Human Wrecking Balls

I know BLOG’s are mostly posted and read by women so this is a man’s posting. I have discovered the greatest TV show. It is called Human Wrecking Balls. These two brothers completely destroy something like a hotel room, a car, a manufactured home, an airplane, or an office. Man versus Man-made – it is totally awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vREPW_ljixc

Merry Christmas!

A couple weeks ago, Andy and I had a Christmas party. We invited several couples over and we had a lot of fun. We played some games and ate a lot of food. One of the games we played was a gift wrapping game. Couples had to wrap a present together each using one hand. It was fun to watch as the couples struggled to cut the paper, tape and fold the paper and add a ribbon. We also had an ornament exchange and we played Family Feud. How could we not?

It has been fun to decorate our house this year since we have so many pine trees, holly berries and pine cones in our own back yard. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that we have a fireplace and mantle. Even better than that, Andy figured out how to get our fireplace to work. He had to get a gas tank and everything.



We got our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving Day so Emma could help us decorate it. I must say, I was very disappointed when we saw the prices of the trees. I thought Christmas trees were only $80 and up in Hawaii!!! With all the zillions of pine trees around here not only was I shocked that the trees were in the $80 range, but there is one prevailing kind of Christmas tree--Frasier Fir.

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Nativity

Last weekend, our church had a live Nativity scene in front of the church.
A few of the old ladies really get into it and they have, over the years, prepared quite an elaborate stable and manger scene as well as some very nice costumes. They asked Andy and I if we would be Mary and Joseph last Friday night.

We were quite flattered and while I had some serious reservations about standing out in the cold for two hours, I must admit that it wasn't that bad. We each wore several layers of clothes under our costumes and it was probably in the 50s. The best part is that we got 3 Nativity honks from cars passing by.

You can't open that until Christmas

A bunch of people at work watch the TV show The Office each week looking for our favorite things to mention the next day. Last night on The Office Jim wrapped Dwight's desk, chair, computer, and office supplies as a gift and told Dwight to not open the gift until Christmas. I came into work early this morning and wrapped some gifts for a few friends.

Myrtle Beach

A couple in our ward invited us to go with them to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this weekend to see the Dolly Parton Dixie Stampede. Not only were we intrigued, but once we saw that the online advertisement boasted a Christmas celebration involving a 4-course dinner, music and livestock, we had to go check it out. The Dixie Stampede is very similar to Medieval Times. There is a large arena and people sit around it at long dinner tables. Throughout the show, we were served a 4-course dinner consisting of soup, bread, Cornish game hen, a baked potato, ham, an apple turnover etc. The real kicker was that they didn't give us any utensils. I really didn't understand that part of it...I mean, if I were at Medieval Times, then maybe real knights didn't use silverware or maybe they weren't around at that time. But the Dixie Stampede....I guess they were trying to up the redneck factor...? I dunno.

The show was a series of horse races and horseback riding tricks. At one point, the performers reenacted the Nativity Scene and it was really nice. They even had camels there. Here are a few pictures.




We spent the night in Myrtle Beach hoping to be able to see the sights in the morning, but the weather was horrible on Saturday. In fact, it has rained almost the entire weekend. So after walking around the "Broadway" and stopping at Krispy Kreme for donuts and hot chocolate, we decided to head home.

Our Project

Anyone who knows Carol knows how much she loves to do things for other people. She arrived here on Saturday night and decided that Emma needed a chest of drawers for her room. She came up with a really cute idea to fix up an old dresser, paint it white and have Emma help paint flowers on it to match her room. We found an old dresser on Craig's List for $60. Here's what it looks like before.
We moved the dresser into our garage so we could sand it, prime it and paint it. Here are a couple great "during" shots.

Here's a picture of Emma carefully arranging the flower decals on her dresser.

Here's Emma posing with her new dresser in her room. I think she likes it.

