World's Worst Wife...

That about says it all.

I feel like I am always cranky and tired and Michael just keeps loving me. Regarding the last post, I wasn't sure what the "ladder thing" was. I'm very pleased with the end result.

We are SOOO Crafty (Part 2)

Okay... So here's how it works:

I (Michael) get Saturday's off. Haylee does not regularly get Saturday's off. So I thought I'd do something to surprise her while she was off at work.

I was scanning hgtv.com/ratemyspace and found a backing for pictures.... Like... a wall panel that the pictures are on.

We had talked about how our living room pictures don't offer much contrast, as you can see in this "before" picture:

Perfect opportunity to surprise Haylee!!!

I read that the guy who posted his design on hgtv stretched some fabric over a frame and hung the pictures on that. I didn't see any instructions, but I figured it must be easy enough. So I drove off to Home Depot to buy me some lumber. And a saw. I made it out of there for under $20. I bought an $8 saw and 5 pieces of 8 ft 1"x2", each under $2.

I took the pictures off the wall, moved our coffee table out of the living room, and lined the pictures up on the rug to see how I would like them. I used the rug as my square, since it has some convenient lines. I then laid the lumber down to get an idea for spacing and size.

Time to cut the lumber. It was ONLY around 105°, but it's monsoon season, so the "dry heat" made me sweat like a pig. I went outside and sawed away. I got two 6 foot pieces and seven 2 foot pieces. Then, I used our awesome staple gun and went to town. Each joint has at least 10 staples holding it together. The corner ones have around 16.

Around this time, Haylee called. She was done with work. She asked what I had done all day. I bet she thought I'd say something like "watching the olympics" or "took a nap". I said "I have a surprise for you. Hurry home."

Now, I knew that the fabric wasn't on there, but I figured that I needed some womanly advice in picking the fabric so that it would match okay. So I just placed the "ladder" in its appropriate spot on the wall. She walked in and saw this:

Her exact line was "I don't know how I feel about that."

So much for romantic surprise.

After I explained my full vision and inspiration to her, she agreed to go pick some fabric with me. We ran off to JoAnn's and found some pretty awesome green stuff that was on double clearance. We paid $2 per yard, 3 yards. So a total of around $6.40. This brought our project total up to $25 (including a saw, around $17 without the saw).

I started stapling the fabric on. Finally, it was time to put the nails in the frame to hang the pictures.

I had this all laid out on the floor. I asked Haylee to take a look at what I had done. She was sleeping. I woke her up and she said, "yeah. Looks great." She then rolled over. She didn't even look.

So I said "whatever. I'll surprise her by getting it all done before she wakes up."

So I placed the nails. This was the final output:

While I was nailing these on, I figured it looked pretty darn good. Haylee would be so surprised that her husband is so handy and romantic.

Haylee, upon awakening, asked "why are they not centered correctly?"

As you can see, there is more panel below the pictures than above them. And now our birch framed smaller pictures are not vertically centered with the larger white frames. (Compare with the "before" pic)

So much for surprises.

Our Rockstar Friends

We went to Jenny and Steven's house Saturday night. While there we ate tacos and played Rock Band. Good times. Our sweet band is called afi. haha. Hardcore. Somehow Jenny didn't get into any of the pictures. She totally rocks the bass.
If you didn't notice, Steven is singing AND playing guitar. BLITZKRIEG BOP!

We had to take a break to check the cellphones. These guys are popular. What more can I say?

Vacation Part 2

I guess I never quite got around to doing Vacation part II.
Here's more pictures.


In Lakeside, which is the Utah town bordering Bear Lake, there's a great pizza place. They serve Home"Style" Pizza. Alternatively, the magnet on our fridge says that they serve "HomeStyle" Pizza. One of their signs also said just plain old homestyle pizza (no quotes).
That's why Utah rocks.
Seriously, though, their pizza was good.



This is Haylee's dad coming out of the trailer. That trailer is packed full of fun goodness.



Under the trailer's awning, we all sat in camping chairs (except that Haylee and I brought our kitchen chairs from Ikea - $8 each). Then we had bonding times.


