So here I am, eating my dinner of refried beans, cheese, and tortilla chips. Can you tell I'm alone tonight? :) As I was preparing it (ha, what is there to prepare but put it in the microwave), I glanced at the ingredients in the refried beans: prepared dry beans, water, salt, LARD (partially hydrogenated lard, with bha and bht added to help protect flavor), onion powder, chili pepper, garlic powder, and salt. Was it good? YES!!! For a little while. Then I realized I was starving, and that's probably why it tasted good. GROSS!!! LARD???

This weekend was SUPER NICE. For our anniversary, Tim and I went out for dinner. Good food. Good, expensive food. Friday night we went to COLD STONE CREAMERY :D :D :D I had cake batter and lemon poppy seed ice cream. Deeeeeeelllliccccious! ;)

Um, yeah. Not my picture. I got it off yahoo. I, sadly, didn't take any pictures this past weekend :(

 

Saturday we went to Traverse. With no plans in buying anything, we left with a Mac...they had a deal with 6 months, ZERO interest! Tim had been wanting to buy one for recording and was planning on buying one in a couple months; but with that deal, he decided to just buy it now :) He's so happy! I left Traverse with a new pair of shoes :)

Each day was just spent together, something we've needed for a long time. It's amazing how spending just a LITTLE bit of extra time together strengthens your relationship.

These are a couple projects I recently did-it's amazing how a little bit of paint can completely change what something looks like!

This is a shelf I got from my parent's garage sale :)

After! I LOVE IT! The awesome record player is also from my parent's garage sale! I love playing vinyls-they've got that "homey" sound to them, all crackly. I just love it. If you're wondering, my AWESOME sister made the picture "You are my sunshine" for my birthday last year. I just love her so much :)

We don't have a pantry, so I needed somewhere to put the extra food we have. I love it!

I have a couple other crafty ideas I've had, just no pictures yet :)

Today marks SIX YEARS that I've been with Tim. Since he has to work tonight, I took the day off of work. We're going to be going to a little bistro for lunch, cold stone creamery for dessert if I can help it :), and will probably just lounge around for the rest of the day. I LOVE the cake batter/banana ice cream at cold stone creamery! It's just like having banana cake :D I like the watermelon sorbet too. Heck, I'm sure I love EVERYTHING there :) Hope everyone has a great day!

Finding joy...

I don't like to talk about work on here; however, today I found out my hours at work are changing...I'll be coming in later and being the last person to leave...which means Tim and I will hardly ever see each other. He normally goes into work at 9pm and doesn't get out until I'm waking up for work. I know this is a part of life, but seriously. You only have one life, what the heck am I doing with mine? Just "being" isn't what I want to do-I want to DO something with my life. With the job I have? It'll get me nowhere. It's not even what I went to school for. Tim and I aren't sure what we'll be doing, but something's going to be changing. Probably this year.

My blog is called "Finding the joy in everyday living", and I think I need to start doing that. In each post, I'm going to post one thing I'm thankful for. Today, I'm thankful for Tim. I came home from work extremely upset, and he listened to me complaining about our life; and once I was finished getting everything out, he made me laugh. Finding someone who can do that is rare.  I'm thankful that even if I'm SUPER mad at him, he makes me laugh. And while at the time, I'm so mad that he's making me laugh because I want to stay mad, I'm instantly not mad anymore. It's almost annoying. But not. It's definitely one of my favorite qualities of his.

I'm going to post my New Year Resolutions on here. I'm going to do my best to stick to them-none of them are the typical "I'm going to lose weight...blah blah blah." These are things I'm going to do to try and make myself a better person:

1. Stop gossiping at work. It does NO GOOD.
2. Be more calm in stressful situations.
3. Change my attitude when I get home. Who wants to have an upset person come home? I'd rather have someone come home excited to hear about my day. And I'm going to try to ask when I come home.
4. Care about people. I don't want to just ask someone how their day is going. "Good." "That's good. My day's good too." I want to really care how people are doing.
5. Always seek to do good.
6. Get rid of stuff.
7. Learn two new recipes per month. Healthy or not :)
8. Save up $5000 (I think that's like $200/paycheck, which, yes, money will be tight, but I'd really like to start saving money for a nice vacation or something).
9. Plan out dinner menus/cook stuff up on Sunday for the week. Just a simple way to make my week days go better. And so Tim doesn't have to keep eating hot dogs and grilled cheese....
10. Lower our grocery bill-find meals that are cheaper to make/last longer/have the same ingredients.
11. Read the classics...for example, charles dickens, jane austen, robert stevenson, jules verne...etc. I'd like to actually have read them for myself.

I'm going to do my best to work on these things. I've already worked hard on the first two and did pretty good today. How's everyone else's resolutions going?

friends, more friends, and a cat in a cape...

i had the best friday i've had in the longest time. the place i work has two different offices in two towns-a really good friend of mine works at the other office. she moved there a few months ago, and we completely hit it off. last friday we went out for dinner, and we were literally at the restaurant for FIVE hours! nonstop talking! it was awesome. i'm so happy to have a friend like her. our throats were so sore from talking. i've never had that happen before. and her husband and tim have so much in common it's crazy. we're planning on going somewhere on vacation next year. probably in february/march, because we both get relatively depressed with it being so gloomy outside. and christmas is over :(

i had a pretty good new years too-i should have posted about that a week ago. oh well. i went over to a friend's house and played a few games, going home around 1:30am. tim had to work from 9pm-3am, so we weren't able to bring the new year in together. it was still fun though.

i'm on the right ;D

this is when auld lang syne started playing. it's kinda depressing.

driving home from my dad's birthday-it started to snow!

when in doubt of what kind of scent you want in your car, get this one. IT'S AWESOME!!!

my cat likes to get into everything we bring home. this is the first time she's had a cape though :)

darn cat, stealing all my candy. and mirror. and pen...

tonight was an ella fitzgerald and moscato kind of night. this whole week has just sucked. I won't go into details, but let's just say it has to do with work. enough said. and tim's schedule too-i feel like we're never home at the same time. tomorrow should be better; although i don't have the day off like i normally do, after work, my friend h and i are going out. and we're going to have an AWESOME TIME! i'll write more this weekend. for now, i'll leave you with this: