Herbs, 'Shrooms and Inspiration

Here's a bunch of random things. A smattering, if you will.

Bridget and I planted a garden! We were having a very difficult time picking out a theme for our garden. Herbs, vegetables, flowers....so many options! Eventually, we just picked our favorite of each. We're really good at decisions.

I've never had very much success with growing things, so we're really interested to see what happens with this little project. Hey you veteran gardeners out there, tell me your secrets!

I've amassed quite a collection of "reclaimed" wood objects for future projects. I keep them on the porch. 'Cause I'm classy like that.

I picked the broken ladder up from a day care down the road. I asked permission before I dug it out of their trash pile. It was at this moment that it really hit me how little pride I have. The kids all pressed their faces up against the chain link fence, watching the crazy white lady load a broken ladder into the trunk of her very dented car. Whatev. I got a sweet ladder.

Someday (soon, I hope) I'm going to marry the boards to this quote:

I just need a few more old crappy boards. And my sander!

And, I'll finish off with a little bit of home decor according to Cory. Tanya gave Cory a little Mario 'Shroom filled with candy for Christmas.  He loved the candy. Thanks, Tanya! You'll be happy to know that he's found the little shroom to be more than just a candy jar.

I guess things get pretty lonely in there sometimes.

 He reminds me of the shy, yet gifted kid who sits in the front of the class. 

I seriously think Cory just goes around trying to put things inside of other things.

Hmm...Cory just came out of his study room and said, "Lindy, you never make me cookies or brownies."

Master of subtlety, that one.

I haven't been grocery shopping in a month so...we'll see how this goes! He LOVES when I make creative food solutions. Mayonnaise is so versatile...

Just bangin' around over here.

Every once in a while I like to give Cory a little surprises. I feel that it keeps our marriage fresh and interesting.

Today I was feeling generous, so I let him wake up to this little scene:

Nothing says I love you like a sink fulla hair.

I've always kind of had a thing for cutting hair. I used to try to get my little brother to play "sleep" so I could give him a trim. I think I may have missed my calling.

You know who you should NEVER, under ANY circumstances let cut your hair? My sister Jackie. She convinced me (on two separate occasions) to let her cut my bangs. Both times were terrible. One time was the night before my already bound to be awkward first day of 8th grade. She gave me a prickly two inch fringe that took 3 months to grow to a regular length. It gave me the opportunity to work on my personality.

I like the new bangs so far. I think they held up pretty well to a long day of work and class.

If you look closely, you'll see that I left the tooth paste splatters on the bathroom mirror for our little photoshoot. I'm classy.

Also, I completely forgot to wear green today. But I did make corned beef for dinner! Cory said that it tasted good, but smelled like old people. He has a point.

See ya next fall

Sometimes I get antsy when I think of all the places I want to go. Europe, Hawaii, Redwoods, and this one random waterfall in North Georgia are just calling my name.

But trips like that take money. And planning. And time. 

None of which we have.

Someday. Maybe.

It's nice when Cory reminds me of all the awesome places we have yet to explore that are right in our regional backyard. (Although, the 12 by 8 foot area of our literal backyard probably holds some surprises too)

On our way home from the Orlando Temple, Cory suggested we stop by the most kitschy, romantic, touristy place Florida has to offer (and thats saying a lot). Turns out, he prefers historical sites to shopping in IKEA and the mall (my suggestions). Either way, I win. 

That's compromise, folks.

Without further ado I present to you: St. Augustine. America's Oldest City.

Disclaimer: While I could back up my wild claims with some actual fact checking, I'm choosing to rely on the information Cory recalled from his third grade field trip as accurate. Its quite possible I'm writing my first piece of historical fiction here. Blame him.

Wanna know what makes this place great? I'll show you.

The visitor's center/parking garage looks like this:

They have entire shops dedicated to foods like chocolate.

Not pictured: Shop specializing in exotic jerky. For real. We're talking Yak and Alligator jerky.

It's a place where you spell "Olde Tyme" when you mean "Old Time."

There is also a Fort.

According to my tour guide, the fort withstood the barrage of cannons for centuries due to the unique "bricks made out of tiny shells" construction technique of the Spanish men who built it. 

Also, this guy hung out for a while. Do you think he's yearning for the days of yore? Regretting the terrible things he did to this country's native people? Counting down the minutes until he gets his smoke break? The world may never know.

