Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens...

I started this list a few months ago and never posted it. Today Kelly from Kelly's Korner is doing a Show Us Your Life on things that we love, so I thought it would be a good time to post it! If you're visiting, hello and welcome! :)


Well, my favorite whiskers are just on one kitten, but this is a list of my favorite things! It's just for fun and after the first few they're in no particular order.

1. My Faith.

2. My husband.

3. My Family and Friends. I couldn't decide on just one picture!!

My family at our wedding.
My girls.

4. My kitten.

5. Flowers. Specifically white flowers. Even more specifically hydrangeas, gerbera daisies, and peonies, all white of course.


6. Paint.

7. Anything shiny or sparkly. Seriously, I'm like a fish.

8. Anything with a story. People. Books. Antiques. Old houses.

My Grandpa's old '72 Ford. I have about a million stories involving this truck.

9. Sunshine.

10. Photographs.

One of my cousin Lacey's senior pictures I took last year.
My cousin Anna, taken 2006.

11. Laughter.

12. Girl stuff. Pedicures. Make-up. High-heeled shoes. Dresses. Tights. Boots. Nail polish. Perfume. Chick-flicks. Girl talk. Bridal/Baby Showers. Weddings. Jewelry.

13. Kitchen gadgets.

My favorite pink Kitchen Aid

14. A comfy bed.

15. Travel.

16. Water.

17. Presents. They're more fun to give than get!

My sister-in-law Anna at Christmas 2008.

18. The out-of-doors. Sleeping under the stars. My hair blowing in the wind. Sun on my face and the little freckles it leaves. Mountains. Beaches. Busy city streets. This deserves more than one picture because it to me illustrates to glory of God more than anything else.


19. Music. Good music. Music you can dance to. Good Jazz. Beethoven. Gershwin. Tchaikovsky. Duke Ellington. Etta Fitzgerald. Jack Johnson. I could go on and on. Always better live.

20. Food from the ground. Fresh fruit. Fresh veggies. Watermelon. Squash. Cucumbers. Broccoli. Peaches. Apples. Grapefruits. Carrots. Oranges. Blueberries. Pineapple. Peppers.

21. Pottery.

A pot my brother made for his senior show last year.

22. Shoes.

23. Freshly cleaned laundry. (Especially if someone else cleaned it).

24. Words. Written, spoken or sung.

A wedding gift from a sweet friend of our's, Lauren Clevenger.

25. Riding with the windows down.

26. Mail. Real mail. Handwritten and with a stamp. Especially when it's for no particular reason.

27. Inside jokes.

28. Secrets.

29. Spicy Food.

30. My life. For including all of the above.

31. Board Games.

32. Champagne.

33. Texas.

34. Peacocks.

Tiny peacock pots my cousin Sarah made. The big one is about 1 inch tall.

35. Books. Real books, not electronic books. Real books don't have batteries or need to be charged.


36. The Farm.
And it's lone pecan tree.

I'm sure I could go on and on, but I'll stop here.

Jennifer

Only One Explanation

Did anyone see any pigs flying over north Texas today?

That's honestly the only way I can think of to explain the supernatural phenomena that is our laundry room:

That's right absolutely NO dirty laundry in the entire house. First time for everything. ;)
Since it's clean here's the laundry room. Yaawn. No, those aren't clothes waiting to be put away, they're tablecloths and placemats hanging up because I don't know where else I could put them.

and closet:

Pretty sure neither of them have looked remotely close to this since ever. Even if the shelves in the closet are still a little messy, we're still way ahead of the norm.

I had to document them before they return to their normal clothes piles to almost the ceiling states.

Jennifer

Long Time No Blog

I can't believe it's been two weeks since I've posted at all! We've not been doing anything special, just living life that's been a little busier lately. LOTS of people coming and going and staying with us in the next month or so! Exciting stuff!!

This weekend our friends Craig and Jenny were here for about 24 hours before they jetted off to Germany today. And somehow I managed to let them leave my house without taking a single picture of them. Apparently I'm just being a total slacker lately!

