This morning I bought really cute address labels with my new address on them! That was item number 7 under "Domesticness" on my list of 101 things to do.
The address on the labels is for our new townshouse. All I've seen of it so far is pictures from a cell phone, so I'm very excited to get up to PA and see it and startign setting up our home.
But I have heard that its a two bedroom, has big closets in the master bedroom and has all new flooring and paint and a new dishwasher. Sounds good to me! I'll do a post with picutres once I move in!
Mike has moved in already so that he can be closer to his NEW JOB! But the poor guy is sleeping on the floor and watching two TV channels. Hopefully the couch delivery will come through on Friday, and they will hook up the phone, internet and cable on Saturday so he can have a little more convienences- and so that I can actually have a conversation with him- there is no cell service that covers the area so we haven't been able to talk very much. But, only a little over a week and we'll be married!
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Quick Update
Fall Break went by way yoo quickly. I'm trying to come up with an effective posting schedule that fits into my schedule but is more frequent that I have been. Because I have been really slack lately. I am thinking about getting some guetposts to fill in for me while I'm on my honeymoon (December 19th-26th), but I know its a busy time of year. If you're interested give me a shout! I'll be guest posting on Mandy's blog next week.
But here's what I've been up to:
Classes and Homework.. This is the worst semester of my college career. My classes stink, and somehow I'm close to flunking Bio 101, even though I can tell you almost everything we discuss. Something about those tests....
Wedding Planning. Totally more fun than classes and homework, and thankfully, taking up less and less time as we get closer. Mike's booked us a room at Niagra Falls and we'll be honeymooning there. He's taking care of all of the details. RSVPs roll in every day and my father's family is throwing me a bridal shower on November 6th. I think I've settled on a centerpiece idea and I'm working on buying all of the pieces (bought eiffel tower candles from hobby lobby last night).
I've still got to find something to hold my post cards, make programs, make nail and makeup appointments, make a cd of the prelude music, finish writing my vows, wrap my bridesmaid gifts, try out my hairstyle, buy sparklers and make the centerpieces for the food table. And possibly convince my dad to make me a photobooth area. My dad's taking care of the alcohol and search for a cake table and Mike is dealing with tuxes.
Being Supportive. Mike threw his back out when he sneezed the other day. He also found a job but in the three weeks that he's had it they have not been able to get in all of the training videos for him to watch. So he's spent all of his time off searching for a more reliable job. Yesterday, he got called for an interview for a state job. Its consistent work and better paying and offers better advancement opportunities, so please keep him in your prayers.
But here's what I've been up to:
Classes and Homework.. This is the worst semester of my college career. My classes stink, and somehow I'm close to flunking Bio 101, even though I can tell you almost everything we discuss. Something about those tests....
Wedding Planning. Totally more fun than classes and homework, and thankfully, taking up less and less time as we get closer. Mike's booked us a room at Niagra Falls and we'll be honeymooning there. He's taking care of all of the details. RSVPs roll in every day and my father's family is throwing me a bridal shower on November 6th. I think I've settled on a centerpiece idea and I'm working on buying all of the pieces (bought eiffel tower candles from hobby lobby last night).
I've still got to find something to hold my post cards, make programs, make nail and makeup appointments, make a cd of the prelude music, finish writing my vows, wrap my bridesmaid gifts, try out my hairstyle, buy sparklers and make the centerpieces for the food table. And possibly convince my dad to make me a photobooth area. My dad's taking care of the alcohol and search for a cake table and Mike is dealing with tuxes.
Being Supportive. Mike threw his back out when he sneezed the other day. He also found a job but in the three weeks that he's had it they have not been able to get in all of the training videos for him to watch. So he's spent all of his time off searching for a more reliable job. Yesterday, he got called for an interview for a state job. Its consistent work and better paying and offers better advancement opportunities, so please keep him in your prayers.
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Yard Sale Score
My church had a yard sale today as part of their efforts to raise money for the renovations. They rasied $3300 today! I went the last hour of the sale and they were running a deal where you could get everything you could put into a carboard box for $1. I paid and headed to my car, fully intending to go back inside, and stick a small crock pot and cupcake pan in a box for $1. But after settling everything into the car I forgot and drove away. I'm still kicking myself for forgetting the crockpot. It was the perfect size to feed just the two of us. But here is what I did get:
All for a grand total of $1 or six cents per item!
What is the best thing you've ever bought at a yard sale? Do you go often? Any tips?
DARN CROCKPOT! Sigh... I guess everything happens for a reason....but it was so cute....
3 cookbooks and 2 novels
3 vases (I may use the round one in a centerpiece at my wedding reception)
2 basket (The red one now holds my pb packets, salt and pepper, toothpicks and coasters on top of the microwave
Giraffe, cow, llama and church cookie cutters
A decorative apple for my teacher-in-training roomate.
