Puppy Love

One of the best feelings in the world after a long day:

Coming home to two fluffy, silly dogs, who are always happy to see me and never fail to put a smile on my face

(even when I am bribing them with treats for a good picture!)

Bye Bye Barney

If you've never read my blog before, you might look at these before pictures of our guest bedroom and think - wow, poor girl, she has to paint over the scary purple walls that the previous owners left behind. 

However, if you've read of my past experiments in paint color, you would realize that I tend to make terrible choices in the perfect hue department.

Recall 2009, when I decided to paint an accent wall "Purple Blanket," and the result was pretty scary.  The paint chip insinuated a rich deep color, but the real life look was Barney.  Evil Barney.

So a year or so later, I finally got around to changing it.  A few hours and lost brain cells later from the Kilz, I had a nice white wall ready to go.  Bye Bye Barney.  I painted that wall "Manhattan Mist" like the other walls are, and I'm very happy with the result.  The color is a warm gray with just a touch of purple.  It goes well with the black furniture and bedding, and I can bring in purple as a small accent color, instead of giving it a whole monster wall.

I still need to decorate above the bed.  I've had these three wooden frames from Ikea for quite a while now, just haven't yet found the perfect fabric to wrap them in yet. 

So, this means we have a non-scary room for guests now - any takers??

Get Moving

Without sounding like every other typical girl out there - I have to say that I'm definitely not satisfied with my weight/fitness level right now.  We've become slackers about going to the gym (and it's seriously two minutes from our house, so that's sad).  Without complaining about how enormous I am 20% more than I weighed on my wedding day or making excuses I'm lazy , I'll just say that I'm on a bit of a timeline to get myself in gear. 

My lovely friend Adrienne is getting married in May, and I'm super excited that this is my first time being a bridesmaid.  She picked out lovely dresses, and mine is being whipped up somewhere right now.  I tried on the store sample - and it fit - just was a little tiny bit snug borderlinewon'tzip .  So, since I don't want to look like I'm squeezing into a hotdog casing in a few months - I have a lot of work to do!

I've tried the route of setting a goal of working out x times per week.  I always make excuses.  And while that still needs to happen, I needed a better way to track what I was doing and become motivated by that.  So I've decided to copy what I've seen a lot of people do - track the miles I've ran in 2010 and post it here.  But let's be honest - I'm not a runner and I won't be posting miles in double-digit increments.  And half of the time I use the elliptical anyway.  So I'm calling it "miles moved" instead.  Because I've decided moving  myself in someway is better than nothing.

[side note: I happened to have gotten some free NikeID shoes through work (yay french benefits haha!) which allow for you to use the Nike+ tool to track your workouts, but it doesn't work with the two types of ipods I already have - classic and shuffle... which is very frustrating!]

I'm late into the year getting started, mainly because I was sick for the first few weeks of the new year :( and I've since been working late at work, and simply didn't have the energy to workout when I get home at 8 (after 1.5 hour commute home) and go to bed at 10 (cue sad violin music).  But this week marks my official start - 1.2 miles moved!  (please don't mock me...)

I will keep track at the bottom of the blog as the year goes on, and maybe by December I will have reached double digits...

99%

I'm happy to say that we had a nice long weekend - full of lots of relaxing, and a few home projects thrown in there for good measure.


The best news - we have 99% finished flooring! After a six month tiny delay, we finally managed to put down thresholds and quarter-round. So no more jagged, tape-showing edges - instead, a nice smooth finish! We still need to fill in the nail holes and stain the exposed ends, but oh well, from a distance it looks 99%!

Remembering a Year

In this post last year, I talked about my way of remembering the year before - a small photo book chronicling the year's events - both big and small.  My 2008 book is something I love looking through from time to time, and I want to keep making one each year.

Nothing groundbreaking to show here, but here are a few of the layouts in my 2009 book:

Instead of using stock backgrounds, I used only pictures I had taken myself as backgrounds.  I find myself taking so many photos of scenery, landscapes, etc - and this is a great way to use them!

I'm using Picaboo for the book (to be consistent with last year's), I always use Picasa to organize and edit photos, and I used Scrapblog to make the cover image.  Overall, a very easy way to wrap up the year (in total, it's about 30 pages).

One of the best things about making these books: when going through my zillions of photos to find the ones to stick in the book, I'm reminded of all the great things we did through the year, and I have a chance to really reflect on what a great life I have.

Adios 2009

Wow, new year!!  Thanks to spending New Years Eve and the next few days in bed with general yucky sickness, I didn't get my new year post up in a timely fashion.  And honestly, I'm still a little loopy from cold medicine so I won't be posting anything profound. 

I did want to look back at last year's new years post... I can't honestly say I could check all of those off as complete - in fact, probably none of them.  I basically wanted to do more with myself and my life in 2009 - I definitely worked on that, but it's not complete.  I still want to spend more time doing things I care about - having fun, laughing, helping others, being crafty - and less time being lazy.  I had some rough days (weeks? months?) where I let my frustration with my terrible commute or general stress get the better of me, but my attitude is something I have been working on a lot, and hope to improve further. And this past year, we really got going on a bunch of the home improvement projects we'd been putting off, so that was good.

So in 2010, my slogan, stolen from Nike, is "Just Do It."  Or, stolen from Home Depot, "more doing."  I need to stop thinking about doing something (or even thinking about thinking about doing something), and just get off my lazy butt and DO IT!  Kinda like my Take Charge slogan from last year, but with even more emphasis. 

2009 - can't say I'll miss ya.  Lots of great things happened (we really are blessed), but I'm happy to put the negative behind me and move on to what is hopefully an even better 2010.  I need to remind myself that each day I can choose how I deal with the day - as my dad used to tell us over and over when we were little - "good attitude, good day.  bad attitude, bad day."  So true.

A Photo A Day...

[Photos Here]

I've decided to do something I've seen lots of other bloggers talk about (most recently Kari) - a project365.  Bascially, you take one picture each day, every day, and in the end, you have a chronicle of your year - even the boring parts.  I think it's meant for people with fancy cameras, but hey, I wanna play too.  So since it's a new year, I am good to go.  I'll post a link at the side of my blog too, in case you want to glimpse the oh-so-exciting daily life of Claire as 2010 progesses.  Here's to hoping it doesn't turn into 360 pictures of me sitting on my couch and 5 interesting ones..

Another Christmas

Our Christmas:

It consisted of too much food (specifically chocolate), lots of sleeping (and napping), and general laziness.  We enjoyed time with Tony's family on Christmas Eve, along with Jon and Jennifer (who's an adorable pregnant lady!), and then about 5 days in Knoxville with my family and friends.  I got to feel my little goddaughter and niece kick (which was AWESOME!) and it must be my biological clock a-tickin' that is making me obsessed with her baby, as if it were my own :)

We got lots of great presents [highlights being: an ipod shuffle to help encourage new-yearsy workouts, a Kurv dustbuster (yes! cleaning products!), a Flip video, great books and clothes and socks, and Tony got an electric smoker and a mandolin (to both help make me lots of yummy food)]

Christmas was wonderful, as always, now time to start the new year fresh.