How Entertaining

My birthday this year was one of the best birthdays I can remember!  My mom and dad hosted which was awesome because my mom is a great cook and I didn't have to do dishes after the party.  My mom made a very artistic cake and a lot of my friends came.  Pictures don't really capture how much fun it was for me, but here are some anyway.

In other news, Tom and I purchased an entertainment center with some tall bookshelves.  I love bookshelves.  They make me happy.  I'm not really sure why.  You can see on our TV one of my favorite video games of all time.  Perhaps because it's so ridiculous. Plants vs. Zombies!  If you haven't heard the song, you really should.  "I know your type: tall, dark, and dead.  You want to bite the petals of of my head, then eat the brains of the one who planted me here..."  It will give you something to sing in the shower or when your baking or in the middle of class (although I wouldn't recommend that last one, your students won't know what's going on.)

Slowly we are making our new home feel more like home.  Next, we'll hang our paintings and picture frames.

School is going well.  We are participating in a month-long read-a-thon.  I volunteered to help at our kick-off activity.  I was in charge of a crossword puzzle station.  It took a lot of time because the point of the activity was to read, so I typed up text to go with the crossword puzzles.  The idea was to read the text then do the puzzle.  It was effective most of the time.  It was interesting to see how some parents basically did the puzzle for their child, but some parents wanted their child to do the work.  I think teaching has made me more inclined to encourage the child to do as much as he/she possibly can.

I'm enjoying teaching science these days.  We're doing a unit on the 5 senses.  I think it will always be fun to guess what's inside a bag just by feeling it.  I made a PowerPoint jeopardy "guess that sound" game. That will also be fun once I finally have time to do it.  Science is not the most essential thing to do in a day, and I always plan more than I actually do.  I'm sure I'll do this one soon, however, because I'm excited for it.  That always helps.

If you know anyone in our area looking for a TV or entertainment center let me know.  We are looking to get rid of our old ones.

Sweet Glorious Vacation

So, Lovetta and I just got back from a California Christmas vacation with our friends Rob and Lisa. We spent the first part of the trip at Lovetta's sister's place in southern California. It was nice because we got to spend some time on the beach and Lovetta got to have her art all-nighter.

The downside to the beginning of the trip was that we came in right after a gigantic storm, probably the biggest the state has seen in some time. What did that mean for us? We didn't get away from the cold very well :( For the entire week and a half we were in California, we only had maybe 2 warm days. So very sad. The beach also had ridiculous amounts of seaweed and dead sea creatures sprawled everywhere from the extra high tides.

The remainder of the time after Christmas was spent in northern California for my brother's wedding.  We spent a lot of our time prepping up to the reception.  We set up this beautiful tent kind of thing in the gym at the local church.  I wish we had pictures of it (I'm sure some will show up sometime in the near future from someone).  They also had this neat photo booth and props set up for guests to take their pictures.  Here's a few that we took.

All in all it was a great trip.  However, after so much time spent driving in a car (at least 30 hours), we're glad to be home now :D

Pssst. Do you wanna know a secret?

So, Lovetta likes to show off all of her amazing artwork (and who could blame her?). But you probably want to see all of the secret artworks that she and I create in our super, secret lab. BEHOLD!

This one was our first creation. It was good, but the best is yet to come! BWAH HA HA!

This was our second creation. He was inspired from a few previous ideas we had. Maybe we'll post them up some day. Isn't it wonderful, though?

This was one of Lovetta's self portraits (with a little of my help). You can tell she is having a good day.

We made this one for a friend of ours who was having a bad day.
MAGIC UNICORN FIXES EVERYTHING!

Thank you for coming to our secret drawing laboratory. Until next time. *maniacal laughter*

Thanksgiving and Art

Thanksgiving means a lot of different things to me. This year it meant being thankful for banana cream pie!


We made that pie with real vanilla bean. Mmmmmm.

