Mutate fish or have babies

A friend and I were discussing this today.
In my close friends, i.e., people/couples my husband and I meet with regularly, work with, or visit regularly, and who are our age for the most part, although most are actually younger:

Newborns: 4
Pregnancies: 5

Here is the alternative:
Birth-control pills poison everyone

In case you are too lazy to click, that's a link to an article where some people are freaking out because the residual chemicals from birth control pills get into the ground water and they found weird half-male half-female fish.

In the words of my friend Millie "it is very sad that there are transsexual fish out there all swimming around not knowing if they should wear heels or hunt deer."

Good times.

We don't owe!!!!

I am so excited! We did our taxes tonight and so many amazing things!! Christian and I are still speaking to one another No one ended up in the bathroom crying We did not have to involve a professional or pay hundreds of dollars to file We did not have to empty our entire savings account which means....

WE DID NOT OWE ANYTHING!

This is so exciting to me. I have been thinking of this night with dread for months (why? see last year). And now we get to keep what is left of our savings.
It's so exciting! :-)

I have something to say about that

Why is it that all good singer/songwriters have to go and write a truly terrible song to/about their kid and then include it on one of their albums so that it somehow gets into Shuffle on my iPod???
Here are 3 I can think of, off the top of my head:

Birdcage - The Wallflowers (Jakob Dylan, Bob Dylan's son)
Gracie - Ben Folds
Little Digger - Liz Phair


Every single one of them is terrible. Just badly written, poor musical quality, no context within the album. Why do people do this? It's actually kind of insulting to the kid, since these are always the worst songs on the albums. It's just very sad.

30th birthday party!

I've posted some photos from my 30th birthday party on my Flickr!

I wish I was better about taking photos, but I am not that good at it.

We had a lot of fun! There were about 20-21 people there altogether. We ate at Sushi Zushi, and they didn't put us in a private room so the poor server had to serve all of us at a super long table. But, oh well! The food was delicious. I had a wonderful pink drink make with champagne. If I didn't have such a low tolerance for alcohol I would have had more of those!

It was so fun to have everyone all in one place. I feel so blessed to have such wonderful friends and family! :-) My in-laws got to stay with us overnight as well so that was fun too.

Well, I guess I am 30 for real now!

Hallway redesign

So, I have finally finished our hallway!

To review, what we did was paint the hallway and install these picture ledges so that we can display all our photos in one place without taking up space on the bookcases. Also, we purchased simple frames from Ikea to help all the photos look uniform and stand out more.

Here is the "Before":


And here is the "After":

and
Happy Valentine's Day!

In between day

My birthday was good! We didn't do too much, the big party is on Saturday. Last night we just had Community Group as usual, but Christian surprised me by bringing an ice cream cake for everyone to share. It was yummy! I will probably eat the last piece of it tonight :-)

This is a weird in-between day while I wait for Valentine's Day and whatever Christian and I will do for that holiday. I am a little freaked out because both the gifts I wanted to get him were unavailable in stores. Most things he likes are pretty much impossible to find, they have to be specialty ordered months in advance, and I didn't do that.

I am hoping to finally get the shelves for the hallway photo gallery today, and as soon as I have them installed I will take pictures and post them on Flickr. You probably thought I forgot but I haven't. I will finish this picture gallery someday!!!

Tomorrow is my birthday!

Yep, tomorrow I turn 30! Hooray! I have been looking forward to turning 30 for quite some time. I have read somewhere that by the time you turn 30 you are more OK with who you are than you were in your 20's. At first I thought that was kind of hogwash but I have hoped that it would be true.

Maybe it is going through Celebrate Recovery for the second time this year, or maybe it is indeed just my age. But I do think that I feel a lot more settled and OK with things than I have at other times in my life. I certainly don't have the amount of worry about what people think of me that I might have had earlier in my life. I can see patterns in life more, and have less of a need to react and more of an attitude of "wait and see". I am sure my husband would tell you differently, because he is on the opposite end of the scale. In comparison to him, I am still very high-strung and neurotic. But, you can only compare yourself to yourself, not to other people. And for me, I feel more settled.

I'm looking forward to having a wonderful dinner this weekend with a bunch of my favorite people! If anyone is reading this, I want you to all bring cameras and take plenty of pictures!

I hear it is going around

It has been another length of time without posting, sorry for the gap.

Apparently everyone here is sick from either a stomach bug or a cold/flu and somehow I was amazingly lucky enough to get BOTH!

We have been whiling away our time here by painting the hallway of our house. It is all part of my overall strategy to create a hallway photo gallery. I am hoping to finish it this week and will have pictures as soon as it is finished. It is unfortunate that we aren't able to install track lighting, that would be ideal. If anyone knows how to do that sort of thing, be our guest, but we sure don't.

Since I have been doing a lot of wearing sweats, not washing my hair, and going to bed at ridiculously early hours, I really don't have anything very interesting to say. Leave me a comment and give me some ideas on what to talk about or something.

Oh, and 8ish days till I turn 30. Woo hoo!