All the lovely spring air has made me a little itchy to add some more color to our house. I have a new love/not-so-mild addiction to wallpaper lately, but unfortunately we're in a rental so that's out. All the wallpaper I love is all crazy expensive so it probably is good I can't put it up otherwise I'd been scheming of ways I could get my hands on some.

A few weeks ago I had the crazy idea to paint this old desk of mine turquoise. I knew it would be little out there, so I waited a couple of weeks and thought on it. Very unlike me I know, patience is not exactly my forte. This is the same desk I painted antique white only three months ago, but I never even put the final coat of the antique white on because it was just too dull, and I didn't like it at all!

The desk is an old one that's been in my bedroom since kindergarten. Since we've been married it's floated around every room of our apartments/house. For the past few months it's been behind our couch, (because I moved the table that used to belong behind the couch into the dining area). But when the new couch and chair were delivered it made the little desk look tiny and awkward so it was stowed in the furniture graveyard that is the spare room.

Because the living room looked odd with a couch floating in the middle of the room with nothing behind it, I moved an old bookcase that my dad made against the wall behind the couch.

I was really shocked at how much I like it there! Plus now our dvds are actually in the living room instead of being in the guest room!
On top of the bookcase are a couple of pots that my brother Joshua made, a painting my Grandma did, and the Character Sketches book belonged to Jonathan's grandparent's. I really like them all together.


Didn't this whole thing start with me talking about a desk? I always explain things in entirely too much detail, please forgive me.

Anyway, once the desk was moved back into the spare room, I had a revelation of what the room should finally be turned into. When we first moved in it was the guest bedroom, and I showed y'all this picture of it a few weeks after we moved in:

I LOVE the light that comes in the pair of windows. Loved it so much that I decided I didn't want to waste the good light on a room that people on sleep in a couple days a month usually. So about 2 months ago, I switched the two rooms with the brilliant idea that the room would become like a library-type room and whenever we finally went down to my Grandma's house and picked up the piano from her, it would go in that room. But when the desk was put in there, I decided it would make a good office/craft room space!

Here's what the room looked like on Friday morning:

Pathetic looking, huh?

Saturday we braved the crowds and hit up IKEA to pick up this bad boy:

and some picture frames, and unexpectedly found a duvet cover that we liked too. I spent like an hour hauling stuff from upstairs down to fill it up with all my craft stuff. It's still not everything and it needs to be organized a little better, but you get the idea. I used two of the IKEA frames to put up some of the sketches that my Grandma did that I wrote about here.

And here's the infamous desk now turquoise!

It still needs so touch-ups hence the white spots

I was SOOOO nervous after I put on the first coat of paint! With the white primer underneath and peaking through the first coat of turquoise looked like some kind of reject from 1992 with a teal faux paint treatment. It. Was. Terrible. Three coats later though, and I really like it! I need to get some new drawer pulls, but I'm going to have to make a trip to Anthropolgie in Plano for that. They really do have the best hardware, Lowe's just doesn't cut it.

In the above picture you can also just barely see the duvet cover we bought at IKEA also, (the white with gray flower print). I had been trying to decide what kind of bedding was going to go with the turquoise desk all last week, and couldn't come up with anything. I had decided to just get plain white bedding and deal with it, even though I wasn't crazy about the idea. But when we were at IKEA Saturday I saw this duvet cover and just loved it and oddly enough Jonathan liked it too! We already had the gray sheets and a couple of the throw pillows. I bought the one with the yellow flowers and the small turquoise print pillow at Target Friday night before I found the duvet, so the tags were still on when I took this picture trying to decide if I liked everything all together.

This super-dark picture shows the desk beside the bed. I want to get a huge bulletin board and cover it in fabric, this is my current favorite for the project:

and put it in a big, gaudy, gold frame above the desk. It may look super crazy all together, but I like it. ;) A welcome departure from our beige living room! haha

That's all for now! Sorry to cram two weeks worth of ramblings into one giant boring post!

