying to understand our husbands. Healing was happening between us, along with a major sugar high from all the now and laters I ate haha. I've got to stop eating a pound of sugar on every road trip!

I got to talk to Alisha face to face which always makes me smile, even if things are complicated. Lots of answered prayers there too.

This weekend my family is all here in Tulsa, eating lots of food, re-enacting the Flesch family singers, playing mario cart, and talking about life. Oh and drinking lots of wine and did I mention eating?! David and Kat were here too. And Spencer's parents. And our whiny little dog who just makes me smile. I just felt really surrounded by people I love (yes I know Blitzy is not a person haha).

And yet there are still confusing things going on. Undercurrents of stress and tiredness and sadness and overwhelmingness in it all. I'm not good at resting either, so that adds to the feeling of sadness I think when I finally pause and sit still for a day or two.

We sang "Come, Thee Thankful People Come" at church this past weekend, and I was laughing inside during the first verse because it's a little hokey to me, but by the final verse I could very much understand where the author was. Come Lord Jesus quickly come.

"Even so, Lord, quickly come, bring thy final harvest home; gather thou thy people in, free from sorrow, free from sin, there, forever purified, in thy presence to abide; come, with all thine angels, come, raise the glorious harvest home."

The Joy of Driving

It's fall!! I'm sitting out on my porch with Blitzy and it's seventy and blue skies and pretty much ridiculously nice outside. I'm trying to not think about the fact that soon it will be dark as soon as I get off work. So here's my list of things I like about fall to keep me from thinking about the fact that fall means winter is coming :).

- pumpkin spice lattes
- my new found love of soups (haha yes mom I know you told me so, but I still don't like bean soup!!)
- the fact that our garden is still putting out tomatoes and jalapenos and basil and egg plant and even bell peppers! hopefully it wont' freeze before some of them are ready, or maybe i'll just find a recipe for fried green tomatoes :)
-boots!
-leggings!
-layering!
-getting to burn the chimnea and sit out on the porch
-wanting to take blitzy for walks again since it's finally nice out again and not 115 degrees haha
-and last but not least, getting to drive with the windows down and the sun roof open and blaring music without feeling totally ridiculous (because let's be honest I still do this when it's 95 out, it's just not nearly as enjoyable haha)

So what do you guys think? Any new found loves during the fall season?

Okay so most of you probably know this by now but we got a new car!!! Which takes the cruising around in the nice weather to a whole new level!! Check out Spencer's new car:




Yep it's pretty ridiculous and I feel a bit out of my league every time I get to drive it, but it is AWESOME!!! And I never thought I would actually get to have one sitting in our driveway so it's even more AWESOME!! Ha can you tell it makes me feel like a little kid :). I am now getting to enjoy the Joy of Driving. Okay unless you a BMW stalker like me that probably means nothing to you, but it makes me smile.

So you should all come visit us and we'll take you for a ride and buy you pumpkin spice lattes and umm make you soup :). Okay enough talk about pumpkin spice lattes I think I'm going to go get one and sit outside and read!

Sweet Relief

Oklahoma was the hottest state ever on record for the month of July.

And today it is so beautiful outside I just want to sit on my front porch all day long and read. I think I might get pretty close to actually doing that :). I'm also making some banana muffins and I've got some red peppers and tomatos from the farmer's market I want to freeze, so it looks like I'll be periodically checking the oven in between my hours of reading and relaxing. I've just started (okay restarted) the Creative Class. It looks very interesting, but also very much like a college textbook, so we'll see how far I make it!

Do you ever feel like your brain is handicapped? Like you were designed to be able to process so much more than you actually can? Okay I know this is when you all go umm yeah duh the fall is a reality. I think it's just been really clear to me lately that my ability to process and to think through things and to dream is also crippled. I wish I had the energy and the knowledge to think through so many things and yet again my days are made up of limited hours and my brain is oh so limiting. Okay that's very abstract I know. Let's see if I can think of examples.


- I wish I had the time and energy and brain power to get a degree in city planning. I know random. But recently there have been lots of discussions about our neighborhood and how to build community and about pocket neighborhoods and minimizing the effect of cars and encouraging foot traffic and well basically I just wish I knew more about it all! Or at least had the time to learn about it.

- I wish I could understand people better. Understand what makes them upset, understand what makes them feel loved, what makes them laugh, how to help them be more creative, how to help them learn what their callings are in life (okay I wish I also knew all these things about myself haha).

- I wish I could cook healthy meals every day that would only take 5 minutes and no planning and that the food would magically grow in my garden haha.