Mmmmm...tryptophan

Andy's mom, Carol, came out for Thanksgiving this year. It's been so much fun to have her here. We had Thanksgiving early this year because Emma decided she wanted to come over on Wednesday and Friday so she could spend Thursday at her grandparent's house. It was a good thing that Carol was here because there was no way I would have been able to prepare dinner because I had to work all day. So I had everything set out and ready and Carol assembled several side dishes and the turkey. I need to mention that I bought a Jennie-o "Fool-Proof Turkey" and it did not disappoint. It was delish! So mad props to Jennie-o.

Here we are holding our pear place card holders just before we took Emma home. Emma really liked hers. I'm afraid that with how rushed our pre-Thanksgiving dinner was for me, the only thing I could contribute was a nicely set table.

It was nice to have a leisurely Thanksgiving Day that wasn't eaten up (tee hee) by spending a bunch of time in the kitchen. We were content to eat leftovers and I made a couple more side dishes to add to the feast as well. This year, I'm grateful that Carol was here, I'm grateful to work from home (it would have only made this Thanksgiving even more stressful if I didn't), I'm grateful for the changes in my life that have lead to rich opportunities for growth, and I'm very grateful to be married to Andy--a positive, gregarious, go getter who, it seems, lives to make me happy. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day!!

This is what I train for....

Last week, I was in California. I worked from Vista for most of the week and had the opportunity to eat at some of my all-time favorite restaurants. My absolute favorite place in San Diego is calle "Extraordinary Desserts".
Of course, this place lives up to its name. Jessie and I went to the Little Italy location and had some delicious paninis (mine was a portabello mushroom, goat cheese, zucchini and pesto panini).

Then we each got a delicious dessert!! They were so good!!! I got a slice of a chocolate macadamia nut cake and Jessie got something chocolaty too. It was strange. At one point, Jessie looked around and noticed that there were a lot of women at the restaurant. Hmmm. How could that be?

I highly recommend this place if you're ever in the San Diego area. I wish they would open stores all over the place, but it's probably a good thing for my waistline that they haven't. Mmmmmmm.


I also ate lunch (twice) at In-n-Out. Always excellent. I'm a fan of their 'Animal Style' burgers. I also couldn't leave California without having a carne asada burrito for lunch one day at "Albertaco's". It's one of the many hole-in-the-wall Mexican places where the food is excellent and not too expensive. Good Mexican food is hard to find in Wilmington.

Like I said, I run about 2.5 miles a day and THIS is what I train for!!!!

Sunday School

So about three weeks ago, I was asked to teach the Young Single Adult Sunday School class. I was a little weirded out because I thought it made more sense to have one of the Young Single Adults teach the class, but I accepted anyway. I think I now know why they asked me. For my first week, all of three people showed up. My second week, we had two people show up--a girl and a guy. What's worse is that of the two who did show up, the girl came up to me after the lesson and said, "That can never happen again! That was sooo uncomfortable!!" I was pretty baffled and said, "I don't get it, did you two used to date or something?" She says, "Uh...yeah. We were engaged." Oh great. I get two people to show up and they can barely stand to be in the same room together! Yay for me!

Fortunately, this week was a lot better because we had 14 people show up!! I was so happy, but a little shocked because with so few people showing up each week, I (admittedly) haven't been putting too much time into the lesson prep. I figure that if only one person shows up, I'd rather have us all attend Andy's class.

Speaking of which, Andy's Sunday School class is going really well. He has been using PowerPoint presentations each week and everyone seems to love it. Several people have commented to me that they love his lessons and they think it's a lot easier to pay attention. I wish I could hear more of his lessons!

Halloween Party

For Activity Days this week, we had a Halloween Party. Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good Halloween costume. I had the girls come dressed up in their Halloween costumes and we played several games and had a lot of sugar!


I invited a couple girls from the neighborhood and a few of the girls invited their friends, so we had about 15 girls show up. I now understand why all the parents readily left me with their kids, made comments about how brave I was and practically ran to their cars. The girls were excited for the party and were certainly in rare form.

