If I could have any wardrobe from a t.v. character it would be...

Emma Pillsbury from Glee.
I LOVE her clothes. All of them are way out of my price range, but someday (when I get either a. a lot of money or b. a sewing machine) I will have clothes that are as cute as hers!

The all yellow outfit makes me swoon a little (they have an ADORABLE yellow skirt at Target, which is actually now on clearance for $12.98 and should be down to $6 very very soon).

The green coat that she was wearing in the mid-season finale was perfect.

Needless to say, I cannot wait for the show to start back up, and also for the chance to audition when they do the casting call for next season!

God day today.

We ate breakfast this morning, I had my fake bacon (which Nathan made fun of me for, because they kind of look like those dog biscuits...) and it was good!
Then we finished our grocery shopping this morning, and stocked up on a bunch of stuff.
While doing this, it. was.pouring.
Then we came home from the store and ate lunch.
Then, miraculously, it stopped raining and became nice and sunny out! So we headed over to the library, the post office, and Trader Joe's (to pick up some almond milk).
The library was good, of course. They had the next book of the series that I'm reading (The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig) and they also had a biography of Louisa May Alcott (Score!).
Then we headed over to the Post Office, but it had closed today about twenty minutes before we got there (bummer), so we'll have to mail the packages on Monday.
When we got home it rained again, talk about perfect timing!
Dinner was also great: Asparagus and Vegetarian lasagna (meat lasagna for Nathan)

I think it's going to be fun to figure out meals that can have meat and also not have meat in them. A little bit of a challenge, but fun none-the-less.

One more episode of How I Met Your Mother, then dishes, then shower, then reading, and then bed!

My new favorite!

So, Nathan and I did our grocery shopping today, and we got something AMAZING for our weekly splurge item: Zuberfizz soda (an eight pack) at Cost Plus.
We just tried our first one, Key Lime Cream Soda, and it was sooooo good!

The other flavors in the package are Cream Soda, Orange Cream Soda, and Creamy Root Beer. I can't wait to try the other ones.  For $7.19 we got a case of wonderful :)

We're going to finish our grocery shopping tomorrow (some of the things we want are only on sale Saturday and Sunday), go to the library, and mail out another trade for swaptree!

Eating at The Table.

I did not grow up eating at the table. I'm sure that we did when I was really little, but as we got older (and busier) it stopped happening. Shoot, we were lucky if we all happened to be eating at the same time. Nathan, on the other hand always ate at the table with his family. (Okay, so maybe not always, but a darn lot of the time)
Recently we rearranged our apartment so we could make better use of our little bistro table for two.
And I found something out: I love eating at the table.
This is definitely something that I want to continue doing. Before we used to eat at the coffee table, or over by the desk (so we could watch shows online). We still watch shows during dinner, but it feels more like dinner now than it did before.

Sometimes I feel like a grown up. Eating at the table may be one of the things that makes me feel that way. ;)

In fact, it's almost time for me to go make dinner: pasta with olive oil, feta, and spinach (and chicken for Nathan). I wish that we still had tomato, but we ran out last night, darn it.

Veg: Day 1

So far so good.
I've decided that the best way for this to work for me is to be a lacto-ovo vegetarian. Which means that I'll still eat dairy and eggs (because, let's face it, I'm not giving up my cheese).
For breakfast I had: a banana in some vanilla yogurt (so yummy)
For lunch I'm about to have: an avocado sharp cheddar grilled cheese with tomato soup.
And for dinner:? As of yet, unknown.

I think that this is going to go pretty well for me. I already don't eat an awful lot of meat, and this way I will definitely be getting more fruits and veggies into my diet. And also more whole grains.

I started preparing our shopping list for the coming week, and I think it's looking pretty good. I found a lot of coupons to use on different things, I do need to print them out still, but there's a good amount of savings to be had with the use of coupons!

Time to go whip together lunch before Nathan gets home from his class!

Thinking about going veg...

I've considered going vegetarian quite a few times in my life before now, but never gone through with it. It was always easy to find an excuse, "No one else in my family is vegetarian","Eating in the caf would be too hard, half the food isn't edible anyway", etc.
But now I don't really have a good reason, seeing as it's just me and Nathan. Now, Nathan doesn't want to go vegetarian, and I'm not going to make him. Since it's just us two it will be way easier to make meals that can have both non-meat or also meat in them. Then we can just cook the meat separately and add it into the base of the meal.

Sad thing: Probably the only meat I'm going to miss is bacon. I LOVE bacon, but the rest of the meat I can do without.

I'm going to try it, and see how it goes. Who knows?
If I hate it there's no one saying that I can't go back to eating meat, and if I love it then that's just awesome.