Okay I know I'm longing for heaven. I think it's interesting how at different times in life you long for different parts of heaven. Sometimes you long for healing, sometimes for no more need, sometimes for no more sorrow, sometimes to see the people you love, and apparently right now I'm longing for a brain that isn't limited by the fall!

Just One of Those Days

So these past two weeks have been crazy. And I know I always say this haha, but seriously I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off at work. I have a bunch of unanswered - make that unread - emails, it takes me hours to be able to return phone calls, my lattes are cold before I even realize time has passed, and I have a list ten things long that probably should have been done on Friday but 5 oclock was there and it was time to head to the bar to wish a coworker farewell as he heads off into retirement. Odd how life passes right in front of your eyes.

Anyway, so today I have been very worn out and let's just say it was one of those days. It started out fine with a nice trip to the farmers market to grab veggies so I can try out my new dehydrator! Yep yep spencer surprised me with a dehydrator :). So right now I'm trying out a zuchinni and squash chip recipe. I'll let you know how they turn out! Oh right back to one of those days, so we got home from the market and Spencer started carnitas for tonight and I started making a tomato soup recipe to eat sometime later this week (I'm finding I really like cooking on Saturdays; it's relaxing and it makes the rest of the week a little less crazy). So the soup was all done simmering and I went to put it in the blender to make it smooth and creamy and then it all started.

So I went to blend it and all the steam put pressure on the blender lid and even though I was holding it down boiling hot tomato soup went flying all over the kitchen, all over my arm, all over my clothes and well you get the picture. So after washing off my arm and icing it down and changing clothes and Spencer helping me wipe red paste off the walls and counter and floor, we went to try it again (this time with the soup being a little cooler). Spencer held down the lid and I turned on the blender. Disaster strikes again. The little plastic part in the middle of the blender lid fell down into the blender and before we could turn the blender off little chunks of plastic were all blended in with my soup. At this point I cried. Mostly because it all happened so fast and I had to unplug the blender to get it to stop and my soup was ruined and my arm was burned and my blender was broken and well yeah I just cried. So we tried to get all the plastic chunks out but apparently our blender works really well, even on plastic! There are tiny pieces all throughout my soup. So I bought a really fine strainer and hopefully I'll still be able to eat it!

Okay so then it was off to pedicures with my work buddies. That part was nice :). I got home a few hours later and found Spencer in the bathroom washing gasoline out of his eye. Yeah apparently he had been mowing the lawn and it shot a three foot stream of gasoline all over him and into his eye. Thankfully he got it rinsed out quick and it looks like no biggie. But still just add that too the list.

Then Spencer went out to finish mowing and I moved on to cleaning the house. I cleaned up the soup mess and put up the mail and threw Spencer's gasoline clothes in the wash. Yeah well 30 minutes later Spencer came back inside and yep did you guess it? I put his iphone through the wash. So yeah you guessed it I cried again. The verdict is still ou it's sitting in a bag of rice drying, we'll see if he'll move on to iphone number 3.

So yeah one of those days. Too many things gone wrong for a brain already exhausted. Tonight should be better. Carnitas with Dmac and Libby and Gregg :). And hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to each my zuchinni chips and my strained tomato soup haha.

And We're Back!

Okay so I promise I'll put up a bunch more pictures, but I still need to sort through them all and I still feel like I'm living on Zurich time right now, so it might get a little crazy if I try to write a long post now haha. So here's a shorty post :). Oh the other reason I'm feeling lazy is that when we got home last night, I sorted through all the mail to make sure we had no pressing bills and turns out the city wrote us up for our yard being messy!!! Apparently we needed to mow and get rid of trash and clean up poisin ivy?!! Anyway, just to be safe we spent most of the day so far cleaning up the yard in 100 degree weather. I talked to a neighbor about it, and he said it happened to him before, and he called about it and they pretty much said it's an idle threat. They had a 100 complaints in our neighborhood alone and there was no way they were going to come out and actually work on your yard and fine you for having too high of grass. Looks like we just had some not so friendly neighbor who thought we should be mowing while we were on vacation! Anyway enough on that!

So here are some of my favorite parts of vacation:

Staying in this really peaceful chalet on a mountain side in Leysin. The view really was as good as the pictures online showed. Too bad it rained so much!! The rain did make for a really peaceful week though. We did lots of reading and journaling and talking about life goals and watching old Bond 007 movies and cooking lots of yummy food oh and of course drinking dshot coffee and eating lots of chocolate oh and drinking wine and eating lots of chocolate. Haha basically we ate chocolate whenever we felt like it :).

