Egg Nog Wars

Whenever Seth or I think of something we need at the grocery store, we write it down on our little whiteboard in the kitchen.

This past week Seth wrote EGG NOG, so huge it covered half the whiteboard.

I promptly crossed it out. Egg Nog is disgusting and I don't want it.

He rewrote it.

I crossed it out again.

He rewrote it again.

I crossed it again.

This pattern went on for about a week.

Until Seth came up with something else to write on the whiteboard.

I thought it was very clever and it made me laugh, so I left it alone.

And today, I bought this for him:

I said I would buy it for him if he promised to finish all of his thank-you cards before we left for Christmas Break. (We are so close! And I am very determined.

I WILL FINISH MY WEDDING THANK YOU'S. I WILL!!)

So I guess it was a tie.

Seth gets his Egg Nog, I get to cross off my goal.

And we stay happily married.

Hiking the Y

Yesterday we went and hiked the Y.

Hopefully this negates some of the gluttonous eating we've been partaking of all week.

David spent most of his time way ahead of us.

Katie spent most of her time complaining and trying to rest for as long as possible.

The rest of us were somewhere in between.

The view from the top was lovely though.

My family left this morning and we have done nothing all day.

We're not ready for our break to be over yet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for:

A Thanksgiving dinner that was delicious, made all the more so by the fact that I did not have to cook it!

Because let's face it, even if I wanted to cook a Thanksgiving meal, there is no way a turkey would fit into my teeny tiny oven.

I am VERY thankful for my gas heater.

(This baby was rated to heat twice the size of our house. It works splendidly.)

We spent the whole day out of the house with family and so we left the heater off. Unfortunately, that meant when we got home at 10pm the house was about the same temperature as the outside (40s).

We have it cranked up right now. Seth and I are both hanging out in the living room until the bedroom warms up.

I love my space heater.

I'm thankful that this boy and I are married.

I'll spare you the sappy details, but he is a marvelous husband and I sometimes still wonder how I ever got to be so lucky as to marry someone like him. The nice thing is that I think he thinks the same about me.

Hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving!

I'm sensing a theme here...

My family is in town.

We're having fun.

This was yesterday, at Burlington Coat Factory.

We also went to (of course) Brick Oven last night.

It was a night of gluttony.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Today we spent up in Smithfield, Utah.

The Toolson family helped found Smithfield and so my Dad took us on a mini tour of some sites (more on that later).

We also went to the Pepperidge Farm outlet.

More gluttony.

But for a great price.

We took up a drive up through Logan Canyon. We went all the way to the scenic overlook to Bear Lake, which is only a few miles from the border of Idaho.

We then stopped at Maddox in Brigham City for dinner.

More gluttony.

I don't think this trend is going to stop, as Thanksgiving is tomorrow.

Craftiness

In a never ending effort to cover up the beigeness of my walls, I decided on yet another craft project for Seth and I to do.

The inspiration was found here.

(You really have to look at the link to understand the rest of this post.)

And these are the results:

The pictures don't do it justice, it really looks cool.

I can't decide if I like the tapered off look or if I want to make more and cover the entire wall. . . .

Regardless, it's SO much better than all that beige.

Rotting Pumpkins

Seth and I always use our back door.

We put our Halloween pumpkins by the front door.

And so, we forgot about them for a long time.

Until they looked like this:

We decided we should probably get rid of them.

We decided this was probably a good idea and we decided we should take care of it immediately.

And so, about a week later, when they looked like this:

We finally got rid of them.

I think our neighbors were happy.

I PASSED

Dear Janette:

Congratulations!  You have been awarded the Novice Level Certificate! I commend you on your accomplishment. Your certificate, certification card, and other information will be sent separately.

The Novice Certification is an entry skill-level status.  We expect that you will follow the Code of Ethics and stay within the areas approved for your level of Certification and skill. You are not allowed to interpret in situations which are limited to Professional Level.

Again, congratulations on your achievement!  I wish you luck in the future.

                                                                                                                       

Sincerely,

Mitch                                                    

Mitch Jensen, Director                                                                                  

Utah Interpreter Program

I just got this 5 minutes ago. I started screaming. 

