Happy Birthday Jen!

Today is my best friend Jen's birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JENNIFER LEIGH. I wish I could be there to help you celebrate. I miss you so much!

Reasons that I love her and she is awesome include:

• She befriended me in Spanish class my freshman year and helped me not look like a total idiot in there
• Ever since we met, she's always, always, always been there for me
• We can communicate with each other without speaking, which comes in handy when we want to talk about people who are around us
• We laugh at the same things, even if some of those things might be awful things that should not be laughed at
• She doesn't judge me for laughing about awful things
• She makes delicious cheesecakes (most of the time....when she's not burning them :-)
• She introduced me to Starbucks way back when
• I feel like I'm a part of her family and she's a part of mine
• Her face looked like this during Ben and my's first dance:
  

(It's hard to see, but she looks SO happy for us that it makes me tear up!)

I love you Jen Leigh!! Hope your birthday is the best one yet. :-)

:-)

Just thought I'd say hello today! Nothing much is going on here this week. Ben and I went to Hobby Lobby last night to look around (I think he was trying to make up for all the football/baseball/more football/more baseball on TV around here lately). We didn't buy anything (this might shock y'all, but I'm unemployed! I don't talk about it much, I know :-), but I saw TONS of things I'd love to have for Christmas decorating. And by tons, I mean rows and rows and rows and rows. So much fun!! I still have major hopes for a couple of job possibilities, so maybe some new Christmas decorations will be in my future soon. Fingers crossed!

My dieting and fitness plan is going well (easy for me to say after only 2 days!). I'm using this Daily Plate site to track my calories, exercise, etc. I saw it on another blog, and it's really neat! In the past, I have tracked my calories in a spreadsheet, but this site is so much more useful. The database is full of all kinds of foods, it tracks your caloric needs based on your weight and activity level, and (the coolest part for me) it keeps track of your daily percentages of protein, carbs, etc. based on all of that other stuff. I've always been worried about getting enough protein and eating too many carbs since I don't eat a lot of meat. But my protein levels are more than fine! And my carb levels aren't too high either! For the most part, I'm finding my basic food choices are actually pretty healthy. It's all the extras (that I've always known are bad) that have been getting me--cookies, cakes, etc. etc. We'll see how it all goes. I'm usually good at being gung-ho about this stuff at the beginning and then it just all peters out gradually. I'm finding that fear is a pretty good motivator so far, though! If I don't lose at least a little weight, I can't really function in that dress. And I want to be able to function AND look good. Haha.

Well, I need to get going. My goals for today include cleaning the kitchen (again, story of my life) and taking down our Halloween decorations. :-)

Our Halloween

We didn't go to any parties or dress up, but our Halloween was a good one anyway!

It started out for me by going here:

Brand new Wal-Mart!

I was going mainly to get the stuff to make these: Candy Corn Bark. You'll have to imagine mine in your head because I didn't take any pictures! Or you can pretend mine looked like the one in the pictures there (even though it totally didn't). It turned out tasty, though!

From Wal-Mart, I hit up...

DSW!

...to check out their shoe selection. I've been looking for shoes to wear in Jenny's wedding in December, and I just recently found a pair online that I LOVE. So I went to DSW to check them out in-person.

THE shoes

Of course, they didn't have them in black in my size. And of course no other size fit. And of course (if I'm being honest) they were not the most comfortable shoes in the world, and I may or may not have felt a little off-balance walking in them which could (or could not) pose a problem for my main duty as a bridesmaid, you know WALKING down the aisle. So, I'm glad I saw them in person, and I'm sad they didn't fit (I was able to try on a quite stylish bright purple version in my size). I tried my hardest to fall in love with another pair of shoes at DSW, but it just didn't happen.

Feeling inspired, I came home and tried on this:

My bridesmaid dress!

Up til this point I had been in a bit of denial about gaining weight since the wedding. And I was expecting the dress to be a little snug (I knew I couldn't gain much weight when I ordered it!). I was not expecting it to look quite as bad as it did! I mean, it zips....so that's something. Haha. Anyway, I am SO glad I tried it on when I did so that I can be absolutely certain it will fit in mid-December. AND, a lucky break, some black shoes I already have work perfectly with it. It won't even have to be hemmed. :-)

So, I will be making GOOD friends with:

Jillian

over the next 7 weeks. And with healthy foods. And with portion control. :-) Which means I have quite a bit of candy corn bark sitting on my counter torturing me at the moment! Bad timing. :-)

I'm actually a little excited because this provides the perfect kick in the butt for me to be healthier! We'll see how it all goes.

Happy Halloween!