Once we got to Interlaken (okay I know I'm skipping lots of details, these are just highlights for now haha), Spencer and I went parasailing!!! It was really amazing! The sun came out just in time for us to see the famout trio of snowcapped mountians, the Eiger, the Jungfrau, and the Monk peaking out of the clouds and the view from the air was spectacular! Running off a cliff into the air is pretty fun too :). Yes I know I might be crazy, but it was probably my favorite part of the trip!Another great part of the trip?! These people went with us :).

Okay this doesn't really show anything in particular from the trip, I just liked this picture :) and yes it was cold enough that I had to wear my ski cap at least half of the trip!!! No 100 degrees and sunny in the alps!!

Okay so we had a really fun time, but it's also nice to be back in good old US of A where everyone speaks English, and I know what road signs mean, and ice is readily avialable and movies don't cost 30 bucks a ticket!!! (we paid over 60 bucks to see Harry Potter the finale in Zurich!!) and drinks don't cost 10 bucks a piece!! (we paid 20 bucks for an iced tea and a frap from starbucks!!!) and I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm going to get in trouble for getting on a train I don't have a ticket for (umm I'm pretty sure we did that a few times in Italy, not to all fellow travelers, the Italian public transport cannot hold a candle to the Swiss one)! Home is pretty nice :). And so is our little dog, okay okay I know she's not little but I love her.

Alright off to do some laundry!

Countdown!!

We leave in less than a week!!! Let the countdown begin. Okay who am I kidding we've been counting down for at least a month now :). I keep thinking someone is going to call me and say, you can't go on this trip, who are you kidding you're too young to go by yourself HAHA. As if I haven't already traveled half way across the world by myself before! Maybe I'm just nervous because I'm so looking forward to it that I really hope something doesn't happen to ruin it because I'll probably just start balling in the airport if they won't let me get on the plane haha.

Only a couple things left on the to do list like:

- don't forget contacts
- leave numbers of hotels we are staying at with our housesitter and the fam
- don't forget dshot coffee (don't worry we already bought it, and a grinder to take along, I know we are full out snobs on this point ;) ha)
- book one more place to stay in interlaken
- drop off our sad little crushed car at the repair shop
- decide what books to bring!!

Okay that last one is the hardest! I always end up with ten books that I want to read and I really think I'll read them all so I pack them all and hate myself as I'm lugging them through the airport and then I end up reading maybe two of them. But it's better than having no books :). So I'm thinking I'll limit myself to four books this trip. One useful book, two fun books, and the Bible. Maybe I'll actually get through all of those :) well I probably won't read the whole Bible, but you know what I mean!

Alrighty I'm off to make homemade pizza and hang out with my little sister, woo hoo!!

Oh and update, insanity is crazy. My legs hurt everyday! Even after the once a week day off they still hurt! And every time we do a video I feel like I'm going to die at least once and our floor has more sweat on it than I would like to admit. Hahah TMI. But I think it will be worth it, verdict still to come . . .

A Little Time to Think

So this weekend we celebrated our anniversary and took a little road trip to Kansas City in the boss's Mercedes :). Driving in that car definitely makes you feel cooler but also a bit ridiculous when you step out of it. I kept expecting people to ask if we were borrowing our parent's car for the weekend! I was supposed to take pics of the trip on my bday camera to get in practice for our Switzerland trip since I won't be taking the old ball and chain (translation: work owned iphone haha) with me. I took exactly zero pictures. So looks like I'll just have a trial by fire haha. Or I'll have no pictures of our trip which would be HORRIBLE. I'm sure the mountains and lack of phone will inspire me to use it once we get there :).

Anyway, so we basically did what we would have done in Tulsa, but somehow it's so much more enjoyable when you know you can tell people you'll be out of town and unreachable for the day. We ate yummy mexican after walking around for an hour trying to find a less shady mexican resturant. Turns out the shady looking one was delicious and one of the best ones in town! We watched HGTV house hunters international (okay we don't do that at home because we have no cable haha), slept in (which was awesome!! I mean we love Blitzy but she loves 6 am on Saturday mornings alot more than we do!!), went to the City Market where we picked up some yummy looking peaches and mushrooms and grabbed breakfast at a diner, hit up the Broadway coffee shop, drove through some super nice historic neighbors looking at people's landscaping, ate some more mexican at Chipotle and then did some shopping in a fancy pants part of Kansas City, like our Mercedes was one in a million kind of fancy shopping! Okay I'm not sure you would call it shopping haha. We walked around Crate and Barrel for over an hour just thinking about ideas for house and left with nothing. We walked in and out of a bunch of clothing stores and bought nothing and actually the only thing we bought the whole weekend was some fancy tangerine flavored balsamice vinegar that is going to make some amazing salad dressing!!!

So yeah the weekend was nice and relaxing and we got to talk about all kinds of things and dream a little about what we want to do with our lives. No answers yet, just thinking :).