I AM A LICENSED INTERPRETER!

I am so awesome!

Happy Birthday Michelle

Today is my sister Michelle's 24th birthday.

For real.

Things you may not have known about Michelle:

1. She is hilarious.

2. She is currently in England getting her masters in being a museum whiz.

3. She's the only person in my family who will let me play the music as loud as I want in the car. (with the exception of my father) She also sings and dances to the music with me. (my father does not do that)

4. She is a hopeless romantic. She drove Amanda and I crazy when we were both engaged because she was much too sappy for us. (Ever seen My Best Friend's Wedding? Amanda and I are Julia Roberts, Michelle is Cameron Diaz.)

5. We like to tease her about being the shortest among the siblings, even though she is the oldest.

Happy Birthday Michelle!

Pet Names

Remember my post about Seth's ridiculous list of baby names?

He also likes to come up with ridiculous pet names for me.

I've been carefully recording them for the past several weeks so that I could share them with you, my devoted readers.

Baby Cakes

Baby Pie

Baby Honey

Cutiesauce

Funky Bunch

Hamster Pop

Sugar Pants

Sugar Lump

Sugar Grimace

Schnookums

Schnooky

Shnuggle-Wuggins

Snuggle Cakes

Honey. . . Dew. . . Melon. . . Head. . .

The last one is my favorite. He kept adding onto it as he thought up some new, more clever version.

It should be noted that he is actually not this sappy. He just likes to try and get the best reaction out of me. The range is from puzzled looks to acting as if I'm throwing up. Sometimes there is violence involved.

I know, we're a little weird.

Whenever I tell Seth that he is weird, he always responds with "Hey, weird people marry weird people."

I've yet to come up with a good response to this. Suggestions?

Snow

What's that? Oh no, I'm never dramatic.

Why do you ask?

Modeling

My lovely friend Betina is a photography major at BYU. She is very talented.

 She came over to my house for dinner a while ago and fell in love with my kitchen and wanted to do a photo shoot in it.

She got me to be the model for it, even though I hadn't even taken a shower that morning. (She put a lot of makeup on me...)

And I actually had a lot of fun.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took.

And here are some pictures she took (shamelessly stolen from her own photography blog.)

She also has a second photography website that you should look at.

I'm pretty sure that Betina is going to be a famous photographer one day and then I can say I roomed with her for 2 and a half years and she even took some pictures of me.

It'll be like I'm almost famous.

Playing the Air Guitar.

Seth once told me that he had to learn how to play the air guitar.

I find this concept extremely hilarious. I didn't realize you had to learn how to play air guitar.

He assures me you do.
He says he learned it by playing Guitar Hero.
So see, video games ARE educational!

Anyway, now that he's finally mastered this skill, he is quite good at it.

My favorite thing to do is blast Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the car and watch Seth go crazy. He does it all: the intense air guitar-ing, singing (with great accuracy) the low and high notes, the head banging a la Wayne's World.

It's great stuff.

My other favorite song to put on around Seth is "It's A Jolly Holiday with Mary" from Mary Poppins. He can imitate the animal's parts to perfection.

Lest you think I'm only going to make fun of Seth in this post, I'll have you know I used to look at the word guitar and think it was pronounced "gwee-ter." In my mind this was a different word from guitar.

It took me years to figure it out.

The Mouse Finale

The exciting finale of our mouse tale!

Actually it kind of sucks, in my opinion.

So Seth put out some crumbs to make sure there weren't any other little mice scavenging for food in our cupboards.

They were gone in the morning.

So I finally allowed him to go buy a snapping trap.

Unfortunately he set it up at night when we were both home and doing homework. It was very, very quiet.

So we clearly heard the trap snap shut.

And then we heard the little mouse squeeking in pain.

It didn't kill it on impact.

This is about where I started envisioning the mouse and gagging to myself.

Seth went to go get it an hour later and it was still struggling.

I said no more snapping traps. Or at least to set them up and get rid of them while I was out of the house at school.

