Merry Christmas

Taking Christmas card photos can be hard.

The Costco Heist

Never order something from Costco without first verifying that you can actually have a membership.

Sigh.

So I bought some Christmas cards from Costco.  I just logged onto their website and voila, they were ordered for pickup.  Well, we go in to pay and pick them up and find out that our membership expired five months ago, and they never billed us to renew it.  Obviously we only go to Costco once per year.  It so happened that I had a Costco gift card, so problem solved: they'd let us buy the Christmas cards with that.  Crisis averted.

Unfortunately I also ordered a certain present that I need to pick up sometime in the next few weeks.  And unfortunately I only have $6.02 left on my Costco gift card.  And unfortunately renewing my membership does not make financial sense. And unfortunately I've spent too many hours working on this gift to turn back now!  I will find a way to get in that store and make a purchase.

Scott and I have debated what to do.  Here are our options:

1. Go to Costco.  Track down someone on their way in and ask them to go with us to buy this item.  Risk rejection.

2. Borrow a card from someone we actually know.

3. Create a barcode that will read a valid membership ID and tape that on the card we currently have. I've created barcodes for work.  How different could it be?

4. Attempt to use my old membership ID from back when I was on my parent's membership.  I have the number.  I'm just not sure if it's valid.  I'm also not sure if the lady at the Costco entrance will accept a number written on a piece of paper as proof that I can enter the facility.

5. Have the worker retrieve the gift and then, while I "search for my Costco card in my purse," Scott will grab the present, throw some cash at the employee, and we will both run for it.

6. Renew our membership so this doesn't happen again next year.

Wish us luck.

Thanksgiving

No, we do not recommend that one on the bottom.  It may or may not be false doctrine about polygamy. haha.

Banana Cream

Island Pecan

Thank you, Grandma.

Pre-Thanksgiving Festivities

This, my friends, is a very long story.

Last Christmas our uncle sent us a gift certificate for a smoked turkey.  It was awesome, except we happened to have a bunch of other meats at the time that we needed to use, so we put off ordering said turkey.

Fast forward ten months, and somehow the turkey gift certificate made it through our move and we remembered it and we were able to locate it.  The stars were aligned and now was the time to get the turkey.

Here's where it gets good.  I look at the gift certificate, and I notice it's just a piece of paper.  There's no code...my name isn't on it...I start to wonder if our uncle just made it himself...  So, I go to the website and see what I need to do to order this turkey.  Well, the website says nothing about gift certificates, so I call.  I'm informed that I'll need to mail in an order form (which I do not have), and then I will get the turkey.  So, we'll skip some additional phone calls (yes, plural) here and skip to where I finally have the order form.

Here's where it gets better.  The order form doesn't tell me how much the turkeys cost.  It doesn't tell me much it will cost to ship this turkey to me.  The order form is actually a form to order more gift certificates.  I'm serious.

I went through enough to get this order form in the first place, so I decided I would just go to the website, find out about the shipping/turkey costs, write a check for any additional funds we needed that the gift card didn't cover, and I'd send that along with the sort-of-order-form.

Well, about a week passed, and I heard nothing.  No confirmation.  Nothing, until the turkey just randomly arrived on our doorstep.  Somehow I sent in the right materials, and they knew to send me a turkey.  Kind of a miracle.

Now to the turkey itself!  It was super delicious and such a fun thing to randomly get on your doorstep.  This thing, however, was smoked, and it smelled smoky. I put it in the fridge and barricaded it with boxes of baking soda, but of course everything in the fridge now smells like Scott's sleeping bag.  Oh well, the turkey is good. 

Memories From Childhood Part II

Back in the preschool days, my best friend and I were very creative.  Despite this being a long time ago, I have a lot of vivid memories from 1995.  Here are two for your reading pleasure.

1. My BFF Kayla lived next door to our preschool teacher, and we loved that lady.  We loved her so much that we'd constantly make her things.  Usually it was just a painting using the "Do A Dot" medium, but one time I remember wanting to make her a Christmas tree.  We couldn't find any evergreen materials, so we grabbed some tumbleweed from the street and glued grass all over it.  Take a moment and picture what this would have looked like.  It was a masterpiece.

2. Sometimes Kayla and I would experiment in the kitchen.  I don't think we were allowed to actually cook anything, but we were allowed to make mixtures.  One of our most successful dishes was Smarties Juice.  The recipe is quite simple, and yet very time-consuming for five-year-olds: You smash smarties and mix them with water.  We thought it tasted so good (perhaps compared to our other concoctions).  Right after we finished making it, we offered a taste to Kayla's big sister who thought it was gross and spit it back out into the cup!  Unfortunately that cup held the entire batch of Smarties Juice.  And we were now out of smarties.  We were very upset.