Okay so I did take some pics this week of a sweet garden feast we had with the neighbors and Dmac!! First Spencer made some fresh spicy pesto from all the basil growing in our garden. And it was delicious!! I can't wait to use the leftover pesto on some pasta :).

Then we also made a salad from our fresh lettuce and cucumbers.

Then we finished it off with some yummy fresh squash. Oh and some fish and scallops that were not from our garden :). Okay this is not a picture of the actual squash we ate, but you get the idea haha.

Okay one other random thing, ha I guess I should post more often so my posts aren't so rambly and random :). We started doing the insanity workout a week ago!!! Okay you should just google it. It's a really intense 60 day workout video series that is all plyometrics and crazy jumping and millions of pushups and well let's just say after every workout we have to sit on the couch and recover for awhile afterwards!! We took before pictures, but I am not posting those ;). If we turn out with six packs and dropping 30 lbs a piece maybe we'll post some tasteful after pictures haha.

The Tale of the Rabbit

Ha the pun in the title is making me laugh to myself. Okay so this Friday night we were driving home from wedding number six I think (I'm starting to lose count!). We were cruising down 75 when all of a sudden a deer attacked our rabbit!! Spencer swerved to try and avoid it, but it still managed to run straight into the side of our poor little car, which now looks like this:

Thankfully neither of us were hurt, just more than a little shocked. Also thankfully we didn't hit anyone else or go flying off the road. So pretty much it could have been way worse. But still the whole side of our car is all smashed up!! And the front mirror is useless! We'll see what they estimate the damage too when we get it appraised later this week. It's totally drivable but it looks awful :( .

On a happier note the 95 degree weather we've been getting early this year has been making our garden go crazy with happiness. Oh wait maybe I'm the one crazy with happiness when I see all these little healthy beauties growing in our yard haha. I'm sure if you had to grow your food for a living it would be much more stressful but I still think I would have loved to have lived 100 years ago and watch my food grow all spring and summer long. I guess I'll just expand my garden a little every year :).

We've got a whole bunch of squash:

This baby I finally picked today and I can't wait to eat it!

We've got a bunch of cajun bell peppers that we think are ready to pick but no one is really sure haha. They definitely aren't the size of normal bell peppers but they don't look like they are getting any bigger either. So we'll probably be making some fresh salsa soon!! Woo hoo!!!

Well actually maybe not so soon. We had these lovely 3 almost ripe tomatoes growing in our beds and I was so excited to pick them today and get to try our first ripe produce. Well besides a few snap peas I've eaten for snacks haha. But then someone stole them!!!! One was stolen three nights ago and then the other two were gone when I went out to look at them this morning!!! Sadness and woah. I'm sure someone enjoyed them but I wanted it to be us!!

So I guess we'll be waiting till some of the others ones ripen to enjoy fresh salsa. Till then we'll be discussing security measures for the garden ;).

Edit: My faith in humanity is restored haha. Our neighbor picked them because he noticed one had split and ants were starting to get in it. He nicely brought them over yesterday afternoon along with some ribs and potato salad and a bunch of rib bones for Blitzy!! Man we have the nicest neighbors!!

A Little Memorial Day Rest

So this weekend we took a much needed little trip to the lake with our neighbors. We soaked up sun and watched the dogs play and talked about life and drank cheap beer and roasted marshmallows and I did lots of reading because I'm not so good at sitting still and doing nothing haha. I'm working on it okay! It did make me want it to be July though! Where we could be sitting and drinking coffee, looking at the mountains from our Swiss chalet. Okay okay I'll stop rubbing it in :).

So we went up to the lake on Saturday evening but the whole place was booked! Instead we hit up Spencer's parents last minute for a place to crash and cook our camp food. It turned out to be really nice to just get to chill at their house and get to sleep in the airconditioning and shower, I know , I know we are whimpy :). It also meant in the morning we got to sit in the coffee shop and chill and read and then I got my bday present early after a spur of the moment to Best Buy to check out their sales!! Woo hoo Spencer got me a new digital camera so I can take lots of sweet pics of our trip to Switzerland. So I tried it out some this weekend :).


First on our babies haha chilling out in Spencer's parent's backyard.

And then on some lake shots. Haha chico george loved the water! He would start paddling before he even got to the water :).

Okay alot more has been happening in life besides our trip to the lake, but I'll have to blog on that another time. My brain is too worn out from being on the computer all day everyday!!!

