{Crazy Buzy}

The past six weeks or so have included such crazy buzy things as...

Youth conference. 

Photoshoots

Birthdays.

Runaway Wives Club.

Remodeling projects.

And just when I thought we were finally getting our routine down, a new church calling was extended to me.  Relief Society Secretary.  Nothing too huge, just big enough to require a super cute new church bag.  

ABC Wednesday "I" is for {Inspiration}...

Pinterest has once again been an INSPIRING website at our house...

New Curtains. 

And delicious Cucumber Cups stuffed with sushi rice, crab and avocado.  

And lastly, this may not have been Pinterest INSPIRED, but our homemade french fries were definitely INSPIRED by this ginormous red potato we (as in the super cute husband) dug up the other day.    

Gosh, I love Pinterest.
Almost as much as homemade fries.

Who am I kidding?
There is NOTHING better than homemade fries.
Not even Pinterest.
It's definitely a close second, though.

ABC Wednesday
ch-ch-ch-check it out!!!  

Almost there, a before and after

My dining room before...

a chaotic catch all....

the only thing missing is a pile of clean laundry on the table.

Am I right, cute husband, or am I right?

And my dining room on crack after... it's so clean.

And blue.

Ish.

Gray.

Ish.

Different.

Ish.
Should I paint the mirror frame black?
Black and white photos or mix and match?

I am missing something here.

The plates above the window need something.

And what do I put on the shelf below the pictures?
Decisions, decisions.

If you only knew how hard it was to pick the paint color to begin with.

It's called Trustworthy from True Value.

Just in case you are wondering.

All white

I can't believe I'm saying this out loud.

I love sewing.

As long as there are no wonky seams, zippers, or buttons, that is.

Otherwise, I rather enjoy it.

I blame Pinterest. I keep seeing all these super cute things and I just can't HELP myself! I have to make one of those. And those. And those. Oh, and look at that... awwwww....

Here is the latest skirt I whipped up this week. I topped it off with an Anthropology inspired belt I saw on Pinterest (which I wish I could find again, that's what I get for not repinning it the first time).

However, instead of using ties or a buckle on the belt, I made up some cute little "pins" to hold it in place... also as seen on Pinterest.
*sigh*

Is this getting out of control, or what? Should I seek professional help?

The family...

Painting.

Photoshopping.

It's all I've done this week.

I've got some projects on the brain.

I've got some projects in progress.

This is one of them.

Just thought I would share.

To see other considerations, click here.

Re-covering...

As of July 2, my house has been here for 13 years. One of the first things I did after we moved in was take one of our old chairs we bought shortly after we got married (20 years ago in August) and recovered it so the cute husband would have a place to sit in the closet while he tied his shoes in the mornings.

He wore it completely out. Literally.
It has now been re-covered.

Will we get another 13 years out of our "new" chair?

I hope so.

Thanks cute husband for showing off your spray painting abilities! *smooch*

Sneak Peak...

My pintrest addiction has forced me to learn to make one of these cute skirts. Yes. Forced. I used an old t-shirt for the underskirt, and leftover fabrics for the ruffles. It took forever, but dang, it's cute, and really, Ishee can't have too many skirts. Right? (tutorial can be found at "Ruffles and Stuff")

And now my Pintrest addiction has also forced me to go back to the fabric store and buy material I did not need to make another one. It will happen right after I get brave and actually start cutting these super cute grey and pale yellow fabrics (This one is for me. Wait. Am I too old to wear ruffles? EEK!).

Thanks Pintrest. I think.

Finished product pictures to come one of these days.

Maybe.

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli

I have issues...

I have issues. I know, surprise surprise, right? Every day it's something new, what bothers me this week won't even matter next week. But in the meantime, this is really bothering me. What is it?

My curtains.

I don't like them.

We have this nice bright sunny living room with a big west facing eight foot wide window and it's the first thing you see when you walk into my house. Only, we can't seem to stand it when it's nice and bright in there.

