Alien sighting...

A nice man came into our home today and installed a new wireless router.  On our wall.  Near our ceiling.  On the first wall you see when you walk into our house.  It's ugly!  It's scary.  When I look at it, I think of a bat-alien-devil thing living there.  How can I cover this thing up?!  I need help!  I can't look at this hideous thing for the next year and a half, knowing that there's nothing I can do about it!  I like my house to look nice and be relaxing (at least as nice as a white, square rental can look)...not alien-like.  Ick. 

(sorry about the dark pictures...I took them with my laptop so I wouldn't have to upload any pics from the camera)

 

When submitting suggestions, please take into account that this is a wireless router, so most things to literally cover it will inhibit everyone's wireless connection.  But don't let that stop the solutions from flowing!  I know there are lots of creative people out there...step up.  Be heard.  Help me!

Best lunch ever?

Manitoba farmer sausage.

Canadian iced tea.

Canadian Heinz ketchup.

Perhaps a piece of Caramilk for dessert?

Yes, I think so.

Why I am not a Theologian…

I have now sat through my first ethics class.  And I now see, more clearly than ever, that I am so very much further from being a philosopher or theologian than I ever realized.  This "being a student" thing will be quite enlightening, if in no other way than to help me understand myself more thoroughly.

So far, it is very clear that I like distinct, organized ideas.  I like piles.  I like categories.  I like order and structure and boxes.  I like to be able to sit back and look at things and understand where the lines are.  I like to be able to take a list of ideas and be able to organize them into piles so that they all make sense to me.

I don't like to receive a pile of thoughts that we're supposed to wrestle with and think through and try, somehow, to understand.  I have no idea what to do with that!  It feels like a useless old blanket in a crumpled heap on the floor (one I'd rather not touch).  It's just a jumble!  A mess.  I would much rather have a clean, fresh blanket, neatly folded and placed carefully where it belongs.  Organize those thoughts into clear, concise points for me and I can deal, but don't just talk at me for three hours nad expect me to get anything from it.

I think thi sis why I liked the sciences, maths, and English so much in high school.  There were right answers and wrong answers.  There were concrete laws and predictable results.  I knew where the boundaries were and could either choose to work within them or not, but at least I knew where I stood and would have an answer at the end of the process.

[{(a+b)/c}/{(r*g)/2}]*h=F

I can do this.  This makes sense to me.  I can work with this.  It's logical.  It has structure.  It has piles and boxes and systems and processes and answers!

So don't give me a three-hour "sermon" full of vague, abstract ideas and tell me to wrestle with it.  Give me practical.  Give me stuff that fits into boxes and can be neatly organized.  Then we'll be getting somewhere!

Yum...

This is what happens when I drop hints about chocolate bars...

Thanks Mom!  Thanks Matt!

Oh yeah, and let's not forget about this:

Thanks Karis!

This will be a very yummy semester indeed!

Well...nobody stopped me... (see previous post)

______________________________

As I mentioned earlier, my sister was just down for a few days to visit us.  We had a few adventures and I thought I'd share some pictures.  Because life is fun like that.

Our first stop after the airport to pick Alicia up was San Francisco.  We stayed overnight and spent the next day sight-seeing.  Here we are in front of the "Painted Ladies."  Full House, anyone?

This is me and Nathan in the town hall.  It was beautiful and elaborate and...wow.  Impressive.

After walking a couple miles in the rain, we were cold and wet and hopped on a cable car.  This is a picture of Lombard street (image google it for a better picture).  We only saw it from the top, but didn't really feel like walking all the way down...we just looked at brochure pictures and figured it looked better on the sunny day when the picture was taken than it would have looked this day anyway.

The streets were STEEP.  We walked up and down some of them and my calves felt it the next day.  Tip: Don't drive a standard in San Francisco unless you are VERY confident.  Let me modify that statement: Don't drive in San Francisco with any car, no matter how confident you are.

(You can see a three cable cars in this picture...one at the bottom of the hill and two on the top of it)

We were cold.  Can you tell?  That is Alcatraz behind us.  Beautiful.  Check.  Let's keep walking!

Alicia and I being happy adventurers out on the docks.  Really, we were happy.  Just cold and wet too.  Brr...we were completely soaked all the way through.

