Browns and Blues

Luke and I had taken a break from working on our house. After the three months of nonstop renovations, we just hit a wall when we moved in. We needed a break! And I'm glad we took one. I'm ready to get back in there, and I have a new, fresh perspective on how I want to decorate!

Today I went back to working on the bathroom (our blue and brown room) with a vengeance! Here are some of the blue and brown things I've added to this room:

Here are two lovely shelves that I got at...are you ready for this?...FAMILY DOLLAR for $8 (in all for both of them)!! I also got the clock there for around $5 or $6 I think. Who says beauty has to be expensive?? Granted, the first shelf is a little scratched up. But it doesn't show up that much in normal light. The flash made it stick out a lot!

And I found this cute little piece in some of the old boxes I looked through at Mom and Dad's last night. It turns out, it was actually a high school graduation present from an ex-boyfriend! Ha! But it matches my bathroom perfectly, so I just HAD to use it :-)
I also found these at Mom and Dad's house. I decided they would also go in the bathroom

Here is what I decided to do with the three small ones (still not sure about the bigger ones yet!) I made these pictures at www.picnik.com. Seriously my new favorite website and obsession! I will soon be hanging these on the wall across from the toilet :-)

Here's a close up so you can see the background pattern...I LOVE it! And might be incorporating it in other places in the room as well.
Here is my final addition to the room. We actually bought it a few weeks ago with a Christmas gift certificate at Bed Bath and Beyond. I think it matches perfectly, and I love it!


Okay, now I need YOUR help. Our little laundry room (which is still pretty torn up) is attached to the bathroom. It looks horrible! Here's a picture of what it looks like from the bathroom (can you tell it's laundry day? :-P)I plan on making (or having my mom SHOW me how to make) a curtain for the doorway. I found a few different patterns that I like online. Which one do you like best? I might also make a curtain for the little window in the bathroom with it to tie it together.

Choice #1
I used this pattern as the background for my "Live" "Laugh" "Love" pictures. It's by far my favorite, but of course it's also the most expensive one. I thought about using it with a dark chocolate panel of fabric at the top to tie in the color of the shower curtain.

Choice #2:
Not loving this one, but at least it's brown and blue

Choice #3:
I'm liking these stripes a little more than the first ones.

Choice #4:
I probably won't use these polka dots, but they ARE adorable. Maybe for a nursery someday ;-)

Choice #5:
I kind of like it! But is it too dramatic?

Choice #6:
I'm really loving this one, although it doesn't incorporate the blue.

Well what do you think? Which choice would look best in my brown and blue haven? For some reason, bathrooms and kitchens are my favorite rooms to decorate, so I'm spending a lot of time on making decisions for this room! I would love your input! :-)

Friday Night highLights

Luke's still not home from the Cavs game, so I thought I'd quickly share some highlights from tonight. I hung out with my parents and sister who is home from college this weekend. We ate pizza and laughed and chatted all night. It was great :-)

First of all, as soon as I got there, my mom gave me this gift from my grandma. It's full of petals from my wedding bouquet, it's tied with pink and brown ribbon used on many decorations from my wedding, and I believe one of our little containers of bubbles is hiding in there somewhere. It's like a little wedding memory jar. I thought it was sweet!

It's beginning to look a lot like Valentines Day when Mom breaks out the pink and red M&Ms!

I got to see the best dog ever! Our Australian Shepherd (mix). She's 10 years old, and her name is Holly because her birthday is on Christmas!
I also got to see my sister's somewhat creepy, obese cat, Kitty. Julie's real creative with names, right? When she was about seven she had 2 fish named Runny and Chasey because they swam fast :-P

And finally before I left, Mom made me go through a bunch of my old clothes to see what I wanted to get rid of (which was all of it :-P). We found a few old gems:

Julie's modeling my old Abercrombie and Fitch shirt - she used to steal it from me all the time simply because of the brand name. Glad we got past all that materialistic stuff eventually!

I remember BEGGING my parents for this sweater for my birthday when I was 16. It was from American Eagle and it cost $50. I thought it was the coolest thing ever....is it not the ugliest thing you've ever seen?! I'm not sure what I was thinking. Julie's look of shock in this picture says it all:

Looking through all my old clothes brought back so many high school memories! That time was so much fun, and so much easier! Looking at the old clothes brought on an hour-long discussion of all of our funny memories. We were laughing so hard we cried. Those are the best times, if you ask me. It's been great having Julie home a little more often this semester. I really miss her a lot more than I expected to. When we were little, we fought all the time. But everyone told us we'd be close someday. I didn't believe them at the time, but now I see that it's true. She's my sister, my accomplice, my inside-joke-sharer, my shoulder to cry on, my ear to rant to, and most of all, my best friend.

