Christmas Decorations

Yay!!! Decorating is one of my VERY favorite parts of Christmas and it was so fun to have my very own, new to me house to decorate. Here's some pics...


I've been excited to put a tree here since I first saw the house... part of the reason I wanted the house, who doesn't want a house with a perfect Christmas tree spot?!

And here are our stockings hung by the chimney with care... there's Paul's (the plaid one) by the way.

My latest craftiness

Store bought stocking and some good old fashioned creativity and felt! :)

I'm doubting myselft... HELP!

So... I'm doubting a paint color choice. I need some opinions. I have a fairly modern styled house, not neccesarily by choice but dictated by my house, and i think my remodeled kitchen is looking too traditional. I'm not willing to post more pictures till it's done, but this is a glimpse so I can get opinions. If I change, I'm thinking of sticking with the gray I have in the living/dining room. I DO love gray and white, but I also love green. Oh the DRAMA!

Pumpkin carving

Happy day before Halloween! Paul and I carved pumpkins together for the first time in our married life... they turned out pretty sweet if you ask me! And no, no templates in our house... pure creativity and heart and soul into our pumpkins! Probably don't need to say, but the snake is Paul's and the "R" is mine.
Oh... and I learned that my Mom really, really must have loved us kids. It never failed that we got roasted pumpkin seeds when we carved pumpkins... it's a PAIN to seperate those slippery devils out from the guts! Love you mom!!!

Our life for the past 4 months or so....

So, my sister, yes the one who made me post pictures of my house, says that she's bored of looking at my living room. So here's more stuff... and NO she's NOT the boss of me!!!!

So, let's see. P.S. this is our life according to our camera... and as we all know I don't take pictures very often so it's rather sporadic.

We went to Carthage finally..



Then my mom came to visit. We went to Milwaukee on a whim to watch a baseball game. Turns out the team I was rooting for won... and I didn't even realize it. I'm a HUGE baseball fan... obviously... not. But Paul was in heaven, it was his happy place; a Giants baseball game.



On the same trip we went to

We did a double decker bus tour. TOTALLY worth the money!!! Definitely the way to see the most Chicago in the amount of time we had.
This is for my nieces, Grace and Ella, who LOVE American Girls, a WHOLE store devoted to them... heaven!

Lots of skyscrapers... cool town I tell ya!

We did the cool Iowa thing, which means we went to the Field of Dreams.


Other than that, we've just been working on the house. The kitchen is my current project. And it is riddled with problems. But what's a renovation without problems?! Here's 2 of them...

That's a countertop... look closely at the edge and you'll see white dots from them sanding the edge down (couldn't be avoided... Rrrriiiight!) I fixed it, don't worry!

This is a cabinet door... lovely eh? Don't worry yet again, they're fixing it for me! It'll be beautiful when it's all done. No pictures till it's done. So be patient my friends!

Paul has been in school. No pictures of that, sorry. He turned another year older. No pictures of that, sorry. We both got sick. No picture of that, lucky you.

The end. :)

Living Room/Dining Room

My sister has been getting on my case *&#@$ (fake grouchy noises) about posting some pictures of my house. My living room and dining room are all that I'm willing to show at this point. Let it be known that my tastes aren't normally this retro-modern, but my house kinda forced me to do it and I'm really diggin the results! :)

This is what you see when you walk through the front door...

Here's another view of the living room...

And the dining room... note how beautiful my kitchen currently is, goes SO well with my decorating. It's one of the next projects, don't worry!

There are a few things we still wanna change, rug, get a round table, get a real side table not a repurposed stool, but we like it. You should all come visit... it's way cooler in person ;)

Home!

It is a bit weird to say that we went home for ten days, because we now own a house in Iowa, but we did go "home" to Spokane and it was a really nice break from the everyday trials of Iowa... and when I say trials, I mean trial... and when I say trial, I mean humidity...oh how that word bugs me! So Natalie flew to Washington, because her schedule is less open than mine and I drove... because at one point when I made the decision to drive, it made economical sense... however, I didn't take into account how boring it is to drive alone in a car for 12 hours... four times!!! Anyway, I noticed that everytime I stopped for a bathroom break along the way, the weather slowly improved as follows: Iowa=hurry up and pee and get back into the car as fast as possible. Nebraska=its still a bit muggy, but its better than more driving through the exciting fields of Nebraska. Colorado=hey... this feels pretty good... and then idaho, montana, and washington were all pretty awesome.

After studying other's blogs, I've come to the realization that a lot of people buy cameras, and take 10 pictures of their kids... every 3 minutes or so... and blog... all of those pictures. Well, in our 10 days of vacation... we took a total of 10 pictures... including the times we took two pictures of the same thing to make sure we got a good one. So... here come the highlights, according to our camera:

For a birthday party, my family rented this whole building called "Jump and Bounce" and the funnest part was this obstacle course. My brothers talked me into racing them, and as you can barely tell, I'm the one already inside... and then thats me popping out first on the right... such a proud moment, which I shall never forget, because its one of our 15 pictures we've taken on our camera this year, lol.