I'm really excited to try this out and see what happens!

I've been misted!

They were doing the H1N1 vaccine for free at Monterey Peninsula College until 1 o'clock, so I headed on over and got vaccinated.
Now I'm just relaxing for the rest of the day, and keeping myself very hydrated. Hopefully I won't get any of the not so fun side affects that they said may happen. (Sore throat, congestion, headache, etc)

I read a really interesting article on MSN yesterday about the Prohibition. It was an article about how the government was putting menthyl alcohol into the products that they knew people were buying to "naturalize" into something to drink. The article said that as many as 10,000 people, maybe even more, were killed by drinking these "naturalized" substances because of the menthyl alcohol. This seems crazy to me, that the government thought it was okay to do this even though they knew that it was going to kill people. I understand that these people were also breaking the laws put forth during the Prohibition, but I don't think that the punishment fits the crime in this case. I don't believe that this was a wise course of action for the government to take, and I cannot believe that I had never heard about it before now. It seems like it should be something that you would read about in history class in high school, or that it would at least be general public knowledge.
This would probably be a pretty good topic for a novel actually. How the choice came about and how it affected normal people and their lives. I believe that it is all the more painful to lose someone you know and love to something that is avoidable, not natural, and not even accidental. How must the families of these people felt when they found out that they lost their loved one because the government decided to play God?
They could have, just as easily (and probably less expensively), put intense bittering agents into the products (which they did do in some cases). Why did the government decide to put in chemicals that they knew would kill?

I think I'm done rambling about this for today, but I may come back to it later. I find it a very interesting subject.

I love Dannon Light n' Fit Vanilla yogurt. (Oh, and silhouettes) [Oh, and Swedish Princess Cake]

Yes, it's true. I think that it might, in fact, be the best yogurt I've ever had.
I just mixed it with a bowl of strawberries and bananas and it was pure yum.

I found this amazing website where they make your picture into a silhouette cut out of vinyl. And they can make it as big as you want! (www.vinylsilhouettes.com) This is something that I would definitely love to get to decorate our home with. Also, I would LOVE to have a custom silhouette cookie cutter (www.victortradingco.com). You send in a picture in profile and they make it into a cookie cutter! It's pretty darn cool. If they weren't expensive I would have bought them and made cookies as part of the favors for our wedding.

Someday when I open my own tea shop/used book store I might get some made, just to be able to sell cool silhouette cookies. Ooh, I wonder if there's anywhere that would make a silhouette cake pan...hmmm... I don't know how well that would work.

Today, I found a recipe for a Swedish Princess Cake, which is apparently hard to make, but delicious. I definitely want to try to make it some time, but I need to have a reason to make it, so I'm keeping an eye out for one of those. Maybe our eight month-a-versary will be a good time to make it!

*So, again, yes, the one picture is HUGE. But, ten cool points if you know what famous literary figure the silhouette is!*

Yummy!

Nathan and I just made Italian Cream Cheese Casserole for dinner (thanks for the recipe Coupon Clipping Cutie!) and it was FANTASTIC.

We changed a little bit about it to better utilize the things we already had in our kitchen, but we will definitely be making this again. Plus, we have enough left over for lunch tomorrow! Hmm, or maybe dinner again. I'm singing at a coffee house night at our church tomorrow night, so I have to be there a bit early for the rehearsal.

Stage makeup class today was a bit remedial for me. We practiced putting on straight make-up, which I've done so many times I can practically do it in my sleep now. Let me put it this way: The class is scheduled from 1:30 to 3:30 and I was out of there at about 2:15. And she lectured on three chapters. I will, however, be bringing my own makeup from now on. The colors that she has just aren't what I'm used to working with and I just generally feel better about using my own stuff. I know that this means I'll have to buy more sooner than if I didn't use it, but that's okay with me.

Tomorrow is grocery shopping day, so I'm going to be looking for some coupons and such for the things that we need to get! I am convinced that we can spend less on groceries than we do right now, so it is my next mission!

Dinner last night!

Was so great.

Nathan and I went to the farmer's market that they have in the downtown area every Tuesday night to walk around (and buy some honey sticks!) and try all the samples from the vendors. We were about to leave when Nathan noticed that the crepe vendor was giving our samples of their "Deluxe" crepe. So, of course, we headed over to try it out. It. Was. Fantastic. Nathan was about to buy one on the spot, but then we realized that we pretty much had everything here at home that we would need to make them, except for a few things and we were planning on hitting Trader Joe's before we went home anyway. So we walked over to Trader Joe's and bought the ingredients that we needed and hightailed it home (Nathan was pretty much running, it was quite funny how excited he was about the crepes).

