Shameless Bragging

The house we rent was built in 1938. There are things I love about this house. The kitchen is not one of them. We don't have a dishwasher, consequently, we have a drying rack for dishes and that literally takes up all the counter space in our kitchen. ALL of it. No we do not have the world's largest dish rack. We don't have any counter space.

Jeremy set out to solve this problem and he came up with this lovely island. He made it himself. When I say he made it himself, I do mean he made all of it. He glued the oak and iron wood together to make the striped top. He welded the steel base together. He cut the shaped wood pieces on the sides. He added a dishtowel rack and hooks to hang pots.

I'm going to shamelessly brag on my man. He's good.

Its Come At Last

In May of 2003 I graduated from the University of Puget Sound and like many of my fellow graduates I had some student loans to pay off.

And guess what?

That's right

Done diggity done!

Student loans paid off as of May 2013.

Woohoo! I really wish I had a picture of my alma mater buuut I don't. I'm glad I have my bachelor's degree but even more glad to have it paid off.

Goodbye Old Friend...Hello Old-er Friend

When Jeremy and I had been dating for about two months he asked me if I wanted a piano. I was somewhat shocked. We weren't seriously dating yet and he was offering me a piano? What? If I said yes was that some kind of a commitment?

 

But who was I to say no to a piano?

 

Jeremy refinished the piano before he brought it to me (a fact I did not know until years later). Quite an accomplishment when you consider that it sat in a bar for 20 years or something, complete with water rings and cigarette burns. But after a tuning most of the keys are in tune and only a couple of them occasionally stick.

 

For all its faults, I love this piano. I learned to sing over its chipped keys and it has blessed our home with music for the last 10 years.

 

Why didn't I dust before I took the picture!

She's been replaced with another old friend.

 

When I was five years old my Grandpa and Grandma Marek bought me a piano. I remember the day it came home. I sat down and pounded on the keys expecting it to sound like Beethoven. I was more than a little angry that I couldn't play anything beautiful yet.

 

After sitting at my parents since I left home at 18, it was time for it to come back to me. (AKA Mom had had enough of storing my piano in her living room.) It's a beautiful piano and the keys still feel familiar.

 

While I'm a little sad to see my 'bar' piano leave, I'm welcoming in an old friend.

 

 

20 sheep and a donkey

Our neighborhood sheep

One morning we're all sitting on the couch at 6 am and Emma says, "There's a fluffy sheep in the neighbors yard."

Now, Emma has an active imagination and I was certain she was playing around or was calling a bush a 'sheep', or something. She kept saying it so Jeremy leaned over and looked into the neighbors yard and behold two sheep. I must clarify that we don't live in farm country. We live in hobby farm country so while seeing a sheep or two in a pen isn't unusual seeing 20 of them in the yard is not normal.

Ten minutes later they, the sheep not the kids, started running across our front yard. All TWENTY of them annnnnd a donkey. I half expected to see a pig, sheep, and cow after that.

It was all good fun and the owner came wandering down the road with a bucket of grain an hour later.

We Saved an Airplane

Saturday was gorgeous so we spent some quality time with the kids outside at the school playground. Good times. I learned a few things -

• Garrett can jump his bike off the curb
• Grant likes to crawl through pea gravel
• All Amanda (my sister-in-law) and I need to rescue an airplane is a 10ft stick and her amazing catching skills.

I'm ready for spring!

We Were So Young



I know, so sad that I had to take a photo of a photo

 I'm playing some serious catch up on the blog. We celebrated our 10th anniversary a few weeks ago. Originally, we planned to go on a cruise for our 10th anniversary but there is no way we were going to take a nursing baby on a cruise. No sir.

We did get a couple of days to ourselves...and Grant. My in-laws were kind enough to take the three older Nashlings for the night.

ANNNNDDDD I have nothing profound to say. Marriage is everything I expected it to be while simultaneously being nothing like I expected it to be. So I guess 10 years and four kids later and we still like each other. It MUST be love.

My Wicked Twin

I was having dinner with some friends that had recently been to Portland to see the musical Wicked. One of them said, "I don't know what it was about the lady that played Elphaba but she reminded me of you." Here's the funny thing, I had just had another friend who'd seen the same production and she told me that she and her husband looked at each other 15 minutes into the show and said, "Does she remind you of...?" Yup, me.

Obviously, I was curious. Carla Stickler, is my wicked twin and we look nothing alike nor do we sound alike. Its the mannerisms, our way of moving, that are similar because when I watched a clip of her singing, the way she moved her hands looked eerily familiar.

BUT, here's the funny thing, I frequently get the "you look like" or "you remind of" someone. I realize that that happens to everyone at some point but it happens to me a lot.