It moos and mixes up chocolate milk but I'm thinking it'll mix juice and rum just fine
2 photobooks to hold the photos I'm wating to scrapbook!
All for a grand total of $1 or six cents per item!
What is the best thing you've ever bought at a yard sale? Do you go often? Any tips?
DARN CROCKPOT! Sigh... I guess everything happens for a reason....but it was so cute....
Friday, 1 October 2010
Day 4: Someone You've Drifted Away From
I wrote this awhile back but I think it satisfies the prompt.
We arrive on Saturday. Our car is packed with several suitcases, bedding and milk jugs filled with water from our tap. Chassidy is with me. My little sister has brought a friend too .We have brought enough clothes to last us a month, but we are indecisive and a tad bit insecure so we will go through all of the clothes in a week. We unload our car and then headed to Kroger’s where we will buy a week’s worth of hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwich supplies and junk food. And then we dress in our swimsuits and head to the beach on one of the two golf carts we have. As it gets closer to dinner time, we shower and then change into our “night clothes”.
These are the clothes that we will wear to impress boys, scoff at other girls in and wear while we push our golf cart back to the beach house and my beckoning parents who can’t understand why we don’t come in early instead of draining the golf cart. We head out to dinner. We spend the meal trying to catch the eye of cute boys sitting a few tables a way without my parent’s noticing. But my sister notices and calls us out. We are picked on the rest of the evening. We don’t care, tonight will be out first night on the strip and we can think of nothing else.
Back at the beach house, we fix our hair, spritzing our hair brushes with Hollister perfume and apply several coats of lip-gloss before hopping onto our golf cart. We take a few pictures and then we are ready. We cruise down the strip at the family campground my sister and I beg to go to year after year.
At first we are the lone golf cart, circling the park, occasionally breaking off down a side street for a change of scenery. We are always early. We don’t want to miss a minute. We live for this week all year long. Gradually, the sun lowers itself into the ocean and the others begin to come out. We continue to circle, passing each other, giving out appraising looks. The sun has set and we begin to wave, to call out to each other. We stop and talk to the boys propped against their cars, sipping out of red cups. We often had our own red cups, filled with orange juice or soda.
Things have changed. We used to be the ones standing around, walking the strip, waiting for a ride. Now, we hold the power to offer rides; to choose or deny. We are now sixteen. Although we say we are seventeen. At the beach, we are always a year older. Some years we are sisters, others we are cousins. We never remember our stories, but its okay, they don’t either. What’s important is that they remember us, our faces, and our names.
We all come the same week every year; we have our friends, and our enemies. All of our friends are male, some younger, some older than us. Our enemies are other girls, vying for our limelight. Some are guys who have pushed us too far, tried to follow us back to our house, or called us names. Because they are our enemies, they are our friends’ enemies as well. They are given dirty looks and withheld rides.
We give out rides to our favorite boys. We cruise around the strip, sometimes pulling onto a dark side road, hoping for a kiss. But most of all, we just ride. We sing out, verses from our favorite songs. We pass a particularly attractive boy and yell “Hey, hey good looking, whatcha got cookin’?”, and then a shirtless one “No shoes, no shirt, no problem”.
The sky grows dark and our golf cart weak. We check our cell phones for the time. It’s close to eleven and we head back to the house, saying our goodbyes. Some nights we push the golf cart up hills and to its home in the tiny garage. We have the help of boys, some we know from summers before and some we don’t. We make it back into the house, right at our eleven o’clock curfew.
We slink into our room after murmuring a goodnight to my parents, spray each others hair with perfume, so that we can sleep without the smoke from the boy’s cigarettes lingering over us. Crawling into bed together, we giggle over highlights from the night and send flirty text messages to “our boys”- promising to meet them again tomorrow. In our chats, we’d talk about which boy was our favorite, compare our “distance” scores, plan our outfits for the next, pine for mixed drinks, and tell dirty stories (at least, we think they’re dirty because we know of nothing worse). We are silly and naive, playing at being bad girls, they same way we used to make our Barbies roll around naked in the back seat of their pink Jeep.
We grow older and things change. Slowly, time pulls us apart and there are no more beach trips. Once, we promised that we would be old ladies together, racing each other down the nursing home hallway in our tricked out wheel chairs. Now, we move in different directions. We are no longer as close as we were as girls. We each have new responsibilities- me to my fiancé and her to her fiancé and his daughters; she raises them like her own. But we are bound to each other by the late night conversations and rainy day rummy games of our girlhood. Though we no longer live in the same city, see each other often, or vacation together we share a bond that no one can erase or replace.
