A Weeks End

Friday we headed up to our cabin, and we had a relaxing trip up to Shaver....












How was your long weekend?



***Special Congrats to Morgan and Justin, who welcomed their daughter into the world today. I hope everything went well for you, everyone is super excited to hear about it all and see pictures of little Madeline Jo!!

Twas A Good Day

I hope everyone had a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving! We did indeed. We went to one gathering at my Grandparent's house. Yes, ONE gathering - isn't that amazing? The only "pro" about your boyfriend's family living across the country, I guess.

I think there were more dogs than people.

Tundra = begger.

Dustin the dog, Foxy, and Dustin the kid.

Miss Riley.

Tundra and Tugsy.

Chris and Tundra <3 style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NP8WnbBMsorDmbTpaLV9xr34FhUP-egeLQRDiNvpA99Pwc_XaUUmpkIse9CzGnQx8CMeyWR1rK8EzrEaI9q3ZIh-Svmn9Y_KHXCkFpyrQ3QD1wY6caJcAYpRt2hjjoIzPjznkTgKqVWA/s400/IMG_0075.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273744340425589250" border="0">I made this Gorgonzola, Fig & Pecan Cheese Terrine (with pita chips!).

The tables were set.

Grandpa cuttin' up that turkey...mmm.

My plate :) Not tooooo bad, eh?

The rest of the time not spent eating, was with our lovely family. All of our family lives in Bakersfield except just a few people, so we do get to see all these people fairly often - but the holidays are still a special time!

My sister and Chad.

Me and my Mommyyy.

Auntie Melissa and Monica

Me and Chris.

Monica and Shani.

Going on a walk to work off all that dinner!!!

Now it's 8:30 am on Friday. Chris had it in his mind to go to one or two places to pick up some deals, but seeing as he is still asleep...yeaaahhh, we'll see about that! (I DO NOT want to go out shopping anyways).

After *edit* I grab some coffee with Steph, we are headed up to the cabin @ Shaver Lake for the rest of the weekend!


Have a fantastic long weekend everyone!

Holiday Things

Saw this on a few people's blogs :) And then I stole it. So here goes!

Egg nog or hot chocolate?
Hot chocolate, with lots of whipped cream. I do like eggnog, in fact, we bought a small carton the other day...however, only a small amount at a time thanks to the calorie gods. Hehe.

Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
I love wrapping presents, early, so I can sit them by the tree for a few weeks. So pretty :)

Colored lights on tree/house or white?
I like white lights and blue lights; however, I'm sure we'll have the multi-colored lights up somewhere on our house (hand-me downs much?).

Do you hang mistletoe?
I never have...and haven't ever seen it hung at anyones house I don't think!

When do you put your decorations up?
When I feel like it! I will have to do that before we leave for Michigan. Not that I have tons of decorations or anything :-/

Favorite holiday memory as a child?
Well it's still my favorite memory, but our Polish dinners on x-mas eve fo sho. Mmm pierogies.

When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
I don't even remember!!! Apparently I wasn't too traumatized!

How do you decorate your Christmas tree?
I have silver and blue ornaments, and also a bunch of randoms. I've only had 2 x-mas trees (away from parents home) so I don't have too much stuff.

Snow! Love it or dread it?
Fun for a short period of time. Glad I don't live in it for months ;)

Do you remember your favorite gift?
Not really...my Dad always gets us all the "techy" stuff (like one year a computer, last year was a GPS)...that's always nice ;)

What’s the most important thing about the holidays for you?
Obviously spending time with family and friends. I just love the holidays for many reasons. The weather, the lights, the hot drinks, etc.

What is your favorite holiday dessert?
The peppermint pie the my aunt makes! Dewars peppermint ice cream, with a chocolate fuge layer, and lots of whipped cream and crushed candy canes. Holy YUM!!!!

What is your favorite holiday tradition?
Oops, already said it. Polish dinners!!!!

What tops your tree?
Umm, I used my parent's angel last year because they are scrooges and didn't put up a tree ;) Buuut, she is kind of creepy so I think I'll get a star this year!!!

Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?
I like giving. I never know "what to ask for". I like making things for people, last year I made and decorated candles.

What is your favorite Christmas song?
Silent Night and O Holy Night.

Candy canes?
I like the fruity flavors.

Favorite Christmas movie?
I have to say A Christmas Story or Chris will kill me, but secretly it is the Santa Clause with Tim Allen.. don't judge me.

What do you leave for Santa?
Ummm, nothing! I'll leave "Santa" some cookies but they might get eaten before he gets to them ;)

Crafty..Crapzor..

I have a migraine. A stomach ache. I'm tired. It's late.

Oh yeah..my craft challenge. Long story short. I planned over the past week (or more) what craft(s) I would do for the Thanksgiving challenge. I picked two that I found online and finally bought supplies on Friday. Found time to take on the easy one on Sunday.

This is what it was supposed to be. This is what it came out like.




Um, fail, I say. At least Tundra's cute!!!

Today I planned on making up for that fugly thing and doing the cuter, more difficult project. You can find the instructions here. Here are some pics:


Let's just say that took WAY too long and hand-sewing the beaks, then the tails, then the body pieces together hurts my brain and eyes. If anyone has done a lot of hand sewing, you can maybe feel my pain? Anyways...I planned on making TEN of them (as you can see by all the pieces I cut out) but it took me 3 hours to cut everything out and sew only TWO together. I guess I'll finish the rest by Thursday??? Riiiiight. I have a few young cousins that might find them entertaining.

Annyywaaays, hopefully this challenge inspired some people :) Hehe. Sorry if I sounded like a negative nancy!!!! Maybe I procrastinated a little too much eh?

Participants: Crafty Challenge #2, Gobble Gobble

• You have to go on over to Talia's blog and look at the adorable Thanksgiving card she made. I love it Talia!!!!

• Check out these adorable turkey cookies that Allison made. Allison, they are so cute and creative, yummm candy corn! (Ummmm, can I please have one...or five???).

• Nickie made a CUTE autumn apron for the challenge. What a great idea...just in time for all the holiday cooking! And I bet your son is happy about that pillow case, he looks like it, hehehe!!! Thank you for sending it my way!

• Morgan's Project - Okay I say you do qualify because your little rose was SO CUTE and inspired me to make some for house decor (plus you're about to pop out your little one and well out of pity......i kid, i kid!)
  
  Check out her fabulously cute rose here.
  

• First participant for my Crafty Challenge: Gobble Gobble, is SuDritt!!! Check out her post on this leafy cuteness! Autumn leaves make me so happy :) Oh and you totally make all of us procrastinators look really bad! But thank you! Hah!

What Lies Ahead

Meant to post this yesterday..my bad! This is what my weekend looks like...


You can mentally check off the first 3 items...booooya!

What does your weekend look like?

Thanks for the Enterainment

A little early but I figured I'm in the mood for some THANKIN', in the spirit of Thanksgiving! When I'm chillin' on the computer at home, work, in need of some entertainment, inspiration, or just plain b-o-r-e-d...I can read one of these person's blogs and be inspired, entertained, challenged, and many other things. So thank YOU! (These are in no order, so don't feel special or anything...hahaha, but if you want to feel special, you should do so!)

(I probably missed someone...or two..or three..I'm doing my best! if I did I will probably realize it and add you to my thanking list! sorry in advance...yikers! Oh and if i spelled your name wrong too!! haha)

Thank you to my long time friend Steph, who keeps me always up-to-date with what's going on in her life...the serious and the not-so-serious. the pictures, the opinions, the chats...everything! Also for the lovely banner you made me :)

Thanks to Morgan, you are hilarious, cute momma, crafty...and of course we have much in common and get along since you're friends with Steph!

To Ashley for her Starbucks love, enviro love, and and ESPECIALLY showing me Mint.com!

To Ashley F. for not making me feel like a big fat loner at the photography show :) And your beautiful pictures and cutie pie dog. Super nice gal.

