cheesy christmas tree decorating post. and you like it.

The title says it all. We decorated our Christmas tree the other night which of course resulted in all unstaged traditional pictures. I'll narrate them for you.

Decorating a Christmas tree requires a delicious and high calorie coffee. I'm talking whip cream and sprinkles. My favorite part of this picture is that my shirt matches my coffee cup. Obvi.

Here's Aj "hanging" an ornament.

 

and here I am doing the same. Though I did switch things up and go with a little more untraditional pose.

Stepping up and being a man performing his star duties.

You know you know.



Ta da!

and you like it.

Fa la la la laaaaa

Aj and I began our tradition of going and cutting doing our own Christmas tree last year and we hope to continue it for years to come. It's more work but it's a lot more festive than Home Depot. So on Sunday we headed to a beautiful Christmas tree farm called Spruce Ridge in Giles County. What a great place! The farm had rolling hill after rolling hill of perfect Christmas trees and the people were oh so lovely.

I love the way the navy and dark green look together

Decorating time!

Navy Crazy

That's how I'm feeling.

My long awaited curtains are finally here and hung. and I could not be happier with them!

side note: I don't think our house is haunted (see multiple orbs) I think we need a new camera.

Now, I don't know if you know how hard it is to find 95" long navy curtains that are the right shade of navy, right fabric weight and right style top. It is hard! Actually, I couldn't find them. I had to modify these navy blues in order for them to be all that I knew they could be.

The curtains I ended up buying had all the qualities I wanted except for they had the wrong style top. Originally these guys came with a grommet top. But I wanted a top that was a bit more simpler and without any type of metal showing.

original top

So I cut the tops off.......

and used some no sew hem tape to make the tops clean and simple. So now they are just what I wanted!

Now, I need to figure out what I want to do about the blind situation. New white mini blinds were put on all are windows right before we moved in, problem is they are ugly.

Current options are:

-Leave them how they are and deal with it for a year and a half.

-Remove the mini blinds and not put any new blinds up.This would work because the curtains can close all the way to prevent peepers. Only annoying part is we will have to put them back up before we move.

 -Get new wood or bamboo blinds. That would be pretty.

We shall see what happens :)



A Reflective Thanksgiving Post

Thanksgiving......

this is what you did to me.

what you get when you google image "stuffed from food"

But besides from feeling like overweight felines, we had a wonderful time with our family and friends when we were back home in Nokesville. Over the Thanksgiving break we did lots of eating, some shopping, some seeing people and some pumpin up of the Christmas spirit.  We also were able to finish our my "Get Done Before Christmas" to do list.

Yes we are now with tree. and it's filling our house with an amazing scent. Mmmm.

If you didn't get to see these felines on Thanksgiving here's a picture from the day, pretty much the same thing.

meow.

Very reflective = not so much

Short and sweet = yes please.

Confused. Like Really.

I've been blogging for about two and a half weeks and continue to be severely confused with this new world.

Questions

I don't know how to follow people. Right after I started blogging I went crazy and became a follower of tons of blogs. I was on some type of a blogging high. All was well. But then the next day my fancy "dashboard" said I was following zero blogs (i.e., I have zero friends). Huh? For almost 2 weeks its said I'm not following anyone and then today I'm following a bunch of blogs again with out doing anything. Headache.

What is the appropriate way to cite things on blogs? Since being in grad school, I have had the fear of God put in me when it comes to needing correct citations.

Is it common for blogs to be getting a lot of hits from people in Russia? Just curious...

Pinterest is making me mad. It would not let me login for five days! Do you know what 5 days without Pinterest does to a girl? It also says I have double the followers than I'm supposed to have. I literaly do not know half the new followers. and I don't think a bunch a new random people are following because I post such magical pins. I think my Pinterest has a virus. Anyone know if its possible for your Pinterest to get a virus?

Who else is excited about my new navy curtains that were delivered today!?

~End questions~

Ok some of those questions have nothing to do with the confusing world of blogging.