We played a game where the girls had to find pumpkins that had been hidden around the house. The yellow ones were one point, the orange ones were 5 points and the black ones were 10 points. I was quite impressed that they found them all--and nothing was broken in the process. Then we played "GHOST" (similar to BINGO). They each got a "GHOST" card and had to fill in a variety of Halloween-type words in each of the 24 spaces. We also had a costume contest. The winners were a sock puppet and a bride. We then played the classic, TP Mummy game. As soon as a winner was declared, the room burst into sheer pandemonium.
There was TP flying everywhere. It was hilarious. We let them throw the TP like crazy and it looked like the inside of our house had been TP'd in the matter of about 10 seconds. We then took advantage of our orange kitchen walls and played pin the nose on the Jack-o-Lantern.
I was so grateful for Andy's help!! There was no way I could have organized all those girls by myself. If only there were a way to bottle all that energy...

We polished off the night with a variety of snacks--pumpkin-shaped, orange Rice Krispy Treats, cupcakes and candy. Then their parents came to pick them up. The last two girls went a little crazy making up movies. Andy had hooked up our camera to the TV and the girls all thought it was so great to see themselves on TV. They wanted to act out nonsensical movies that involved a lot of screaming and running around. When I asked them if they knew what blackmail was, they replied, "Yes, it's when someone sends you a letter and doesn't sign it." Yup. Keep screaming.

Tennessee

A couple weeks ago, I went to Nashville, Tennessee to attend the National Guardianship Association's annual Conference. It just so happened to be that my brother and his family and my sister also live there. I went out a couple days early so I could spend some time with them and I had a blast!!

It's no secret that I have the cutest nieces and nephews on the planet. Brianna is smart, beautiful and very level headed. I shared a room with her and one night, before we went to sleep, she read me the beginning of a story she was writing. It was really good. When I told her that thee was a middle school-aged girl from Florida who recently published a book she wrote which made it to the NY Times Best Seller's List, Brianna asked, "You mean I could sell this book and make a profit?" She very much liked that idea. Look out world.

Arick is a ham and loved giving others bunny ears in the pictures I took. Ty is such a sweetheart. He is full of hugs and I spent a good 20 minutes or more telling him what time it was whenever his digital watch changed numbers..."One, Zero, One, Six...One, Zero, One, Seven!" Ella is a typical toddler and loves learning about her surroundings and trying to take on the world by saying "I do it". She was also good for a laugh when we read scriptures one night. Someone would read a phase and wait for her to repeat. She would only pick up on part of the phrase and would often change words to things that made sense to her...which we all found to be very entertaining.

We watched the BYU/Utah State game. It's an understatement to say the Andrew gets into the games. He wears a helmet and Ella needs little encouragement to break out into a Touchdown dance.


On Saturday, we went out on a boat ride. It was very cold, but it was also very beautiful. We even saw Johnny Cash's old, burned down house. There is something to be said for living in the south. The weather is temperate, it rains enough so that it is very green and the people are very nice. If only we could do something about all the bugs!!

Grandma Pearson

I'll preface this post by noting that Andy's mom is an amazing seamstress and I marvel at her sewing talents!! So this week, Carol (or Grandma Carol) sent Emma a package and it arrived on Saturday. When Emma opened it she was nothing less than THRILLED!!!! It contained an 18" doll with a variety of Disney princess outfits all hand sewn by Carol. I was amazed! Emma was in heaven. She also included some Hannah Montana clothes for Emma and blond wigs for both Emma and her doll. Emma immediately got her and her doll all dressed up and ready for a Hannah Montana concert. Emma proceeded to sing and dance around the room performing a concert of sorts for her designer (me) and her security guard (Andy).

Here are some pictures...





Here's a quick video of her concert...

So Sneaky

On Wednesday, Andy called me on his way home from work and said that he wanted to go to ceramics class with me if I would wait for him. So twenty minutes later when I heard the garage door open I was not expecting to see ANNE bound in the door yelling "Surprise!!!"