A Little Work Frivolity

So sometimes my job can be quite entertaining. And I mean entertaining in a way that is not just entertaining to engineers haha. So here you go, my little work entertainment story.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a meeting and we started talking about how my team had gone down to visit the Chevron offices in Houston and while they were down there they ran into someone really interesting in the elevator: a stretch instructor. Yep a paid Chevron employee whose job is to go around to the different groups and lead stretching exercises during breaks to make sure everyone is relaxed and not too stressed out.

Wow.

So I was telling them how when I worked at Chevron we had this little face in the bottom of our computer screen that was supposed to keep you ergonomically in check. It would tell you take breaks from your computer and if you didn't take them the face would slowly change from a happy green face to an angry red face and if you didn't take a break for four hours it would lock you out of your computer. So then my boss's boss, TJ, jokingly said I should lead a stretching routine at our mid year conference for all the technical staff (read 160 men over age 40). So we laughed about it and I said yeah sure I'll do it.

Fast forward to yesterday to another meeting (yes we are in a lot of meetings).

TJ: So do you have your yoga mat ready for the meeting tomorrow?

Me: Oh yeah I've been practicing my routine.

TJ: So are you going to wear sweats to the meting?

Me: Umm what would you do if I actually wore sweats to the meeting? (It's supposed to be business casual).

TJ: Try me.

Me: Oh really okay I will.

Okay I know I probably shouldn't be this ridiculous with my boss's boss but it was pretty funny. So I left the meeting and decided after talking to my office buddy that I should get sweat bands with the Cimarex logo on them just in case he really did try to get me to do the stretching routine in front of everyone.

I get to the meeting this morning, and here's what my agenda looks like:

Yep he actually modified the agenda!!! Later I found out it was only my agenda that mysteriously was modified but still it was pretty ridiculously funny. I wore my sweat bands for awhile and showed them off to TJ and I might actually do a "routine" tomorrow just to be even more ridiculous.

Okay enough of work craziness. On another note we have some baby tomatos coming in!!!

New Year's Resolution Half Way Done

We booked the tickets!!!! Wooooo hooooo!!! Last night I felt giddy :). Well after I spent an hour trying to book tickets and then had to call my bank to clear the purchase ha. I guess it's a good thing bank cards have a daily limit, but seriously I had filled out the same online forms about 10 times before I finally thought hmm maybe my bank is denying this.

So July 16th through 29th we'll be partying it up in Switzerland. I'm so excited!! Anybody want to house sit? And eat all the produce that will be conveniently ready while we are gone? :)

Spring Planting Festival

Alrighty so this might be short update if the internet at Cherry Street keeps acting like dial-up haha. So I feel like the last month has flown by! I'm not even sure what all we have been up to but I know I have gone to two weddings, two baby showers, and two wedding showers. So yes I'm pretty much broke haha. Okay I really do like celebrating people but I am tired!!! So last night we took a break from the all the craziness and had a little planting party in our yard!! Woo hoo!!! I can't wait till everything starts producing yummy vegetables in about umm 50 to 75 days haha. But I guess at the pace time has been flying by the last month I won't have to be impatient too long :). So yeah we are sharing our lovely three garden beds and myriad of planters with David and Kat!! Woo hoo variety is the spice of life! We figured this way we'd get more choices and if I get tired of thousands of cherry tomatos (umm remember last year's mega bush?!) then I can share them with the neighbors :). So we planted a bunch of squash, a couple of lemon cucumbers (which are supposed to be round and delicious!), a bunch of tomatos, a bunch of bell peppers, a couple of jalepenos, an aji pepper!!!!, a bunch of herbs, two strawberry plants and an egg plant. So pretty much we'll be in veggie heaven! And even better handy man Spencer installed a watering system on a timer! So except for those lovely July 110 degree days we won't even have to remember to water every day! In case you were wondering, yes come visit! And we will gladly share whatever survives our limited gardening skills :). Because umm yes I wish I could tell you these were all the plants we seeded a month ago but actually everyone single one died!! Guess that's what I get for leaving them outside for a day while we partied it up in Conway, Arkansas while the temperature hit 90 and the wind was well normal Oklahoma wind. Yep, I can't even blame Blitzy for the demise of our fine plants, may they rest in peace haha. Okay but I did plant some lettuce and beans and bell peppers straight in the ground and they are coming up!!! They're hard to see but if you look really hard you can see little green sprouts umm about 1/4 an inch tall if even :). Okay coffee house internet officially sucks today. 4 minutes to download one pic!!! Looks like I'll be downloading the pics later! On another note, the Switzerland trip is official!! I'm going to try to book the flights this week!! I can't wait!!! Wow most exclamation points ever in one post. I think it might have to do with the beautiful weather we are having right now. What can I say I'm a sun child at heart :).

