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.

Official 1/1/11 Post

Okay I know this is umm almost a month old, but I'm stuck recovering from a cold looking out the window at the freezing weather outside. It seemed like an appropriate time to finally write about some of my new year's resolutions.

Okay I know resolutions can be stressful and make you feel guilty, but I like to think of them as ways to dream a little about what the next year could be like. They help me to not feel stuck in a rut. I tend to put things on my list that are more like wishes than resolutions . Like go to Switzerland. That is on my resolution list for 2011. I resolve to go to Switzerland :). I'll let you know if it happens haha.

Okay so another one of my resolutions is two fold, or actually maybe more folds than that even (excuse my bad grammar haha)! I want to keep expanding our garden. I'm reading this book all about backyard homesteading and it's making me want to grow all kinds of things in our yard! I'm not fully convinced on the raising chicken part yet, but I may still get there :). We don't want to burn ourselves out on gardening though by goign to overboard at the beginning so we're going to just add two more beds this year to the one bed we already have. We've made a little list of what we want to grow:

- tomatoes (maybe upside down!!)
- lettuce
- spinach
- squash
- zucchini
- bell peppers
- herbs (hopefully I'll have better luck than with my rosemary last year!!)
- jalepenos
- asaparagus (okay this doesn't bloom till the second year, but we're going to start!)
- green onions
- cucumbers (maybe in containers? or on a trellis?)
- and my favorite!!! a blueberry bush!! I actually made it a separate resolution from gardening to plant a fruit tree or bush in our yard this year because I was so excited about it!

Okay maybe the list isn't so small, but I think it's doable, and I think they are all things we will eat! One of my problems last year was having a million peppers and cherry tomatoes and not knowing what to make with them. I hate throwing away produce and there's not much motivation to go pick more of something when your kitchen is already overflowing with unused veggies. So here comes the two fold part of this resolution. I also want to learn more veggie recipes!! I like eating veggies (okay I still hate onions, I know, I know I'm still a 5 year old at heart ;) but other than that I like mostly everything), but sometimes I just don' t know how to cook them! So I actually started working on this part today, since it is gross outside and you can't really plant anything in Oklahoma till the beginning of March!! So, I went online and searched myrecipes.com and came up with a bunch of cucumber, cherry tomato, squash and zucchini recipes. Yum, yum, yum!! Anybody have any recipes to recommend? Fast and limited ingredients are the best ;). Besides veggie recipes I also want to learn how to can and perserve vegetables so I can eat them all winter long. Okay this might be way out of my league, but I can dream right? :)

Side note on dreaming, I've been reading the book "A Praying Life" by Paul Miller. Don't tell my Bible study for the semester (we're supposed to start next week and read a chapter a week), but I'm probably going to finish it this week, or maybe even today! It's been really encouraging and basically reminding me that part of praying is getting back your ability to dream, to hope, to wish for God's kingdom to come quickly. It calls prayer an adventure because you're never quite sure what is going to happen. So on that note, I think I might add practice praying like a little child to my resolution list for 2011. We'll see how it goes. I'm guessing I'll need ALOT of practice.