I have got to be married to the sneakiest guy alive! For three weeks Andy has been planning on surprising me by using some frequent flier miles to fly Anne out here before she starts her new job in Oakland! I sure was surprised. It took me a good minute or so to figure out how Anne could possibly be in my kitchen. Did she move in to one of the houses down the street? Did I completely space out and forget that she was coming here on vacation? No. Andy was just sneaky. He lives to pull one over on me and I think I just need to get used to it. He even went so far as to contact my bosses at work and let them know that my schedule would need to be 'flexible' on Thursday and Friday so I could hang out with Anne.

We had a lot of fun together. I took Anne to Flip's BBQ to try some North Carolina BBQ then we went to my ceramics class. She helped me paint a piece I had been working on. On Thursday, I gave her a royal tour of Wilmington. She kept saying that our place seems very peaceful...which it is. We love how quiet it is around here at night. I had also been planning on going to a spa that night to celebrate my recent raise, so it was so fun to have her here so we could go together! She then took Andy and I out to dinner at On the Border. Yum. We also watched the BYU/TCU game, but I don't want to talk about that. >:-/

On Friday, we hung out around the house, called Meilani for her birthday and then Emma came for a visit. We had a lot of fun playing with her and she stayed the night too. I made Anne take some ceramics pieces home for her and Heather. It's so nice when I don't need to worry about packing and mailing those things out.

On Saturday, Emma was in a dancing mood so we had a dance party and danced to the Jackson 5's ABC and Sugar Daddy. Anne was our paparazi.

After we went to the pumpkin patch on Saturday, I had to take Anne to the airport. So it was a short trip, but it was a lot of fun.

Temple Trip

Last weekend, Andy and I spent the day at the Raleigh temple. We had a wonderful time.

SSG

So I've been in charge of the Activity Days girls for a little while now. I'm in charge of planning activities every other week for all the girls in our ward who are 8 to 12 years old. For the most part, the girls are very good and it's a lot of fun to come up with new ideas and activities for them. Last month, one of the girls mentioned that they have "SSG" on the weeks that we don't have an activity. I was rather intrigued when they first told me about it and a couple weeks ago, they were complaining that they would have to cancel "SSG" because the two ring leaders couldn't have it at their house that coming week. Being the nice person I am, I offered to host SSG at my house. If you're like me, you have no idea what "SSG" is. As it turns out, it stands for "Scripture Study Girls". They basically get together and one of them prepares a lesson, one of them prepares an activity and one of them prepares the snack. What's really impressive is that the girls are completely in charge. I told them that I wasn't going to prepare ANYTHING...and they were just fine with that.

About 7 girls showed up and they discussed "Our Gospel Standards" on the back of their Faith in God booklets. Then they played some clean music to go along with the concept that we shouldn't listen to inappropriate music. I had to stifle a laugh or two because the first few minutes were spent discussing a change in the group's name from SSG to maybe GSG because they don't always study the scriptures...sometimes they just have a gospel discussion. It was great. We then had brownies. There was a little extra time, so we played hide and go seek and sardines. When their parents came to pick them up, they didn't want to leave.

Last year, when I went to Girl's Camp with a different ward, I was very impressed with the idea that the girls want so badly to be around and associate with girls who share their same standards. It's so important for these girls to feel safe and comfortable around their peers and to know that they can rely on each other to support them in keeping their standards high.

This last week, we talked about Family History and we made family trees by using scrapbook paper for the leaves. (A great way to use up scraps!) The girls loved it and they turned out pretty cute.

Yoink!!

I found this on BYU's website. Can you believe they're giving this one away?!?!

BYU Mint Brownies

MAKES ONE 9-BY-13 PAN OF BROWNIES.
PREP AND COOK: 90 min. COOL: 1 hr.
1 c. margarine
1/2 c. cocoa
2 Tbsp. honey
4 eggs
2 c. sugar
1 3/4 c. flour
1/2 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. chopped walnuts
12 oz. chocolate icing (Use your own icing recipe or purchase some chocolate frosting. You can also search the Internet for chocolate icing recipes.)

