Oh, Happy Day!!

Indeed, it is :)

Mark flip-flopped his normal schedule, and hung out with me and got suit-fitted this morning, and went into his internship this afternoon. A nice change from the norm :)

Why this day is so happy:

Exhibit A: laying in my uber-amazing-comfy bed forever this morning :)

Exhibit B: leftover Thai food for lunch!! This is Chicken Panang, also known as heaven:

Exhibit C: My CSA box!!!!!!

I do think we might be upgrading to the bigger box next month, but we'll make do with this for now I guess..... :) This makes me so, so, so, so happy for so many reasons. I am more thankful for this food than other food - I guess I shouldn't be, but I just feel a stronger connection. I've read about the farmers that grew this food. I trust the company. I believe in their methods. This food is organic, and it's local, and beautiful. This will become our food for this week: bruschetta for lunch tomorrow, eggplant parmesan (maybe a small eggplant parm) for Thursday's dinner with a green salad, and peaches for our snacks. Oh, how happy this box makes me!!

And finally, Exhibit D: Wonderful shopping trip to Jo-Anne Fabric and Crafts!

I got quite the spread of scrapbooking supplies, and Lord knows I sorely needed them (and oh, they are pretty! Paper! Prismacolors! Metallic gold pen! Oh my!), but this little gem was my favorite buy of today :) I desperately want a house to decorate. It's hard to decorate for holidays and such 1) when you've never really done it and don't really know how, and 2) when your place of residence is not permanent. But I've decided to try and turn over a new leaf this year, and this is a great place to start! (And it looks so pretty on my red door!) Come Christmas, I hope to have garland running along our little banister between the dining room and living room, but this is a lovely start for fall. Once October comes, I'll add a few real pumpkins, and our entrance will be lovely :)

I think I'm gonna go break into some of that new scrapbooking stuff now ... hope everyone has an equally lovely day as I did!!

Monday Monday

Oh Monday, how I missed you.

Since working my weekend schedule, I LOVE Mondays! (I know, that's weird when the rest of the population hates them, but whatev.) The week is new, I have five days to do whatever, and I always wake up super-early and get to see the sunrise coming through our bedroom windows. (Cause I always blog in bed. Where do you guys blog?)

Happy thing:
A really FANTASTIC giveaway is being held at mucho mucho bueno bueno!! You should check it out, because it's really really great, and it introduced me to a really cool website with lots of pretty dresses :)

Other happy thing:
I got my boots!! Mark and I had a date day on Friday because he wasn't working, and we went to see Iron Man 2 at the Dollar Theater (am I the only one who wasn't all that impressed? The first one was way better...), and out to eat for a late lunch. Then he was like "Hey, let's go to the Clarks store!" So we did, and I am SO IN LOVE with these boots, and they said people were already buying them like crazy, so I'm glad I bought them when I did or they might have run out! And then we bought him some new jeans (for $30 at Banana! What a steal!) And we were both happy :) And now we can't buy anything else for quite a while...

And now, what I hope to accomplish this week:
-Scrapbook my cruise! (Or at least start on it)
-Sign up for a CSA! (OMG I'm SO EXCITED. See this website for the awesome organization I'm going through...)
-clean my house. no exclamation point there.
-Go to Nashville and visit Elissa! She's having a rough time right now, and she needs me. And I miss her. So that's that.

Hope all you gals (and guys? are there any guys besides Mark who read this?) have a great week!!

Surprise!

Yesterday, I got a phone call from Kelly, and Surprise! I'm getting a visit from her today! She and her friend Kait are going with their boyfriends to the Arcade Fire concert in Georgia, but Colton and Bryce (the boyfriends) will be at the lake today. So Kelly and Kait are coming here to hang with me while they wait for the boys to get back. Yay!!

That also means that I really need to get out of my bed and clean my house. Because it's a disaster, and I've never met Kait before, and while Kelly can handle my messiness, I'm not sure if that's the kind of first impression I want to put out there to Kelly's friends. Motivation? I've got some.

Time to get a move on!

Update from Ooltewah

I'm at my parents' house, about to go take pictures with Kelly after she showers, and I thought I'd post a quick update.

It's been a fun trip so far - after dinner last night, we watched some old home movies (and I never cease to be embarrassed ... I had about a 10-year awkward stage. Thank God that's over.) I've cooked a bit, and tonight we're going to Big River Grill with Sarah and Thomas. Hopefully afterward, we're going to reprise Kelly's performance in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (she was a senior in high school at the time), and we'll probably play a round or two of Baulderdash. Tomorrow, per Mark's request, we're eating lunch at our favorite BBQ joint :)

Good times.

I love coming home. You can't beat my family :)

Pictures! (Or, I'm Back!!)

Finally! I'm posting pictures from like 3 weeks ago ... a few of these you may have already seen, but I can't remember what I've posted and what I haven't, so you'll just get to look at them again. Quick recap: Mark left on Saturday, Kelly came on Monday. Tuesday we went to Samford to take books back and make pictures. These are at Samford...

Then we came back to the house to make ice cream and start our ravioli adventure.

Ice cream! It was delish!

(obviously.)

Later that afternoon, we started making mushroom ravioli. It took 3 hours. It was a long process.

Kelly kneads the pasta dough...

Spooning the pasta onto the rolled dough...

The finished product. It was pretty freakin' good.

On Wednesday, we went to the Birmingham Museum of Art.

It was pretty fun, and we got some good pictures, but man it was FREEZING in that place.

So we escaped outside to the sculpture garden...

Where Kelly got eaten by a cloud. Sad day.

I snatched her back, and that night we got to see Colton. (Much to Kelly's delight.)

