I ♥: the little things, ballet, food, the outdoors, cats, dogs, all animals actually, reading, piano, traveling, weddings, flowers & gardening, decorating/renovating, friends, family, love.
How do you get rid of clutter? Physical clutter, like things lying around in your house that should have a place, but you can’t seem to ever find one. I’ve been cleaning this weekend since I always like to have a clean place to come home to after we go away for awhile (since Thanksgiving vacation is quickly approaching) and I’ve found that we have so much stuff that is just sitting around. Most of it I’m sure is stuff we don’t need. IE: old papers and books and boxes, etc. I feel like it would take forever to sort through everything and determine what we really need. And then once I discover what we need, where does it go?
I think I need a professional organizer.
Another project from the weekend. I added some “frosted” branches to my large berry wreath from last year. I’m hoping this makes it a little more Christmas-y.
Abraham Lincoln.
PS: I Love LIFE. That is all. :)
Made this wreath yesterday with left over Christmas-y fabric from last year. Inspiration curtesy of Pinterest :)
TGIF!
This weekend will be pretty mellow. Which is nice. I have a little bit of preparation for my next week for school. I even need to head into work a little early to get everything organized and ready. So since I don’t want to think about it too much during the weekend, it’s nice to just have a relaxing, sit in pajamas all day, kind of plan. There’s a WVU football game tomorrow. We didn’t claim tickets since he has a lot of work to do. I’m honestly a little disappointed in that since it’s the last home game we would be able to attend for the season. But when there’s a game, the entire day is practically devoted to it. Tomorrow’s game is at noon. Meaning we would “tailgate” starting really early, then the game wouldn’t probably be over until about 3 or 4. So, that defeats the whole spend-the-day-in-pajamas plan.
One thing we do plan on getting accomplished tomorrow is buying a new Christmas tree for this year (obviously we’re doing the artificial route again). Growing up, my family used to do live trees every year. I loved it, and looking for the tree was a big tradition. His family barely put up a tree and it wasn’t really made into a focal point, or even a point of interest in the holiday. So I was a little sad when he said he really didn’t want to do the “real tree” thing when we had our first Christmas living together. So out we went to purchase a small artificial tree that year. It worked well our first few holidays since we lived in a small apartment and didn’t really have that many ornaments and decorations. Now that we have a bigger place, and more things to hang on the tree, I want to upgrade it. We currently have a 6 foot tall skinny Christmas tree that has something like 400 “tips” on it.
(our tree the first year)
It seriously cost me a whole $20 to purchase. He doesn’t really see eye to eye with me on this new purchase, seeing as how the tree wasn’t a big deal to him growing up. I’m not doing a huge upgrade, because obviously this place isn’t where we’ll be decorating for Christmas many more years to come. But since I expressed the importance, he’s [reluctantly] coming with to look at slightly bigger and fuller trees for this year.
I think it’s funny that I’m already wanting to decorate for Christmas. It’s probably because I don’t have any Thanksgiving decorations and all of my fall ones have been up since Labor Day weekend. I’m excited though that I have so much time off for Thanksgiving this year. We’re spending exactly one week at home: Saturday to Saturday. So I only have 2 more weeks of work until I get a nice vacation. :) I’m really excited to spend time with my family, eat a ton of good food, get some shopping done, and have some longer time to relax. This really is my favorite time of year.
I can successfully say that my fried macaroni and cheese were a success!
I found the recipe on pinterest and pretty much gave myself a pinterest challenge. I started everything Sunday afternoon, after shopping for 2 pounds of cheese. That’s a lot of cheese once it’s all grated and sitting in mountains on plates in your kitchen. It was wonderful cheese. I got this apple wood smoked Gouda. It was fantastic. So anyway, I made the macaroni, added the cheese, and formed it all into balls to freeze overnight. Then Monday, after I got home from work, I breaded and fried 35ish macaroni balls whilst trying to get dressed. Good thing my costume was extremely simple. They were a little cold once we got to the party and began eating them, but everyone kept asking for the recipe and saying how good they were. I think I’ll need to keep doing Pinterest food challenges for myself from time to time.
I think before going home for Thanksgiving, I’m going to make a batch of pumpkin brown icing cookies that I made last year. I think cooking and baking has become a new hobby to keep me busy! It helps me feel really productive, and I even feel like that productiveness has spread into my work ethic at my job too.
I really had a fantastic week and can say that my attitude has really improved from last week! I loved being there and felt like I got so much stuff accomplished over the past few days. It also helps that my assistant substitutes have been incredible this week. I hope I have the same ones scheduled in there for next week as well. Really looking forward to the next few weeks, especially with Thanksgiving around the corner!
We woke up this morning to snow flurries. I honestly can’t remember if snow has commonly fallen this “early” in the year. All I know is my body is completely not prepared for the cold. Shortly after waking up and getting ready for the day, I was walking around the house wearing pants, socks, a sweater, with a hoodie over it and a scarf. And yes, the heat was on. The temperature is going to be back up to the sixties in the middle of the week, so I’ll have to get re-acclimated to the cold at a later date.
We’re going to a Halloween party on Monday night, the first one that the husband and I have gone to together. It will be our 6th Halloween and I don’t think we’ve ever dressed up before. We’re DIYing our costumes and are going as Lois Lane and Clark Kent/Superman. Both are pretty much complete, we just need to get Lois and Clark appropriate eyewear sometime tomorrow. The party’s also a potluck, and with a group of people we love hanging out with, and have on many occasions in the past. I don’t exactly have a large repertoire of “potluck recipes” and generally have to look up new ideas so that I don’t continue bringing the same dish time after time. I think at the last event I made Hash Brown casserole, and the time before that we took the lazy route and brought store bought cookies. This time I found a recipe online for Fried Macaroni and Cheese balls (I think they refer to them as “bites” on the website). It’s a 2 day process to make them so I have to start them tomorrow. Maybe that will also motivate me to clean the apartment more tomorrow too. I also plan on making a new soup for dinner.
The past few weeks I drifted into a lazy slump that consisted of going to work, coming home, watching TV, and spending hours reading or on the computer, or a combination of a few things. I need to start doing something more productive, and I’m starting to get back into cooking/baking. I have plans for meals this week, and want to start practicing my holiday baking. I’m researching a few new cookie recipes for Christmas time. We’ll see how motivated I stay after the work week. But I don’t think I’ll get back into a slump, as I’m actually not dreading this work week!
