Fact.

Yes, chocolate pairs well with wine. But it also pairs fantastically with a dark beer, or 5.

Nieces are so much fun. Especially when you can buy them sugary treats and then leave them with their momma the rest of the day 😉

I’m pretty close with one of my cousins, who is about a month younger than me, started dating her husband just days before me & Chris, got married a month before us, lives 1 mile away…and just had a sweet little baby boy!!

When I’ve been wearing my hair long for too much time, I want to chop it off. So I do.

Truffle fries from Moo Creamery are AMAZING.

Sometimes my crazy dog likes to snuggle.

Technology Geek

Friday my I got a lovely e-mail from Verizon stating that I was eligible for a phone upgrade.  Little did they know I have been counting down this day for MONTHS.   Finally, my little Motorola Droid just hasn’t been cutting it – it’s sooooo slow, and the camera just isn’t up to par.  I know that seems silly, but I really just want 2 things in my phone – for it to not be slow as hell and to have a great camera.

After a lot of research and review-reading I ended up ordering the same phone that my husband has.  In the world of iPhone-obsessed friends, I feel a little out of place but that is OK (aslongastheygivemeinstagramsoonkthnx).  I actually would have considered an iPhone, but I was kind of shocked when I saw that they don’t have 4G.   There’s at least 10 phones (or more) in the same price range and they all have it.  ANYWHO.  New phone. Coming tomorrow. Win!

So in honor of my old phone, I wanted to just grab a few recent photos off of it.

New coffee drinks from F&E; holy yum.  Much cheaper than those bottled Frappuchinos, too!  And isn’t their packaging the best?

This was the 2nd pumpkin I carved this year.  It proceeded to get disgusting and moldy before Halloween even came 😦

On the road to the bay area this weekend.  Driving the I-5 through the middle of California is ridiculously boring and ugly, it makes me cry every time we have to make this drive!

Showing off my fantastic nail painting skills whilst on said drive up north.  It was all good until I had to paint the right hand. #fail

Saying good-bye to SF.

A little present the husband got me this weekend.  It fits perfectly above our fire place 🙂  I LOVE IT.

Sleeved

Soo, this weekend I made a semi-spontaneous purchase:

It’s delicious.  I’ve wanted a tablet for a while now, mainly because I am constantly printing out recipes and I waste so much ink and paper doing that, and this is SO much more convenient and helpful as well.  Also, we don’t have a laptop and am lazy and like to lay on the couch while perusing the Internet. Shhh.

Anyways, I need some sort of case and I was looking for just a simple skin..BUT THEN, I remember my long lost friend known as Etsy.  I’ve been cheating on Etsy with Pinterest for a long time now, and rarely give any attention to Etsy unless I am linked there. I’m so sorry Etsy.

Now that I’ve rekindled my love for Etsy, I thought I’d share a few tablet covers that I am currently drooling over. Most of them are a wee bit too expensive. Maybe I’ll end up making one. Maybe (probably) not.

Those are my favorites.  The first one is probably what I would buy if I had that much to throw away on a cover for an electronic device (totally not high on my priority list).

Do any of you have a tablet? Is a case necessary?

