I dislike two things:

depression and exercise.

I heard on NPR a few days ago that if you have the one and do the other, they cancel each other out. I'm trying. But I really, really dislike exercise.

Two funny stories, though.

1. Rode my bike to Target with Dave. When we started peddling, I ran into a pole, straight on, in slowmo.

2. We came across a really steep hill and Dave said, "Watch this!" He got half way and then couldn't keep going and looked up at me and said, "Cool, huh?" I love him! He made me laugh so hard.

I want to make Richard proud. The NPR program said I had to try for four months for it to make a difference. One day down.

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Things

Wow! Updates!

We made this. That should tell you a bit about our lives right now.

Other things:

1| We moved to SLC. Good things: Flash, Lily, River, Target, Costco. Bad things: Missing Jonah, Haylie and the fam, no more Ana's (just as summer started, too), missing friends (especially Katie and Bennett!).

2| We are going to Uganda! And the same note we are doing fundraisers to help the people there. Please see details here: http://seeeme.org/donate.html. Look at how cheap it is to help orphans!

Plus, everyone who donates gets an awesome water buffalo picture! (Drawn by a ten-year-old at Byana Mary Hill Orphanage and mixed up by me.)

3| Ah, that is about it. So, "el fin."

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Fit

My wife and i are a perfect fit. She compliments me and I her. She helps me remember everything, I help her remember how awesome she is.
She has great spiritual insights. I am grateful for her new resolve to spiritually redecorate our house. I love her.

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Our latest project . . .

a deck of floating face cards. They have been produced and should be here soon. I know, David is well on his infomercial way. That is one of the reasons I love him!

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My New Secretary

Dave, Kathryn, and I went to the DI on Friday. It turns out that the Sugar House DI is far superior to the one we have in Logan: more items, cheaper prices and cooler things. Kathy spotted an amazing secretary (which she wanted, but had no room for, but I still feel bad) and I jumped on it. It was a little harder to talk Dave into purchasing it (he had a good case, I have a very hard time finishing projects...).

Sadly for Him, every old, sassy, (and occasionally sweet) woman in the building swarmed around him to put pressure on him to let me buy it. Comments such as, "That thing is $15 and you won't let her buy it?!" to "Oh, that is amazing! It will be an heirloom for sure," were all directed to my poor husband. Even the DI guy started writing the sold slip before Dave even agreed. When David finally conceded, (as if they would have let him say "no") a round of applause burst from the basement of the Sugar House DI.

It was beautiful, and so is the secretary.

The back is come kind of horrible lumber. I think I will have to replace that, just so it is perfect.

Here it is in its open state. (Notice the pencil holder on the bottom right? I love the small details.)

A detail shot of the carving.

The handles are all beautiful as well.

And here it is closed.

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My New Favorite Hobby

See it on my blog, here. 

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this post will probably mean nothing to you

I have a question about my jade plant and needed to link to an image. (So people on a gardening site could reference this photo in regards to my question. So you can just ignore this or rejoice in the fact that I have a new plant.)

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New Pepsi Look: Two Thumbs Down

This is what I think: 

But I think this is WAY better:

I don't know which one is worse, Pepsi's rebranding or Tropicana's (whose cheaper looking, sterile, non-juicy, no straw-in-in-orange, awkwardly spaced redo makes me think I'm purchasing GoodValue and not a pricey orange juice).

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Uganda Details: Everything must have a beginning

Alright, I was too excited to think through my post. Some details:

1. We are going as part of the Engineers Without Borders program.

a. This means we are going to help people get access to a clean water supply (Dave's engineering degree comes i

n handy here). 

b. And help train them to be good workers (Dave's MBA comes in handy here).

c. And hopefully have an awesome dance party.

2. We are going sometime in July.

a. Dave is the team leader and he doesn't even know when in July we are going.

b. But we are going for a month . . .

c. or maybe longer? 

3. Some other exciting things

a. We might have a layover in Dubai 

i. where we kind of want to live someday

b. We are taking a week to get there so we can see some of Uganda

ii. Including, but not limited to

a. White-water rafting

b. Waterfall gazing

c. Looking for crocodiles in rivers

c. Scott pointing us to one of his clients blogs: aeglenn.blogspot.com

ii. We loved this post 

"Children at an orphanage in Entebbe, Uganda. There are so many children here it is incredible; there are orphans everywhere. The people take them in and it is not unusual to see families struggling with 8-10 children. We talked to a woman yesterday who has taken in twelve children. She said, 'Sometimes I feel sad that I cannot do more, but everything must have a beginning'. We have decided to use that as our personal reminder to guide our actions here as we try to help."

4. We'll keep you all updated.

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Uganda

We are going for over three weeks! This is probably a shock to everyone, because it is a shock to both of us! We were simply discussing it on Tuesday, and today we are going!

This makes me smile:

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It may be manipulation...

But I love this commercial. I want to make something awesome, learn origami and buy Asics shoes. There is something about Kihachiro Onisuka (yes, I had to look that up) that makes me wish he was my grandpa, or granspa's best friend (you know the one who comes over on Sunday afternoons for canasta).

Credits to Mabona Origami for making origami cool. 

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'Tis the season to blog about Christmas

This year, Christmas Rocks! I've spent the last month preparing the decorations. It is our first year (or holiday) that we've actually put anything up. First things first, I bought stockings. I've wanted to make some forever, but decided against it when I saw these at Pottery Barn (for the cost of material I would have had to bought). Right now, a lot of their stockings are on sale and they all ship free.

Alright, enough free advertising for Pottery Barn. It's Martha Stewart's turn. I started decorating ornaments and it wasn't working out. The tree was so overwhelming. But I wanted a lot of color. At the craft store, I saw a Martha glitter set of 18 great colors and ta-da:

(Side note: if you are a widow because it is finals week, don't get too carried away with the camera...)

And now advertising for me. Not really, but I did make sweet Christmas things this year. The back side of a gift certificate I made for a client:

I used it to make tags for our neighbor/friend gifts. I'm finishing them up but will show them to you later.

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Pictures of the New Apartment

The new pepper plant (ah, orange).

Our wall of Kathy art. The center piece fits PERFECTLY over our thermostat.

A section of our new tablecloth.

My favorite plant piece (and the only fake one!).

Our new bookshelf wall. We arraigned it by color.

A french not tutorial I'm putting together (mostly for myself).

We are loving it here. It is bigger, cleaner and brighter. We are currently taking reservations for visitors (because we miss you all).

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Grandma Vivi

Laurie decided to scan some photos of Vivian so we could display them at her funeral. While we were scanning/editing the photos, I thought I'd upload them on to flickr. Get your fill here. I'm still uploading, so there will be many more photos in the near future.

A before and after shot.

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Boy Bands and Cannibals

Every night for the past three nights, I've had a dream about dating some random person. The thing is, I never think about Anthony Hopkins, Justin Timberlake or the Jonas Brothers on a regular basis (or ever).

The first dream: Anthony Hopkins saw me at a show his daughter and granddaughter were performing in. I asked him if he wanted to sit next to me. It took him the whole rest of the show to get there. He asked me to eat with him, so I ran ahead to make reservations while he walked (slowly) to the restaurant after me. I went back to get him and he was dead. His daughter and granddaughter wouldn't let me go to the funeral because they thought I was trying to get his money. I didn't even like him, I just felt bad for him, so it wasn't such a big loss.

The second dream: I kiss Justin Timberlake and then he tells me who I should vote for because, "[He] used to be a member of the boy-band *NSYNC and [he] knows these things." He said it in a manner that implied, "Duh, you should have already known that."

The third dream: I'm dating one of the Jonas Brothers, but I've never seen them before and have a hard time remembering which one I'm supposed to be dating. I figure it must be the oldest one (at which point I try to figure out if it's against the law to date someone so young, but figure I'll just pretend to be 18), but I keep forgetting what he looks like, so I have to listen for clues. I don't like him but I think it's fun when we go places and everyone screams. Plus, we got to live in an awesome house in Disneyland.

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A Soviet housing revival right here in Logan (aka student housing))

I'm very excited to move, and yet I realized today that I will miss the quaintness of this apartment (mice, spiders, mold, dust and orange drinking water excluded). Today I was picking the last of the apples from the tree on an old, rickety (easy-to-fall-off-and-get-hurt) ladder, and I felt as if I was in a spread for an autumnal issue of Martha Stewart Living (in a good way, not the stuffy, too cute or too perfect way).