I don't know why, we just can't.

More issues for another day, I guess.

Not to mention, the wind blows from that direction so there is always a draft and then there's the cat that just can't stay out of the blinds and curtains....

So, we keep the window nice and hidden, by vertical blinds - which I hate and are thusly (is that a word?) covered by thick thermal curtains, which I hate even more.

No idea why, really, they just don't do it for me. They are so... boring.

But, I haven't clue one what to do about this latest issue. I've looked everywhere in person and online for the perfect (affordable) drapes. Can't find anything. I hunted the fabric stores. Can't find anything.

My budget is ... like, oh.... nothing.

What I envision is... I don't know, and there in-lies the problem.

It just needs... something. Something... different.

But not so different that the red pillows and blankets don't match anymore. *wink wink*

Fix it for me. Please?

What would YOU do to this window?

If I was a good wife...

A couple of years ago, I had this golf quote cut for the super cute husband. It got put away somewhere to be completely forgotten about until this past December, when the husband decided he wanted to hang it up in his office. He knew just what he wanted done with it, it was a matter of getting me to actually do it for him. So I surprised him and actually did it.

Not only did I actually do it, but I used my Chamber of Commerce Christmas gift card I got from work to buy the frame from a local business. So there!

Merry Christmas.

That sounds like I never actually do anything for him, which isn't true. I think. I do things for him all the time. Like his laundry.

Just don't look at his pile of his ties in the dining room waiting to be mended.

He took this picture the other day, I think as a reminder to me that they are still there waiting for my attention.

Little does he know, they aren't there anymore. I moved them into a basket so I wouldn't have to keep looking at them and remembering that I still haven't fixed them.

You know, out of sight, out of mind?

One of these days... I promise... and it won't be years and years like the vinyl saying. It might even be this year if he holds his cards just right.

The one where she nearly loses a finger...

Picture this...

I'm just getting started sewing a super secret Christmas present for someone. Suddenly, my sewing machine decides to shell it's guts. I poked and prodded and did all I could think to do to save my precious machine...

No such luck.

I called the repair shop and explained the problem. "Well," he said. "We do free estimates, but a tune up will cost you anywhere from $50-70, plus the cost of repairs and parts". Um, how much? For this basic Singer I paid about $75 for 15 years ago that's worth about 48 cents? How much is a new one?

So...

We bought a new one.

I asked for a few recommendations from friends who know more about sewing machines than I can even pretend and since my budget was so low, and I'm nowhere near a professional seamstress, I went with the most recommended brand. A "Brother". Plus, it's the kind they use on Project Runway and if it's on TV, it has to be good, right?

It is.

I like it.

A lot.

Thanks super cute husband for letting me have my Christmas present a few weeks early!

The first thing I discovered was that the needle that came with it was not meant to be sewn through five layers of flannel. It caught my nose square on the tip when it broke off. At least it didn't blind me.

The second thing I discovered was that... oh my gosh... sewing machine can sew EVEN stitches? Add that to the list of things my old Singer was incapable of.

The third thing I discovered was that the feed dogs actually PULL the fabric as it moves. I didn't have to do any pulling (could explain some of my uneven stitches, eh?).

And the last thing I discovered was that them there feed dogs are VERY VERY sharp and they can and will cut big chunks of your fingers off. I reattached the skin (even though the super cute husband suggested I just cut that little flap off... sounded too painful) and slapped a band-aid on so I wouldn't bleed all over my fabric and went back to work. Eventually. Took me a few hours to get over my fear of the feed dogs.

(before you go feeling all bad for me or anything, just know that it actually looks worse in person... and feels worse than it looks)

I can't wait to share my super cute projects... especially the one item I made for Ishee. Oh my goodness... massive amounts of cuteness have overtaken my home. I would share, but alas, the child insisted upon coming home from school today so her project had to be put away unfinished until I have another day off from work.