I probably wont blog again until Sunday but most likely Monday, ahh but don't be mad if it's Tuesday. Don't think it's becuase I fell off the blogging train, it's because I will be busy busy with holiday fun. Ohhh but the amazingness that will be delivered next week. I'm talking a curtain post, a living room post (cause I know you want to see where we watch tv), possibly a reflective post on Thanksgiving, and maybe a Christmas tree post!!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

via whipperberry.com

Break.

Guess what!?! I'm officially on Thanksgiving Break. Ahhhhhhhhh relief. This break is much needed and the best part is that it represents how stinkin close I am to the end of the semester and a long winter break.

Plans for Thanksgiving break:

-Homework. Even though I'm on a break I still have a couple of days worth of homework to do.

-Heading home to sweet Nokesville in the middle of the week.

-Enjoying 5 days straight with Aj. No work for him and no school for me will be wonderful.

-Being thankful.

-Getting a Christmas tree as soon as possible after Thanksgiving. I'm very respectful to each and ever holiday and give them each their time to shine. But as of 12am Thursday night/Friday morning Thanksgiving can eat it (pun intended).

-See the new Twilight movie. Team Renesmee!

Offspring

I would like to introduce you to our future child.






Is that not the scariest cutest little baby you ever did see?! I thinks she favors her mother with those blue eyes. AJ's response to the picture, "It looks like an Olsen twin." Haha he cracks me up. I think the picture could be used in schools as a form of birth control.

It's a hard-knock life

It's a hard-knock life for renters. It's a hard-knock life for us! (read as if your watching Annie and cute orphans cleaning about). Now you want to watch the movie dontcha?

You know why life's so hard for renters? Two reasons:

            1-You have to follow a bunch of mostly silly rules like not being allowed to paint your walls
                arrghhh.
            2-You've probally moved multiple times and are planning on moving again

Right now, #2 is the one getting me itchy. You know why? Curtains. I've been wanting curtains for our living room for almost a year and a half but I haven't been able to pull the trigger and buy them. I avoided buying curtains at our first apartment in Warrenton because I knew we were only going to be there one year and then would be moving on to somewhere new. I feared spending lots of money on curtains for our first living room then moving and then the windows in our new living room would be too large or small or have too many or less windows blah blah blah. On top of all of that, most curtains are just ugly and I could never find good cute ones.

I'm ready now. and the husband agrees. We have been in our current house in Christiansburg for a little over 3 months and are planning on staying in this house till I get done with graduate school in May 2013. This means one little lady can finally dress her windows.

The big problem is, like I said before, most curtains are not so cute. Most curtains are even more not cute when you are searching for bold patterned navy curtains. That's what this girl wants. Bold patterned navy curtains.

So you know you excitedly go and log-on to your little laptop expecting to find great, great things.......and you find a bunch of this.

sorry Kohls, it's not you, it's your ugly curtains

And you're like hell no.

Then after searching hours upon hours you find these. Cue the singing baby angels.

now these are from this great etsy shop http://www.etsy.com/shop/CastleCreekDesigns?ref=seller_info .

This girl would love them but they are totes out of my price range.

Ok someone stop the singing baby angels. Cause these hottie curtains are $180 per window. Ouch. Even I can't somehow come up with a crazy story justifying spending that much. Especially since we will be moving again eventually.

So I continued looking and searching and being disappointed. and I'm still a little disappointed. Because I just can't find those fabulous bold patterned navy curtains in our price range. Lame. I even considered the option of DIYing some curtains but then I remebered I'm a busy graduate student who wouldn't be able to finish such a time consuming project until maybe summer?

So what's the point of this long orphan/renting stinks/curtain post Courtney? Plain navy curtains is the point and it's what we are getting. But we are getting them before Christmas which is the important part :) I'll post pictures when they come in.

I love pallet wood.

We finally finished our new over the sofa art! It's huge and just what we needed for the big empty wall the sofa is against.