There is no cure.

Today I remembered something, and I am so shocked that I haven't mentioned this in the blog because it makes me laugh so much.

While we were selling/buying our house a few months back, and going through fire and brimstone, I might add, I saw a deal that was way too good to be true.  A 4,000 square foot home for like two-hundred grand.  I knew there was something seriously wrong with that house because houses only run for those prices if they're located in the Gobi Desert, but I decided to have my realtor look into it anyway.

We got the following message back:

HEALTH HAZARD. SHOW HOME AT OWN RISK. Home was infested with mice. Most of the mice have been removed. HOWEVER there is still a concern with possible HANTAVIRUS which can be stirred up in the air or through skin contact. There is no cure.

I am just dying over that last sentence.  There is no cure.  The agent felt the responsibility to tell us that we might contract an INCURABLE disease if we so much as visit this home.  I can think of nothing worse to say about a house.  Still laughing.

The crazy end to that story is, the house had 8 offers the first day!  That is a perfect description of the housing market 3 months ago.  Complete insanity.  And now I will say a few dozen prayers of gratitude that I survived that experience and that I don't live with mice or incurable diseases.

Welcome Fall

You may remember I've tried to get these festive Oreos for 98 cents for the past two years.  Finally, after all these years we bought them.  Full price.  No regrets.

Fresh-cut flowers from the yard. :)

Nothing goes better with scones than spinach.  Nothing.

Who knew rotten garlic cloves turned into daffodils?

A picture of a human!  (A very cute human.)

Strange Happenings

 A few weird things have been happening over here lately.  Like someone has been putting random trash in our garbage.  Such as bottled water bottles.  And let me tell you, our garbage is about 5 feet from our neighbor's recycling bin, so this is pretty suspicious.  The trash culprit is also against recycling...

 

Also the bush we have in front of our electrical box out front was destroyed.  It looks like the electric people needed to do some maintenance and didn't like that we covered up their ugly electric box with a bush.  Coming from people who have a really hard time keeping plants a live as it is, this was pretty devastating.

Also I got the following text on my work cell the other day: "Thanks for all the love and support.  She is in recovery now, and the doc said it went well.  They took the right ovary (about the size of a tennis ball)."  Umm...I debated texting back and telling them they had the wrong number, but I didn't really want them to know that I know about the ovary.  Or lack thereof.  Or size thereof.  This person also wished me a happy birthday a few weeks ago.

Sometimes I like to try and come up with a way in which these happenings are all related.  But number 3 is super hard to work with and slightly gross, so then I stop.

Happy October, friends!  Here's to hoping my month gets LESS spooky.

92 Hours Later...

Hardly anything outside the norm is going on right now.  We work.  Then we work some more.  Then we take care of the house.  Then we sleep.  Sometimes we eat.  Anyway, my blogging options right now are either more news about our house projects, my thoughts on Lost season 6 (spoiler free, of course), or college football banter.  These are all equally riveting in my mind, so I think we'll hit them all.

The House: 

The table and chairs are almost done.  Good heavens, it'll only end up taking a few weeks, but every day during those two weeks we had to do some sort of step to finish them.  Every daaaaay.  I don't think I'll tackle any other refinishing projects for a while, but I am very pleased about how this is turning out.

We're not missing anything about this before picture.  Except perhaps the fact that the wall matched our bananas so nicely:

We could still make some improvements in the decor department, but here's the "after":

 There's always more to be done around here. We don't have a lot of other major projects, but there's more space to decorate, more and more boxes to go through (still), and an unlimited supply of grout I still haven't cleaned.  We love this house, but wow it is hard to keep up on the cleaning!

Thoughts on Lost Season 6: 

*The ending...What the heck?  I'm not saying I didn't like it, I'm just saying what the heck?

*Why did that one bad guy never have a name?

*Michael Giacchino rocks my world.  So does Matthew Fox.  And I just love the Benjamin Linus character for whatever reason. 

*Sayid fell in love way too many times, and the Shannon fling was always so weird, and yet they kept revisiting it!

*The best quotes of the entire series include Hurley not knowing who the President of the United States is and that moment when Benjamin Linus brings Sayid a chicken salad sandwich.

*This show ranks up there with Prison Break and FNL, we liked it that much.

