Feliz Navidad

Christmas is almost here, and we are all decked out at home. We have a tree for the first time this year, and surprisingly the cats haven't knocked it over. It's just a little guy, but I love it.

Many thanks to Matt and Sonia, who got us a bunch of new ornaments for our wedding. What a great gift! Here's one:

My favorite brand new ornament this year is the piñata:

And of course I have to represent the Swedes with our Swedish horse:

Look how good Roxy is being! I think Santa will reward her this year.

When in Milwaukee . . .

. . . do as the Germans do, right?

The Friday after Thanksgiving we went up to Milwaukee to spend time with some family, and ended up at a German bar. There was lots of polka, lots of German words I can't pronounce, and, of course, lots of shots. Apparently the thing to do there is a quintuple shot off of a ski, so we obliged. Killepitch was the liquor of choice, naturally.

(It helps if everybody is the same height.)

We also played a game of Nails, which was new to me. Each person has their own nail in a stump, and you go around the circle with each person getting one smack per turn to try and hammer it all the way in. The last person with their nail sticking out loses, and I guess each group gets to decide their punishment. My lovely cousin Elise (in the gray) had to do 10 jumping jacks in the middle of the dance floor - not too bad.



Don't think that Scott and I aren't furiously working on a way to make one of these for our home.

McTreemy

It's rare that I get to see Scott trim trees (really, who does get to see their spouse at work?), so I was excited when I had the opportunity this past weekend. Scott's mom needed a couple of the trees in her front yard trimmed, so I went along for the ride.

It is alternately exciting and scary to watch him. He gets up there pretty high!

Since he had all his equipment out, we decided to go to my mom's house and work on the enormous tree in her backyard. Scott almost took out a window with a falling branch, but we all survived.

It's right about now that I decide Scott should really get a nice desk job.

Ryan Adams rocks

One of my favorite performers, Ryan Adams, was on Letterman last night. Oh, how sweet it was. I'll watch Ryan on any show at any time, but it's especially cool when he goes on Dave's show. I know Dave really likes his music, and I can see that Ryan likes Dave, and it's nice to see the man love.

Scott and I went to see Ryan about a month ago at the Chicago Theatre, where he put on a fabulous show. I was inspired by his performance last night, and decided to look up some Ryan stuff on YouTube. Lucky me, someone was able to tape him singing my favorite song off his new album at the very show we were at. Wanna see?

This is "The Sun Also Sets" from Easy Tiger. The video isn't that great, but the audio is surprisingly good.

It's almost Halloween . . .

We spent last Saturday night carving pumpkins. Not the brightest idea, as the unusually warm weather is already causing them to crumble, but that just gives us an excuse to carve some more next weekend. There were seven of us, so we got a great variety of designs.

Scott was very ambitious, and went for the labor-intensive tree design. (What else would Scott have chosen?!) It turned out incredible.

I decided to go more ghoulish, and chose the Grim Reaper.

We had 7 pumpkins worth of seeds, so we of course had to cook them up. We made a batch of garlic seeds, and a batch of spicy seeds with Tabasco sauce. Mmmmmm.

Goodbye, sweet Mickey

Sadly, one of my mom's two cats, Mickey, passed away yesterday. He was only four years old, and such a sweet kitty. He was found in my mom's front yard, with no apparent trauma. We don't know what happened to him, which is really hard. I hate to think that he suffered, but at such a young age, it couldn't have been natural. He will be sorely missed.

More color . . .

Ellen secretly took some pictures of our place this weekend while we were gone and e-mailed them out to a few people, so this might not be quite the "reveal" as we planned, but oh well. Here's kitchen and master bedroom color.

P.S. Why do ceiling fans have to be so ugly?

Bedroom before

Bedroom after

Kitchen before

Kitchen after

The bedroom is now just a darker shade of green, so not too big of a difference. The kitchen is a much bigger change. "HELLO, I'M YOUR KITCHEN!" is what it greets us with each morning. I like it. The cabinets and appliances are not the most attractive, so at least the yellow distracts from them, right?

We have color

We're still working on putting up all of our pictures and decorating the space, so no "final" pictures yet. We can show you color, though. Here is the guest room, where you, our lovely friends and family, will be staying if you come to visit us.

Guest room before

Guest room after

Originally we were planning on keeping the bright orange wall. We are in Bears country after all, plus I'm a U of I grad. However, after closer inspection, we found out that the previous owners were awful painters, and this orange wall was their masterpiece. Splotchy, drippy, and patchy are all words I'd use to describe this wall. Plus, it looks like they went back later with a different shade of orange to fix some spots, so it had a sort of tie-dyed effect. Awesome.

I think the yellow has a warm fuzzy feeling to it, don't you?

Introducing Speedy!

We rescued this little guy a couple months ago from the dumpster at our old apartment complex. We cleaned him up, gave him a new shell, and now he sits proudly in our living room. I think he's pretty happy to have a new family, don't you?



Our cats happen to like him, too. At first I thought they might be wary of a new stranger in the house, but then I realized that they have no idea what a turtle is, and to them it's just a new soft place to rest their butts.

We're homeowners!

We just got home from a long night of painting our very first (owned) place. On Friday we were handed the keys to our condo, and we couldn't be more excited. We bought a two bedroom, two bathroom condo in the town where we both grew up, close to where we both work, and close to our families.

We have been dreaming of the day that we could paint our walls any color we choose. After four years of living in the beigeland of our apartment, painting was a welcome prospect. We were hoping to get everything done over the weekend, but we came across a few glitches which I'll get to later on this week.

For now, here's some "before" pics that show the place on Friday.

It's kind of hard to get a sense of the place from pictures, but we're really happy with it. Scott made a video tour of the place, but it's pending approval from me before it goes up on the blog (I haven't watched it yet, but I know I make an appearance). Possibly tomorrow.

Brand New Blog!

We have officially entered dorkdom. A blog.

No real plans for it right now, just want to have a space to share fun and interesting news, when and if it happens.