To Sarah for ALSO make me feel right at home at the art show, for your cheerfulness and ability to make me laugh! You are too cute and SO FUNNY.

To Jimaie for chillin' with me at the art show as well, and everything that we have in common makes me happy happy.

To Wishcake for being so sweet and genuine every time you write anything!

My RL friend Mallory, I always love when she posts a blog...it either makes me crack up laughing or makes me want to give her a hug and make her feel hopeful. Since I don't get to see you much, your writing really is how you act in person and that makes me happy!

To Amy, who I originally posted about in regards to her Etsy shop. You make such fun and cute things THAT I LOVE...and send me nice messages/e-mails asking how I am doing!

Thanks to Allison for being a nice and caring person! Your posts are something I can relate too, always in some way.

Thanks to Rachel for sharing your chaotic life with everyone. I mean WOW, pretty sure you haven't the craziest guy drama EVER...they like, cling to you like magnets...I know you have some sort of secret! I know it! :)

Jesslaw, you so remind me of Rachel with her guy issues, haha...it's great!

Emily, your blog and tweets are always entertaining. I love them! And your dogs...so adorable!

My sister, Kristin, who doesn't blog that much, but it's always nice to read blogs that people you know write, especially if they don't live in the same town! Oh but she's moving back, muahahaha.

Talia, Steph's cousin, who is sooo sweet. Her daughters are adorable and her cooking/crafting is inspiring. Thanks for all the yummy recipes!!!!

Colleen Sherman, I can always relate to the things you post about! You take lovely pictures and I am thankful to have met you at your show.

Susan, another Bako area person, I love that you post pictures pretty much every time you blog...and that you are also so crafty! I love it!

Sara McG...just recently started reading your blog...but your posts are fun to read and your pictures are beautiful as well!

Sensibly Sassy Sarah is another person I can mostly always relate to! I love reading your posts and tweets, they are always so real!

Jamie, of course everyone loves her, but seriously you are so funny!

Sohobutterfly, your pictures are fantastic as well! Your doggies are hilarious, and so are you. Your posts are always entertaining :)

Design Gal, I loooove your blog! So inspiring and fun!!!

Lauren, um yeah, the title of your blog + mine + the fact that our guys don't write in them = awesome.

Caitlyn, oh my GOSH you posted a blog today! A real blog! YAY! (she's Steph's sister and she's so funny!)

I love peeking in at Lisa's blog because she's uber crafty and her daughter is adorable! It was so interesting reading about your pregnancy.

The Working Girls...what working lady can't relate to your blog? For reals, it's great.


Again, if I missed you, doesn't mean I don't love ya...I'll figure it out grrrr. <3

Um that kinda sounded like a bunch of year book entries...my bad ;)

Christmas Music? Hmm.

This is kind of a not-so-shameless plug for one of my favorite musical persons, Dustin Kensrue of the band Thrice. He has kind of a folky-bluesy-acousticy-awesomey feel, and ohhh I love him. (Dontcha love my made-up words???)

Anyway, he came out with a Christmas album (The Good Night is Still Everywhere) yesterday, that is awesome! And if you hate Christmas music like me you will love it. If you love it, I think you'll enjoy it too (Okay, I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas music, but whatever.)

If you're in the mood of that type of thing or just like to check out different music for fun, you can stream the Christmas album at dustinkensrue.com

:) enjoy.

Oh and he's cute too!

Since I am on the subject, who loves Christmas music and who hates it? Kinda in between? I love a few songs, but I'd rather not hear them 24/7 for a month straight!

Psssst...One Week!

One week left to start/finish/send me your spiffy craft for Crafty Challenge #2.

Post your project by Monday, November 24th and send me a link to your blog post. Just e-mail me, send me an IM or twitter, whatever is easiest. E-mail links to: parodyofanangelx(at)gmail.com

A Dog Story

The first things we wanted to do after getting our house was (1) Fix our fence and, (2) Get a dog! That ended up not happening right away but that's okay. I've really wanted an Australian Shepherd, and Chris has always wanted a Siberian Husky. Both expensive dogs = us not able to get said dogs, at least as puppies. So I started looking at the local shelters, as well as Aussie and Siberian rescue clubs around California. Well, a few weekends ago we just decided to go down to the Bakersfield SPCA & Kern County shelters and check out the dogs. I had actually seen a few Aussies online at the County site.