As soon as we got home we got to work on the crepes. I whipped up the batter (which is super simple, and super yummy) and Nathan got to work on cutting veggies and grating cheese. Before we knew it we were eating the crepes.

This is what was in the crepes:
spinach
tomato chunks
feta cheese
cheddar cheese
lemon juice (except when I forgot it (: )

and I had added a little bit of garlic powder into the crepe batter which gave it a little bit of kick.

I think next time I want to add some onion in there too.

Ooh, another find at the farmer's market: Emily Post's Etiquette from 1969. I got it for free from the free book man! It's hysterical, there's a whole section on how to throw a double wedding, and how a wedding with 200 people should cost (at the top of the range) $4,000. It seems so crazy to me that people are spending the same amount of money for one day that I paid for a YEAR of college. $30,000 is just ridiculous for a wedding. Now, this doesn't mean that we only spent $4,000 for our wedding. I wish. If I could have I would have. But, I am glad that we didn't go over $9,000. And it was all paid for (because my parents [and Nathan's] are fantastic) with no one going into debt.

Time to go make chicken spinach salad for dinner tonight, and then off to church to sing for the Ash Wednesday service.

Look what I found!

(Okay, so I know that only Rebecca will appreciate it as much as I do, but it was such a good deal!)

Today was an amazing Valentines Day! It started out not so good because I woke up with a really puffy right eye. I think I got some face stuff too close to my eye last night (darn you benzoyl peroxide!) so underneath it was all red and puffy. So I showered and then I iced it for five minutes, and that brought the swelling down and then the make-up covered up the redness. So all I was left with was a little bit of puffiness.
So we headed off to church, and I sang with the worship group today (and had my first solo piece) and that was a lot of fun. Then after church we came home, where I found a lovely bouquet of roses (peach colored, my favorite!), candy, and a card from my wonderful husband.
Then we packed up our annual Valentines Day picnic, and we went to the lake down the street where we had staked out the perfect picnic spot the other day on the walk. We had our picnic and played cards and watched the people who were paddle boating around the lake. We came home after that and then headed over to Dollar Tree (because I needed a wreath form for a project I'm going to make) and I found the Merman book.

It totally made the day even better.

And for dinner we had Chinese food! Yum!

All in all, this was a great Valentines Day.
Time to go read about The Merman!

And the cold is almost.... GONE!

When I woke up this morning my nose was almost completely unstuffed! Yay!

The weather is finally clearing up, no more rain in the foreseeable future, which means that we can take our normal nightly walks again.

So far the weight loss saga has been going well. I've lost 15 pounds since Christmas, and with my ballet classes twice a week (which are killing my calves) I'm getting a pretty decent amount of exercise in. So I'm going to keep eating well and working out and hope that the progress continues.

Today I made the treats for our valentines picnic tomorrow. We found a perfect spot by the lake today and tomorrow after church we'll come home and pack up the basket and head over to the lake.

Nathan has formed a ridiculous attachment to the bear that I made last week. It's pretty cute, he likes to hold it while we're watching The Office on Netflix.

Well, time to do other things before I head to bed so I can wake up early to go to church!

I may (or may not) be getting sick.

I'm really hoping for the may not be side of the coin. It could (hopefully) just be my throat reacting to the weather changing.

Crossing my fingers for not getting sick!

I'm trying out a new cleanser (Cetaphil) and some Persa-10 gel. I'm hoping that this combination will work for clearing up my face. The cleanser is supposed to be very good for acne prone skin because it's so gentle.
Plus, I talked to my stage makeup teacher and she told me that there's a chance that I might be allergic to the fragrance than the companies put in the cleansers and make-ups that they make. So I got some cleanser and foundation that are fragrance free, and I'm hoping that my face will be helped by this. The reason that the professor says that I might be allergic is because I've tried so many things to clear up my face and none of them worked, so this is a logical thing to try out to see if it works.

Time to watch How I Met Your Mother with my wonderful husband! (and keeping my fingers crossed for not getting sick!)

Singing...

I have rehearsal tonight for the church worship group I sing with, and I absolutely LOVE it.

They're such great people, who make me feel so welcome, and it's a chance for me to do something with my talent (graciously given to me by God). What better to do with my voice then help lead others in praise? I like to feel involved in the church. It's hard for me to go to church when I feel like I don't have any connections there. I feel like an outsider, even after I've been going there a while. Living Hope Church here in Monterey has been a bit of a different experience for me, more like my first church experience at Greentree. And it's been so nice to have that feeling again, that feeling that I belong there and have a purpose there.

