Traveling Salesman

B is currently on his 23 hour flight back home. He's been touring Asia for the last week and is now making his way back to God's Country. While I love B more than Paula Deen loves lard and can't wait to see him, I can't help but love the fact that his job takes him away from home sometimes. I've thought of a few reasons. Humor me, would you?

5.) You get to travel to some pretty awesome places. Seriously, I got to see my very first west coast sunset last year due to his travels in Los Angeles.

4.) If you want to sit on the couch all night long in your Mu-Mu and chow down on Chinese all while watching Golden Girls, you go girl!

3.) Two words: NO LAUNDRY. Seriously, I do jack while B is gone. If something happens to me while he's gone, just set fire to my apartment. It will save my mother a lot of embarrassment.

2.) You can sit on the potty while watching t.v. because you can now leave the door open. I'm not even sure I should share that... don't judge, you do it too.

1.) You can make like a starfish in the bed and hog the whole stinkin' thing because no one is there to wake you up from your naked escapade with the entire cast of Magic Mike and tell you to roll over or to give up some of the sheet you're hoarding.

Miss you, B! I can't imagine giving up 1/8th of my bed to anyone else.

-W

2013

2013 is upon us and I'm super excited about it. I know I'm a little late on this post seeing how we are half way through January but better late than never... right? I'm excited because a lot of fun and exciting things are in the works already. This year we hope to buy a house or maybe make a decision on housing options, travel a lot more and celebrate our 2nd anniversary. I know it doesn't sound like much but I finally don't have work and school goals in my future.

We celebrated B's birthday a few weeks ago. I took him to a really cool restaurant here in Atlanta and I would recommend it to any one. It was the 57th Fighter Group Restaurant. The restaurant is set up like a World War 2 bunker complete with war news and updates over the speaker system in the bathroom. The best thing about the entire experience is that it sits about 100 yards from the runway of the DeKalb Airport so we were able to watch the planes take off and land. B loved it. Check it out sometime.

Then, B left for Singapore, Malaysia and Bangkok.... what an interesting time that has been. He's 13 hours ahead of us so we get a little confused on what day he is on, what day I am on and when I work next. His confusions are making me question my own work schedule. Can't wait for him to come back.

We have a trip to D.C. planned next month and our 4th trip to Vegas planned in April. Seriously, so excited.

Oh, I forgot to say, the picture above is from our cruise last year in Costa Maya.

I hope everyone had a great New Year and is just as excited about 2013 as I am!

-W

"Maybe next year, I'll start acting my age
Turn a new leaf over my wicked ways
Get a real job and start pullin' my weight
Only 365 days
Until I change my ways"
-Corey Smith

Sittin' on the dock of the bay

So maybe I'm not sitting at the bay but I am sitting at my hotel waiting to go to the dock.... That's the same thing, right?

No?

Buzz kill.

Anyway, I'm waiting to catch a shuttle from our hotel to the cruise ship. Our trip was postponed by a day due to hurricane Sandy.

I have added some in pictures that I have taken while waiting here. One is of our luggage and another is of my awesome new kicks. Keep in mind, I am posting from my phone so I hope the pictures actually load.

Have a great week!!

-W

Southern Living & Family Circle

In the last year I've tried to make my apartment feel like home. Sometimes that means getting rid of a few misplaced or mismatched pieces of furniture. I've hung pictures on the walls, put together a few projects to clutter the floor with and even bought an antique quilt rack to put my blankets on in the living room. Not matter how much money I spend and how much junk I fill my floor with, I can't make my apartment feel like home. Then I realized that it isn't really a home that I'm trying to build. I'm actually trying to make my apartment feel like my mom's house. Isn't it funny how you spend your entire teenage years imagining what your own place will feel like, look like and even smell like but when the time comes to have your own space, you want everything that you used to have?

I want what my mother has.....

WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN!!??

I've decided it isn't such a bad thing after all. I was in Wal-Mart recently and was waiting very impatiently in the check-out line behind a mother with three screaming children in her buggy all wanting candy bars and such (btw, I DON'T want what that mother has) when I looked over at the magazine rack to browse some celebrity dirt. I usually get my fill from hourly updates via TMZ but sometimes I need a mid-hour update. Then a Southern Living magazine caught my eye. My mom reads Southern Living and Family Circle like it's going out of style. I picked up the magazine and thumbed through the pages. It's their Thanksgiving special so there are tons of turkey and pie recipes to drool over. Then the new Family Circle started calling out to me so I had to get it too. I dropped them in my buggy and proceeded to the register.

After I read through them they found their forever home on the end tables with the other magazines I read. I was walking through the apartment a few days ago and was picking up things as I went when I came across the magazines again. They caught my eye and I literally stopped in my tracks. I suddenly felt like I was back at home again. I left the magazines where the were and walked away.

Maybe I'm crazy but I will probably go home in a few weeks and read the exact same magazines and gasp at exactly the same articles as I did the first time I read them. But that's ok because I'll do it with my mom like it's the first time and it will make me feel at home all over again.