This is Natalie and I duking it out in the ring. About two minutes later, we were too tired and sat on a bench with the rest of the adults... getting old stinks.




One of the days, all the boys in my family went golfing, but there are no pictures so that's not important obviously... The girls on the other hand got to go enjoy what Natalie's family has named, an Estrogen adventure... meaning they all got pedicures. It may be hard to tell, but there are three brown feet, and three white feet in the circle(my mom, Natalie, and our sister in law julie) so if you want to know which is Natalie's, use that knowledge to make your guess.

Other than that, there are three pictures of me trying to do a backflip, a couple more boxing pictures, and that's all she wrote. Apparently we need to learn how to take more pictures of what is going on. We did other things too in our 10 days away from the land of humidity and mosquitos, but I'll let Natalie blog about that later... bye bye now.

Power out + dark grocery store + pharmacy = Me working in the dark!

Last night we had yet another sweet Iowa storm. Apparently there were sustained 70 mph winds, the sky was green, lotsa thunder and lightning... all of this is second hand though... I was stuck in my windowless pharmacy just listening to it. Then, the power went out... for 6 hours. I was only there for about 4 hours of darkness. And you would think dark + pharmacy = get to go home, but no such luck. Darn backup batteries! I had 1 functioning computer, my register worked... what more do you need... oh yeah light to read and count by. flashlight! Solved. So i worked in the dark for 4 hours, with creepy people staring me down (everyone is creepy in the dark by the way), and 30 minutes into it a kitchen employee comes running up and asks

Them: "Are you a nurse?"
Me: "hmmm... no but what do you need?"
Them: "someone's choking in the kitchen. No I didn't call 911, they didn't want me to"
Me: once again... hmmm... as I run across the store.

Don't worry she was fine and I didn't have to brush up my rusty first aid skills. She was apparently breathing the whole time, just had something stuck in her throat and someone did the heimlich on her anyway and she had a piece of food lodged in her esophagus that she just had to "spew up". I then sat with her for 5 or so minutes while she "spewed" in a bucket... lovely!

Ahh... Friday nights at HyVee!

Winter Quarters

Last weekend Paul and I, well mostly I and Paul obliged, decided to take a 4&1/2 hour trip across the glorious state of Iowa to Omaha, Nebraska. What's there you say? Winter Quarters! The trip out started out a little scary, lets just say when it rains here, it pours! Enough rain that I got to wondering: what exactly does one do if a tornado occurs while you're in the car? Thanks to the wonders of technology and the iPhone, I was able to learn that you NEVER try to outdrive a tornado... the moral of the story is, get out of the car and get into a sturdy building or to low ground and cover your head with your arms. Just FYI, in case you ever find yourself driving in rainy, thundery weather on the great plains of Iowa.

Winter Quarters was nice, I think I was expecting more from Church history sites considering that the only other one I'd been to was NAuvoo. We went through the visitor's center, walked through the Pioneer Cemetary and the went to the temple.

Shiny new toys

So we decided it was time to move up in the world and buy a new grill so that I (Paul) could be more of a man and learn to cook outdoors. So after weeks of searching, I finally picked out the perfect one.




So we started simple with some burgers and sausages... even tried steaks one night. Then last night natalie threw together some beautiful kabob type things with chicken, peppers, and pineapple.





Well in the middle of it, this part of the midwest got put on tornado watch and there was tons of wind, lightning, and of course... loads of rain... which ironically, is something we really like about living here. So, wanting to protect the shiny new grill and the delicious food, I did the logical thing and moved it closer to the house where it was protected by the little bit of roof that hangs over. Well, you know how you never want to break or damage your shiny new toys? Well, the grill is fine, but I melted a good chunk of the vinyl siding on our shiny new house.




I then proceded to stare in disbelief and shout one of my favorite words... "CRAP!!!" Yup, I'm pretty much an idiot. Natalie thinks we should just tell people that lightning struck our house. I suppose that would sure make me come out looking a lot less like a fool.

Luckily, the previous owners of the house left us a box of new siding that was the same color and everything. The other day I fixed some leaky valves on our washing machine faucets and I've been feeling like a handy man, so without having a clue what I was doing, I threw on my chemistry goggles, busted out my new saw, ripped the siding off and made it look all pretty again. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, "YESSSSS!!!!!!"




I don't think Natalie would have been very happy if there was a permanent melted blob on the backside of our house, so I'm glad everything worked out in the end. So learn from my stupidity... don't cook with the grill too close to the house! Even if its raining.