We decided to ride on the outside part of the cable car on the way back.  You could see so much better, but the wind was chilly.  By the way, it is the wind that is helping Alicia's hair to stand up at that angle...she didn't style it like that in the morning.

Now for some warmer pictures...we went out the next day in search of a project to do together.  We saw some canvases and paint at Michaels and thought painting would be fun.  We got ourselves all set up (we're Buhlers, so we didn't need any newspaper or plastic between the carpet and our canvases...we're that good) and painted on and off the rest of the visit.  This painting is now hanging on our living room wall.

Beautiful, no?  Nathan felt a bit left out, so we bought some more canvases and did a set of three very colorful paintings for the bathroom.  We DID put newspaper between the canvases and carpet when Nathan was painting with us...

We had one warm, sunny day while Alicia was out, so here we are picking some oranges off the tree here on campus.  Alicia was pretty excited...

She picked too many to carry...I laughed at her...tourist...

At least she put the oranges to good use (see the full bowl in the background?).  She made orange juice and later we made an orange cake with orange glaze.  Yummy.

Another truly Californian experience is eating at In-n-Out burger.  It's quite the experience (at least if you know about the "ecretsay enumay").  It was pretty good...

Someone back home had recommended that Alicia get the Double Burger Animal Style.  It was HUGE.  Apparently not as big as they come, but this one was almost as big as Alicia's head.  haha.  But she says it was good, so that's all that matters, right?

And that was Alicia's visit!  So fun.  It was nice to have some family see where we live.  In some ways it made it feel so much more like home to have my sister see where we live and to experience our life with us for a few days.  Thanks for coming, Alicia!  I can't wait for my trip out to see you in a couple months!

For more pictures and my sister's side of the trip, click HERE.

______________________________

Oh yeah, be sure to check out the afghan on the couch behind me in the first few haircut pictures.  Pretty granny-like, eh?  I just finished it two days ago and it's going to my Etsy shop any day now!  I just love the colors!

Good ideas come late at night...

Well, it's late at night.

I've decided that I'm going to give myself a haircut first thing tomorrow morning.

Let's all take a moment to remember what happened last time I decided to give my hair a chop first thing the next morning:

Someone talk me out of this in the next 12 hours...

Not much...

I don't have much to share, but I wanted to check in with the blogging world to assure you all that I'm alive and well and enjoying my visit with my sister very much and will post more about it, perhaps, once she flies away home : (. 

So I guess in the meantime it's your turn to share! 

Question of the weekend:

What up with your weekend? (answer in comments)

Rainy days...sweeping the Sun away...on my way...

What is happening these days?  I was just over at my sister-in-law's blog and she was having the same problem.  What to post?  While I feel that she must have TONS to post (being pregnant with twins and moving next weekend and working full time at a daycare) I feel like I have absolutely nothing.  Then again, it might go both ways and she may feel that I am the one with lots to post (being the one living in "sunny" California and planning a trip to San Francisco today/tomorrow and living life on the "edge").  But all my days for the last 5 weeks have been pretty much the same:

-  wake up whenever my body naturally wakes up
-  get ready for the day...try to have this step finished by 12 noon
-  have lunch whenever I get hungry
-  read/crochet/quilt/explore the World Wide Web - pretty much do whatever I feel like all afternoon
-  make supper
-  eat supper
-  clean up supper
-  more reading/tv/crocheting/quilting/whatever I feel like all evening
-  go to bed

Don't get me wrong...it has been a VERY relaxing routine and I've been enjoying it quite a bit.  But 5 weeks of this does get to be a bit much.  And it produces very little to actually blog about.  (Hence all the pictures of my latest projects)

So I mentioned that we're going to San Francisco today.  That's exciting.  My sister is flying in to Sacramento this evening and then we're going to drive to San Francisco where we got a cheap hotel (priceline = $50 a night).  Little did I know that the parking at the hotel is $35 though!!!  I'm used to hotel parking being free!  Then again, I've never stayed in San Francisco overnight.  (Now that I think of it, the parking at the hotel in LA earlier in December also was not free, though it wasn't $35 either)  So we'll head to San Francisco and spend the night and spend tomorrow seeing the sights.  It's supposed to rain (we've been having SO much rain lately - I feel like I'm in BC, not California) so we might end up just buying trolley passes and seeing the city from inside the trolley.  That could be fun too, I guess.  And then we'll drive home because we're only a couple hours from San Fran.  I'm looking forward to this trip, but not as much as I'm looking forward to seeing my sister!  We haven't been together for...9 months?  10 months?  It's been a while.  It should be grand.

