A photo update

I've been neglecting putting up some photos that I've taken. So here they are, delayed though they may be.

Nate and Rachel gave us this great "Kimbler, Families are Forever" sign as a wedding gift, and until recently, it was sitting all alone on the wall above our dining table. We bought these frames a while ago, but we didn't have all the pictures that we wanted to put in them, and the frames were all black, which didn't look great with the brown sign. So, crafty as I'm trying to be, I bought some paint and made them brown. I'm pretty proud of myself, small accomplishment though it is. I just don't have a whole lot of time for stuff like this!Aaron is great. On Valentine's Day (kind of; we celebrated on the Saturday of that weekend), he got up before me, went to the grocery store, a florist, and came back and made breakfast. (The flowers were beautiful!) He made french toast (which was amazing-- a new recipe which I think we'll be using a lot more now!) and blueberry muffins. Unfortunately, in his rush to get all the food ready before I woke up and came into the kitchen, he misread the directions on the back of the muffin mix box and added an extra cup of water to the mix. Oops! The muffins were still good, they just don't rise and get fluffy with all that extra water. I ate one, but I left it up to my poor husband to eat the rest. Good effort, Aaron.

This is the basket I won from the Mary Kay drawing on Valentine's Day. Four friends came over yesterday for our free facials and it was pretty fun, though I didn't expect it to take as long as it did. Oh well!Oh and my countdowns? Here they are:

• My birthday: 7 days
• End of classes: 44 days
• Aaron's birthday: 48 days
  
• Graduation: 53 days

The Harry Potter countdown is too long and depressing, so I'm leaving it out for now.

Also, Aaron and I have been married for 288 days <3

Mount Doom and Mary Kay

I feel like I've been living in Lord of the Rings all semester.

I'm taking a great Senior Seminar class on Tolkien, Lewis, and Medieval Literature. I know that sounds a little random, since neither Tolkien nor Lewis are Medieval authors, but they were both Medieval scholars and wrote a lot on Medieval literature. So in addition to reading works like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,and Pearl, I had to read the entire Lord of the Rings series in the first half of the semester.

And this is just for one class.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really loving the books, but I feel like all I do these days is read and work. Even when I'm sleeping, I dream about Frodo and Sam and Gollum and Merry and Pippin and all the other characters that I'm getting to know so well.

Unfortunately I got a little behind over Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend, and I'm just nearing the end when I was supposed to be done earlier this week. *sigh* I even forgot to eat dinner last night because I was too busy cheering Frodo and Sam on as they reached Mt. Doom.

So that's pretty much my life right now.

Speaking of Valentine's Day weekend, Aaron and I went out to dinner with Mike and Amber Turner (my old roommate and her husband) at Gloria's Little Italy. When we walked in, a lady gave Amber and I a flower each and a little paper to fill out to enter a drawing. Knowing that I rarely win anything, I filled out the form and promptly forgot about it.

Then on Monday, I got a phone call telling me that I had won! I won a free Mary Kay facial and a gift basket with a Mary Kay gift card, a Gloria's Little Italy gift card, candy, and other goodies! I'm getting my facial on Saturday and I invited a few friends to do it with me. I'm pretty excited!

Also, I just ordered my cap and gown for my college graduation. It's a little strange-- I am so ready to be done with school, but at the same time, I don't know what it's like to NOT be in school... I mean, I've always had summers off from school, but it's going to be strange to still live in Provo while Aaron and most of my ward are still students. Weird. I'll finally have time to scrapbook, and sew, and do all kinds of things I just can't do right now.

I put a couple countdowns on my Facebook profile:

• My birthday: 9 days
• Aaron's birthday: 51 days
• Graduation: 56 days
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: 266 days
  

Sweet.

Success!

Well, the diet ended, and now that we've been back on solid foods for about a week, we have our final results!

Aaron's down 7 pounds! I'm so impressed with him (and a little jealous too).

I'm down about 5 pounds (give or take one, depending on the day and when I weigh myself) from where I was at the beginning of the diet!

Pretty good results, considering we were only doing the lemonade only diet for 5 days, which is actually a lot shorter than most people recommend for a successful cleanse diet. Most people do it for a MINIMUM of 10 days and tack on a 3 day ease-in and ease-out on the beginning and end, making the whole process over 2 weeks long. We did a 2 day ease out, so the whole thing lasted a week. 5 pounds in one week? Yes please!

I'm thinking about doing it again after I graduate. I would do it again during the semester, but it's just too hard when I'm taking the classes that I am. Like cooking class- I had to miss out on eating for one of my cooking labs, which was SO hard since I had just spent 2 hours cooking and smelling it all. So I can't do the diet again until I'm out of that class.

On another note, we got our taxes done yesterday, and according to the volunteers who filed them for us, we should have our money in about 1 1/2 weeks! We're debating now what we should do with the money... It would be great to save it all, but my laptop is struggling these days, and my camera isn't that great anymore either. I got both the camera and the computer my senior year of high school, and while I've loved both of them dearly, they're just falling behind the current technology. And I would love a desktop computer, since I don't really have much need of something as portable as a laptop or netbook. And, if we get a computer while Aaron is still in school, we can put it as an educational expense on next year's taxes, since I'm sure Aaron will be doing all kinds of school stuff with it, being an IT major and all. I don't know, we still need to figure out what would be best. Any suggestions are welcome!