As we passed through the Arizona strip on our way to California, we had a flat tire on that fun-packed trailer of goodness. We stopped at a combo Arby's/Gas Station in Mesquite, NV. This is where we experienced the surprising Cheese-flavored water bottle...


and the miracle of the Cross Onion Petals.

(Minor photoshopping... For contrast improvement, of course)

We went to Six Flags once we finally arrived in California. This is one of the few meaningful pictures we took. Other than this, we took lots of silly pictures in line.

Then we came home.

We were going to go to Idaho, but we found out that next year's reunion is in Boise, and we were feeling very time-strapped, so we saved around 6 hours of driving and decided to spend the time with Haylee's family in California, instead.

Vacation Part 1

While Haylee is getting ready for church, I thought I'd post a bit about our fun vacation.

The plan was to go to Bear Lake for a family reunion (Haylee's father's family) and then go explore some of my old mission turf in the Boise area.

I woke up Wednesday, July 23 and my throat was super-dry. Not cool. Whatever caused this also caused me to lose my voice later that day and cough every night from Fridayish on.

So we took off to Bear Lake in our car (the new-to-us Accord). We averaged over 30 MPG! (In fact, on one leg, we got 42, but that was downhill.)

And we stopped in Salt Lake to spend time with Luke and McKenzie. They were nice enough to put us up for the night. Before we went to bed, we played Rock Band.

There we are! Actually, there they are. I was taking the picture. I think McKenzie might have taken pics too, so check her blog and someday there might be pictures up.

Yay. Nighttime came and morning came and the great Utah holiday Pioneer Day was upon us. We watched the parade on TV with McKenzie & Luke and McKenzie built us some delicious breakfast burritos with turkey sausage. This was not the last time that we enjoyed turkey breakfast meat on our vacation, but more on that later.

After leaving the house of our (new for me) friends, we had Taco Time in Layton or Kaysville. I was not so impressed with the size of the burrito, as I was hoping that it would be more Rubios-ish. But it tasted great and Haylee had a good time remembering the good ol' days when she was at the Y.

After realizing that we don't have any clue where we're going, we stopped at Walmart and bought a GPS (by the way, please note that it is no longer Wal-Mart. It is now one word. See the commercials). And our good friend TomTom, voiced by Borat, took us to Logan.

We stayed at the Baugh Inn, owned by Best Western. It was a cute little place. Here's the outside of our room:

We could pull right up to the door. That was nice. Easy to put stuff in the room.

We had dinner at Blackstone, a restaurant a block or so away. We drove because we had already walked all over town looking at the "we're closed to celebrate this great holiday with our families" signs on all of the shops. We ordered the appetizer sampler, some flavored lemonades, and ribs. Everything was out of this world good. Seriously, an outstanding restaurant in Logan. Check it out if you have the chance. A bit pricey for an everyday place, but just right for a nice stop on a big vacation. Because we had a late lunch at Taco Time and because I was feeling a bit sick, we didn't eat as much of the food as we would have liked, but at least we didn't gorge ourselves sick.

The next morning, we enjoyed the continental breakfast and went to Bear Lake. Check out this cool boat we saw:

That is all for now. Haylee will upload some other events that came before the vacation probably. And then we'll wrap up the rest of our vacation. Yay for travel-logs!

Summer is Flying By

So... We are way behind. Not that anyone really pays much attention.

July 4th I was still healing from the horrendous tooth extractions, but that didn't stop us from buying a car. Yes, a car. We are crazy. Now we have 3 cars and don't really know what we're going to do with all of them.

The "new" 2001 Honda Accord EX. This picture was taken in a KFC parking lot. Yeah, we ate there. Crazy, I know.

We Are So Crafty

We both had the day off from work today and couldn't decide what to do. We went to the oral surgeon, Michael's parents, T.C. Eggington's (breakfast place), SuperCuts, Scottrade and Gilbert. All of this was before 1 p.m. We decided to drive home and I had the wonderful idea of making a headboard for our bed. I know... I'm like a genius or something.

Michael thought that was a good idea so we went to Home Depot and JoAnn fabrics. After a lot of hardwork (on Michael's part) and a few tears (on my hormonal, drug withdrawal part) we got it done!

Check out our sweet room: