Summary Sunday: 1st One on Monday in 2014 Edition

Yup. It's Monday...and I'm doing a Summary Sunday. Like Annie likes to say, "no judging". It's been an interesting few days. Let's just say that I should definitely start working towards getting posts done a few days in advance. Hahahaha...I'm laughing just reading myself write that. If you know me at all, then you know I'm totally a procrastinator. Me having stuff done super far in advance just never happens. Like, ever. But it would be nice. I'll keep dreaming.

I am obviously just not one of those "together" blog writers. If you thought that up to this point, you might want to look up the word gullible in the dictionary, because your picture might be there. I'm just about as much of a disorganized mess as they come. Which makes this even more entertaining...March is all about spring...including spring cleaning. This will be a challenge for me. We'll see how it goes.

This Summary Sunday post will be a little bit different. Not only is it a summary of last week, I also need to do a month end wrap up for February. To be completely honest, I have no idea how to do that without making this a total mess. So good luck to you as a reader. Because this might be brutal.

February's theme was love. That actually did go well. Thank goodness. I need something in this post to be positive in the accomplishment category.

There were lots of love themed posts during the month. I talked about how Collin and I met, got engaged, and finally got married...and we spent some of our wedding gift cards by having a delicious brunch at Brick 29.

©Broken H Photography

I congratulated my parents on an impressive 36 years of marriage...and they celebrated with some time together in Hawaii. (I'm jealous.)

I made the first of our new 2014 holiday decorations - which is actually our only Valentine's Day decoration. We then spent our Valentine's Day together as a family, eating sushi and watching the Olympics.

I reminded you to date your significant other all year round...and we went on a family date with my brother, his wife and my adorable niece to see The LEGO Movie. Which, by the way, if you haven't seen it...you need to. It's hilarious and cute and wonderful.

And then I piled on the DIY wedding crafts.

Our wedding canopy...

©Broken H Photography

Glitter Glue Mason Jars...

Wedding Invitations...

and my favorite post of 2014 so far...the origami wedding flowers that took me forever to complete.

Oh...and somewhere in the middle of all this awesomeness came some additional fun at our place...our heaters died. Space heaters and our gas fireplace are now our good friends as we save up for that joy.

And then I got sick. Yup. That was fun. I had to cancel a day of work and felt pukey and had a swimming head for about three days. Not my idea of a good time.

You started out good February...and I really did like you...but you ended on a very sour note. I think I'm okay with saying goodbye to you.

Now...how about last week...

Last week we got surprised by a band concert. We found out Sunday that Darian had a concert on Monday night. That was awesome. Well...the timing wasn't awesome, but the night was. We scrambled to make our schedules work and showed up at 5pm for the Potato Feed. Darian played great and we all had a good potato dinner together. They had a raffle going that night for some baskets full of prizes. Collin's office made a donation that got us a pile of entries and...well...we won. We won a lot. We never win anything. But somehow that night we won like six times. Total craziness. And I got an iPad out of the deal. Sweet.

As for the blog...

We already talked about the posts I posted, so I get to skip that one.

Books I Read: I finished Passion by Lauren Kate, the 3rd book in the Fallen series. I'm holding steady at one book behind schedule on my Goodreads goal and I have my Nook nice and loaded with a good selection of books for the next few months.

Recipes I Tried: We had potatoes on Monday night, does that count? Ya. Right. I was sick. No way I cooked people. (Yes, I should probably rephrase that to make it make some actual sense, but I'm enjoying the fact that it resembles one of those eCards about the need for appropriate punctuation and grammar far too much to fix it.) I made the men cook and we ate some leftovers on the other nights.

Projects I Worked On/Finished: Well...this post is getting even easier since I accomplished a big batch of zero last week. Boom! Laziness is paying off. I spent a lot of time bonding with my bed. We're good friends.

Favorite Pin of the Week: I love these cute little sock owls over at Craft Passion. Seriously...how cute are these? And the tutorial makes them look pretty straight forward to make too.

Wow. Longest review post ever. That only took me two hours. Ok. I'm going back to my evening now. And then I'll be starting on some crafting stuff later this week. Because the blog schedule says I have to. Fine. So be it. Crafting it is.

Summary Sunday: Money Pit Edition

Perhaps you're familiar with this movie...

Source: IMDB

It feels like my life right now. In the 1986 film version, Tom Hanks and Shelley Long play a couple who buy a home that turns out to be a complete lemon. Things begin to fall apart the moment their purchase is final.

In our life, our house has somewhat fallen suit.

In 2009, the upstairs water heater (which was inconveniently built into a closet that prevented full access) decided to explode, sending water down through the walls and ceiling to the first floor. In 2011, the main level water heater died. I was in the shower getting ready for work when I had that revelation.

2013 was a banner year for destruction. At the beginning of last year, the wind knocked over one of our front light pillars. The second followed in August. In May, I turned on a hose in our front lawn to discover that I had left the hose on during the winter, thus freezing the pipe. It repaid me by flooding our basement. That little piece of joy took over six months to repair. In June, one of the air conditioners died.

And then there was this week. Apparently 2014 will not be the year of no home disasters. We are already expecting that we will need a new sprinkler system come spring (ours is some obsolete disaster with no clear cut ability to blow out the lines and prevent freezing and destruction of valves). That was going to be spendy enough. But it will be nothing compared to what decided to befall us this week.

I came home from work on Tuesday night and walked in the door to an odor of something burning. Turns out, it was coming from the vents. We shut off the basement heater and figured we should get someone out to inspect it...surely it needed a servicing. Oh, if we were only so lucky.

As luck would have it, we discovered on Thursday that not only do we need to replace the basement heater, we also need to replace the upstairs one. You know...unless we want to throw money at repairs that will last less than a year or we all want to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or burn down our house. And of course, they are both linked to the air conditioning units...one of which (as I mentioned earlier) died last year. Grand total for repairs? Ugly. 5 digit ugly. Needless to say, that will not be happening right away.

So...we've spent the weekend using a few space heaters to keep things warm and we'll be waiting for what we hope will be a decent tax refund to help us fix at least one of the two units.

Yup. That was my week. Fun times. What else did I do?

Posts I Posted: Most importantly, I wished my parents a happy 36th anniversary...on the correct day.

I shared my technique for getting perfect glitter distribution in mason jars and explained how I designed my own wedding invitations and saved over $200.

Oh...and I revived the post on my date box (and over 160 date ideas) to remind everyone that dating is a year round event, not just for Valentine's Day.

Books I Read: I finished two books this week and now I'm only one book behind on my Goodreads goal. Yay! Slowly catching up. I finished the Divergent series with Allegiant by Veronica Roth and I continued to read the Fallen series by finishing Torment by Lauren Kate and starting Passion.

Recipes I Tried: No new recipes this week, but it was a good week for budget friendly recipes. We dusted off my old recipe for beef stroganoff...one that I hadn't made for quite a while. It was nice to get it back in rotation. I made some super easy goulash, but used a jalapeno chili that gave me terrible heartburn. Collin also pitched in with one of his standbys, a very bachelor friendly meal we call spread.

Projects I Worked On/Finished: I started attacking the crop room clean up this week. It promises to be one heck of an endeavor. I sorted through and boxed up all of the wedding stuff that had been cluttering up a quarter of the room, so I can actually see some carpet again. I think the next step will be emptying everything out of the closet so that I can start reorganizing the shelving in there. I also have a good DIY project in mind. We'll see how it goes.

Favorite Pin of the Week: I only did a smidge of pinning this week. My time was spent on other things apparently. But I still found a couple of fun things. My favorite is simply something that appealed to my sweet tooth. It's a recipe for horchata from Love Bakes Good Cakes. I'm a big fan of the cinnamon sugar rice drink, but I've never had a recipe for it at the house. Now I do. And I intend to use it.

And that's it. Phew. Now onto a new week...let's hope this one is a little less "fun".

Love Isn't Just for Valentine's Day

We're now a week out from Valentine's Day...but that doesn't mean that the month of love is over. So...this is your reminder to show love every day.

It's easy to start to take your loved ones for granted when you've been together for a long time. Sometimes seeing them every day and dealing with all the little frustrations in life (or the big frustrations) can make it simple to forget how special love is and how it needs continuous attention to stay healthy.

So...keep dating your significant other. No matter what. It doesn't have to be fancy and it doesn't have to be expensive, it just has to be you and them.

To help you...I'm reviving the posts for my Date Box.

For 160 Date Ideas (ranging from free to night on the town)...click here.

To make the box...click here.

To make the dating cards...click here.

Show your loved one that you love them 365 days a year. Happy Dating!

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve

I've found myself a new hobby. Well...actually, it's more of a co-hobby with Collin. We have discovered the fun of thrift stores. You know, Goodwill, Youth Ranch, DI (Deseret Industries for those of you not familiar with the Mormon version).

We started going to thrift stores on a whim a few months ago. It's now become one of our favorite things to do as part of a date. Collin loves that he can get awesome coffee mugs and bar glasses for $0.25 each and I am totally in love with buying books for under $1. In fact, yesterday I bought a best seller paperback for $0.13! Score!

You've now probably figured out where I'm going with this. I had heard about Anita Shreve before (I have no idea where from), but I am really cheap and hate to buy books unless I know I'm going to like them. Yes, I have a Nook and yes I have a pile of books on it, but there's just something about being able to have the real deal in your hand. Plus, I get a certain satisfaction from filling up the bookshelves in our home library.

I happened upon The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve in pretty dang good condition at one of our very first thrift store shops. I'm now glad that I picked it up. $0.65 well spent. I enjoyed this nice, easy read. Funny enough, it gets some pretty harsh reviews over at Goodreads, where many found the story trite and boring. Whatever. I disagree. To me, it's kind of one of those lazy afternoon reads. You know, the ones where you just sit down and let your mind relax and absorb everything coming at it.

In The Pilot's Wife, Kathryn's husband Jack is killed when the plane he is flying explodes over the coast of Ireland. She is obviously distraught over this development and becomes even more unhinged when news stories begin to paint her husband in an unfavorable light. Many of them insinuate that his death was in fact a suicide that resulted in the deaths of many others. Kathryn refuses to believe this, but after discovering some odd items around the house, she decides to look into the circumstances of his death on her own. What she finds, (dun, dun, dun...) will change everything.

Okay, so let me be up front in saying that this wasn't the absolute best book I've ever read. It is somewhat predictable. But the writing is really good and the character of Kathryn is really well developed. It's a quick read that doesn't require a whole lot of deep attention. In other words, this is totally Chick Lit. Sometimes I just need that. So in the end, I gave The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve 4 out of 5 stars.