The next day, we went to Sno-Biz.

We love Sno-Biz.

That night we went out to eat with the amazing Laura Echerd at Firebird's. It was SO yummy.

We dressed up for the occasion. Because who doesn't love dressing up?

Friday was a busy day. We cooked up a storm that morning, and Kelly incinerated some bacon in my microwave. It was impressive. We were going to Colton's later that afternoon, so we made cookies for his family.

Peanut butter cup cookies, to be exact.

Oh, yum.

Then we went to this petting-zoo-type place at Oak Mtn. State Park.

The animals were very, very friendly.

And they had the cutest baby donkey in the whole wide world.

Honestly, don't you just want to lay down and cuddle with him?

Kelly made friends with this goat. And then he stepped on her foot. Oh well.

Then we went and saw Toy Story 3 with Colton. I can't say enough good things about that movie. It was wonderful, and I cried like a baby.

And then I had to work the weekend, which was sad. And on Monday, Kelly and I left early in the morning and I went to meet my hubby at the airport!

So, now you're all up to date on pictures. I will soon finish my current roll, and then you'll get to see life on Hannah's farm, and hopefully some adorable pictures of Kelly and Colton if I can get them to comply today.

Happy Monday, everybody! I'm off to freeze some tomatoes :)

Immediate Funk Eliminator:

The new HP7 trailer is now out.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/harrypotterandthedeathlyhallows/

oh. em. gee.
(P.S. This one has lots of potential spoilers, so if you haven't read the seventh book, don't watch the trailer. Or, do, and be maybe-confused and maybe-disappointed, because you just found out what happens.)

Harry Potter makes my heart happy.

(And it will always, always be better than Twilight.)

25, and grown up

I think I'm finally starting to feel like a grown-up.

I don't really know why it's taken me this long... Well, I do know part of it. During the 2 years in which I worked nights, I didn't feel like a grown-up. I didn't feel like much of anything, actually, except a zombie.

But now that Mark is working daily, and I'm making breakfast and sending him off and have a pretty sweet morning routine ... I like it. Working on the weekends gives me the best of both worlds. I'm a housewife during the week, and I've gotten into a really great routine of cleaning and cooking (we haven't been out to eat for dinner since Kelly came to visit), and I love it. I feel like a real person. With a real life. And I still get to do what I love on Saturday and Sunday as well. It's a pretty sweet deal.

I've discovered some interesting things about myself during this process...

I actually like washing the dishes (which has always been my least favorite chore)  - but only if I do it in the morning. And with my iPod playing.

Cooking makes me incredibly happy. Eating, even more so :)

I like it when my house is clean. Therefore, I clean it. I know, very basic concept ... but it's taken me years to figure this out. (More like years to actually get up the motivation to DO the cleaning...) I've probably still got years to go before it's always the way I want it. Actually, let's be honest. That will probably never happen.

Speaking of, I need to go and conquer some of that cleaning. And dish-washing. And cooking. I'm making Mark a pie today, and the kitchen needs to be cleaned (first, before I start the pie, and then again after the pie ... why oh why can't they invent a self-cleaning kitchen??)

What are your favorite/least favorite household chores?

The Week that Kelly Came

Good morning, blogland! It seems like everybody had a pretty nasty Monday yesterday, and I hope that Tuesday is much, much better.

I worked yesterday. Not good, not bad, just neutral. Which is what work has been a lot lately.

Before I get into the pictures and stories from last week, let me just say, I had some crazy dreams last night. Please note this disclaimer first: I AM NOT PREGNANT. I repeat ... I am NOT HAVING A BABY. End disclaimer.

So, the entire night, and I mean ENTIRE, I dreamed about having a baby. Well, first it was one baby. The second dream, I was having septuplets, which were all term, and yet my baby bump was seriously lacking in size. This had me worried. And I was dreaming about having a c-section, and looking up at the CRNA and completely freaking out ... and he gave me this gas stuff, and I was sure I was going to be put out and intubated, and I remember thinking that I did NOT want that to happen ... but I never went to sleep. And realized that it was laughing gas that he was giving me. And THEN I dreamed that I was still in high school, and had just had a baby, and was trying to do too many things at once, and this weird lady who I don't know was helping me with the baby and trying to keep me from breastfeeding .... and yeah. It was weird.

That's what happens when you attend deliveries (especially c-sections, a lot) and work with babies all the time.

Once again ... I AM NOT PREGNANT. Fin.

Now ... onto the fun stuff!

Kelly's Birthday Dinner:

I used my new china and my crystal and bought snapdragons to make a really pretty table :)




And we dressed up!




Love her :)


This is a GORGEOUS picture of Kelly, I think.


Colton came for dinner!


Me and my sweetie





Kelly's birthday cupcakes


Opening her birthday card from me


And her present!


Colton gave her an Arcade Fire CD, along with a song that he wrote and recorded himself. It was really ridiculously cute :)


After dinner, we played Battle of the Sexes!


Thursday, we went to Chez Lulu!


Lookin' cute :)


And Friday, we met Colton at the Botanical Gardens. They are so stinkin' cute.


Skipping!


They decided to have a skipping contest ... here they're plotting their path


And off they go! Oh, how I love this picture




I love the light here


Then we went to Starbucks for a "snacky-snack" for Kelly





In the car, after dinner at Cantina


Mark took us to the First Presbyterian church as a history lesson - one of the churches to whom Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is addressed.


I love my sister!


And then we headed up to the Vulcan, to try to look at the Birmingham skyline. The trees were in our way.


Silhouettes of the trees


We found a little hole! Birmingham is really pretty at night...


And there you have it - our fun week in pictures! I can't wait for her to visit again in July :)