January-blanuary

Ashley and I finally decided to exchange Christmas presents! I went to Lansing for the weekend to visit and also got to exchange gifts with Natalie. A little late, but at least we did it before February! While at Ashley's I saw this sight:

Alyssa, their cat's place setting. Notice the water cup she drinks out of all the food that she paws out of her bowl to eat. This is the same cat that eats cheez-its and spray cheese. Hilarious.

Ever since the holidays, my mother has been into puzzles. Yes, puzzles. I believe it's genetic. Grammy is the same way and I hardly remember a trip to visit her without working on a puzzle being involved. The first puzzle we started on was insane. It was a picture of beads. Thousands. It was awful. So we put it away and started on plan b.

This past week has been a bit miserable. For some reason work has been really draining and then I caught a cold. So this has been my life for the week: chapstick, kleenex and lots of fluids. Not pictured is my Neti-pot, my raw nose and all of the trash cans in my house that are full of more piles of tissues. Hopefully I can nip this in the bud!

On the bright side, today was 45!! This winter has been CRAZY! After last year's blizzards, I was concerned this year about driving in the snow but it hasn't been a problem since it keeps melting! I am ok with this kind of winter!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2012! I made it through! One year later, I have a picture from every week this year! I am excited to order the photo book and be able to flip through and see everything again!

Drum roll please....

Dec 25-Jan 1st

My first Christmas off of work was lovely, Summer and Grant came over to my parents house and we opened gifts and ate a rediculous cake that I made gluten free for Summer. It was delish and we all had to lay on the floor afterwards because it was so rich! It was so nice to just relax and chill, hang out with family and play games!

New Years I did have to work but it was fun. I definitely prefer working New Year's to Christmas. I had a really good set of patients (including a 3.5 pound baby) and got to bring in the New Year with work friends! We watched the ball drop in our treatment room and toasted with sparkling juice in plastic cups and had a huge potluck!

Here's to 2012!

Almost done!

I can't believe the year is almost over! And for the first time, I think ever, I finished a New Years resolution!! Well almost...I still have a few weeks to go but I am excited to print out the book and see all the pictures put together from the year!

Nov 13-20 Microwave fire. Mom was trying to prepare for Thanksgiving when she heard a popping sound coming from her microwave. Next thing she knew smoke was pouring out of the cabinets! She had to call the fire department and everything! Put quite a damper on our Thanksgiving preparation abilities with tons of restoration people trying to clean our house and having to re-shop for a lot of our Thanksgiving food since we had to throw a lot of it away! It was crazy!

Nov 21-26 Thanksgiving. So even with the fire and the craziness we managed to have a normal Thanksgiving and mostly Gluten Free too! Summer and Grant joined us and we had a feast!

Nov 27-Dec 2 Painting at work. The new hospital was opening and I was part of the staff lounge decorating team. We decided to "illegally" paint it and so decided to do it one night when we were overstaffed. It was also my last night of working at the old hospital. It was weird since I have spent so much time there to be moving to a new building. It was almost like starting a new job, but with all the same colleagues. This is a picture on my way out on my last night.

Dec 3-10 Murder Mystery Dinner. Such a fun time and such a fun group of people! It's playing dress up for grown ups.

Notice Pat's "monkey tail" beard and "gun"

Oh and a side note: this week we moved to the new hospital and I found a fairy door in the lobby!

Dec 11-17 Wicked. Amazing musical as always. Not as good seats as when I saw it in London (front row) but still great even from the balcony! And the Detroit Opera House is beautiful and it was fun to see the "D" all dressed up for Christmas.

Dec 18-Dec 24 Work gift exchange. We decided instead of buying each other gifts this year we would do a gift exchange with As Seen on TV products! We also made cookies and had a ugliest cookie contest as well. Don't have pics of the cookies yet but will post them when I have them. We did drive around Brighton and look at the crazy Christmas lights in my parent's neighborhood. They seriously have every blown up lawn decoration possible! and lit up the whole neighborhood with their LED lights.

Fall is Upon Us!

Oct 16-22 MSU vs. UMich game at Chip and Megan's house! Ashley made these crazy caramel chocolate apples.