The only physical evidence I have is the picture of me at state Jr. Miss with my roommate, who happened to be from the town where the contest was held. People kept talking to me like they knew me because they thought I was her. Weird. I'm the one on the right.




Oh to be 18 again. Ok, really just physically.

 

I guess I have a lot of twins out there.

Trouble that starts with T that rhymes with P...

I listened to a story  on NPR about women and what their shoes tell us about them (focusin on women who immigranted to Canada). It was shocking how deep and revealing a pair of shoes could be for these women. For many of them, their shoes provided deep and meaningful insights into their sense of identity in relation to their life experiences. It was an interesting story in a weird kind of shoeish way.

Naturally I began to wonder what my shoes said about me. I was wearing a pair of old running shoes with no tread left and laces untied and pulled lose.

What do my shoes say about me? The very thought makes me shudder.

I recently got rid of all of our VHS because our VCR broke and we've decided not to replace it. While You Were Sleeping was among the collection. I had a particularly bad today and Jer came home, took me out to dinner, and then we replaced a couple of my movies.

While You Were Sleeping is a classic romantic comedy. My favorite scene is when they're eating dinner and there's 4 conversations going on at once that get all tangled up and no one knows what they're talking about. I kid you not it is exactly what it was like trying to have Christmas Eve with my dad's family while growing up. Everyone participated in everyone else's conversation but no one knew what anyone else was talking about.

For awhile it seems like Hollywood came out with a series of great romantic comedies but the last few years, I feel like they've tanked. They've become like so many other movie genres, trashy and full of dirty humor that ruins the experience.

So tonight we're enjoying a classic...I'm enjoying a classic and Jeremy is being a good sport since I had to unclog the toilet today with a stick.

Freegal, You Rock My World

I love Freegal. Seriously it is the most wonderful thing since Napster. I'll admit that I don't own an ipod or any other MP3 carrying device of any type. Nor do I buy cd's. I have the same 10 cd's I had in college, two or three of which are ones roommates burned for me. That seems a little odd to me considering how much I love music.


BUT I have a really hard time bringing myself to buy a cd when I really only like 2 maybe 3 songs on it tops. There are very few artists that I like everything they sing, which is why, back in the day, I loved Napster. I think I had 150 songs before I got the lovely little message that I needed to delete them from my computer or I would be sued.


Freegal Music Library is accessed with my Pierce County Library card number and password. I get three free downloads each week. Right now it includes most artists that are under the Sony label, which is a lot. Its wonderful.


They have classic artists like Rosemary Clooney who I adore, voice like butter and classical like Handel's Messiah. But they also have both of Adele's cds which I also really like...most of it anyway.


Freegal, you rock my world.
Yet another reason I love my library card.

Snowmaggedon aka Snowpalozza aka Honkin Big Storm

Snow storm + freezing rain = mess

I'll admit that I giggle about the Pacific Northwest. The weather people practically throw their arms over their heads and start screaming for everyone to run for cover as soon as it looks like a storm is coming.

The first day wasn't so bad. Four or five inches but then the rains came and froze and trees started falling down. There was so much ice on the cars we couldn't get in them, not that there was anywhere we could go.

Ok so maybe after the ice, we could have thrown our hands over and heads and started screaming. But we had a generator so it was inconvenient but not completely miserable.

We survived Snowmaggedon 2012.

The Corn was as High as a Three Year Olds Eye

We planted a garden this year. It didn't work out exactly as we'd planned. Mostly because with moving into our house there were so many other projects to get done the garden got in late and was then neglected. As you can tell from the two foot tall corn stalks, dead potatoes, and squash we couldn't find in the weeds. Our only success was the tomatoes. (Uhh, the sun was in Emma's eyes and she wouldn't look at the camera.)

Good Times Had By All

I'm a little behind on my blogging, but like everyone else its been a busy summer. The last week of July one of my best friends from college came to visit from Washington, D.C. We visited our alma mater, the University of Puget Sound. Dana is pointing at the obelisk in the center of the quad with our graduating year, 2003. (I would have put my own picture in there but somehow I was doing almost the exact same pose and it looked obscene.) Not sure what happened there. I took a pic of the giant pendulum in the new science building as we eavesdropped on a high schooler getting a tour with his parents.

Anyway, we also visited Point Defiance Park and MSM deli yummm.

Later in the week, Dana, Karli (another of my UPS roommies) and I went to Seattle and had dinner at Tango. Dana had heard they had the best dessert in Seattle, El Diablo. We tried El Diablo (sauce on the side) and yes it was the yummiest dessert I've ever had in Seattle. (Unfortunately I don't eat in Seattle that much but it was awesome.)

Yes as we used to say at the Princess Palace, it was 'good times had by all'.