28 things

I decided to make a list of 28 things to do before my next birthday (Sep 14) and here it is:

1. Get my Drivers License (That's right, I still don't have one)
2. Go to The Ledges in Boone, IA (Never been there!)
3. Make an Ice Cream Cake
4. Go to a movie on opening night.
5. Make a quilt.
6. Host a "Party" (ie 31, tupperware, clever container)
7. Make noodles from scratch.
8. Complete a 5k. (This will NOT be easy, as I consider 200m to be long distance)
9. Teach 2 people how to sew/craft. (Believe it or not, some people don't know how!)
10. Find/Choose a home church.
11. Complete a FaceBook Fast (maybe start with 24 hrs, and work up to a week?)
12. Make a pie from scratch.
13. Have a date night with dinner & a movie.
14. Make a board game.
15. Go through EVERY item of clothing in the house, and minimize.
16. Go one month spending only $50/wk on food & house supplies.
17. Create a picture collage for each year Mike & I have been together.
18. Go to a Zoo with the girls. (ANY Zoo)
19. Learn to crochet. (Hopefully it isn't as dangerous as knitting)
20. Make Butter! (And cheese if I get really crazy!)
21. Make a dress/skirt for each of the girls.
22. Participate in the 2013 Iowa Games.

:+:+: The last few are kind of vague, but I have attempted to quantify them, comparing to my current participation in each activity now, to my hopeful goals. :+:+:
(I will be tracking them on my FlyLady Calendar!)

23. Send more (snail) mail. -at least once a month.
24. Read more (not at the computer). -Once a week?
25. Exercise more. -Twice a week.
26. Journal/Blog more. -Once a week.
27. Spend time in spiritual devotion. -Twice a week.

And my favorite (Every mom will understand)...
28. Sleep in until... I wake up!

A New Year with Resolutions to Keep.... or Break

Every year people all over the world make resolutions to start the year with great intentions. Unfortunately by mid February, the intentions and zeal of the resolutions are long forgotten. I am one of those people. I hate that when you make resolutions, you almost always reach for too high a goal, and set yourself up for failure. It's either that or the goal isn't a measurable thing i.e. "Be healthy" or "Stop Worrying." I decided to keep this all in mind when making my resolutions for 2012.

1. Go to bed between 9:30-10:30pm most of the time.  
-This was actually a resolution from 2011 that I did a descent job of keeping... but it's not quite habit yet.
2. Get reacquainted w/ FlyLady and her wonderful purple ways.  
-For those of you that don't know: flylady.net is a wonderful site full of tips and methods for cleaning, organizing and decluttering your home AND keeping it that way.
3. Unpack and declutter ALL boxes from us moving in November.
-I love this one because it is a very measurable/visual goal.
4. Finish reading the 4 books I started last year- AND review them (on here).
-Last year my resolutions included "Read 6 books". Well I failed at that, but I did START 4 books :)
4. Start blogging again...once a week?
-Again this is a measurable goal. Yay!

Notice that I have nothing on the list referring to losing weight or getting in shape. It's not that those aren't goals of mine (in actuality they are HUGE goals). It's more that I don't want to list these things as ToDo's... :)

HD Channel Listing Ames IA

When I first got HD channels here in Ames IA I was quite upset that I had to relearn all the channel numbers ... and couldn't find a list anywhere... so I sat down and flipped through channels and wrote it all down to share. Here you go.

51-1 Hallmark
51-5 ABC Fam
51-7 Comedy C.
51-11 Discovery
51-13 Fox News
51-19 TLC
51-21 WE
51-25 Big Ten
52-1 FX
52-5 E!
52-7 Vs.
52-9 Speed
52-13 BET
52-15 Bravo
52-19 Animal Planet
52-21 USA
52-23 Travel
53-5 Cartoon Network
53-7 TBS
53-9 TNT
53-11 Spike
53-13 TV Land
53-15 A&E
53-17 MTV
53-19 Nick
53-21 MSNBC
53-23 tru
54-1 Food
54-3 HGTV
54-5 Soap
54-7 Telemundo
54-9 Disney
54-11 A&E
54-13 History
54-19 ESPN Classic
54-21 SyFy
54-23 AMC
55-5 ESPN
55-13 ESPN2
55-15 Fox Midwest
55-17 Weather
56-5 LMN
87-2 NBC
87-4 Ion
87-6 CBS
87-8 ABC
87-12 CW KCWI
88-2 IPTV
88-4 MC 22
88-8 THIS

Traveling in hel...I mean Illinois (Same thing!)

A couple weekends ago we were supposed to drive to IL for a wedding... here is how it played out!

We started off leaving 2 hours later then planned. That was mainly my fault due to not being completely packed, but partially Mike's fault cause he didn't know what time he was going to be done with work. The weather was horrible. It was pouring so hard that visibility was 50-100 ft for the first 2 hours. This just stressed Mike out and made him very tense. His neck started hurting much sooner in the trip because of this. While it was pouring, we all of a sudden came to a standstill. After about 5 minutes of being stopped, I called my mother-in-law to see if she could check the news for accidents or whatever. After 5 minutes of no news, we found out the road was flooded and we would have to turn around and find a different road all on our own. Luckily for me I can read maps... even old ones with water spots all over them.