Mini Update

So I've made it so far without looking at house blogs! It was really hard for the first few days and now it's not too bad. I made it I think maybe a week without eating sugar. That was waaaay too hard haha. One thing at a time :). Borders is now at 50% off!!! Okay I just love books. But actually the funniest thing I bought was Enrique's new CD. Yes I know I am 15 at heart apparently. And hispanic. Go figure that one out :). Oh and Blitzy got spayed and has been even crazier than ever! The only noticeable effect of the surgery is her half shaved stomach which just really makes me laugh every time I see it.

Chillaxin' in the Sun

Okay so for some reason I wanted to revert to freshman year at TU when chillaxin' was an acceptable phrase haha. It's 85 degrees outside!! And breezy! And sunny! And well there is a reason I don't and probably never will live in the pacific northwest. I pretty much can't function when the weather is gloomy is for more than umm four hours at a time. So today is basically therapy for me. We got up and had topeca with Kat, went to church, heard about how God pursues us passionatly, went to Top That for pizza with a bunch of friends (and I didn't have to do any convincing to get them to sit outside!), took Blitzy for a nice long walk around the river and laughed when I found a plastic bag (more on that later), and now I've been sitting out on the front porch drinking pomegranate limeade, reading $64 Tomato, and working on my Bible study for tomorrow night while Biltzy switches between barking at everyone who walks by and lounging in the sun and while Spencer draws up a master plan for our yard. Pretty much the best lazy Sunday ever. And to top it off we're having fajitas with fresh homemade salsa for dinner!!

Okay so now that I've made you all jealous of my afternoon or at least of my front porch haha, I have to tell you a funny bag story. So I was walking Blitzy and I had forgotten to bring a plastic bag along for well, you know, she is a dog :). So I was worrying a little bit about it while I was thinking and praying about other things and then I looked down and ta da there was a plastic grocery bag wrapped around a little shrub. Okay I might be reading into it too much but I'm pretty sure God answered my unprayed prayer so I could stop worrying about how I was going to manage picking up my dog's poop without a plastic bag. And I could stop worrying about her pooping with a million of my closest friends watching while they drank beer at the new riverside cafe. Haha so there you go, random story of God's provision for me and my little overly concerned about the details engineer brain haha.

So yes, the $64 Tomato. I totally recommend it. I've read over half of it in the last day and a half, which for me is alot of reading in a short period of time, at least these days. Ha oh if only you could go back and see little 8th grade me reading ALL summer long. Anyway it's a memoir all about one guy and his quest for the perfect garden. It's pretty hilarious. Read the part on deer, seriously I laughed out loud! Which is also rare for me when reading books. I guess I've been reading too many things on sociology or poverty or umm horizontal wellbores lately, not too much to laugh about there :).

Hmm what else? Well we've been working on the spare bedroom. I've been trying to make it a coherent room instead of just the room where we put all the leftover furniture pieces we have that don't go together. So here's what I've got so far! It's got a long way to go, but it already feels more airy and open :).

Okay so first the unorganized before pictures. And yes I know having the bed unmade makes it look so much worse but I like the effect :).

New duvet cover is on the way!

Definitely need to organize that bookshelf . . .

And that desk . . . and find somewhere else to store those guitars!

Okay so this dresser was what inspired me to get to work! I thought it would look cool painted some fun color . . .So here you go! Okay the lighting is really bad in this, but it's a fun dark green. And yes I know I need to finish the top two drawers :). Apparently we didn't sand the varnish well enough on those drawers and the paint just came right off!

And another step towards making it look brighter in there. Some lovely white curtains :).

Okay I've got a ways to go, but it's a start :). Alright I'm off to see the plans the master gardener has come up with!

Lent

So the verdict is I'm giving up house blogs for lent. No more random checking of other people's cute house ideas for 6 whole weeks! This is going to take some serious will power.

And Spencer is giving up angry birds on his iphone. Not sure which one of us will be more miserable :).

Intervention

So I bet you're thinking, I knew it! They are growing something shady in those trays of theirs. Well nope this week I did have my own little intervention, but it was a - wait for it -fashion intervention! Yep, yep you heard me right. If you know me or my wardrobe you might be thinking about time! Haha. So yeah I had been talking to some of my friends at church who have way more fashion sense than I do and telling them how much I need help with my wardrobe. I mean I got a grown up purse for Christmas (I know I'm about ten years late but cut me some slack I am an engineer haha) but half of my wardrobe is from umm let's just say 8th grade might not be too far from the truth :). So anyway yesterday Kacey and Allison came over and went through my whole wardrobe and told me everything I had to get rid of. I can't believe they laughed at my sketchers!! And my highschool AE button downs!! And my nasty flats that look like they have diseases growing in them because I never wear socks! Haha okay I had been needing to get rid of those but shopping for new clothes and shoes is never that high on my agenda, at least not shopping for a massive wardrobe makoever. But I decided to be open to the idea and let wiser more knowledgable aka more girly women help me out :).