Here are some pictures from our pumpkin carving adventure of almost a week ago. Yes, our pumpkin already started to rot. Yes, it's now sitting outside instead of on our table! Haha. We got one pumpkin at Wal-Mart to carve together. Next year I definitely want to get two. And maybe go to a pumpkin patch! :-)

Ben, before we started carving

Pre-face

Wal-Mart had a pretty good selection of pumpkins! We were pleased. I found a template online to use, and I stuck with a simple one. Neither of us could really remember carving pumpkins on our own, so we didn't want to start out too complicated!

Pumpkin with template

Working with the stencil

(Yes we both wore our Panther's jerseys. No, it did not help the Panthers to a victory. Yes, I would've had one of us change if we had gone out in public. :-)

Ben with the jack o'lantern!

Me with him

Glowing in the dark!

We had fun with the whole process! We also roasted the pumpkin seeds--yum. And now we have a Halloween tradition that we didn't have before we were married. :-)

We don't have big plans for celebrating today, but we did buy some candy "just in case we get any trick-or-treaters" (AKA for us to eat all week and finish eating after tonight!).

Candies!

Hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween!

Show Us Your Life--Costumes!

I was totally going to do our pumpkin carving post today, but I think I'll save it for Halloween. Don't worry, this post is Halloween-themed, too. Kelly is hosting another carnival, so click here to see more fun costumes!I'm just posting one costume, but it's my favorite one! It's from the library last year, and all of us in the children's department dressed as Rainbow Magic Fairies. It's a hugely popular series of books, and one girl in particular was OBSESSED, so we all dressed up for her. And it freaked her out a bit, I think. Haha. Although she later did draw a picture of all of us dressed up, so I think once the shock of the life-size fairies wore off, she was impressed. :-)

Anyway, I chose a pink fairy (obviously), and spent FOREVER looking for a pink tutu/skirt. I thought that would be the easy part, but it wasn't. And I spent a bit more than I wanted on the tutu I ended up with, but it WILL be used again! I wish I was working this year so that I could dress up in this exact same costume. I think the outfit would DEFINITELY make an impression, especially if I wasn't working as a children's librarian. Hehe.

Luckily, the only other things I had to buy were the jewelry and the wings. Shockingly, I had plenty of other pink clothes to wear. :-)

Anyway, here is my inspiration!

Sienna

And here I am all dressed up!

It was such a fun costume, and I have such fun memories of putting it together and actually wearing it. Happy almost-Halloween!!

Fun mail!

I told you my mother-in-law was awesome!! In addition to the sweet gift that we had waiting for us when we got back from our trip home (that included the cute pumpkin towels!), she sent us a box full of Halloween treats that we got yesterday!!

Box o'treats

It included Peeps (I love them!), candy corn, peanut butter Ghiradelli squares, gummy worms, Pez, MORAVIAN COOKIES (yum, yum, yum!), popcorn, cider mix, and ORANGE hot chocolate mix. You better believe I will be taking a picture when we break out the hot chocolate because I haven't seen anything like it before! :-)

My mother-in-law is SO thoughtful and good at putting gifts together, and she usually sends one for each major holiday (and mine almost always include the appropriate Peeps! :-). See the orange and black tissue paper in the picture? Every holiday gift is themed like that--with cute wrappings and cards. My Valentine's gift last year included some red glass hearts as part of the packaging that I've been making part of my decor since.

Thanks, Deborah, for loving on us near and far!

Goings-on!

Random stuff that probably (be thankful!) won't get a post of its own. :-)

Ben bought me flowers, and I got to use one of our pretty vases for the first time!

I got to pull out the Jack-o-Lantern place mats (one of my mother-in-law's annual Halloween gifts to me--this year, it was cute pumpkin towels! :-)

I spray-painted a lamp base. :-)

Before

After!

I took pictures of our bedroom in case anyone at home wanted to see! None of them turned out very well. And they all highlighted how bare our bedroom is. It's spacious, though!!

I (perhaps) burned a hole in a recipe because I had turned on the wrong burner and did not realize it.

And, finally, a little blast from the past. I saw these pictures on my computer, and I just have to share! In preparation for the wedding back in February, I ordered TONS of shoes from Zappos to try on....I had liked their service before, and I knew they had free shipping for returns. It was still VERY STRANGE (and slightly exhilarating! :-) to order $700 worth of shoes. (Another random fun fact--I did not know how to spell exhilarating til now.)

The giant box they came in (the UPS guy could not believe it was full of shoes!)

Most of the choices

The stack of shoe boxes

So, I took a few of my favorites to try on with my dress, chose the wedge (the fourth one over in the picture above), and then CHANGED MY MIND. Haha. I ended up with a different wedge by the same brand.

My wedding shoe

I liked it because of the pretty rhinestones and because the wedge was a little shorter. I may or may not sometimes feel like a giant around my tiny friends and my super-skinny husband. :-) And I may or may not have had to lug that giant box to a UPS store later.

And that's your dose of random for today!!