Well, we didn't really see any dogs we were interested in at the SPCA. By that I mean, not a pitbul or a yippity yappy dog. Though I would love to say that I'd love to rescue ANY animals, different households have different needs. We have two cats and we needed to find a more mellow dog/tolerant dog. After that we went to the County shelter. Their adoption center really didn't have many animals, 75% of the animals at the shelter weren't yet adoptable (meaning that they hadn't been there a week yet, so they were still waiting for their owners to come find them). Well...we walked down the first line of kennels in the not-yet-adoptable area, and there were TWO huskies. One was jumping around barking, one was sitting calmly (MY kinda dog!). We went through the rest of the kennels and I didn't see the Aussies so their owner's must have come for them. We ended up putting our names down on the "wait list" for the two huskies, because I'm such a nice girlfriend ;)

The female husky, the calm one, was actually ready to be "adoptable", but she needed her behavior test done. She's about 2-3 years old and was found off some random street. We called back 2 days later, they told us she passed the test but needed to be checked if she was spayed. We called back a few days later, again, then again, back and forth. FINALLY they said we could pick her up Wednesday (as in, this past week Wednesday, the 12th). We already had a dog tag made, had picked our her name: Tundra, and had purchased plenty of toys and supplies. Chris picked her up from the shelter after work and I met them at home - after making a Target stop for more supplies. I drove up and they were waiting for my outside and a big smile emerged on my face and I was so excited!

Here are some pictures from the past few days:

Lovebugs.

Treat time.

She matches our rug ;)

Sleepy.

I brought her to work...

She was a tad bored...

She loves care rides, though doesn't realize how big she is!

We went on a hike on the bluffs.

I would have a lot more pictures if my camera wasn't such a piece of crap! Most of those are from my phone. Anyways, so far it's been a roller coaster. Let me tell you why. Before getting her, we read a lot about Siberian Huskies and what they need is lots of exercise, they get bored easily and they are "escape artists" by nature. It's not that they don't love you, they just love to run...and run and run. We felt we could take on this job. Well, apparently our house wasn't ready to take on this job, nor were we really thinking about the nature of these dogs.

FIRST catastrophe: I took her to work. We have a side yard that is fenced, so when I had to run a quick errand, I put her out in the side yard to get some fresh air. WELL, I come back and see her OUTSIDE OF THE GATE (she must have just got out). I managed to fetch her before she took off. Apparently she squeezed out of a 6-inch gap between the gate post and the building. Sigh-no more side yard for Tundra.

SECOND day I take her to work I have to run another short errand, I get back and my boss said she figured out how to push open the front doors (just your standard glass swinging doors). Well, one of the other office dogs does that so of course SHE figured it out. Well...apparently Tundra took off and my boss caught her a street over. Thank God.

THIRD ordeal was on our hike. Everyone (EXCEPT ME) thought it'd be a good idea to let her off leash, "ohhh, she will stay with everyone" (4 other dogs + 6 people). I handed the leash over to Chris and said, "fine, if she takes off it's YOUR fault, not mine." Guess what happend? She took off running. These dogs LOVE to run FAST. Again, it's not that they want to get away from you...they just like to run. We all start running after her, and after about 5 mins she gets tired and comes back to me. Hate to say it, but I told you so

FOURTH, final and worst thing so far was Saturday when we left to a family photo session and my Grandma's birthday party. We were gone for about 5 hours, we left her in the back yard with food, water, and plenty of toys. Well, long story short, our newly built gate has a big gap under it so we put some wood under it and some other things to deter her from getting out. We get home and she was not in the backyard and I see that she dug out under the gate. So I obviously started crying. Chris check his phone, that he left at home, and someone left a message that they had seen her. Well apparently she broke their "leash" and got away, so that didn't help. We started driving around the neighborhood for about 15 minutes and we get another phone call, a person on our street had her (they had called earlier too, but didn't leave a message?). So we went back home and the people walked her down the street. I was crying and felt like a r-e-t-a-r-d. They were really nice and telling us how awesome of a dog she was and the guy (Pretttttyyy sure he was drunk) asked if he could hug her goodbye, lol.