Mike is now EXTREMLY stressed. I think he has a sincere phobia of getting lost, and as much as he trusts my map reading skills, he was even more stressed then before. At this point we had gotten on a smller highway which would only take us about 10 minutes out of our way. THEN we came to a stand still again. As we crept forward we came to what looked like a river flowing across the hwy at a rushing speed. This "river" was atleast 50ft wide and 2-3ft deep and we needed to drive through it. We wouldn't have crossed if we hadn't just witnessed a car the same size as ours go through safely. Needless to say, this was now even more stressful.

After this point I demanded we stop at a gas station because I had a horrible headache from reading the map while driving. The next hour or so was spent with me trying to navigate the map. I missed one turn off which took us another 45 minutes out of our way. And then when we finally got to the Mississippi River crossing, there was a detour so I took my own way which ended up getting us lost in IL on a tollway. So we had to turn around, costing us an additional $5 to get off and on and off again from this dumb tollway. After the long trip we finally made it to the hotel at 10:30 pm, when we originally planned to get there around 6pm.

We were very hungry and there were ZERO fast food places within eye sight. We didn't WANT to drive and didn't know where we would have gone anyways. So we walked to this little bar and grill right by the hotel. When we got in there it was karaoke night and the most unorganized place ever. No servers, no menus. Couldn't here anything. Ugh. Very disappointing. So we went back to our room and I ended up ordering Pizza Hut (which only took 8 calls to find the one that delivered to us).-So the first day SUCKED!

Saturday morning we went to the restaurant located in the hotel for breakfast. It was a decent breakfast, but I don't know about it costing $15 a person. Then we went to the pool and swam for a little bit. The heater for the hot tub was broken. The sauna didn't work very well. Then Mike wanted to play racquet ball. I had never played but agreed to play. There was a $10 charge to play, which I didn't tell Mike about. It would have stressed him out and it was the one thing he was really looking forward to doing. So I spent about an hour trying to learn a new sport and have my husband criticize my every move as I lost each game by over 20 points. Then we went back to the same bar and grill to try it for lunch. The food was good but when I went to pay my card was declined. After we left I called the bank to find out my account was negative $600 and there were atleast $500 in pending transactions which would be recieving fees of $35 each (about 12 of them). (It turned out that most were false charges but in turn caused checks to bounce and othr angry people).

As if nothing else could go wrong, my pancreas started hurting. In an effort to not miss the entire reception, I decided that I would nap instead of going to the ceremony. Luckily for me it worked and I was good to go for the reception. When we got to the reception there was a group of my friends there that I had no idea were going to be there. In this group was a guy that I used to work with at Pizza Hut. He is truly one of my best guy friends. So this was a good part! Yay for something good! There was an open bar, which I was looking forward too, even though Mike specifically told me he didn't want me to get trashed. This one bar tender was a total d!ck to me. He wouldn't serve me half the things I asked for when he would serve it to others, and I could get it from a different tender.

There was lots of very yummy food. There was great music and lots of dancing. After the dance we actually invited a few people back to our room for card games. We played games till 2 am! When I woke up in the morning with a pounding headache I realized my ibuprofen was in the car... and I also couldn't complain cause Mike would be upset that I had drank enough to get a hangover. We then went to breakfast (paid by the wedding party). After breakfast there was a note under our door saying that in order to check out all you had to do was leave your keys on top of the TV and thats it.

So we left and 30 minutes into our trip I realized I left my phone charger there. So I called one of the guys I knew was still at the hotel. He went to try and get it and the desk told him we weren't checked out yet and would have to come back to check out or be charged another day as penalty. So we had to turn around which involved 4 extra tolls (about $3 total). Mike is now insanely pissed and telling me how dumb I was for thinking I could just leave without talking to the desk, even though I showed him the paper.

It turned out that we weren't checked out because my bank was denying their charges for the stay. Luckily we had some cash to buy gas on the way back. I went up to the room and got my charger and we left again. (More tolls). When we got to the Mississippi we had to take my own little detour again, which at least didn't get us lost, just stressed Mike out some. Then we stopped for gas and there was an arbys there. I got a large fry and wanted Bronco Berry sauce for it (tastes like sweet and sour). They gave me the frys and then told me they didn't have any sauce. I didn't frickin want the frys without the sauce. UGH! It was only now that I tried to use the new adapter for out ipod to play it over the radio in the car. Guess what: It didn't work! When we finally got back home we had to pick up Reyna from Mikes parents house and they wanted us to stay for a evening of family activities. When we declined, they tried to guilt us into staying... we still went home. When we got home Mike wanted dinner, and Reyna wanted a bath. I took care of them then tried again at getting my Sims 3 to work. After 4 hours of working on my computer I STILL have an un-working copy of the Sims 3. It won't work until EA puts out a patch for it. -So this was my horrible weekend that I had been looking SO forward too.

This is a pic of me and one of the friends I had there- Samantha! (Still looking for my pic with Mike)