Let's see...what else?  Nope.  I can't think of anything.  Is it worth posting, even when there's nothing to really post about?  Let me know, because I sometimes wonder about that.  : )

Have a good couple days!  See ya when I see ya!

Yosemite

Nathan and I went out to Yosemite with a couple of friends on Friday.  It was good, except for these roads driving in:

Winding roads along the side of the mountain + extreme elevation changes = sick me.
*sigh* I bought some motion sickness drugs when we got where we were going and took some before we left to come back.  I think they helped...I didn't get sick on the way back at least!

It was beautiful though:

Do you see the waterfall in the background?  Here's a better shot of it:

Apparently the waterfalls are at their fullest in a couple months when the spring runoff happens.  Makes sense.

We saw some other waterfalls too...they were beautiful as well.  Nathan is an amazing nature photographer.  I will admit, though, I was not always as patient as I should have been when he would park with the camera for 10-15 minutes in one spot...

Then again, he would get shots like this:

And I wouldn't.

We also climbed on some rocks right up to a waterfall:

I like climbing on rocks.  I think my low center of gravity and balance really help me.  In this picture I have something in each of my hands, so I had to catch myself with my other foot.  It worked.  I didn't fall once.  So I guess that book that I mentioned a while ago where I was warned about my lifespan being shorter because I am short doesn't apply to death due to rock-climbing (or any balance-related activity).  Take that, tall people.

Here is a picture of me and Nathan:

Looking pretty good for almost 5 years of marriage, eh?

This is one of the shots that we were climbing on the rocks to get:

Oh yeah, and we saw snow:

It was very grainy snow, not at all like the soft fluffy snow that you get on the prairies.  Here it was just packed ice.  It made me sad that this is all the snow some kids get to experience in their lives. 

And last but not least, something completely unrelated to our Yosemite trip:

 

This is my latest creation that is going to my Etsy site.  I couldn't get the colors to look true to themselves in the photo (boo on artificial lighting), but hopefully you can picture a real brown and a cute pink, cause that's how it really is.  I'll have to get a better picture next time it's sunny outside, but that might be a while.  It's supposed to be rainy at least until the weekend.

Guess who's...

an official Californian driver?!

(I'm covering part of it so everyone out there in blogger-land doesn't see all my important "stuff")

That's me!
I took my driver's test in early November (and passed with flying colors) but there was some confusion with me not having a Social Security Number so it took two whole months for me to get my actual photo ID.  But now I have it!  Whoo-hoo!  Yay for a less confusing identity!

And speaking of cars...you know that feeling if getting into your car after it's been sitting in the sun for a while and it's hot and stuffy and you have to let the heat out before you get in?

Yup.

California.

Today.

Beautiful.

What am I doing these days?

I run from one activity to another like a 3 year old with a high on sugar life.  Among my latest are:
-  reading "The Gospel According to Lost" by Chris Seay
-  reading " Paul's Idea of Community" by Banks (and writing a paper on it for class - I finished this one yesterday!)
-  making my first actual "quilted" baby quilt - this I also finished yesterday
-  cleaning all the loose threads off my first rag quilt - this one gives me blisters, so I haven't picked it up for a few days
-  crocheting a scarf for my Etsy shop - would only take an hour or less to finish, but it's kinda nice knowing that there is a project sitting there in case I get bored with something else
-  thinking about a pattern for my next baby quilt - any ideas?

I guess while I'm making a random list of mostly projects, I'll share a few pictures of the latest.  Yesterday was a warm, sunny day, so I took advantage of the natural light and got pictures of everything.