After it was dark, I went out to pick a great bouquet of saturated pinks, oranges and yellows. It is such a great thing to have a huge flower garden in your backyard. (I know you all want to see pictures, but I camera is in storage.) I was walking back inside with the flowers and I kept hear a faint buzzing, and whenever I moved what was in my right hand closer (either scissors or flashlight), it would get louder. I kept brushing myself off and then figured I had gone crazy and went inside. Then I felt something on my neck, something BIG. I made Dave check me for any bugs, but none were to be found. It turned out to be this huge bumblebee. Dave swatted it and it deflated it (it was substantially smaller).


Our apartment search could be going better (some places we looked include: apartments owned by the parents of the high school jock that wanted to date me but we didn't speak the same language-literally, a Soviet housing revival right here in Logan, and staying in Alta's basement). I'd much rather purchase the above house (Sq Ft: 2615, Bedrooms: 4, Baths: 2, Family Rooms: 2, Acres: .37, Outdoor Lighting, Wrap-around Porch, Dishwasher, Jetted Tub, etc.). All for (John and Brooke, skip this next part) $117,900. And that's the asking price, so I bet you could get it for cheaper (but they'd have to throw in the toy car and the bicycle). Someone we know lives by it and says the current owners have fixed it up a lot. Anyway, we are still looking for a place to live, so if anybody hears anything, let us know.

A quick update on the rest of our lives: busy and good. We are so happy right now, though Dave is always at work or school. We'll try to write more often. 

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How Could Tina Fey NOT be Sarah Palin?

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Our Current Living Situation

As promised, I'm keeping record of our lovely time in our current apartment. Including lovely little incidents like this:

(Before we located a shop vac: Dave soaking a beach towel and wringing it into a waste basket.)

The water came in through the kitchen window and brought with it all kinds of fun tidbits: dirt, dirty water, dead bugs, dirt... When we came home to this little surprise on Sunday, all the bugs in the apartment were climbing up the walls away from the water. 60+ gallons and still damp/wet.

ON TOP OF THAT: This morning I went into the laundry room (where we had moved all the living room things to to keep them from getting wet) and SURPRISE! It had flooded as well (Sometime between 1:00 yesterday and 5:30 this morning).

Oh well, I guess being young and poor means that life is full of exciting things like this. I'll probably (and hopefully) never get to jump in 2.5" deep water in me kitchen ever again.

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I know I promised to blog about our CURRENT living situation...

Heck, I'll even take the cheaper Ikea versions:

LEFT BOTTOM:

Four poster bed: HEMNES $299.00

Bench: NORDEN $69.99 + Upholstery Fabric, Staple Gun and Paint

Vase: OVATION Free, I already own it

Throw: UNNI VIRKA $29.99

Bed Spread: FORSYTIA $29.99

TOP MIDDLE:

Dresser: HEMNES $179.00 + contact paper (for stencils) and paint

BOTTOM MIDDLE:

Chairs: LILLBERG $149.00 + Black Paint

Rug: GEDSER $39.99

Assorted Frames: The RIBBA collection $7.99 and up

TOP RIGHT:

The real thing is cheap enough: Spectrum Chandelier $36.00

MIDDLE RIGHT:

Um, some blank White Bedspread and fabric ink: priceless

BOTTOM RIGHT:

Porch Swing: Delahey $109.00 + paint

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We're moving...

and I'm surprisingly a little sad. I wasn't a first, the day I realized the apartment was dark, dirty, and old, I found five spiders, and a mouse hopped across the floor. Then I started thinking about all the things I'll miss: Alta, the light fixtures, the garden, the dripping radiator, the skinny stove, the cupboards. 

We have a lot of history here, it has been the place for the first two-and-a-half years of "us." My mother was probably conceived here*.

I'm going to attempt to catalogue some of the things I like, as soon as I can find my camera. 

However, deep in our old photos I did find a picture of our previous fridge. Some things I loved about this fridge: 

-it was as old as my parents

-it opened from the left and since our kitchen is so tiny, you had to stand against the left wall and the open it, trapping yourself and making impossible for anyone else to be in the kitchen.

-When we got a new fridge, it had half the size foot print, and double the storage inside

-deicing

-the sweet handles

-the lazy susan style shelves

-like moldy food? you'd love this fridge, it doesn't keep anything cool enough

*More about my personal family history involving this house in future posts.

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