College Football Banter:

It has begun, and my moodiness levels are on the rise.  I'm pretty sure this is causation, and not just correlation, Statistics People.  The good news is I get a 4-hour back scratch every Saturday in order to keep the peace around here.  Goooooo cougars.

Around Here

Kitchen Progress

We are in house-project mode.  The great room saw a slight makeover because remember how it used to be home to the bowling alley and had burgundy and mustard walls?  

No more of that, my friends.  After much deliberating and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, we finally picked our paint colors.  We went with a color called Ivory Lace for the living room side and Almost Aqua for the kitchen/dining side.

Here's one tentative before/after of the dining area so you can see the paint change:

We're still working on painting trim a brighter white, we took down that awkward television that was hanging over the table, and we're also refinishing our table and chairs! In other words, we'll be eating on the floor for the next 5 months.  We got a good start on the table today though.

We started with this:

It's your typical light-wood table, but don't let this picture fool you, this table was not in good shape.  At all.  There were scratches and the finish was totally wearing off all over the place.  That's what you get when you spend $25 on KSL.

So we sanded.

And applied a wood conditioner.

And stained with a red mahogany stain!

And we ended up with this (although we're doing another coat in a few hours so it will be a little darker and a little redder):

What a change!  The plan is to paint everything except the top (which is now stained) white, so we're going for the farmhouse table look, which I first saw here.  It is a lot of work, but we had a fun day working on this together.  Now I need about 6 otter pops and a back massage.

A New Member of the Family

Meet the newest member of the family.  (There I go with the deceptively exciting post titles again, sorry.)

Scott spotted this little guy for one dollar at Lowes and thought we "needed" him.  I didn't really want to care for yet another plant even for free, but lo and behold, the plant was purchased and now sits next to our bathtub. 

We sometimes argue over how to best raise this plant.  I think it's kind of flimsy and needs a good shaking and Scott thinks it's dainty and just needs some love.  So, while my back is turned he feeds it more water, and while Scott is away I torture the plant by forcing it into the sunlight and shaking its branches.

If plants are any indication, this is probably how we'll raise our children.  Me: torture them for their own dang good, and Scott: love them and feed them treats behind my back. 

I think we might make a really good team.

Oh yeah remember how we have a new house and I've refused to post decent photos?  We're still working on projects everywhere, but today I can show you our little front room since we've run out of decorations and furniture to put in there!

We just got our carpets cleaned and therefore refuse to walk in this room to preserve the beauty of cleaned carpets.  As you can imagine, getting that piano bench back in there without touching the carpet was a challenge! 

So, if you come to our house I hope you can jump from the wood floor to the couches.  Not that I'd make you do that or anything...

Goodbye Speed Queen

I need to document some special details about my old washing machine.  We got it for like twenty dollars from a random person who we were buying a TV stand from.  They happened to have a washing machine that they were also getting rid of, and Scott didn't have one at the house.  Perfect!

 

Well, the washing machine (model name: Speed Queen) was not the best.  It typically got stuck on the rinse cycle and it kind of leaked out the bottom.  And  yet, we were very capable of switching it to the spin cycle, and there was a drain right next to the leak, so we decided it was good enough. 

 

3 years went by, and we moved to the new house.  The new house had everything we ever wanted.  Except for a drain right next to our leaky washer.  So, that was a problem.  Why all houses don't have built in leaky-washer drains, I don't know.  So that was the end of the Speed Queen right there.  It never even got hooked up. 

 

Now let me tell you about the new washer.  It is fancy.  Actually it is not fancy, but compared to the Speed Queen, it's SUPER fancy.  It tells me exactly how many minutes are left in the cycle.  It has a bedding cycle.  The knob can turn clockwise or counterclockwise (blew my mind).  It sings a little song when it's done.  I can read all of the settings on the dial.  It doesn't leak.  It can complete a cycle all on its own.  What I'm saying is, my quality of life drastically increased with this new washing machine.

High Fashion

I follow some fashion blogs, and sometimes I like to check out what the celebs are wearing.  I'm not much of a fashionista (I am wearing Bermuda shorts from the 10th grade right now), but I like to see what's out there. 

Sometimes I especially like to see what's out there.  Like this T-Swift/Carly Simon combo:

Wow, what outfits!  Taylor is wearing Mickey Mouse shorts, and Carly Simon...I think I know who Carly Simon's doppelganger is:

Am I the first to make this connection?

All this doppelganger talk reminds me of my all-time favorite celebrity doppelganger:

Sadly the Ben F. comparison was not my creation.  It's something so brilliant I never would have thought of it.

These are the things in my life that make me laugh every time I see them.  Every time.