Beach Bound
We arrive on Saturday. Our car is packed with several suitcases, bedding and milk jugs filled with water from our tap. Chassidy is with me. My little sister has brought a friend too .We have brought enough clothes to last us a month, but we are indecisive and a tad bit insecure so we will go through all of the clothes in a week. We unload our car and then headed to Kroger’s where we will buy a week’s worth of hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwich supplies and junk food. And then we dress in our swimsuits and head to the beach on one of the two golf carts we have. As it gets closer to dinner time, we shower and then change into our “night clothes”.
These are the clothes that we will wear to impress boys, scoff at other girls in and wear while we push our golf cart back to the beach house and my beckoning parents who can’t understand why we don’t come in early instead of draining the golf cart. We head out to dinner. We spend the meal trying to catch the eye of cute boys sitting a few tables a way without my parent’s noticing. But my sister notices and calls us out. We are picked on the rest of the evening. We don’t care, tonight will be out first night on the strip and we can think of nothing else.
Back at the beach house, we fix our hair, spritzing our hair brushes with Hollister perfume and apply several coats of lip-gloss before hopping onto our golf cart. We take a few pictures and then we are ready. We cruise down the strip at the family campground my sister and I beg to go to year after year.
At first we are the lone golf cart, circling the park, occasionally breaking off down a side street for a change of scenery. We are always early. We don’t want to miss a minute. We live for this week all year long. Gradually, the sun lowers itself into the ocean and the others begin to come out. We continue to circle, passing each other, giving out appraising looks. The sun has set and we begin to wave, to call out to each other. We stop and talk to the boys propped against their cars, sipping out of red cups. We often had our own red cups, filled with orange juice or soda.
Things have changed. We used to be the ones standing around, walking the strip, waiting for a ride. Now, we hold the power to offer rides; to choose or deny. We are now sixteen. Although we say we are seventeen. At the beach, we are always a year older. Some years we are sisters, others we are cousins. We never remember our stories, but its okay, they don’t either. What’s important is that they remember us, our faces, and our names.
We all come the same week every year; we have our friends, and our enemies. All of our friends are male, some younger, some older than us. Our enemies are other girls, vying for our limelight. Some are guys who have pushed us too far, tried to follow us back to our house, or called us names. Because they are our enemies, they are our friends’ enemies as well. They are given dirty looks and withheld rides.
We give out rides to our favorite boys. We cruise around the strip, sometimes pulling onto a dark side road, hoping for a kiss. But most of all, we just ride. We sing out, verses from our favorite songs. We pass a particularly attractive boy and yell “Hey, hey good looking, whatcha got cookin’?”, and then a shirtless one “No shoes, no shirt, no problem”.
The sky grows dark and our golf cart weak. We check our cell phones for the time. It’s close to eleven and we head back to the house, saying our goodbyes. Some nights we push the golf cart up hills and to its home in the tiny garage. We have the help of boys, some we know from summers before and some we don’t. We make it back into the house, right at our eleven o’clock curfew.
We slink into our room after murmuring a goodnight to my parents, spray each others hair with perfume, so that we can sleep without the smoke from the boy’s cigarettes lingering over us. Crawling into bed together, we giggle over highlights from the night and send flirty text messages to “our boys”- promising to meet them again tomorrow. In our chats, we’d talk about which boy was our favorite, compare our “distance” scores, plan our outfits for the next, pine for mixed drinks, and tell dirty stories (at least, we think they’re dirty because we know of nothing worse). We are silly and naive, playing at being bad girls, they same way we used to make our Barbies roll around naked in the back seat of their pink Jeep.
We grow older and things change. Slowly, time pulls us apart and there are no more beach trips. Once, we promised that we would be old ladies together, racing each other down the nursing home hallway in our tricked out wheel chairs. Now, we move in different directions. We are no longer as close as we were as girls. We each have new responsibilities- me to my fiancé and her to her fiancé and his daughters; she raises them like her own. But we are bound to each other by the late night conversations and rainy day rummy games of our girlhood. Though we no longer live in the same city, see each other often, or vacation together we share a bond that no one can erase or replace.
Saturday, 24 July 2010
An Old Entry from an Old Blog
Last year I blogged for my college, on their website. I'm copying over one of my favortie posts, because sometimes I feel I need a reminder of what it was like to be in Scotland and let the little things go. The lesson I talk about in the post is something I really want to try to work on and bring back into my life. So here is the old post:
Long walks in the rain leave plenty of time for reflection. Yesterday, on my way home from Uni, I thought about my professor’s description of the Scots as “messy” and about how much whining I’d done about the Scottish way of doing things.