ABC, 123

I stole this from Morgan, because I needed some kind of reason to blog 🙂

A. Age: 26

B. Bed size: Queen – we definitely need a larger bed, mostly because our dogs like to take up THE WHOLE THING.

C. Chore that you hate:  All…buuuut, probably cleaning the bathroom is my most hated.

D. Dogs: Yes, two. Tundra the Husky & Sadie the mini Aussie.

E. Essential start to your day: Hitting snooze. Twice.

F. Favorite color: Dark grey, mustard, purple…it kind of depends on the time of year!

G. Gold or Silver: Silver fo sho, but bronze is better than both!  I really am not a fan of gold at all.

H. Height: 5’6″

I. Instruments you play: None, but I have played the piano and drums when I was a young lady.

J. Job title: Uhm, I guess Engineer Assistant or Drafter? Basically I do everything. Oh and Cupcake Extraordinaire.

K. Kids: None, just the dogs and cat.  Which are definitely our children! For now. 😉

L. Live: The armpit of California.

M. Mother’s name: Coleen

N. Nicknames: I don’t really have one, sometimes people call me Lyss.

O. Overnight hospital stays: None! *knock on wood*

P. Pet peeves: Just one? I would say on a daily basis is rude/bad/crappy/slow drivers.

Q. Quote from a movie: I suck at remembering quotes from anything. Or remembering anything at all in general. SORRY.

R. Right or left handed: Righty.

S. Siblings: I have a sister, Kristin, who is a year and a half younger than me, but 6 inches taller!

T. (This was missing how about..) Tacos: Yes I love tacos, fish tacos are my most favorite any day of the week.

U. Underwear: Yes I wear them.

V. Vegetable you hate: GREEN BEANS. Duh, have you read my profile?  That’s the only vegetable, and probably food, I won’t eat.

W. What makes you run late: My husband? HAHA. Hmm, kind of true. Also, my procrastination skillz.

X. X-Rays you’ve had: Just teeth I believe.

Y. Yummy food that you make: Cupcakes! And basically anything I make is bound to be delicious. BAM!

Z. Zoo animal: I love them all. Especially penguins and fennec foxes!

Cluster

After a nice weekend up in the mountains (so, SO nice), we came back yesterday to the extreme heat.  During summer since it’s so hot, I try to get a lot of stuff done inside the house, even though the heat, in general, makes me feel super lazy.  I decided to ignore the tired/lazy part of my brain and get one little task done that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, which was this:

There used to be a shelf here with some random deer things and decorations, but I didn’t really like it there because it’s kind of tight coming out of the hallwayand I have managed to run into it/bump my head more than a few times – so I’m going to move it in the kitchen.   I love the look of random frames with random photos all clustered together, and I added a few little things I embroidered a few months back that have been sitting in my craft room.  So far, I really like this wall and will probably add a few more little photos 🙂

Photo 22 & Random Things

Day 22: A photo of someone you love

Well that’s just a little obvious. Chris hates me taking pictures of him.

I’ve been posting just a lot of these photos so I thought I’d talk about some other things for once in my life 🙂

• It turned insanely hot here all of the sudden. Two weeks ago it was nice and cool, even rainy. Today it was 108 degrees when I was driving home from work at 5pm.  I think it gets worse every year, I can’t wait to move to a cooler place someday.
• Work has been insanely busy. I’m SO looking forward to a few weekend trips coming up, some parties, my birthday, maybe a camping trip or two, and a trip to Michigan in the next couple months.
• I need to drink my water during the day! We are eating MUCH healthier and working out, but I really don’t drink enough water. I think I get bored with the taste unless I am dying of thirst. Any tips?  Maybe those tea packets or something?
• Aaron Brothers is having a buy-one-frame-get-one for a penny sale…which is fantastic for me. I printed out a ton of photos a few months ago and kind of forgot how expensive framing them would be so they have just been sitting in a pile for months.  So far I’ve purchased 8 frames this week!  They have a good variety of rustic-y looking frames which is right up my alley.  I’m going to put together a few picture wall collages but it’ll probably take a few weeks for me to get it all together.  Here’s one of my new favorite prints for our house that I was finally able to frame!

  I think this is our new motto 🙂 Print from atwopipeproblem 

Photo Challenge Day 2

Today’s photo challenge was to take a picture of what you wore today.

I love that you can see the dog hair on the floor/kind of on my shoes. It’s ironic because I probably always have dog hair on me, so even though the photo was about the shoes I’m wearing, I’m also wearing dog hair 😉   I would also like to say how difficult it was to take a photo at that angle with the timer and prop the camera on something…I finally got an OK shot after quite a few attempts.

Oh and since I’m speaking of shoes, I bought these bad gals yesterday (thanks for the heads up, Lorie!!).

I saw a photo of them a while back online, but never found anywhere to buy them so I figured they were an old style, nope! Brand new. Yay.