Also my mom and my sisters and I did a lot of art. Here's a little tree that I painted. (this one I did before Thanksgiving, but I think it goes well on this post.)



Here's a painting I did of Tom and me. I might add some more to it, but it's really wet right now. I'm letting it dry some. Or maybe I'm done.

My mom has some nice markers. I used them on some life drawings. Here's Tom (back when he had more hair).

And Angela.

We took turns modeling for each other. These poses were fun because we were laying and sitting on my kitchen counter so we could all see. We did some six-minute poses and some ten-minute poses. Time goes by so fast. Here's Angela again in charcoal this time.

Here's Melody.

And here's my mom.

I am getting better, but I need a lot of practice. Melody and Angela and my mom did a lot of good pictures of me. (Probably because I'm so good at posing :) ) Happy Thanksgiving! I'm glad we can listen to Christmas music without dispute now.

Photo Follow Up

As promised, here are the photos from our new place (pardon the mess) and Halloween.

Here is the bedroom. There's a nice balcony leading off to the side.

This is the second bedroom. We call it "The Butterfly Room".
Can you tell why?

This is the 3/4 Bathroom. The Full Bathroom has been omitted, but it should be noted that it has a jetted tub. We have yet to take this for a test drive. Update forthcoming.


This is the study. As you can tell, it's more important for me to have my computer up and running than it is to unpack the gajillion boxes we've put in here.
Priorities.


This is the living room. If you look past the box of Saltines over to the TV, you'll notice one of the games that has devoured our lives over the last year. It's called Rotohex.

Here's me as Steve Jobs introducing my shiny 4th Generation iPod touch.


Here's me shortly after deciding that I couldn't look like an old man anymore.


Zombies. That is all.
PS-Rob wanted to have him and I dress up like Plants to counteract the invasion.

Rob's kickin' birthday cake. Once again designed by the masterminds behind such things as
The Grill Cake
and
The Barbie Cake

Hope you've enjoyed this little photo montage!

Home, Sweet Home

So, the wait is finally over! We closed on our condo a little over a week ago and have spent most of our time moving in the interim between now and then. First, I have to say that more than anything I hate moving. I've moved a lot in the last 10 years of my life. I know a lot about living out of your suitcase from my mission and never spent much more than a year at any given apartment during my 5 years of college. I'm at a point in life where I can't really pack everything I own into a small car and cross town to simply plop it down in whatever habitation I've been assigned. I have furniture and clothing and books (10+ boxes of them) and dishes and games and computers and who knows what other stuff laying around to try to travel from A to B with. It's quite comforting to know that now I don't have to move again for a long, long time. Now, we just have to unpack.

The nice thing about all of this, though, is that we're simply not renting anymore. The place we bought costs us just as much as we used to pay rent, but now that money isn't sucked up into the ether. It's (somewhat) staying in our pocket. Our interest rate isn't half bad, either! We bought the place at what seems to be the best possible time, especially if the economy turns around as expected. It's ours! That's the best part. It's our home, sweet home.

In other news, I'm bald. Well, less so now than a few days ago. Now it's more like being fuzzy than bald. I just hope that my hair looks alright by the time my brother gets married next month. Otherwise, I might just have to cut it all off again in an attempt to not look like I'm halfway between shaving my head and growing it back to full length (which is exactly what will be happening).

Why did I shave my head, you ask? Well, sometimes sacrifices must be made in order to have a legitimately cool Halloween costume. Mine this year was Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. He's got some crazy bald spots goin' on, so I had Lovetta shave my head down to look like I was balding. Well, naturally after Halloween was over, I didn't want to look like a 40 year-old man (even if he is a bajillionaire). So, I shaved it all off. Completely. It's starting to grow back. But, I apparently shock people with the lack of hair on my head. One of my co-workers keeps making "cancer patient" comments every time he sees me. Maybe in a few days, he'll be able to look me in the eyes again. We'll see.

Anyway, pictures will come later, either in this post or in another one.

I hate waiting...