My lovely to be thrown away/ dumped pile:


So after telling me about 3/4 of my current clothes had to go - okay maybe that's an exaggeration but not quite ha I told you I needed help - we picked up Natalie and Kathryn for more help and moral support and headed out to the stores! 6 hours later after countless outfit trials, multiple snack trips, and plenty of moments of feeling completely ridiculous in girly outfits (which I did take home by the way, they swore they made me look awesome so we'll see haha) I headed home with a new wardrobe!! Okay most of a new wardrobe :). Round two is still in the works to look for dress pants, black shoes, and accesories oh and maybe a nice dress for the 11 weddings we have this summer!! So umm Alisha whenever you decide to visit me we can go on round two ;).

Check it out!! I think this is more shoes than I normally own at one time, let alone buy at one time! And believe me without my wonderful fashionistas I would not have bought silver tennis shoes or mustard flats or really probably any of these besides the brown flats haha.

Ironic though turns out the silver shoes and mustard flats are some of my favorite already!!


So yes I did buy other things besides shoes :). Ha be prepared for some awful clothes pics. I wasn't going to put them all on again and apparently I'm really bad at staging haha. And these are by no means all the things I got, I just got tired of taking pictures and figured you have better things to do than read this all day long haha.

So I got lots of cute dressy tops like this!



And this!A couple of cute summery dresses like this one :)


And a cute jean skirt! With about a million different colors of cardigans. Literally a million okay maybe literally seven. I think I got blue, purple, two shades of green, and a peachy pink one. Oh and they made me get a lacey top I wasn't sure about! But I wore it to church and got lots of compliments so looks like they knew what they were talking about :).

I did manage to get some tshirts too, not all fancy gold shoes and frilly shirts haha.

Okay enough of showing you my wardrobe :). We're off to a date and yep I'm wearing all new clothes haha.

Spring!!!!!

So today I walked my little (HAHA) dog in 70 degree sunshine with Tara, and it was AWESOME. Well besides the fact tha Blitzy doesn't think heeling is any fun :). I'm signing her up for training class as soon as they post the times sometime this week!

So maybe it is only spring inside my head, but it is spring enough for one of my favorite things ~ seeding!! Okay make that gardening, but to get a garden first you have to have some seeds haha. I know I'm stating the obvious here :). So tonight we seeded!

64 little boxes full of seeds!! We've got tomatos and peppers and green onions and herbs and squash and zuchinni and snap peas and lots of lettuce and spinach and cucumbers!! I can't wait to see it all start coming up! I'm still amazed (okay I've only had a garden one year haha) that big plants come out of little tiny seeds. I also can't wait to have lots of fresh veggies! I got this raw cookbook at a borders that's going out of businesss ~ side note, a bookstore with everything on sale may be my addiction, I literally felt like a little kid again! Spencer had to tell me to put some of my choices back haha ~ and now I'm excited about eating more raw. Only problem is it is insanely expensive! Like raw almond butter (think gourmet peanut butter) is TEN BUCKS! Since when is peanut butter ten bucks!! Okay so anyway I can't wait to have lots of free veggies! Okay not totally free since I'll have some sweat equity and a few bucks worth of seeds but you know what I mean. And no I haven't had caffeine, at least not since 9 this morning :). Okay so back to the seeding. So Spencer set up this nice ghetto rigged grow center upstairs. He is so handy!

So yes it looks like we're growing a little something very common to Oklahoma but we're not so don't worry :). 45 to 60 days from now we'll have all kinds of yummy produce! I think I've decided gardening must get passed down in the blood. My grandparents were farmers and gardeners, my parents taught me how to garden when I was little and I can remember helping grandma pick raspberries most summer for 25 cents a pint haha I was some willing cheap labor :). And now I'm pretty much giddy about having my own garden. And maybe some chickens someday :). Okay enough for now, I'll have to put up pics of my other project later, for now just dream about little seedlings haha.

Helllo From the Land of Extremes

So random trivia of the day, Tulsa has had a 90 degree temperature swing in the last week! -10 degrees (and this was real!! my car said -4 when I got in it last wednesday morning!!) to 80 degrees this afternoon. And let me tell you I am loving the balmy weather!! In fact I love it so much I haven't wanted to be on my computer to blog :).

But I'm excited today because I got these sweet green pillows, for a super good deal at target! So after two snow days of looking for pillows and coming up empty handed I finally found some when I was back at work last week taking a mini break from the world of petroleum engineering. Which by the way XEC stock hit 114 bucks! Okay you probably don't care but that just makes me smile :).