He put out some more crumbs but they haven't been touched in days so we're hoping that this is finally the end.

Quittin' Time

Yesterday was my very last day working at Cold Stone Creamery.

I took advantage of my discount while I could.

Names

It is a well known fact in Seth's family that he would one day name his future children "Toast" and "Bucket."

Then I came along and married him. I am still in the process of trying to uproot this plan.

Because over my dead body are my children going to be named Toast and Bucket. (And I use the term "named" loosely, as these are not names, they are nouns.)

A few Sundays ago during Sacrament meeting Seth had fun drawing the ugliest babies ever and pairing them with equally ugly names. Then he would write "our baby" next to them. One of them had lobster claws. One had an onion head. You get the idea.

Anyway, in addition to Toast and Bucket, these are some of the names he came up with during church as well as a few others he plans on saddling our future children with:

Pugsly

Frankensauce

Chuck

Hoobens Bueno

Abdullah Abdullah

Milton

Gunderson

There are more but I don't remember them  now. They're equally horrid.

And what does Seth think about all this?

"I don't know why it fills me with so much pleasure to choose such wonderful names."

I wrote that down last night after he came up with "Milton."

P.S. Please do NOT assume this post was because I am pregnant or anywhere even remotely close to that. I know there were some of you... 

The Mouse, Part 3

I know many of you have been waiting with bated breath for the conclusion of this exciting story.

Never fear, I am here to indulge your curiosities.

So remember this quote, from my last post?

"We're going to try to catch him again this afternoon. Hopefully he's stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice."

Yeah. He was not a stupid mouse.

We set up our clever little trap two (or was it three?) more times.

Each time our little mouse friend enemy would eat all of the crumbs leading up to the cardboard tube.

And then he would knock the tube over into the bucket, as if mocking us for thinking we could fool him again.

Friday night, in despair, I went to bed early. Seth stayed up to eat Apple Crisp.

When I woke up early Saturday morning, I came out to the kitchen to find this:

I was bewildered. I had no idea what happened. I had to wait 2 hours for Seth to wake up and tell me the story:

And so, the man finally outsmarted the mouse.

After we went out to lunch with some friends, we trooped over to the Duck Pond to set the mouse free in a new home far away from mine. Our friend Canada is an aspiring veterinarian and wanted to show off her animal restraining skills she's been learning in her classes.

But when she took the lid off the bucket, the mouse LEAPED out of it. I'm talking like 3 feet of air here, people. Mice can jump.

She chased it down though and did finally manage to "restrain" the mouse for us to look at.

During this whole episode Seth looked up a lot of information on mice and learned that they typically do not live alone. So as a precaution, he set out some crumbs in our cupboard to see if there were any more left foraging for food in our house.

The crumbs were gone in the morning.

I'm thinking this is not the end of our mice troubles.

Happy Halloween!

So we were actually pretty lame for Halloween. We did go over to N106 and hang out with friends for the night. But that's mostly because we didn't want to be at home in case any trick-or-treaters came to our door, as we had no candy.

Actually a small group came just before we left and since I was taking a nap, Seth was forced to answer the door. He held out our small jar of old stale candy corn and they each took a few. I guess as they were leaving one little boy complained forlornly to his mother that this was already the second house that didn't have candy. We felt pretty guilty so we got out of there in a hurry.

The one Halloweeny thing we did do was carve pumpkins. This was last Monday, for Family Home Evening.

Of course the worst part is getting all the pumpkin guts out of the pumpkin. This time it was worse because we forgot to bring them inside to warm them up, so it was frozen gook. Delightful.

Seth, of course, did not understand what my problem was.

Also, I sort of accidentally broke one of the little saws we had in our pumpkin carving kit, so Seth had to use one of his coping saw blades. He was a good sport.

Our creations! Seth modeled his after Jack Skellington, from The Nightmare Before Christmas (one of his favorite movies) and I picked a design from the little booklet in our pumpkin carving kit.

Hope everyone had a lovely Halloween.
Seth and I are going out tomorrow to get on sale leftover Halloween candy. I can't wait!