 

End of week love

Man, I’ve had a really tough week. Can’t go into details…I don’t even knowwwww.  One thing I can talk about that happed this week is our turtle died 😦 He was a really small guy and he was actually our first pet Chris and I got about a month or two after we moved into our old apartment together. RIP Fred, he was a cutie. I love my animals mucho. Even if they aren’t the cuddly kind!

Anyways, some happy things!!!!…

We love the show Parenthood, but I hadn’t really watched all of the episodes in Season 1, so I bought it last week and actually finished it last night!  Lots of little details about the show make sense now. I love all the characters. (Okay maybe not Jasmine. Ugh.)

I’m not usually a cookbook person, or a book person for the matter; however, I was browsing some books on Amazon to learn more about baking, and I came across Baked it looked pretty awesome.  I got it last week, and read through the entire thing, and I LOVE it.  It is packed with tips and really amazing looking recipes, and they are from a bakery so that makes it even more awesome 🙂  Oh and it also stole my heart because there are woodland/deer motifs throughout, drooooool.

 The Head and the Heart. Still obsessed with them. So good.

 I know, I’m lame. I love Scentsy. This is my new favorite scent, Oats & Honey. It smells SO good.  I even bought the spray, and have been spraying it around my house. If you have  Scentsy warmer I definitely suggest you get it!

I need this cupcake stand so bad. Too bad it’s $148 (REALLY? So dumb). I’m on a mission to find a cheap knock-off.

 Chris and I signed up at a gym again (FINALLY) and started working out on a regular basis, and with that means eating healthier.  We are doing really good so far. I stepped on a scale the other day and just about died, I have a ways to go but that’s ok. I’ve never been obsessive about weight, I just want to FEEL good.  I’m tracking what I eat and how much I workout every day on Livestrong.com. I used to use it religiously a few years ago and it really made me want to not be so lazy.  I’m also pretty excited because Chris is actually more into being healthy than ever, it was kind of weird going to the store and having him be concerned about what was in we were buying 🙂

It’s not all cupcakes and unicorns

A few weeks ago I wrote a little post about wanting to be more positive about life in genera.  I feel like sometimes with blogging, it’s too easy to sugar coat your feelings or only talk about happy things. Probably making people think like your life is perfect. I know I feel this way about other blogs I read.  And really, nobody wants to hear a Negative Nancy complaining all the time; but at the same time, it’s nice to know that other people’s lives just aren’t perfect, and people struggle with things every day.

I wish I felt more like telling you in depth about all the things in life I’m not happy about, how I wish I would just stop being lazy in general about things, how I wish we would make more time to make our house cleaner, to work on projects, how I wish I could be having extra money to pay off that credit card that I racked up from wedding things, how I really need a vacation, and how I wish I could just bake all the time (wouldn’t that be amazing?). But then I feel like, that’s all just minor things that just aren’t a big deal. We have jobs, a house, money to pay the bills (and money to throw around just a little bit). But the real part of me wants so many other things. Right. Now. I want a family. I want to move. I want to bake cupcakes and sell them. I want Chris to be done with school and have a better job. I want to not go to work every day wishing I was doing something else. I want to feel like someone cares.

I feel like I should make a list of all these things I want/need to get done, goals I want to have, because one would think that that would help me push forward – but most of me feels like I would be setting myself up for failure. Like I’m making a list of things that will not happen anytime soon so why bother.

In the meantime I will bake cupcakes and post photos of my cute family and pups, and work on not being so down in the dumps.

No wonder it’s on sale…

Whilst browsing the Modcloth sale section…I saw some amazingly horrid items.  What surprises me most is that some of them have really good ratings. Am I missing something. I mean, these clothes are pretty horrid looking to me. Yikes.

I don’t think either of these ugly things would look good on ANYONE.

The design on the first one just seems like super odd placement, I am not a fan. The second one? It’s just so bad. So, so bad.

Word cannot express how much I hate these shoes.  Why would anyone ever make such ugly footwear? Baffled.

Maybe I’m just not a fan of the ugly cropped sweaters? When I think of a sweater, I think cold weather. Like, NOT trying to show off your tummy.