I’ve come to realize that the “messiness” I strongly rejected with every American bone in my body, is actually something to strive for. The Scottish have got it figured out. None of these people care that it’s raining on their nice clothing. What the heck can they do about it? Nothing. And they realize this and have embraced it. Instead of going around in sweats on dreary days, like I do back home, the Scots go about as if nothing is different. They can’t change it, so why worry?
“Why worry” seems a common thought among the Scots. I’ve heard it so often since I’ve been here. The way I am, I want to know things now, I want things to follow a logical system. I want to know things are taken care of. Well, that’s not quite how things are done here. “It’ll work out,” “It’ll happen,” “It’ll take care of itself” are all things I’ve been told, when I’ve been stressed about something, like signing up for classes. The attitude here is much more, “You’ve done your part, let it be.” It has to be a much more stress free way to live.
Without having to worry about things in life that really don’t matter, or aren’t the most important, they focus on what really matters–life’s pleasures, like spending time with family, walking through beautiful gardens (even in the rain), savoring a hot chocolate with brandy, eating ice cream (even when its cold), picnicking in Edinburgh, and at least in Glasgow, alcohol.
I see children everywhere. Small children play in the gardens during their parents’ lunch break; older ones go off to eat lunch alone. Instead of rushing to different activities after school it seems like the family congregates in the park. Children are allowed to play outside for recess, in the rain. I was never allowed out for recess if it were raining. And why shouldn’t they be allowed? Children love to play in the rain. It’s just not a big deal here.
Walking everywhere is not a big deal either. I walk about a mile to class everyday, sometimes further. My friends and I have started to calculate distance, based on how far something is, in addition to the mile we already walked. So if it’s two miles from home, we say one.
I hope this attitude will seep into other areas of my life. I want to be more appreciative of the little things, and to be able to let go of things that don’t matter. But, I don’t think that it’s something I can control. I just have to let it happen.
So, I want to try to reiterate this way of thinking into my everyday life. I think I will find it useful later when I am a newlywed and recent grad.
I want to think hard and see if there are any "lessons" I can pick up from the Korean culture as well. I'll get back to you in a later post on that one. If you'd like to browse through the old blog and read about my time in Scotland and my college focused life, go here. Some of the last entries overlap with things I blogged about here.
Long walks in the rain leave plenty of time for reflection. Yesterday, on my way home from Uni, I thought about my professor’s description of the Scots as “messy” and about how much whining I’d done about the Scottish way of doing things.
I’ve come to realize that the “messiness” I strongly rejected with every American bone in my body, is actually something to strive for. The Scottish have got it figured out. None of these people care that it’s raining on their nice clothing. What the heck can they do about it? Nothing. And they realize this and have embraced it. Instead of going around in sweats on dreary days, like I do back home, the Scots go about as if nothing is different. They can’t change it, so why worry?
“Why worry” seems a common thought among the Scots. I’ve heard it so often since I’ve been here. The way I am, I want to know things now, I want things to follow a logical system. I want to know things are taken care of. Well, that’s not quite how things are done here. “It’ll work out,” “It’ll happen,” “It’ll take care of itself” are all things I’ve been told, when I’ve been stressed about something, like signing up for classes. The attitude here is much more, “You’ve done your part, let it be.” It has to be a much more stress free way to live.
Without having to worry about things in life that really don’t matter, or aren’t the most important, they focus on what really matters–life’s pleasures, like spending time with family, walking through beautiful gardens (even in the rain), savoring a hot chocolate with brandy, eating ice cream (even when its cold), picnicking in Edinburgh, and at least in Glasgow, alcohol.
I see children everywhere. Small children play in the gardens during their parents’ lunch break; older ones go off to eat lunch alone. Instead of rushing to different activities after school it seems like the family congregates in the park. Children are allowed to play outside for recess, in the rain. I was never allowed out for recess if it were raining. And why shouldn’t they be allowed? Children love to play in the rain. It’s just not a big deal here.
Walking everywhere is not a big deal either. I walk about a mile to class everyday, sometimes further. My friends and I have started to calculate distance, based on how far something is, in addition to the mile we already walked. So if it’s two miles from home, we say one.
I hope this attitude will seep into other areas of my life. I want to be more appreciative of the little things, and to be able to let go of things that don’t matter. But, I don’t think that it’s something I can control. I just have to let it happen.
So, I want to try to reiterate this way of thinking into my everyday life. I think I will find it useful later when I am a newlywed and recent grad.
I want to think hard and see if there are any "lessons" I can pick up from the Korean culture as well. I'll get back to you in a later post on that one. If you'd like to browse through the old blog and read about my time in Scotland and my college focused life, go here. Some of the last entries overlap with things I blogged about here.
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