-W

Dreams

I dreamt of pumpkin spice lattes last night while I was sleeping on the couch. Then B woke me up and told me to go to bed. When I laid down I couldn't sleep so I got up and watched scary shows on t.v. until he woke up again. It was during that time that I decided the blog needed an overhaul. Hope you are liking it!

I also looked up some Photoshop tricks too. Check this out..

I'm shooting my cousin's wedding this weekend and being that her fiancee is a baseball fan, I thought this would be appropriate.

I got two ant bites taking those pictures. They itch horribly now.

B is traveling again this week. He's headed to Orlando for a nerd convention. He was semi- looking forward to it until he remembered that Disney World is in Orlando and his flight would probably be pack with little people wearing Mickey ears. Good luck, B!!!

Did I mention I was having pumpkin spice lattes with Mr. David Beckham in my dream? No?

Happy Monday!

-W

A Little Message

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, 

with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 

And the peace of God, which trancends all understanding, 

will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

-Philippians 4:6-7

Let me first say I do not talk openly about my faith and beliefs. I do believe in God and I support those who want to go out into the world and "witness" to others but I do not feel that is what God has in his plans for me. In the past few weeks, this particular verse has been popping up everywhere. Also, a friend of mine has started school to be in the medical field and is facing the same problems I had in the beginning of nursing school. Then I remembered that this verse had been showing up and thought that maybe this is what I was needing to say to her. I also shared this story.


One day at the beginning of second year, everything came crashing down on me and I cried for 30 minutes in the bathroom. I don't think anything bad had really happened that day. No bad grades returned or snotty comments from the teachers but it just hit me like a ton of bricks that there were a million things that needed to happen in the next 4 months. I was living with B by then and had a long drive home which sometimes wasn't so good because it gave me too much time to think about things. I had just left work and was headed towards 400 and my mind was racing with all of these thoughts about other majors I could take on when I failed the semester. It was pretty pathetic. So then I thought I'd just call someone. Sometimes I just need to get my thoughts out in the open to someone else and then I don't really think about them anymore. The first person I thought of was B, of course. He's my best friend after all and is the only person who knows everything about me including how to turn my day around. But then I started thinking about what he would say. He would let me vent and then he would say something like "Aw hun. You're going to do just fine. Take it one day at a time and you'll make it through. I just know you will." I didn't need a pep talk. Then I thought of my best gal pal Kayla and what she would say. She'd say the exact same thing as B..... except the hun part. That's when I came to my mom. I thought about what she would say and it almost stopped me in the middle of the road. The only thing she would have said is "God never gives you more than you can handle."
Wow. What a thought. God never gives you more than you can handle. What a basic saying we hear every day. I guess I had never really applied it to my life. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I could suddenly breath again. It was after that one thought, everything seemed to get a little bit easier. I started reminding myself every time that I had those negative thoughts that I have all of the information I need to make my dreams happen for me. The teachers can only give so much information before they are basically answering the test question for you.

After that day, I went into each test and quiz day and sat at my desk without my notes and just reminded myself that I've done all the reading and studied all of the material. Each day got a little bit easier after that point and I continue to remind myself that I need to pray about the things that I am encountering in life and to also say thanks for the things that I have been blessed with.

Maybe you needed to hear this verse today too or you need to pass it along to someone else too. Who knows. God works in mysterious ways.
-W

An Upgrade and Pinterest Project

B is, for lack of better words and a lengthy explanation, a traveling salesman. Travel season is picking up and we thought he was going to be gone this week to Los Angeles and I was going to accompany him because who doesn't like having their wife as a chaperone? But the trip was cancelled.

Either way, I ended up having the week off so I planned a few Pinterest projects.... and ended up upgrading my jewelry box.

We'll start with the jewelry. It started out looking like this.

There really wasn't anything wrong with my previous system. It held my jewelry just fine and it was a cute butterfly that my mom had painted for me. My collection is growing and I sometimes felt like I didn't really know what I had because nothing was really on display. 

I was at Walmart a few days ago wandering around and stumbled upon this....

Hello idea! I think it's some sort of small parfait dish. Either way it was $1.50 so I scooped it up and brought it home.

So then it quickly became this...

LOVE IT!!!! Everything has a place and I can quickly see where all of my jewelry is.

My Pinterest project was a little different. While on Pinterest one day, I saw a cute project where someone took tomato cages, turned them upside down and strung lights on them. Very cute! In the picture Christmas tree lights were used to make it look like a Christmas tree but I wanted to use orange lights to make it more of a Halloween theme.

I cleaned off our porch, threw away some tomato plants (finally!) and ended up with 4 cages. I then took a trip to Hobby Lobby..... unsupervised... sorry, B, and found some orange lights.

These were the supplies I ended up using.

One important point in this project is to stack two cages on top of each other or else you will not have the infrastructure to make the lights go in a circle.

Now you're ready to start stringing the lights on. It took me 4 boxes of lights to do one small tree.

Sorry for the horrible pictures. I love my little tree but I'm thinking it might sit on our porch as an outside decoration but I'm working on cleaning my porch. That's a post for another day.

Happy Friday!

-W