Sunday, August 31, 2008

Chris is going to run a 5K

I decided today that I am going to run a 5K. Yes I said that I am going to run a 5K. This coming from the guy who never actually ran a single pole during baseball practice. I have decided that I will run the Hogeye 5K in April of 09. So here is the plan. Since I am actually putting this on paper you guys are suppose to hold me accountable. So once a week everybody should call me and tell me to get off my fat butt and go run. I figure if everybody who reads this does it once a week and we take the people who won't call (Frank) then I should get like 5 phone calls a week. If I get 5 phone calls a week and I actually answer 3 of them and do it by April I should be good to go. I don't really know what brought this on but somewhere between when Britt started preaching and I left I decided to do this. I guess it was the fact that a local teacher was in the Olympics. She worked full time and had time to train for that. I should be able to find 45 minutes a day to do this right? I have said about 1,000,444,555,666 times that I was going to get in shape. I spent $500 on a treadmill. I tried eating good at Chick-fil-a. I bought Wii Fit. But what a surprise I am still fat. So I am going to train 4 days a week, not eat fried foods, and going to try try try to cut out the sweet tea and ColdStone creamery. April 5, 2009 is the day that gives me 218 days to get my big butt in shape. So all 4 people that read this need to keep me on it. If somebody is on my case maybe I will do it. I am going to put a poster up right now in the bathroom to remind me each day that I need to do it. Thanks in advance for your help and by April 5th of next year I will be 75 pounds lighter and be ready to complete my first 5k!!!!

Monday, August 25, 2008

Sneak peak and upcoming events

Chris and I went to Target Friday and bought Baxter and Morgan their Halloween costumes. Morgan is going to be a lady bug (it was the biggest sized costume that they had) and Baxter is going to be a pumpkin. Morgan really likes his costume but Baxter hates his.
We also went to Halloween Express to get ideas for our 3rd annual Halloween party. The first year we all went as The Flintstones. Last year Chris went as the Spartan cheerleader that Will Ferrell portrayed on Saturday Night Live and I went as Snow White. I think that Chris is going to be another Will Ferrell character this year and I have no clue what I am going to be yet. If anyone has any suggestions leave us a comment and let us know.

This year Halloween falls on a Friday night so we are planning on having the Halloween party around 7 that night. Everyone is invited so mark that date on your calendars! We also will be having a Pampered Chef party October 18th at 7. I just wanted to let everyone know about them so they can start making plans on come. We will send out more formal invitations when the dates come closer.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Bird watching

Chris went to Lowe's Saturday night to buy some stuff to help organize the garage and being the sweet and wonderful husband that he is he came home with a surprise for me! We have wanted some patio furniture for our front porch for awhile because the space is so large and we also wanted a place to sit and relax. But we never found anything that we wanted that we could afford. Well Lowe's had all of their patio furniture 50% off so Chris bought me a cute little set. I want to put some kind of plant on the table to make it look homier (it's not like we don't have enough plants already!). So if any you of need patio furniture or gardening supplies now is the time to buy them because most stores have them on sale.

Now I can sit outside and watch the neighbors and take pictures of our crazy hummingbirds. You have to be careful when you come over because you might get hit in the head by some of them bzzing by. We have two feeders in the back and two in the front and I think that we could probably use another 2 to 3.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Its been a year!

Chris and I have been homeowners for a year now! I can't believe how quick this past year has gone by. I know that I haven't posted anything about the house in a while so I thought that I would take the opportunity to share with you some of the things that we have done around the house and things that we are planning on doing in the near future.

We really haven't done any major work to the house since we have lived here. The only things that we really have done have been cosmetic like painting, changing lighting fixtures, adding shelving, etc (check out our previous posts to see other improvements). The little thing that we did several weeks ago was to add hardware to the kitchen cabinets. We have been wanted to do this for sometime but never got around to doing it. Our biggest dilemma was what color to choose. I wanted chrome and Chris wanted bronze. If we went with bronze then we had to change all of the hardware in the house for it to match. Chris really liked the bronze and since new homes are using bronze instead of chrome or pewter we decided to go with bronze. So, we changed out all of the locks in the house and now we just have to change out all of the door handles!
You're probably saying to yourself it took them a year to change the locks and yes we know we have to paint the door again!The other thing that we did was that we put together some wall art for the living room. When we went to IKEA we bought 3 wooden frames that you put decorative fabric in. We thought that it looked pretty cool and since we had a wall in the living that wasn't used we decided to give it a try. We couldn't really find any fabric that we liked but we decided on one that was reversible. Total cost of the project was thirty dollars. The fabric kind of blends in with the wall but eventually I would like to paint the "builder beige" for something a little bit darker.
The first big home improvement project that we want to do is putting down hardwood floors. We went and looked around at different flooring companies and have come to two different conclusions. We had decided that we definitely want to put down engineered hardwood floors and that we want to pay someone to install them since they have to be glued down. We are still undecided on what color. We have two choices though:
The first one is hand scraped and the second is smooth and very glossy. We really like the hand scarped for the dogs but they didn't have a darker color than that. But, we aren't installing them for a very long time so we're hoping by then that they come out with a darker hand scarped color.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Goodbye Bartholomew, hello...