Good thing, too... my finger needs a break (although typing is much more painful than sewing).

Ah, the sweet sound of accomplishment...

I've recently discovered the world of couponing and how much money you can save by clipping and sorting and scouring ads for the best deals. It's filled my pantries in the kitchen to the gills and the overflow has managed to find it's way no further than the floor of my food storage room off the garage. It was time for some organization!

Before:




After:

And while I was feeling so energetic, I even cleaned up the husbands office slash workout room (which is used more for storing of miscellaneous junk than actually "working" in).

Ah, the sweet smell of accomplishment. Can you smell it from there? It feels GOOD!

Ye.... er, me.... of little faith...

It wouldn't have surprised me to look at this scene for the next four months...

because in four months is the end of golf season and it's not until golf season ends that I get many honey do's out of my husband.

Fortunately, mother nature has been in a pissy mood lately (I'm just glad to know she's not just ticked off at Idaho... what'd we do anyway?) and refuses to bring on some decent weather. You know it's bad when it's not even nice enough for my husband to go play golf. He'll golf in any kind of weather. Except freezing cold wind and rain.

However, he surprised me the other day with the "laying of the pavers"...

After paver number three, he said to me... "are you sure we can't just pour concrete?" To which I replied... "do you really want to load all 34 of these 40 pound bricks back in the truck and take them back?" Um... not really. Ditto.
(do you see all those branches on my lawn... that's what wind does to willow trees!)

Needless to say, the next time you visit, you will no longer have to defile my grass or wade through ankle deep weeds to get to the front door. Instead you will wade through ankle deep gravel to my beautiful new sidewalk! It should take the whole summer for the weeds to grow back through it (I think my husband has an aversion to round up, I really do... of coarse, it is hard to spray weeds when the wind is always blowing unless you want to kill everything within a quarter of a mile...).

My dad was beyond thrilled... the fact that I had no sidewalk was really starting to bother him. I still haven't paved my driveway, but a sidewalk is a close second in his book.

Because it's all about him...

And the fact that the husband needed a project since he couldn't golf. Old mother nature is supposed to let up one of these next few days... so I won't see him again for awhile... I should be thanking her, instead of fretting about her orneriness, I guess. Nah... I'm too tired of grey, clouds, rain, and COLD! Lets get on with summer! Enough of this crap already!

I think I have some serious issues.... Maybe I should go plant some flowers?

Finished product...

As requested... I guess... this is the finished product... the final handprints.

When we first moved into our house 10 years ago (has it really been that long?), the first thing my father in law insisted we do (and you always do what he says no matter what) was pour a sidewalk and steps. So... we did... and we did what he wanted, too, because you always do what he says no matter what.

A few years later, the heavy steps started sinking, creating a massive and somewhat hazardous crack in the sidewalk. We lived with it for a long time, warning visitors to watch out for that crack! After my own children kept falling on it repeatedly, we finally decided it was time to do something about it. This was two years ago.

So we ripped out the sidewalk and built a nice big trex deck on top of the steps.

In the process, we covered up something that was very valuable to me... the handprints that my oldest two children left in the cement when they were 2 and 4 years old.

Last week, we finally poured a new sidewalk of sorts. It's more of a landing... as the actual sidewalk is going to be done out of pavers just as soon as my husband gets bored and needs a serious time consuming project to do, so that'll probably never happen in my lifetime (or next week maybe).

When we poured the concrete, though, I had one request... new handprints, and this time, it would be all three of the kidlings!

The boys handprint... bigger than mine! By a LONG way, too! Sheesh!

While you were out, I was working on a project...

Not just any project, but a secret project. A very secret project. And not just one secret project, but two, quite possibly even three secret projects.

The first secret project is a secret, I'm not telling even you what it is, mainly because it quite possibly could involve someone who reads or has read this blog before.