So on to the pillows, here you go. Except for maybe hanging something on the wall behind the chair, I'm done decorating the bedroom!! Woo hoo one year later and I have one room done, ha this is going to be a lifelong project I think :).

And no I don't only take pics of the dog, but somehow she always seems to be where I am haha!

Alright well I'm off to the StL this weekend to see Brooke and Travis and their cute kids and to see Alisha and my parents! And Rach at least I think ha we've both been last minute about this! And best part is I'm taking a half day so I'll get to drive through the sunshine listening to the Taylor Swift CD Spencer gave me for vday (he also got me tickets to her concert!!!). And yes I admit it I'm still 15 at heart, what can I say :).

Okay enjoy the sunshine and 80 degrees while it lasts!

Snow day number 4!!

So we're working on day number four of being snowed in our house and I'm about out of ideas for how to spend my time. Oh but first my exploits from yesterday :). So Spencer's been working from home the last four days so I've been entertaining myself. So yesterday I decided to shuffle the driveway in the morning. So here's how it looked when I started:

So I shoveled for two straight hours which actually was really nice because I finally felt warm for the first time in a couple days! Four layers of clothes plus 18 inches of snow equals a pretty good sweat ;). Okay sorry TMI. Then we decided we'd try to get the truck out to see if we could drive around the neighborhood (our rabbit has too low of clearance to go much of anywhere in 18 inches of snow!). So we pulled the rabbit out . . . and got it stuck in the road and had to dig it out. Then we pulled the truck out . . . and got it stuck in the road annd had to dig it out. Ha ha seeing the pattern? So somewhere in the midst of all of this Blitzy managed to push the gate open and was frolicking around in the snow. And getting way to close to the cars while we were trying to get them to move. So we dumped her here:

ha ha yep, in the back of the truckbed full of snow :). After another 30 minutes of digging our cars out all we managed to do was get them back in the driveway in the exact same places they were before we dug them out! Hence snow day number 4 because we still can't get out of our neighborhood. And I can't get on to the network either so it's day 4 of figuring out what to do with myself. Ha silly little dog!

So, so far here's what I've managed to do the last couple of days:

- do laundry

-do dishes (my gosh you make a lot of dishes dirty when you can't leave the house!!)

-unthaw the kitchen pipes with a hair dryer (okay really Spencer did this 2 1/2 times and I did it 1/2 a time haha I was too short to reach the place where it was frozen in the basement

-do taxes
-walk the dog three times, once to QT to get essentials like DP and chips and candy haha -find Blitzy a dog training class

-read a book on poverty in the inner city

-did Bible study for Monday night

-did a workout while watching HGTV haha (I had to keep myself occupied!!)

-watched a bunch of bones episodes

-cleaned the kitchen

-worked on a plan for a trip to Switzerland this summer!!

-shopped for decorative pillows (unsuccessfully!!)

-did a little baking (but now I'm out of butter)

-tried not to go completely crazy!!

-checked a bunch of blog posts on house stuff, which isn't very interesting when you are snowed in with no supplies and no way to go shopping! well except for online which I decided I already despise.

-hung out with the Moores :). It has seriously made it so much more bearable to be snowed in because we just walk over to their house and hang out with them and make margaritas and play life and watch more bones and eat tacos haha sounds like what we normally do with them

So basically I'm about out of ideas for what to do with myself. I think I'm going to do a little more reading, do another workout, email Alisha and umm walk the dog again :). Wish me luck!

Snow Day Number Two!

I forgot to tell all of you that we've moved to Montana. Ha just kidding, but you'd think I wasn't kidding if you could look out my window!! We've been officially snowed in for two days now and honestly I'm not sure when we'll be able to get the little VW rabbit out and about again. I think we got 18 inches of snow, not to mention all the drifting and the clearance on our car is umm about 6 inches. And Tulsa's road crews are nonexistent. I think maybe the highways have been cleared. We asked the neighbors about the last bad storm a few years ago and they said it was pretty much all there till it melted!!


Besides the fact that I'm not sure when we'll be able to dig ourselves out, it has actually been really relaxing and really beautiful. I took Blitzy for a walk this morning and it was just breathtaking. Everything was clean and bright and the air just smelled fresh and clear if that makes any sense at all. Ha there's a reason I wasn't a poet :). I think I'll just shut up and let the pictures do the talking.

Snow Dog!! And yes I know she's not a leash, but really how far is she going to go? :)

Our lovely buried house.

I couldn't resist :).

Okay so maybe she could get a ways away haha. She can fly through the snow like crazy!!

The handsome hubby in the twighlight last night.