We're also singing my favorite song this weekend: Above All.

"Crucified, laid behind the stone,he lived to die rejected and alone. Like a rose, trampled on the ground, he took the fall, and thought of me, above all..."

Makes you think.

February is National Embroidery Month!

Who knew? I only recently discovered my love of embroidery. I've been cross-stitching for a while, but had never really tried embroidery. Then, in December I believe, I decided (on a whim) to try it.

In a lot of ways it's easier than cross-stitching, you don't have to have a pattern out in front of you because it's already on the fabric (you can buy the fabric printed, or you can trace (or draw) your pattern on yourself), and the colors are completely up to you!

If you enjoy sewing take a whack at it, you never know if you're going to like something until you try it!

*I have no idea why the picture is so stinking HUGE! I made it as small as possible, but for some reason or other this is the size. This is my current bird embroidery, I have four done, and eventually will have enough to quilt a throw blanket! I can't wait!*

Being Still

We talked about rest today in church, and it took me back to the verse (the pastor mentioned it also) Psalms 46:10 "Be still and know that I am God"

I have a really hard time being still. I like to know whats happening and how I can do something to further or hinder the situation (only hinder if it's something bad, of course!). It makes me crazy to not know what to do, or how to handle something. But, that's not my job. My job is to leave it up to God, and to go with my gut (could also be referred to as my conscience I suppose).

There used to be all kinds of crazy Sabbath rules, and I'm very glad that those no longer apply. One of them was that you couldn't walk in your garden on the Sabbath! I like my walks, they're very relaxing. They bring me... rest.

So, I'm going to keep working on being still, and leaving things up to God. 22 years down and oh so many more to go before I maybe have a chance at getting this right!

I have my classes all figured out!

I added my last class today. Yay.

I went in early to talk to the professor, and she told me that I was in luck and someone had just dropped! I'm glad I went in early because SIX (count that, six!) people came in during the class to try to add.

So now my schedule is:
Tues/Thurs: Ballet
Weds: Costuming
Also Thurs: Stage Makeup

All in all, a pretty good schedule to defer my loans.

And, it doesn't seem like any of these is going to be terribly hard. Ballet is difficult physically, but she's grading on attendance so that's not a problem.

Now, onto the job front, hopefully that will also be taken care of soon!

Class Canceled?

So, it's day one of my "first" semester of college, and one of my classes is completely canceled, which means I have to find something else to take the place of that class. I was hoping to find something that wasn't going to put me over six units, but there's very little in the way of two unit classes...ergh.

Ballet was fun though, and I definitely won't be needing to work out in the morning before I go to that class. I think I'm really going to enjoy it!

Tomorrow costuming starts! That's the one that I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be great to supplement all the things I learned at Point Loma with the classes here that weren't offered at Loma.

Back to the hunt for the ever illusive two unit class.

So I have been sucking at blogging!

I'm really going to work on it, I swear.

To recap everything I didn't post about:

Christmas: It was a lot of fun, but there were definitely some stressful times too. Switching back and forth between two different houses was a little more complicated than we hoped it would be. We wanted to make sure that we were able to spend equal time with both of our families, but that meant that it felt like we missed out on a lot with each of them too.
I did, however, get an awesome Christmas present. My parents got me the Clarisonic Mia. Which I absolutely love. It's definitely making the skin on my face healthier, and I'm hoping that, with more time, it will help clear the acne that I just cant seem to get rid of.

Visitors: We've had quite a few visitors since we cam home from Christmas. First Nathan's sister Becca and her boyfriend Zach came to stay with us for a weekend. Unfortunately it rained pretty much the whole time. There was one good morning, so we took a walk (a seven or eight mile walk) all around Monterey to show them the sights. Then this last weekend my girlfriends from home came to stay for the weekend. And we took over the living room with all of our scrapbooking materials. It was a great weekend though, since we don't get to spend tim with each other too often.

And now back to the present:
I made a lunch bag for myself today out of a tea towel! Since I start my new classes tomorrow (Yay for deferring student loans you can't afford to pay!) I needed something to bring my lunch in. The classes that I'm taking are not going to be too difficult (ballet, stage movement, and costuming) but I'm looking forward to having something to do. And to getting a job on the campus to give us a little bit more of an income.

Nathan and I have been married for just over six months now, and I can positively say that these have been the greatest six months of my life. He's wonderful, and I am so excited to love him for the rest of my life. I could not have asked for a better man, I've been utterly blessed.

*An Edit: I just went back to look at my posts, and I am sad to say that I did not complete NaNoWriMo, but there's always next year, and I still am working on my story, just not as quickly as the contest called for!*