The second secret project isn't really a secret, unless your name is Grace, and I don't know if it's a secret project for her either, but I'm pretending that it is either way as it's still a project in the works.

The third secret project is a very secret project I shall refer to as the "while you were snowbirding in St. George" episode of "While you were out" or perhaps even "My parents house"... minus the camera's, silly hosts, and professional decorators. It's just me and my sisters and of course, our parents house.

Why? Because growing up mom was the queen of keeping busy. She was always cleaning and cooking and doing laundry and canning beans and pulling weeds and raising 10 kids and putting up with dad and even more cleaning. Now that she's a ripe old age of 79, she just doesn't have it in her to do those things anymore, well, except for putting up with dad, but she hasn't a choice there and I'm pretty sure it's more work than all of the above.

She's now the queen of crocheting and embroidering and quilting and sewing and working on humanitarian projects and just taking it easy as her health won't let her do much of anything else. So we got together and decided it was time to do something nice for her, something she's talked of doing forever and just can't do herself.

It's nothing to exciting, really. Simply, a new warm coat of paint on the stark white walls, and eventually some new drapes, that is if we (*cough - my sisters - *cough*) can ever decide on just what to do and find the right material.

Our choices so far are these:


For this room (can you tell the paint color is not stark white anymore?):


So... panels or just a valance? Go with the stripes on the left or the right or find a coordinating solid color? Stripes as chair covers or coordinating solid as chair covers? And when I say chair cover, I mean replace dad's dirty bum protector:


(We didn't have the heart to go through dad's desk, as bad as it needs it. Mom would have appreciated it... a lot... it's an eyesore and a sore spot all in one. Everything was put back into the room just as we found it, except for an old clock we retired to the laundry room and that ancient paint by number above dad's chair that we're just retiring, period. I just hope I got the TV hooked up correctly - can you say "too many wires that can't possibly go to anything" - or I will be getting a phone call in the middle of the night that starts with something like "what the hail did you do to my TV?")

We're (well, I am and I'm sure the sisters are, too) anxious to finish up the project. It's a busy month! My parents will be home in just a few weeks and I have birthdays to celebrate, cakes to bake, and friends and neighbors having babies, some who require dinner, and other secret projects to finish and post offices to argue with and libraries to visit and books to read and scriptures to study and house to finish cleaning and a husband to convince that if you really want the little girls to know that life isn't fair, just go ahead and buy a cell phone for the Boy for his birthday, along with new name brand golf clubs and a golf pass. Go ahead, I dare you.

And that's just this week!

So with that being said, Ishee wants to know why there are so many birthday's in March. Happy happy birthday this month to the following family members: Grandpa, my father in law, Abbi, Patrick, the Boy, Nancy, Jesse, Verl, Devin, Bob, Madison, Tanner, and Parker.

Friends Rossi, Katy, Julie, Donna, Karen... Happy Birthday to you all, too.

And finally.... congratulations on your decision to be baptized, sweet Grace, and to my good friends Heidi and Cathy, may your babies be born healthy and strong and sooner rather than later.

I think I'm going back to bed now.

Here's a story, of a man named....

Ebenezer...

My son is such an optimist. He figured he didn't need to finish his genealogy project on Wednesday night because school was destined to be closed on Thursday. I made him do it anyway. School wasn't closed. Then it was. Coarse, we didn't find this out until the kids were already at the bus stop. So they came home and said "HA! I knew I didn't have to finish my project last night."

Yeah yeah yeah... bite me

So how'd he do?

First off, I have to explain that an epiphany came to me as I was in the shower, where they always come, and I remembered that my big brother, sibling #1, compiled a book just last year about my dad's family. This includes family information, genealogy information going back as far as the eye can see, life histories, patriarchial blessings, photos, and newspaper clippings. Anything and everything he could convince aunt Carol and the rest of his relatives to share with him. I forgot all about it. So I retrieved it from the corner of my desk where it has sat since I took posession of it last summer and did some research.