Jennifer

P.S. Does anyone have tips on how to take pictures of interiors? Mine always either come out super bright or super dark. :-/

Post Full of Pictures

This weekend we had a pretty relaxed weekend. Jonathan's knee started hurting him a couple of weeks ago, and this past week it was really swollen and painful, so we tried to take it easy and keep him off his feet all weekend. He saw a sports medicine doctor here this morning who thinks that he may have torn his meniscus, but we'll know more after he has an MRI in the next week or so. So pretty much all weekend we laid around on the new couch and chair, did a little house cleaning, and just had a nice weekend together.

Speaking of the new furniture, it was delivered Friday and I LOVE it!!

They are so incredibly comfortable and I really liked the fabric we picked out. See, I did all that worrying for nothing! ;) Sorry for the bad lighting in the picture, the weather has been a little crazy here all weekend with lots of clouds and that does not equal a good indoor photo.
Yes, I realize it looks a little similar to our old couch in color. But I'm a fan of neutral couches because I like to change out the pillows and redecorate all the time. I always liked how neutral our old couch was, it just started falling apart and had to be replaced. This couch is WAY better than the old one though. We love how big it is, and I seriously cannot express how comfortable it is, and it's a little more fancy than the old couch.

Yesterday morning the guys in our Sunday School somehow got wrangled into grilled hamburgers and hotdogs for 300 people for dinner immediately following church.

Andrew, Jonathan, Jim and Jim grilling

While they were grilling the other wives and I were standing around looking pretty and watching...

Your's truly with all the skinny minis in our class.
Jordan, Jacquelyn, Me, and Candace

But we were put to work too! We helped out in the kitchen assembling the grilled burgers and dogs, and wrapping them in foil to keep warm.
After all the hard work we were all exhausted and went home for naps. Last night Jacquelyn & Andrew and Jim & Jordan came over to our house for dinner. I made these Thai kind of noodles that are Jonathan's favorites, but they weren't as good as usual. Don't you hate that? Usually they're WONDERFUL!

A pic of the noodles another time I made them, not last night!

Here's the recipe:

Sesame Noodles with Peanut Sauce

2 carrots, peeled sliced
1/4 lb snow peas
4-5 green onions, chopped
1 cups broccoli florets
1/2 lb whole wheat spaghetti noodles
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 1/2 Tbsp creamy peanut butter
3 Tbsp soy sauce
3 1/2 Tbsp lime juice
2 tsp tahini
1 1/2 tsp Asian red chile paste
1 lb cooked shelled shrimp
1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Cook spaghetti noodles according to directions on package. *Reserve 1/4 cup cooking water and drain noodles.* Return noodles to pot and toss with sesame oil.

*I forgot to do this yesterday, and it was really dry as a result, so don't neglect this step!*

Stirfry carrots, broccoli and snow peas in a skillet for about a minute so that they're cooked but still crisp.

In a small bowl, mix peanut butter, soy sauce, lime juice, tahini, chile paste, and reserved pasta water. Add to pasta with cooked shrimp, stir-fryed veggies, green onions, and cilantro and mix well.

It's a super easy recipe and doesn't take very long to make. I know it has the weirdest list of ingredients ever, but I promise it's delicious, just do yourself a favor and don't smell the PB mixture before you put it in the noodles. Plus, once you find the tahini, everything else (but the shrimp) is pretty much staples that we keep in the house at all the time, so it's really a quick dinner to make when you don't want to go to the store. We've made it with chicken instead of shrimp several times, and have used tons of different veggies and it's always good!

This recipe is a modified version of one found in the Williams-Sonoma "Eat Well" cookbook, as with all Williams-Sonoma cookbooks, (I think we have 9), it's full of fantastic recipes! I highly recommend any of their cookbooks, this one and the Bride & Groom one are my favorites though. When we didn't live in the same town as a W-S I would buy one of their cookbooks every time we visited the store, I can't do that now or it would be way too expensive!!


Lastly, have y'all seen all the pictures/videos on the news of the flooding in Nashville? I've witnessed first-hand how devastating floods can be, (our house flooded when I was in kindergarten), and my heart is just breaking for all the people of Nashville. It's so sad to see all the pictures of the flooding and to think that it's the same city we visited just two months ago! Thinking about the beautiful city and all the sweet people there is just so sad! Please remember all those affected in your prayers!

Jennifer