I thought this was a creative way of rubbing MSU's win in a Wolverine fan's face. 

Oct 23-29 Was a rough week at work so thought this was appropriate. It is posted on a wall next to the on call resident's room. The post it note says "Bang head here".

Later that week I woke up to water coming from my ceiling. After multiple phone calls and a couple freak outs, it ended up just being my furnace condensation pipe being clogged, so just have to repaint the ceiling after it dries. But it was scary!

Oct 30-Nov 5 Summer and Grant came over and we decided to do an experiment from pinterest: putting a hair mask on her! She said she couldn't tell a difference afterwards, but it sure was fun and stinky!

Nov 6-Nov 12 Woke up to the first snow of the season! It didn't stick of course because it was like 60 earlier in the week, but I can't believe that it still hasn't really snowed at all here yet! I'm probably jinxing myself but it's been so nice to have tolerable/real fall weather for once!

and fall begins....

Sept 18-24: UMich football game with Shelly for my birthday present! The weather was beautiful, they won and we had a lovely time! It was a great start to fall!

Sept 25- Oct 1: I celebrated my birthday with some work girls. We went out to dinner and did a Pinterest craft: homemade coasters!

Melissa made a crazy trifle that had a gallon of pudding in it and was soo good!

Oct 2-8: Left for D.C. to visit my dad. Natalie in the Detroit airport.

Went on a tour of a replica of the Godspeed which was one of the first ships that brought colonists to the U.S.

Oct 9-15: Still in D.C. Went to visit the memorials

and the Natural History Museum

visited Grammy and went to Great Falls National Park

Went to Georgetown and had a cupcake

and went shopping and introduced Natalie to Chick-fil-a

The beginning of fall...

Look! I am only two weeks behind!! :)

Sept 4-10: This week was busy with work, I had to work the holiday and then we had our orientation to the new hospital! Thankfully, I got to go with two friends from the night shift. Aren't we attractive in our hard hats? Ha

Sept 11-17: Bryce is leaving for Paraguay! Crazy, but we decided to have a little high school get together welcoming Stephen back from California and saying bye to Bryce. Beforehand we went to the apple orchard to get some cider for the party and I wanted to get some honeycrisp apples. It was a lovely day and a welcome to fall: my favorite season!

Natalie trying out Patrick's "life juice" theory with the baby goat. Just kidding, she didn't bite it! :)

Crap

Aggghh, so here goes another 5 week update. Though, I did say in the last post it would be a while because of the wedding....

Who am I kidding? But I am still taking pictures so it counts!!

July 30-Aug 7 Pat, Natalie, Shelly and I went berry picking! Little did we know it was going to be so hot ! We got a couple of pints of raspberries and then decided to try blackberries but the bushes were crazy and had a billion thorns so Pat and I toughed it out for a little while but ended up giving up pretty quickly. Then we took a tour of Google and saw the "Giggle" fairy door.

Aug 7-13 Grant and Summer's wedding. I am only going to post a couple since most of these are on Facebook already.

Aug 13-20 Since my Aunt and Uncle were in town for the wedding and my dad and uncle's birthdays occurred while they were in town we decided to celebrate! My mom got my dad kayaks and so we took them out for practice. Then we had dinner and opened gifts. My dad and my uncle went shopping for each other (separately) and both got the other a shirt! Such twins! :)

Aug 21-27 Natalie and I decided to be crafty one day and attempt a project from Pinterest. This was our attempt at making beach glass. Supposedly, this mixture of glue, water, dish soap and food coloring was supposed to make the glass have a frosted blue tint. But after a couple attempts and a lot of mess, we decided it was a bust. Fail.

Aug 28-Sep 3 This week was cupcake week. I made cupcakes for a friend's birthday. We always order shakes from Pizza House and always get peanut butter chocolate malts. So I decided to make a pb chocolate malt cupcake. It was delish. My mom said it was the best cupcake she's ever had. The second cupcake I made for our Labor Day potluck at work. It's a pink lemonade cupcake. Good, but not as good as the other one. I felt like Martha Stewart making them all! It was fun!