Thus...

#1... Five generation worksheet. This became very easy. I also remembered in that same epiphany that my son had to do a five generation worksheet for a scout merit badge. All it took was a little effort to find it. I automatically deducted points from his overall score as he double checked the instructions to find that the five generation sheet should take up 1/3 of the overall posterboard, and my lacsidaisical child (I don't even know what that means for sure or even if it's spelled right since my spellcheck won't seem to work, but it just rolls of the tongue so well, like Plaxico, I'm using it anyway), my lacsidaisical child decided his single sheet of type paper was more than big enough. I wonder if his teacher will notice?


#2... Family crest. Thanks to sibling #1, the wonderful and fabulous family history book included in the front cover the official family crest. Well, I don't know if it's the official one, he found it online, a place I couldn't peek at. Instructions didn't say anything about using information someone else found online.


#3... Family story. I did a bit of digging in my stuff and found the biography of Ebenezer Bryce. I handed this along with the family history book to my son and said "find a story you like." He decided after reading the first paragraph on Ebenezer Bryce that this was indeed his man. Ebenezer Bryce joined the church when he was 17 in Scotland. He wanted to sail to America but his dad didn't want him to go. He told his dad he would stay home, but when he became of age, he was going to leave anyway. So his dad gave him permission to leave. He eventually wound up in Salt Lake City where he lived with George Albert and Bathsheba Smith for a time, until he married his wife, Mary Ann. Eventually they settled in the St. George area, at the mouth of a canyon they named Bryce Canyon, which is now a National Park. He said of the canyon, "it's a heck of a place to lose a cow." I've never been there, but looking at this picture, I will totally take his word on it!

He also built a church in Pine Valley, Utah, where the attic rafters were built like a bottom of a ship. Ebenezer only agreed to build the church if he could do it his way, so being a boat builder by trade, he did it the only way he knew how! I've never been there either! Have you?


The boy wrote his story, and my 11 year old, an avid writer herself, read it, rolled her eyes and told him he needed to work on his story telling abilities. (The above written was MY story... which needs it's own work, I know.)

#4... family traditions. This was a bit hard for him since we have none. Certainly nothing passed down from family member to family member... none that I am aware of anyway. He told of eating Sunday dinners at grandma's house every week, and what we do for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and even the Easter egg hunts. He used lots of small descriptive words to get all 300 words, that was for sure.

#5... Pie chart. Turns out 69.some odd percent of my relatives come from England. Others come from Ireland, Scotland, and Denmark. 6% are unknown... as Canada doesn't count as a country in this pie chart project and one was apparently hatched in South Carolina in the early 1800's. The most exciting part of this pie chart was learning to make one on Excell.

#6... Map of the movement westward. Another difficult challenge, or so I thought. As luck would have it, dh's crazy grandma's insistence that I find out not just names, but details on her lineage came in handy. I never did find much, as old Sam Parker was hatched in the 1800's in Liverpool England. However, he arrived at Ellis Island. He moved to Elgin, Illinois where he farmed. He got married and had two children. He moved to Kemmerrer Wyoming and had his last child. He moved to Pocatello, Idaho as a railroad worker where he divorced his wife and the rest is history. That's all we needed... where did they start, and where did they end in Idaho and with whom. Easy peasy!

Extra credit included turning that five generation worksheet into a 7 generation worksheet which would have required the internet and several phone calls to relatives, as well as perhaps even hours of research at the family history library. Or perhaps we could have done a timeline of our family history beginning with the oldest ancestor. Rumor has it that mom can trace her line all the way back to Charlamagne... that was way more work that lacsidaisical child was willing to do. He's more of a "straight A's doing the bare minimum of work" kind of guy.

No internet was required in the making of this project. No late night phone calls to grandma begging for information she knows nothing about. It all came from a family book, my cedar chest, and many diligent hours of research from years past. And for that... I am quite proud if I do say so myself.