Look how cold it is

We kept our beer out side on our stairwell to keep it cold. Well it sure did the trick. When I opened the bottle it exploded first. Then after I put it in the sink to finish exploding it froze.

Pictures of our clean back yard

In preparation of getting a dog, we had to clean up the back yard. The landlords left all of the junk everywhere. There was even a bucket of dried cement! I didn't take before pictures, but believe me, they had the most random stuff out there. Anyways, it looks much better now. Julie, you'll surely see a difference.

Once again, more pictures

Here are more pictures of Austin's book. I want to finish this thing already. Geez, this is taking me longer than books usually do. But here we go:

I am particularly fond of this one. I think that the little bubbles are so cool.

The not so secret life of Allison

So I'm getting some sort of recognition/award for the volunteer work that I've been doing at the Troy YMCA. The lady asked me to write a bio about myself. This is what I had to say about myself:

A recent graduate from The University of California, Riverside, Allison has recently moved to Troy, NY with her boyfriend. With a Bachelor’s degree in English, she plans to pursue a career in the publishing community; however, for the time being she has been planning a newsletter with our Black and Latino Achiever program. Fresh out of college and a California native, her experience with life is minimal though is promising. She would like to travel the world and write many young adult fiction novels.
Allison is very close to her family. She has one brother who is currently a Freshman in high school and plays the trumpet in the school band. Like her brother she also participated in band. She played the clarinet and percussion in her school band as well as taking many years of organ and piano lessons. Along with her musical background, she practiced the sport of gymnastics for eleven years and taught throughout high school and college. She also enjoys reading, photography and scrap booking. Testing the waters or entrepreneurship, she is currently running her own scrap booking business.


Boy, don't I have an exciting life? I'm sure that they didn't want an entire autobiography, but still, how incredibly boring is this? If I was looking through a program, I don't think that I'd read this. Although there will be 500+ people at this awards ceremony so I might get bored enough to read all the bios. I asked Ed if it would be bad if I didn't go to the awards and just watched on TV. He said that I probably should go. Well guess who gets to escort me to this banquet? Edward! Muuuaaahhh ahh ahh ahh (that's my evil laugh).

Christopher's tooth

When I was still home Christopher had injured that front tooth that he messed up when he was younger. He had bitten into a piece of pizza and messed it up some how. Obviously, the pizza had something in it that wasn't supposed to be there. Everyone stay away from RoundTable! Anyways, he had to go have it checked out because it was bothering him so much. Turns out that since he waited a while to go have it looked at, an infection set in and attacked the root. He had to have it pulled and got a fake tooth retainer thing. I know, I couldn't visualize it at first either. Let me finish my story first before you get a picture. I guess he's too young to have a root canal so he had to get that thing. He said that when he gets older he can get his root canal. Okay, here's the picture:

More pictures

After more tedious job searching and filling out another dog application, I've been working a good part of my day on Austin's book and made seven new pages. A couple of these I made the other day, so that's why there are more than seven. Here are the results. Sorry for the flipped picture.

We're starting to furnish our place

Well, after coming back we've decided to get a few new things. I've started putting up more drapes. Originally I was going to make them, but then with the cost of buying a sewing machine plus fabric, it was cheaper for me to buy them. So here are some pictures.

Our new TV! We're pretty excited about this. It's a 32" flat screened HDTV. PBS looks great on this baby.
This is a little decoration that I had made while I was still home. I've finally framed it. Now all we have to do is hang it. That might take another 5 months.

These are the old blinds in our family room.
And this is our new drape.


This is the actual design on those drapes. It's the same for our new laundry area drapes too.
If you remember, we had different drapes for our laundry area. We're going to put those up to separate the living and family room. Edward thinks that if we block off that area we'll save more on heating. So, since the laundry are is so ugly, I had to get new drapes that would compliment the old ones since they aren't far away. I went with the light colored one for the family room window to offset the brightness of the red.
These are our new drapes in the bedroom. They're navy blue, not black. They help with the sun a lot. I haven't figured out how to hem up the bottom of the curtains by the bed. For now they're tied up so that Edward doesn't get caught up in them at night.
Excuse the mess. I just finished folding the laundry. We're really not this messy.


Ed is playing our new Wii. The other day we went everywhere and called everyone to find one, but they were all sold out. So today after picking up our new coffee table he asked me to call Best Buy to see if they had any and they did! He got so excited. The man at the store said that there were only three on the shelf. We were only two miles away, but by the time we got there, Edward grabbed the last one. I didn't have his Best Buy gift cards on me so I went all the way home while he clung onto the Wii for dear life. We went to Toys 'R' Us afterwards to get him some games with this 25% off coupon.
This is the boxing portion of Wii Sports.
Looks like an ordinary table right?
Wrong! It's lift top one so that we don't have to lean forwards over it. It doesn't match out end table, but that's okay. We could have gotten the matching color, but we both liked this one much better and wanted to make sure that we enjoyed it since it was a lot of money.

Update on Austin's book

Here are a few more pages from Austin's book. We just got a new coffee table, so it should be easier for me to work now. Scrap booking on rickety cardboard boxes wasn't work for me at all. These are all that I have for now. I think that I've finished a couple more, but haven't taken pictures of them yet. My next thing to do is our cruise. We have a TON of pictures of that trip.