Who knew that life would bring us so close after all these years? Is there any bond quite like the bond of sisters? I'm not sure that there is. We totally get each other, inside and out. We can finish each others' sentences, and we're not afraid to be blunt with one another. I love my sister, and I'm so glad she's in my life!

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P.S. I hope you like my new February header!

The Bachelor

Because I have nothing better on my mind today :-P

Does anyone else watch The Bachelor? I've been really into it this season, more so than other seasons for some reason. Part of it is because I genuinely like Jason. And a big part of the reason I'm watching this season is because I saw in the preview that DeAnna is going to make an appearance! I just want to see what happens, and I hope Jason puts her in her place! (If you didn't watch DeAnna's season of the bachelorette, she let Jason get down on one knee and propose during the finale, and THEN turned him down. I thought that was just cruel!)
I know I'm pulling for Melissa. She's a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader (and she was on the CMT show). She seems sweet and genuine, and I think Jason seems to really have a connection with her.Is anyone else watching? If so, who are you pulling for?

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In other news, I'm looking forward to tomorrow night! Luke's going to another Cavs game. He got his dad tickets for Christmas, so they're going to have a little father-son game night tomorrow :-) Luckily, my mom called and invited me over for pizza and a movie tomorrow night! I guess Julie's coming home from college again. She just broke up with her boyfriend, and I think that's why she's been making frequent visits home: nothing's keeping her in Akron anymore! I'm excited, because I've been missing her :-(

Happy weekend, just in case I don't post again since I'll be SOO busy this weekend (Ha! Yeah right, you know I'll probably write every day :-P)

How I Spent my SNOW DAY!

Yes, all schools and even universities in the area were canceled due to the non-stop snow and frozen rain we've gotten since 7:00 last night. it's supposed to keep going on until 7:00 tonight, too, and therefore all the activities at our church are canceled for tonight as well. Luke and I were supposed to help with the preschool KBC class, but I guess we'll have to find something to do around the house instead!

Well here are the highlights of my snow day in pictures. I was kinda bored being here all alone, so I took a lot of them ;-)

All images were edited in Picnik! Yes, I'm totally addicted.

I wore my glasses since I didn't have to dress up for work or anything. I love just bummin around!

All morning I cleaned the house! I was determined not to sit on my behind all day!

Then I had a wonderful lunch. Luke's sweet mom gave us some of the broccoli cheese soup she made the other night. It was pretty tasty, and warmed me up! Here it is with the recipe box she got me as a shower gift full of all of Luke's favorite recipes! The broccoli cheese soup was in there, so I think I'll try my hand at making it next week.

Then I ventured outside to get some lovely pictures of the snow. Don't worry, I made sure to really bundle up!


Here are the steps leading up to our entrance. Looks safe, right?

Here is a side view of our house in the middle of the winter wonderland

And I took a picture of our street...look how white everything is! The only color in the whole picture is the street sign.

After that, I had had enough of the snow! I came inside and baked (actually, microwaved) a little treat: a wonderful chocolate cake made in the microwave! If you want the recipe, check out Reeni's blog. It turned out really good! But I somehow messed up the frosting and it was really runny! I just slathered some on and let it run down the sides of the cake. I always mess SOMETHING up when I'm baking. But it tasted pretty good, so that's all that matters :-)

I wore my adorable apron, also from my mother-in-law (both of our sweet little "mommy's" sure know how to take care of us, even though we're all grown up! :-)) It's pink! And you can't really tell, but it has my name on it! Love it!

And here's my finished product. Doesn't look too great, but it tastes pretty good! I had a little piece of it.

The cake was sooo chocolaty, I had to balance it out with some of this peppermint tea that I got for Christmas. Yum!

Well today has been the perfect snow day! Later I plan on catching up on some American Idol that I DVR'd last night. And then maybe cleaning a little more, because I promised Luke that if I had the day off I'd make it spotless!

I feel bad for Luke...while I had the day off, he had to go into work at 6 (2 hours early) this morning to plow! He works for the Salem Parks Department. There are 7 parks in Salem, so he has his job cut out for him today! I plan on having a mug of hot chocolate ready for him when he walks in the door. then later we'll have Chili for dinner, and maybe snuggle up and watch a movie later.

It will be a little sad to return to the real world tomorrow, but at least it will be Thursday! Wednesday is a good day to have a snow day, because it breaks the week exactly in half.

