The Best Thing I've Heard Recently....

New Year's Day

Temple Square Reflections

 One of our favorite "lights" at Christmas.

We're so lucky to live by Temple Square.

 Salt Lake City Temple

 Tyler loves his smile in this picture. 

I like how I'm almost cross-eyed. 

bahaha.

 

 A reflection on the true meaning of Christmas.

 

So crowded that you couldn't hear the message audibly,

but the message always resonates within the heart.

Snapshot of Christmas

The stocking that I made for Tyler:

Tyler doesn't have a stocking. Can you believe it!? 

When living in CA, their roof got a leak and the attic flooded. 

All of the Christmas things were ruined. 

So, this year, in less than 3 weeks [one and a half of those working], 

I made this stocking for Tyler. 

I love it.

[don't mind him cheesing in half of the picture - I really wanted a close up of the stocking]

My parents bought us some really fun games for the holidays. 

We returned the favor. 

Listed:

The Great Dalmudi [to the 'rents]

5 Crowns [to the 'rents]

Sequence Dice [my fav!!!! from the 'rents]

Rummikub [ a classic, from the 'rents]

 I'm pretty sure this is the only picture of us together on Christmas lol

It was a crazy day at work....

My mom made this darling apron for me! 

I don't have one and she picked some beautiful fabric/colors for this!

See that puppy on the chair? Same one that Tyler proposed to me with. Leo, the puppy, is obviously included in all of our festivities. He even wore jingle-bell antlers, thanks to Tyler. Ty's going to be a great daddy haha

More to come...

New Years Resolution

Ok.

I realize I've been gone for a while.

Well, I just want to share one New Year's resolution, because I'm going to need your help.

We've decided to NOT EAT OUT. Ever. Again. [ok, not really]

We will eat out for anniversaries, birthdays, etc. Only very special occasions. 

So.

The dilemma.

On my weeks on, its really hard to cook, starting at 8:15 pm.

Lets talk about freezer meals, quick fixes, templates that help silly people like me make and keep a schedule, etc. Simplify Supper is a pretty good website, but I don't know that their meals are tested through.

Ready, get set, go!

I'll even have you over for dinner if you help me out.

Thanks!!!!

Books Under Your Belt

So, I'm a book nerd, to no one's surprise. Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

How about you!?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [a favorite!]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [favorite]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [another favorite!]

Holiday Cards, Take 2

I finally ordered my "holiday cards," since they'll arrive in mailboxes a little after Christmas!

It was a hard choice, choosing between 3 of my favorite designs,

but Ty liked this one [below] the best.

So, here's a holiday card for all of you in Blogger land!

Happy Holidays!

[ps - If you want one, send me your address!] 

Hopefully they'll run another promotion like this next year - that way I'll be able to make this a tradition. I really hope our generation sends greeting cards. I loved getting them growing up. Here's to hope for the future!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

[pss:  for some reason, I could not post the description under the card. The formatting hated me. So, my friends, that is why you get 2 holiday card posts. Kind of obnoxious, but we'll get through it somehow!]

Holiday Cards

Joyous Noir Christmas Card

Shop Shutterfly for beautiful photo Christmas cards.

View the entire collection of cards.


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