A toque that I have listed over at my Etsy shop:

Scarf that's going to my Etsy shop just as soon as I finish it:

Baby quilt from the fabric I showed you here.  It's not perfect or professional, but I'd say it's pretty good.  Hand-stitching the binding was BY FAR the most time-consuming part of the entire project.  But I enjoyed it all. : )

And last but not least, a flanel, double-layer receiving blanket.  I found this fabric at Walmart in their sale basket (end of the roll) and loved it.  So I picked it up and later found that I actually had some navy blue flannel on hand from another project that would work perfectly for the back.  It took a bit of piecing (added white flannel strips to two sides of the back) to make it all fit together because it was made from all scraps, but I really love it.  I haven't been able to decide if I'll sell it or keep it in my stash for future gifts or (perhaps) personal use?

I picked a pomegranate today.

PoSt SoMeThInG...aNyThInG!

Don't you sometimes just want to post but have absolutely nothing to write about?  Yup.  I thought so.  I guess I'll just share random thoughts.  Those can end up being entertaining (not to mention, enlightening), right?  Let's see...

-  I started doing homework again today after almost a month off.  I was just not feeling like this was the right time to become a full time student again, so I put the books aside and re-evaluated what I was thinking.  I ended up deciding that I would go through with the whole application thing and then take whatever courses caught my eye.  So I won't be actually trying to complete any sort of degree while I'm here, but I feel so much more peace about this decision.  And this way I'll have some seminary credits sitting around in case I ever get around to finishing my BA and decide that I would like a Masters degree.  How is the homework going, you ask?  Well...how do I put this?  There are a few other things that I would rather be doing right now...

-  I wrote a bunch of letters yesterday.  It always takes me so long to actually get myself to sit down and write a personal letter.  I LOVE getting them though, so I can't expect any to come if I don't write them myself every once in a while.  So naturally, when I picked up the mail later that day, I expected our mailbox to be full of mail.  If I write some, I should receive some, right?  I DID end up getting a book in the mail that was part of a Christmas gift, though.  That was exciting.

-  Right now I'm babysitting our friends' daughter.  She's NAPPING so I'm sitting here at their place, with my laptop and homework reading, hoping that she won't wake up too soon so I can actually get some homework done.  But then again, if you remember my comment from earlier, obviously I would rather be having fun with an 8 month old than reading about Paul's idea of community!

-  It's raining outside...well, misting/sprinkling really.  It's been so foggy lately that we haven't really seen the sun for a couple weeks.  I thought California was supposed to be sunny all year round!  Apparently not.  It is foggy and cloudy and today it's raining.  We are in the middle of a drought, near a desert, though, so even when it rains, it doesn't get you too wet and doesn't last that long, so I really can't complain.  And it has been around 7 degrees during the day, so I really can't complain about that either. : )

-  I am working on a scarf for my Etsy shop...also almost finished binding a baby quilt that I plan to list.  Fun stuff.  Thing is, it takes money to make things, so the beginning has been unfortunately slow...

-  Does it seem to anyone else like pregnancies go in spurts?  It seemed like there was a huge amount of pregnant women that I knew back in 2007/2008.  And now there seems to be another swell (no pun intended) for 2010.  I counted the other night and there are 12 women I know who are either pregnant or who have had babies in the past week.  And most of those babies are due in June and July.  Wow.  Is it that alot of those 2007/2008 babies are going to be older siblings, that the timing between kids is the main factor?  I guess that could make sense.  But alot of the babies are firsts for the parents.  So I have no idea why they all group together like that.  Weird.  Must be some kind of conspiracy...

-  Nathan has started blogging again!  He wanted to get in on book reviewing, like I'm doing, so he has resurrected his old officehourthoughts.blogspot.com.  You can find him on my sidebar as "A Short Step Down From Thought Provoking."

Well, I really have no idea where to go with this post from here.  As always, I am open to post suggestions or random questions in my comments.

Have a good week!

Cookie-making

I decided to make peanut butter cookies today.  I made 36.  And then I got sick of making individual cookies.  I seem to remember not having the patience for individual cookies ever since I was little and helping my mom make cookies.  I usually overcome my boredom and end up making serving-size morsels of goodness.  But every once in a while at least half the batch of dough ends up on one pan, baked into one HUGE cookie.  I like to call them "cookie-squares".  Why not, right?

Hahaha...I love it!!!