Crossing my fingers for 4 more of these babies before winter is over! 5 is our limit before we have to start making up days at the end of the year :-P

My Newest Addiction

Am I really posting again today?? I know, it's the second time in one day AGAIN. But I discovered a new website, and just HAD to share! Maybe I'm behind the times, I don't know. But I just stumbled upon this website: www.picnik.com. Here you can edit your own photos FOR FREE! This is not good, because I'm sure I'll spend hours upon hours here.

I played around with it a little bit tonight, and here are my first three creations:

Photo #1: My cat, Gabby

Before:

After:

Photo #2: Our First Dance:
Before:
After:

Photo #3: Wedding dress and bouqet
Before:

After:

I think my favorite part is that you can write your captions on the pictures themselves...the website has all kinds of adorable fonts. And I just love making the pictures look timeless and old-fashioned. I have a feeling I will be wasting a lot of my life here :-P You should check it out if you haven't already!

Luck is on my Side

About 3 weeks before my wedding, I killed my cell phone in a very unfortunate way...I used to always keep my cell phone in my back pocket. One day I was wearing some capris with shallow pockets, with my cell phone tucked inside. It was a very small cell phone. I was getting ready to use the restroom, standing by the toilet when I heard a big splash. I looked inside the toilet, and to my dismay, there lay my cell phone. I even fished it out and tried to save it (thank goodness it fell in before I had done my business:-P) But it was no use. It had died.

After that, I bought a cheap, older phone on ebay. A phone is a very important thing 3 weeks before a wedding! Luke bought me a pink cover for it as an I'm-sorry-your-phone-fell-in-the-toilet gift :-P I still have that phone.

On Sunday night, my phone went MIA. I remembered using it to text my friend earlier, but couldn't remember what had happened to it. I spent an hour looking for it before I finally gave up.

It was today, Tuesday, that I finally found the phone. It was under my car. I don't know how I didn't run over it, or how it didn't get water damaged from that snow that was all around it, but it still works fine! I'm so excited that luck was on my side this time and I didn't run over it or something! I now realize that it must have fallen out of my hand before FPU class Sunday night (I was carrying about 17 things, so it could have easily fallen :-P) I hope luck is on my side tomorrow, and I have a snow day! We are supposed to get another 8 to 10 inches of snow. Unless the forecast drastically changes between now and tomorrow morning, we will have a snow day. The superintendent was at our building today, and pretty much alluded to the fact that there was a pretty high chance that he would call school off.

In other news, my friend Lindsey and I came up with a good plan last night! She lives far away, so we don't get to spend much time together. We decided that we were going to surprise Luke and her boyfriend (whose name also happens to be Luke!) and take them to the spring Ohio State game! They are both huge Buckeyes fans. We plan on not telling them where we're going until the morning of the game. We also plan on wearing Ohio State jerseys (we're going to buy them secretly since we both don't have one right now), which will probably make them love us even more ;-) Then we will take them to the spring game, and treat them to some BW3's afterwards. We'll make it a real "guy's day" for them. But part of the reason we're doing it is so Lindsey and I can have a chance to catch up! I'm SUPER excited!

Have a great day. Here's to indestructable phones and snow days!

A Glimpse Into My Past

I know I JUST posted a little while ago, but Luke resurrected my old computer for long enough to retrieve some of my old photos and documents from it (It's a long story. Let's just say my six-year-old laptop broke in half at the hinges. You just don't come back from something like that :-P). I had to post some old photos from college...for nostalgia's sake.

Malone College Days

My friends and I all got our ears double pierced one night b/c our friend had just gotten a job at the piercing place at the mall.

The year was 2003, and short belly shirts, streaky highlights, and big chunky belts were cool. Ahh, what a difference six years can make :-P
I distinctly remember that this picture was taken on Gilmore Girls night. My friends and I never missed an episode, and had a party every Tuesday at 8 (or was it 9? I can't believe I don't remember!)
Why do we all look like we're 12?
Then in 2004, Luke came into my life!

We love going to Indians games...here we are at the season opener a few years ago. It was snowed out. P.S.: It was APRIL and 3 days before Easter :-P

Aww, we were so in love (and still are!) Luke cleans up nicely, no?

Here I am with Julie at my cousin's wedding in 2005. I'm going to use it as my "get skinny again" inspiration picture :-P
And here was the last stage of my college years: student teaching. These pictures make me miss the kids so much :-(

I've only been out of college for a year and a half, but it feels like so long ago! I miss that time. It was so much simpler! But I'm sure there will come a time when I'll say that about today, so I better enjoy it while it lasts.