The best part is that the project only costed us about $30. AJ got the pallets for free from his work and all we had to buy was the stencil, stain and some hanging thingys. If we would have bought some art around the same size at say Smeir 1 we probably wouldn't have been able to go out to dinner last night. Which we did and it was ahhmmazing. If you're ever in Roanoke go to METRO! Whenever I eat their sushi I have a Hallelujah moment.  No, I'm serious. The first time I ate their sushi I lifted both my hands in the air and said hallelujah. For real.

Back to my love........



I now want to make everything out of pallet wood.

Like this



                      via Pinterest

and this mirror

                    via Pinterest

oh and this.

                       via Pinterest

Now we're on to those curtains. Only 14 days left :) 

Aww.

I was going through old pictures this morning and came across a 10th grade homecoming picture. So fun to look at! When this picture was taken AJ and I had been dating for about 10 months. It will be 9 years in January. Oh memories....

On a side note, could we have been wearing anymore red?! This was before I realized clothing/decorating is about coordinating, not matching.

Thoughts after 9pm on a hump day.

Studying is a pain in the booty. I don't care how old you get and how many years you've been doing it, it hurts the booty. In particular, this girl's booty. Why does it not get easier?

Only a week and a half till T-Break. That stands for Thanksgiving Break, it's what all the cool college kids I know are calling it now a days. Ha just kidding. I don't know any cool college kids.

Why do we buy cute aprons from Pier 1 but avoid wearing them cause we don't want to get them dirty and stained with food? Just me? I'm staring at one hanging in my kitchen. It's a year old. It looks brand new. It's too cute to cook in. Would it be inappropriate to wear it out in public with leggings and boots. We've all seen ladies girls wear leggings and boots with less.

I need a haircut so bad. So bad that I've been refusing to wear my hair down for about 2 weeks. I've been avoiding getting my haircut because I just know who to trust with scissors in Christiansburg.

Too sweet not to share

"Little lady, you light up my little world" -AJ before bed last night

Weekend

How was your weekend?

Ours was good too.

We decided to take advantage of a semi-local attraction by going hiking at Cascade Falls. Guess what?! Hikings fun, who knew? Not this girl. It may have been so enjoyable because I had such a cute and sweet hiking buddy.

                                                    you're not supposed to wear make-up when you're a serious hiker

I also spent my weekend avoiding homework and working on this.

which began as this 

It's our soon to be over the sofa art. Just waiting on the stencil to come in the mail this week and then we can finish spicing old Mr. Pallet Wood up.

Am I a bad person?

I love Pinterest, I do I do I do.

But I also kinda hate it. Does it make me a bad person to want to keep the really good ideas to myself?Sometimes I don't want a bunch of other people to find out how to also make a dining table out of only a piece of wood, duct tape and a clothes hanger. You have to keep those really good ideas to yourself.

This makes me a selective pinner. I rate potential pins on a scale of 1-10 based on their greatness. Anything that scores an 8 or above is not getting pinned. These ideas go into a little thing called the Internet Explorer "Favorites Tab."

Am I really the only one who feels this way?

Here's one pin I will share.

brought to you by Pinterest

Now I bet he's the life of the party. Anyone is welcome to steal this idea.

22 days.

22 days till we get a Christmas tree! I'm dancing!

                             last years christmas tree


One of my talents is convincing the husband that we have to have certain things before we can have other things. Most recently, I've used this skill to try to convince him that before we get a christmas tree, we must, we must get new curtains and new artwork for above our couch in the living room. Christmas will be ruined if we don't.

New artwork for above the couch is happening this weekend. I'll let you know when the curtains are on the way : )

Cause I miss you. I do.

Why a blog now?

AJ and I have been living in Christiansburg for 3 months now and sometimes I have moments of feeling so so far away and disconnected from all the great people we love. We really like Christiansburg but it doesn't have our friends and family. I miss our peeps.

I'm hoping the blog will be a way to share with our friends and family what we are up to in between phone calls and visits.



Oh. and the other reason to start a blog.....who doesn't love talking about themselves :)

Blogging.

Hey look at me!


I'm blogging.


I'm a blogger.


..........at least for the moment. For over a year I've been trying to decide if I should or should not begin blogging. I came to the conclusion that I shall try it for a month.

1 month.