Needless to say, today we took care of any way of her to get out our yard with lots of cement, rocks and bricks. I did more research along the lines of things to keep her from getting bored, we bought more play things and chew things. Also bought a dog door to put in the slider that goes into the bedroom so we can close the door to our room during the day and she can go in and out, while the cats won't since they won't have access to the bedroom. I took her on a jog/walk this morning, we went to the dog park, and we will walk her again tonight. Twice a day running/walking will need to be a routine for her. I don't think I'll take her to work, as much as I want to it's too risky and she gets bored because I can't pay her enough attention. But, honestly, she is the sweetest dog. She is SUPER mellow and loves to lick and cuddle. She sleeps on the bed ALL NIGHT and only goes potty when we let her out. Plus she is giving us good work outs :)

I think as we get to know her and the breed everything will get better. And we'll eventually get another doggie to keep her company. Oh yeah, and the cats are warming up to her to. It was a little rough at first but now they can actually be within a foot of each other without the cat freaking out (Tundra wouldn't harm the cats, she's too nice).

An Attempt at Being Healthier

My aunt was telling me the other day about this website, LiveStrong, and that she was going to start "counting calories" on it (it's called "The Daily Plate"). So I told her I'd check it out and see what it was all about. It's actually not just counting calories, which I'm not really into, but more of seeing a breakdown of what you eat on a daily basis, as well as what kind of "exercise" you get.

So this is basically how it works:

1. Set up a profile and you enter some personal info, such as age and weight, and it helps calculate your calories and such.

2. Then you can start adding what you eat daily. They have a huge database of foods and all you have to do is search for items. For example, today I had Split Pea Soup by Eating Right. All I did was search for that and all the nutritional info. came up and I just "added" it to today's plate. You can also add meals. Most work days I have a Kashi bar and a coffee, so I create a meal called "breakfast" and I add the whole meal every day. You can also create "recipes" (last night I made stuffed chicken, so I created a recipe for it). For each food item you add to your plate, you can also adjust the serving size. If the serving size is 1 cup, and you had 2 cups, you would adjust the serving size to twice that amount. Easy peasy.

3. Add various "exersizes" for the day. They have a ton of different things to choose from. Different speeds of walking, gym, various sports, even household chorse like doing laundry or the dishes. For each activity you can input how long you performed for. All of these things a subtracted from your dairly calorie intake.

This is what my Daily Plate looked like yesterday (there's also a pie chart they show you that breaks down protien vs carbs vs fat-not shown here, as well as other charts)
There's a lot more to the site as well, I highly suggest you check it out (maybe even join?). You can add friends and check out what they are eating, and you can also create groups for people to join. There's also tons and tons of information. Oh and they have an application for iPhone as well ;) (check out the Dares portion of it too-it's not all about eating and exersizing).

So I started that this weekend and have had no problem taking a few minutes every day inputting what I ate and any exersize I did (you can even enter things from a few days back). Though it may not be pretty sometimes (like the other day with my pumpkin bread, hot chocolate, and white mocha!), but it makes me actually want to do less of the CRAP eating (eww not literal crap!), and getting more exersize.

If anyone wants to join, let me know :) I'd love to see what you're eating!

Crafty Challenge #2: Gobble Gobble

I'm going to keep doing these craft challenges until more than 2 people do them :)

Challenge 2: Create a thankful something for Thanksgiving. Whether card-making or baking is your thing, knock yourself out.

Deadline: Please post your project on your blog by Monday, November 24th (2 weeks away!). Send me a link to your post and I'll start posting everyone's projects on my blog as they come in. E-mail links to: parodyofanangelx(at)gmail(dot)com

Don't forgot, share our challenge with other bloggers :) FUN!