Free shirt from lymabean!

Who wants a free shirt?!

College Bean Shirt!

To be honest though, I like the design of the ASU bean better than the UA bean.

Craft/Study Room

More work needed on the craft/study room:


But, I did get all my junk cleared out of the entry way:


And, just for fun . . .


It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . . Nina jumping on the table while I'm taking a picture!

Scrapbooking & A Cold

Between trying to clean my craft/study room and going out and doing stuff, it looks like I'll be trying to cram in reading most of the chapter and doing homework problems tomorrow night.

Yesterday, went with Greg's sister, Kati, to a scrapbooking get-together. Kati's first foray into scrapbooking. I'd forgotten to bring some stuff to finish the page I had intended, so I helped Kati make a page for her Alaska travel album. Went to my mom's house after, where I got some more of my stuff and had to wait for my dad to come over to drop off my new cell phone (number still the same). I didn't get back till 8:00 or 9:00. I cleaned, but didn't get that much done. Greg is getting kind of impatient with my apparently slow progress.

Today, I cleaned some in the morning, read some in the afternoon (but not much, unfortunately), and then went to Kati's couples night dinner party. That was pretty good - we played Apples to Apples, which I hadn't played before.

Came down with a slight cold Friday afternoon, so that's been a bummer too (though not as bad as Emma's . . . )

I anticipate getting all the cleaning done for my craft/study room this coming week, so once that is done, I can get on top of all this craftiness I had envisioned doing before we moved in. Yay.

Blueberry Scones

There is an apparent debate in Greg's office amongst the tax associates and senior associates as to what exactly "scones" are. Some say scones are biscuit-y pastries whereas others have come to know scones as some sort of fried dough. In order to illustrate the biscuit-y pastry nature of true scones, Greg baked some scones last night to bring to work:


I was the unwitting beneficiary of fresh blueberry scones!

The server is back up! (Thanks to Greg)

The famed "don't touch the shiny part" sticker book:


I showed it to Greg while cleaning out my bookcase. He was not allowed to touch the shiny part.

Q: What is the story behind the "don't touch the shiny part" sticker book?

A: Back in the early 1990s, sticker collections and sticker trading were quite the fad among a certain group of little girls. Sticker books, which were bound pages of oiled paper, were used to facilitate the collection and storage of individual stickers that were traded. Some time in the middle of the sticker collecting craze, I acquired this *sweet* sticker book with a shiny metallic cover. To keep the cover looking shiny and new, I wrapped tissue around the metallic cover and instructed all those who came in contact with the sticker book not to touch the shiny part. Looking back on it, it's probably quite hilarious, isn't it?

"One: cut a hole in a box . . ."

Man. I feel like I have no life when I leave for work at 6:30 in the morning and don't get back home until 10:00 pm. Greg isn't even back yet and he left earlier than I did.

After having an internal debate as to whether or not I should paint a second coat of yellow in my craft/study room . . . I've decided that I'm lazy, want my room to be done, and will not paint a second coat (not having study space is starting to kind of stress me out). Last night, Greg and I moved our old dining table into the room and put the leaf in, so now I have an extra long work table to scrapbook, sew, and be crafty in general! I also set up a smaller table perpendicular to the work table that will be my "study" space as opposed to my "crafty" space.

I estimate that I can fit up to four other people at the work table, so I'm looking forward to getting the room (and the rest of the house) all set up and having people over!

Paint Smarter, Not Harder

Dora, Lee Anne, and Kimberly came yesterday morning to help me out with painting my craft/study room (so good!). We almost finished the primer, then for the rest of the day - and into the wee hours of the morning - I painted the first coat of yellow (double good!). My hands, however, are sore from all the painting I've been doing lately (no good!). In painting the first coat of yellow, I tried to be careful to *hopefully* avoid having to do a second coat (primer = no fun, first coat of color = fun, second coat of color = old news), but we'll have to see in the light of day how the first coat turned out.

While painting, I pulled out this stool (maybe I shouldn't refer to it as a "stool" since Dora said you're not supposed to actually stand on it because it's unstable and Asian relatives who possess similar stools will scold you for actually trying to stand on it):


Apparently, these stools are often used as handy/readily available street fighting weapons (in movies, in real life, or both? I wasn't clear on that) since you often find them in street market food stands (in China/Hong Kong) and can be conveniently grabbed and used as a tool for hitting other people should a scuffle happen to break out on or near the street. Maybe Dora needs to elaborate. But seriously. I don't even remember everything Dora said about the stool being used in fights and it's still hilarious. I was laughing while telling Greg and almost couldn't get the words out.

What?!

Hmmm.

Pope blasts Europeans for not having enough children by Sim Sim Wissgott Sat Sep 8, 3:27 PM ET MARIAZELL, Austria (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI blasted Europeans for being selfish and not having enough children, in a sermon on Saturday at the 850-year-old pilgrimage site of Mariazell in Austria. "Europe has become child-poor. We want everything for ourselves and place little trust in the future," the pope told a crowd of faithful from his canopied area at an open-air, afternoon mass that took place under heavy rain. But Benedict held out hope, saying: "The earth will be deprived of a future only when the forces of the human heart and of reason illuminated by the heart are extinguished . . . Where God is, there is the future." [. . .]

a) Europe already has a lot of people.
b) There's no guarantee that all the children he's encouraging people to have are going to turn out to be faithful Catholics.
c) Overpopulation is already a problem. At some point, practicality trumps ideology.

Progress on the House (and Lack of on the Server)

Boo to the lack of pictures and posting . . . the server has not yet been set up because its priority level fails to place it on the "things to do for the house" list. I tried to "fast track" the set up of the server, but we (i.e., Greg) discovered/realized that we (i.e., Greg) have to switch out all jacks for the structured wiring from phone to CAT5. Hopefully this will happen in the next week or so, although there are many other projects that are needing to be done (blinds, painting, moving stuff around so that the carpet peeps can change out the defective carpet pad after we've already moved all our junk onto the carpet . . . )

I'm itching to be crafty and post though, especially since my (one) class this semester is once a week, after we finish with the house projects, I can have a few days a week to be crafty.

I'm hoping to get my craft room primed this Friday so that on Saturday we (Dora? Lee Anne? Kimberly? Melody? Whoever else might want to help?) can actually paint the room with color. It's actually kind of a drag to do the priming cause it's just white.

I did make excellent progress today as I spent about 6 hours painting our master bedroom. I did an entire coat myself, save the edges and corners. I feel super accomplished. Once the server is up - pictures!