I thought it made a lot of sense that the oldest town in America would also feature the oldest street in America. We found it, and took a stroll.

The Spanish settlers were all about culture. And gift shops.

The oldest street in America led us to the most inviting windows in America. I want this.

We found a wax museum too. The oldest in America? Probably not.

 We walked in, took some awkward pictures of the lobby as the receptionist stared at us, and walked out. The $6.00 per person fee was a little too rich for our blood.

The complete awkwardness of this picture makes me so happy.

The rest of the trip looked like this:

 I'm now dedicated to satisfying my travel lust with really getting to know the places within a 4 hour radius a little more. 'Cause I think we have some pretty awesome stuff. Suggestions welcome :)

Pillow Talk with my Puff Daddy

Usually right before we go to sleep, we talk. Sometimes we even hold hands and talk. Pretty much anything goes, and we'll gossip, tell funny stories, complain about work (me), complain about lab reports (him), and one time we just took turns saying things we like about each other. Which was very sweet.

Last night, just as we were getting very sleepy, we had this little exchange:

Lindy: Today I made cream puffs with Bridget. 

Cory: You can DO that?

Lindy: Well, I'd never done it before, but my mom used to do it all the time, so I had an idea of how it works. But anyway....

Cory: Wait. How do they get all puffy?

Lindy: I dunno. The salt maybe?

Cory: Yea, probably. How do you get the cream inside?

[Then I got distracted explaining how we filled them up, and had a side story about how we tried to make homemade whipped cream with half and half coffee creamer, which, not surprisingly, failed. So we used a can of Reddi-whip to fill them up instead. It's diversions like this that make a simple story take half an hour. Eventually I got back on track, which is where we'll pick up]

Lindy: But, that's not the point. One of the tips I read said to poke the puffs with a toothpick after baking. So I gave a toothpick to Bridget, and told her to poke them, and I started cleaning up. When I looked back over to see how it was going, I saw that every time she would poke one, they would collapse and deflate! Turns out that is the opposite of what you should do. So we stopped doing that real fast, but we'd already deflated half of the puffs.

So we both laugh over the silly mistake, and I start to fall asleep. Then...

Cory: I want cream puffs.

Lindy: Hmm...I think we have all the stuff to make them.

Cory: Can we make them?

Lindy: Ummm....sure.

Cory: Now?

Lindy: Ummm....okay.

Cory: Yay!!

And that is the story of how we made cream puffs at midnight.

We are basically pastry chefs.

I'm posting the recipe over at Pile o' Craft, so if you'd like to have your own cream puff adventure, click on over. 

Now I've gotta pack, cause we're takin' a trip to Orlando today and tomorrow! Yay for a mini-vacation :)

A Morally Gray Area

I'm sitting  in the living room "writing my papers" that are due tomorrow morning, as Cory is sitting in the spare bedroom/study room studying with a friend. Just a sheet of very thin drywall separates us, and I can pretty much hear every word they say to each other. And yes. I'm listening.

 There are long stretches of silence (while they work out the problems, I presume), punctuated by bursts of conversation.

And by conversation, I mean, "Take the x and y, and then divide everything by 1.5. Then you solve for blah blah math blah maximum allowable pencil something." (Direct quote. I just typed it as they said it. Well, mostly.)

But sometimes, they really open up to each other. Share their feelings and stuff.

"Man, I always get so scared that my calculator is going to die in the middle of a test."
"Yea man. Me too."

And,

"Dude, get one of these man. This is the best thing I've ever had in my life." (In reference to some kind of eraser pen that I can hear clicking as he extends it up and down.)

I just went in there an nonchalantly took this picture.

As I snapped it, Cory says, "You're not putting this on the internet, are you?"

Ummmm....why do you ask?

I should really get going on these papers now. But, if YOU had to write one on how third wave feminism is represented in the movie Legally Blonde, you'd be procrastinating too. Probably. And I haven't even picked out a topic for the second paper yet.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, yes I did just type "how to reference a film title" into Google. I get the underline/bold/italics rules mixed up sometimes. I'm pretty much the most awesome English major ever.

Spring? Already?

Winter was seriously short lived around here. And I really miss it. But, maybe it's just me and my broken car air conditioner. But seriously, where did winter go? Bridget and I decided to soak up the warm sunshine and practice our photography (we both got new cameras for Christmas). 

These are the signs of spring we found in her neighborhood:

But it wasn't all fun and games. On our trip around the neighborhood we found a seriously creepy mailbox topper.

Seriously, lady? Why? 

I think he's going to eat me.

In other news, I'm officially halfway done with my last semester of undergraduate education! Yay!

And Cory gained 5 pounds last week. And I haven't even switched him to whole milk yet! So, awesome.

And, I don't know how to cook pasta for less than 15 people. Seeing as we are only 2 people, it's becoming a problem.

And this was AFTER we had stuffed our faces until our bellies hurt. Yea.

Some Family History and Peanut M&Ms

 It's been a struggle to find the right photos to put on the shelves over our couch. Not exactly a life or death struggle. Or even something that I thought of more than once a week, or even made the list of things I wanted to do something about. But my original solution of printing out some random, bright, vintage-y things to put in the frames wasn't quite right. Even though I maintain that these seals are pretty awesome.

Awesome, right? Well, Cory wasn't sold on them. Or any of the other completely weird pictures I had up there. And, while I thought the prints were fun, I didn't have any personal attachment to them. They were meaningless to us. 

We displayed pictures of our parents and grandparents at our wedding reception in July. As a bonus, we got to keep the pictures, and I had spread them randomly throughout the house. They were nice on their own, but didn't really make much of a statement...then it came to me.

Down came the random artsy crap, and up went our statement:

These shelves are pretty much the first thing you see when you walk in the door, and it makes me so, so happy to see these pictures.  To see our parents and grandparents as they were just starting their marriages--before they had kids, or houses, or college degrees. Just two crazy kids living on love.

Cory's side of the family. Now that's what I call a gene pool.

Seeing our parents and grandparents at our age just kills me. I love it so much. It kind of makes me want to invite them all over to play Partini and wear 40's style clothing. I like to think that we all would have been the best of married friends. You know what I mean.

My side of the family. Ridiculously good looking.

It should be noted that our parents were married in the 80's, so their pictures were actually originally in color. When he saw my copies Cory said, "Why did you change our parents pictures? Now they look like they're a million years old." 

Because I like things to match. Okay?

Also, I have all of their love stories for you guys. I was going to summarize them in this post, but they're too amazing to summarize. They involve bike stealing, long distance war time relationships kept alive through letters alone, balls, Frisbee football, Stake basketball tournaments, and so much more. This post is already getting really long, and I haven't even told you about the M&M's yet, which was the whole thing I was going to write about today. So I'll post their love stories this week. I should have done it LAST week, what with Valentine's Day and all (which also happens to be one of their anniversaries. I know. Hindsight=twentytwenty.) but look forward to it this week.

And, about the M&Ms. Cory is a skinny guy. Like, really skinny. His metabolism is like the energizer bunny on back tar heroin. It never stops. This combined with the stress of school and a propensity to eat Honey Nut Cheerios for every meal unless something else is prepared for him has led to him losing weight on my watch. Which is bad. 

I've been working on ways to get him to eat more, but it's hard. Eating just...isn't on his list of priorities. Which is unfathomable to me. I literally cannot fathom it.

So, in an effort to put eating a little higher on his list, I've been trying to make high calorie snacks a little more accessible (I pretty much wrote the book on bad eating habits, so, I'm excited to put these skills to work).

Enter: A dish of Peanut M&M's place ever so innocently on the coffee table.

I didn't think much of it, but within half an hour of putting them out, the M&M's had disappeared! He ate them! I was shocked. He pretty much never eats sweets (Mentos don't count.). I had just hit the jackpot of fattening Cory up snacks. He loves them, and I am not tempted by them in even the smallest way. Win-win.

So, maybe our little friends started making an appearance more often. 

Maybe the dish would get refilled as he played some video games.

Maybe the dish would be on the table next to his dinner plate.

Maybe the dish would slip next to Cory as he watched TV.

Maybe the dish would show up to keep him company during study time...

Maybe I overplayed the usefulness of the dish.

Maybe this is the face he makes right before he asks, "Why are you taking pictures, and why have you been giving me so many peanut M&Ms this week?"

Uhhhmm...well...because... I just love you so much? 

But really, I don't think he noticed/minded until I started taking the pictures.

I'm thinking of buying him his own gallon of whole milk, and lacing it with whey protein. Desperate times, people. Suggestions?