MINT ICING
5 Tbsp. margarine
dash of salt
3 Tbsp. milk
1 Tbsp. light corn syrup
2 1/3 c. powdered sugar
1/2 tsp. mint extract
1-2 drops green food coloring

1. Melt margarine and mix in cocoa. Allow to cool. Add honey, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix well. Add nuts. Pour batter into a greased 9-by-13 baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool.

2. Prepare mint icing: Soften margarine. Add salt, corn syrup, and powdered sugar. Beat until smooth and fluffy. Add mint extract and food coloring. Mix. Add milk gradually until the consistency is a little thinner than cake frosting.

3. Spread mint icing over brownies. Place brownies in the freezer for a short time to stiffen the icing. Remove from the freezer and carefully add a layer of chocolate icing.

Go Cougs!!!

(This is Andy...) I am excited how high BYU is ranked this early in the season. If as many BCS teams beat each other up as last year (LSU playing for the National Championship with two losses) could BYU play for the National Championship this year?

1. Oklahoma (plays Texas and Texas Tech)
2. Alabama (plays LSU)
3. LSU (plays Alabama)
4. Missouri (plays Texas)
5. Texas (Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas Tech)
6. Penn St. (plays no team currently ranked higher than BYU)
7. Texas Tech (plays Texas and Oklahoma)
8. BYU

Because so many of these teams play each other - if BYU wins out and no other team moves ahead of BYU - the worst BYU could finish is 5th. But with the number of match ups and conference championships - could BYU finish as high as third or second and play for the National Championship? Let the debate begin.

Andy taught Gospel Doctrine today. He did a really good job. He prepared a PowerPoint presentation and everything. I was a little concerned that the PowerPoint slides would be a little too advanced for our ward. I hasten to add that I am justified in thinking that. The last time he taught, he offered to send out a text message and/or email each time he taught in order to remind everyone what the lesson would be about. Well, after sending out the first text message, he got a phone call the next morning from a guy in our ward who thanked him for emailing his cell phone and it was obvious that he didn't know how to retrieve the "email" because Andy had to explain what a text message was and what he had sent. Anyway, a lot of people participated, the visuals were very helpful and it went over quite well. Looks like his MBA is paying off!

Also, on Friday, I went to the doctor for an allergy test. I don't think I'm particularly susceptible to allergens and it's not very often that I get a sinus headache, but after seeing Paula's impressive list of things she's allergic to, I decided to get it done. Basically, the doctor 'injected' my back with about 56 potential allergens. Then I waited for 15 minutes for my skin to react...or not. As a general rule, whenever a doctor walks into the room and says, "Whoa!" it's not a good thing. Well, that's what happened to me. As it turns out, I am very allergic to dust and dust mites (category 4++). I am also allergic to a variety of grasses (category 3) as well as Red Cedar and Sweet Gum pollens, mold and (drum roll please...) cats and dogs (category 2)!!! Woo Hoo! I'm officially thrilled that I'm allergic to cats and dogs and am very hopeful that we will never have to have a pet. On the flip side, I am not allergic to seafood/shell fish. Darn. I had high hopes.

Raku Party

Two weeks ago, when "Hurricane Hannah" struck, my ceramics class had to postpone its Raku party till today. After spending about 8 hours around a whole lot of smoke, I came home with a bunch of cool pots and I smelled like a campfire. Essentially, we put our pots in a propane kiln until it got up to about 1,850 degrees. Then each piece is unloaded into a small garbage can containing newspaper or other flammable materials. You let it burn a little and then you cover it and let it cool off for a while. It was a lot of fun and I am quite satisfied with the way my pieces turned out.

There was one piece that my classmates wouldn't let me throw away. A few weeks ago, when I was trimming my pot, I accidentally turned the wheel on full blast and it went spinning into oblivion! It broke and my classmates all thought it looked really cool. I decided to keep it and I think it looks very interesting. I think I'll probably try an sell it and I'll have to keep myself from laughing if anyone buys it.

I'm including a slide show of the pieces I have made this "semester". Not all of them are Raku. The more shiny/metallic and the crackle pieces are Raku. Enjoy!