Merry Christmas

We had fun with my family in California, and we're excited to spend time with (most of) Bryan's family when we get back to Utah.

We hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Christmas time is here again

I thought I should do a Christmas post sometime before Christmas, so here is a little recap of our Christmas season:

-It snowed, but luckily not very much.  This was when it snowed on a really sunny day

 

-We saw the Carl Bloch exhibit at the MOA.  It was pretty cool, and this painting was amazing up close.

-We went to Disneyland over Thanksgiving break for free and it was freezing cold

 

-We got a little tree, and our house smelled great (and we're hopeful that the tree will still be alive when we get back to Utah on Sunday)

-We made snowflakes (notice the window)

 all decorated

decorated, lit up, and lights dimmed 

-We found Christmasland again

 We even saw the gate open up and a car go in.  We were this close to running inside.

-We had a second Thanksgiving dinner with Justin and Marissa, and I made a pretty pecan cheesecake

-I got to visit Sandi, Matt, and baby Ruby Rose since they moved to Utah

-We went to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert... but we were too late to get seats even though we had tickets.  Salt Lake traffic/parking is the worst.  We watched it in the Conference Center theater, so it was still fun to see.  David Archuleta was pretty good. After we got to see the lights on temple square, so it was still a fun night.

We're in California for Christmas, and the rain has finally stopped, so it looks like it's going to be a pretty weekend.

Merry Christmas!

Home Improvement

I've been saving a lot of pictures of gallery walls to my desktop, and when we moved into our current house I thought this might be a nice remedy to the white walls staring me in the face at every turn.

It was kind of tricky putting it up, and it was hard to tell if it looked how I wanted it to until it was all pretty much in place.  I think I would have spaced them a little further apart if I'd had the motivation to fix it after the fact, but it will do for now.  Maybe I'll add to it to make it fill the space a little better.

 The other area of our house that needed some work was the kitchen.  Ours is teeny tiny.  I had a feeling I'd end up scratching our pots and pans if we kept them in a cupboard (and to be perfectly honest, I hate having to dig through a million pots and pans to get to the one that I actually want), so we took a leaf out Julia Child's book and put up some pegboard (this should have been pretty easy, but we ended up having to go back to Lowe's to get different screws three separate times.  Apparently our walls are abnormal).  We painted it blue, and hung everything up.  I have really loved it because everything is so easy to find and we didn't have to sacrifice any storage space.

 Disclaimer: the stains on the kitchen floor are permanent.  We really have tried to clean them. 

Upon moving in, we quickly realized that we didn't have a microwave, so we got one on sale at Target (thanks Dad).  The problem was that we didn't have anywhere to put it.  Our kitchen has minimal counter space to begin with, so we weren't going to take it all up with a microwave.  We realized that we could just barely squeeze the microwave in between the oven and refrigerator if we squished the dryer, oven, and fridge a little more.  Then we picked up some 2x2s, 2x4s, and a piece of plywood to make a very basic table for the microwave to stand on.  It was a tight squeeze, but it fit perfectly, and the table even gave us a place to put our trash can.

We had fun making the house feel more like our own (when I wasn't pulling my hair out about the pegboard situation) and it was nice to have a chance to break in some of our tools (including our power drill!)