When we came back from Dallas I went to take Chris's car Bartholomew out for a drive with the dogs. Well, it was deader than a door nail. This isn't the first time that this has happened but our warranty ran out in June and we decided that we needed to start looking for a new one. Remember a few months ago when I traded in my SUV, Kenneth, to get a more fuel efficient car. At the time it sounded like a good idea but we didn't realize you can't put a sheet of plywood in a car and you can't haul big things in it. Chris has been wanting a truck for sometime know and I saw a commercial for Nissan saying if you bought one of these three cars they would give you a Nissan Verse for free!

We were curious about the commercial so we decided to go check it out. Well, the truck that Chris wanted wasn't part of the three cars advertised but we decided to test drive it anyways. The Nissan Frontier drove extremely rough and it actually made me car sick, and I don't get car sick. We told the salesman that we weren't interested and he recommended that we test drive the Nissan Xterra because it is mounted on a truck frame. We drove it and liked it but we know there was no way that they could come close to our current payments. The salesman came back with some numbers and of course the payments were more than we wanted to pay. So we told him that we wanted to go home and do some research and think about it. He was like well is there anything that I can do to send you home with this car. I told the guy that there was nothing he could do to change our minds and then he offered us a check for eight thousand dollars!! After talking with Chris and with much thought we decided to go ahead and buy the Xterra because we could pay off two of our high interest credits cards. If anyone is looking or wanting to purchase an SUV right now car dealerships are willing to basically give some of their vehicles away for free or give you cash to take them off their hands.

Here is a picture of the new SUV. Chris hasn't decided want he wants to name it but here are some of the ones that we have come up with so far: Madden, Jackson, and Rylie. I told him that it needed a rugged name because it was manlier.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Adventures in the Big D

I've been really bad at not keeping up to date on our blog but last Friday we went to Dallas for our friend Joelle's wedding which was on Saturday. So, since we didn't take an anniversary trip this year we decided to use this occasion for a much needed vacation. It seems like every time we go to Dallas it's always in August during the hottest part of the summer. Chris said that the next time we go that it will either be during the winter or late fall.

We left late Friday afternoon because Chris didn't get off from work until 3:00, so we didn't make it into Dallas until around 9:00. Since we got there so late we only had time to do one thing Friday night which was to go to Dave & Buster's. All of our friends that had been there before referred to it as an Adult Chucky Cheese. There is an actual restaurant located there and in the back there is a huge game room that includes skeetball, air hockey, all kinds of arcade games, and a huge variety of games that you play to win tickets. It was a lot of fun and we spent fifty dollars and won enough tickets to get a three dollar frisbee. After that we drove to our hotel which was located in Rowlett, TX. Chris stays in so many hotel rooms that he earns points to stay in hotels for free. Since he is an elite member they upgraded our room and we got to stay in the honeymoon suite.

Saturday morning we woke up really early to go to the Dallas Arboretum. We wanted to get there early enough to avoid the triple digit degree heat. We only spent an hour and a half there because it was so hot but it was really beautiful and very peaceful there. Here for some pictures of the place:
After we left there we went and cooled down at The Cheesecake Factory. If you have never been to the Cheesecake Factory we would highly recommend that you go, just make sure that you split a meal with the person that you go with so you have room left over for dessert! I took some pictures of our fried macaroni cheese and of our cheesecakes. Let's just say that after eating this I probably gained 5 pounds!!
Since we ate so much for lunch we decided to walk some of it off at NorthPark Mall. It is one of Dallas's premier shopping centers. They have Neiman Marcus, Tiffany's, Oscar de la Renta, Barney's, Kate Spade, and several other name brand stores that we couldn't afford to shop in. But, it was fun to look around and cool off before heading back to our hotel to get ready for Joelle & Kris's wedding. Joelle & Kris's wedding was beautiful!! They got married at a ranch called Double D Ranch located outside of Dallas. We want to congratulate Joelle & Kris on their marriage and we wish you both a life filled with happiness. Chris took the pictures for Joelle's wedding and here is one of those pictures:Sunday we started the morning at one of our favorite places to eat Cracker Barrel. After we got fueled for the day we went to one of my favorite places the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. We actually only went to the Japanese Garden because we were to hot to go through the other gardens. Maybe one day we will make it to the other gardens. This is our second time to go to the Japanese Garden and I wish that this time there weren't so many people there. Here are some pics:
To cool down after the Japanese Garden we drove to the Grapevine Mills Mall which has a ton of stores. After leaving the mall we got lost and ended up eating at a Church's chicken when I got a call from Joelle saying that her step-father had some tickets to the Texas Rangers game that night. We were planning on going and buying tickets at the game but thankfully he had two free tickets which we really appreciated him letting us go with them. We sat 23 rows up on the lower deck which was amazing. The temperature at 1st pitch was 107 but by the end of the game a wind storm started and it dropped 2o degrees.
Monday we went to IKEA which is a HUGE home interior store that has a lot of stuff for really cheap. The closest one to us is in Texas. We stocked up one some stuff that we needed for the house before heading to Babe's Chicken Dinner. Joelle introduced us to this place the last time we were in Dallas. It is a family style restaurant that serves amazing chicken. If you are ever in Dallas make sure and add this place to your list of places to visit. After we stuffed ourselves sick we went to the Allen Outlet mall before heading home. It's nice to go away for awhile but it's always hard to get back into the swing of things.