Cable Spaghetti

Scott and I are a perfect match. One of the wonderful things we share is the love of organization!

This past Saturday Scott needed to go in to work to reorganize the servers and such. It needed to be done when the office was closed so he could disconnect all the networks and phones. I didn't want him to be lonely, so after I went and had my hair done I picked up lunch and came to keep him company. I ended up being a big help, too, because he was having to do all the work and keep track of what everything was at the same time, and once I got there I could keep records of what was connected to what, and then read it all back to him when it was all taken apart.

So here's one of the server stacks before:

Nasty, huh?

Anyway, here it is after Scott stripped all the cables. That took HOURS because they were so tangled. Every few minutes I heard a "Damn it, so-and-so, why did you do it like this?!", but mostly it went smoothly (it just took time). There were a few cables he couldn't undo, such as the firewall cables, so we had to work around those.

The next few hours were spent rewiring everything. WHAT A JOB. We got everything run very neatly, in nice bundles, with NO TANGLES.

Once everything was all organized we just had to put the shields over the cables and can you even believe how neat this looks?!

Here's another server stack that is now organized (trust me, I know it looks like a spaghetti factory, but everything's bundled and color coded and OH BOY you should have seen it before Scott got his hands on it!):

Having things nice and neat just feels so...right.

It's So Short!

I've been feeling totally blah lately. You know the feeling. I needed to spice something up, and I hadn't done anything to the hair for a while, so Friday night I decided I needed to do something. When I woke up Saturday morning I got on the internet and looked through tons of websites about what cuts are best for your face shape and such. I even found a site where I could upload a picture of myself and superimpose celebrities' hairstyles to see how they would look.

I finally decided on a layered, A-line, long bob. I spent the afternoon trying to get a good picture of it to send to Mim, and most of them kinda suck so I'll just post them all:

I think this picture looks the best (with it tucked behind my ears):

And here's the back, which looks funny here but it really is cut evenly, I promise!

It's one of those wash and wear cuts, so I still don't have to blow my hair dry every morning (WIN), but it's a little cute and a little flirty and I feel a little...refreshed, I suppose.

Now I just have to grow it out (Scott prefers long hair) (don't worry, he still thinks I'm pretty).

And then in another year maybe I'll go get another haircut...

Also, it's a new, auburnish color, but you can't really tell in these pictures. Someday maybe I'll get a good camera instead of just using the one on my phone...

Pictures To Catch Up

I hate Blogger with an unbridled passion. I hate centered text, but it won't let me use left alignment because it's a piece of...never mind...just got it to work...

First up is a picture of the lovely Em, who has changed her hair once again. It's a very very dark blue, so dark that you can't tell it's blue until you're right up on it. I love it.

Nyah is starting to eat solid foods! Here she is trying sweet potatoes for the first time. Only babies are adorable when they spit food out; anyone else gets dirty looks.

This is Mim's deck. This is only one of the snow storms she's had this winter. We haven't been so lucky; we get a bit, then it melts, then we get a bit more, and right now it's staying but who knows for how long?

Poor Kwiddens finally got her wisdom teeth taken out. This picture is not flattering at all, but she said I could put it on the internet so here you go. She was miserable not being able to eat regularly, and at one point she got dry socket and had to go in for extra care. She hated the clove oil they packed them with, but remembering back to when I had mine taken out, I loved it! It smelled so good and the pain was all but gone!

A long time ago I posted a picture of a pair of lacy gloves I had made, but I never posted about the scarf that matches them:

It's a wool/cashmere blend, so it's super soft and surprisingly warm.

Here is my Christmas tree skirt. I made it myself.

Here is my Christmas tree, all decked out with my handmade ornaments. I can't decide if I'm sick of them or not. Part of me wants to just get new, store-bought ornaments and make it look more put-together, and sell the old set. There's a lot there, and it's all handmade lace, so I might be able to get at least $100 for it. Maybe.

Monday Musings

Last night at about 2:00 a.m. Scott and I were woken up by people yelling outside our window. Scott got up and looked, and it looked like it was just two people yelling, but not physically fighting or anything, so he just got back in bed and ignored it. BUT, after a minute or so, the woman started screaming bloody murder "Help! Help! Get away from me! Help! Let go of me! Help! Help!"...basically what I would be yelling if I were being attacked, so Scott got up, grabbed his gun just in case (concealed, of course), and went outside to see if he could get a better look and make sure nobody got murdered right in front of our house. Meanwhile, I called the police.

They sent a few officers our way while I described what was happening to the emergency operator. While the police were on their way, Scott went out toward the fighting couple as soon as it was apparent that there wasn't any physical violence. They talked a bit, and the man seemed upset and was pacing around, but nobody was yelling any more. I just stayed inside the house, watching what was going on, but unable to hear anything at all.

Two cruisers showed up and one cop went to talk to Scott, while the other went to question the two people who had been yelling. A third person appeared seemingly out of nowhere (he had been inside a car parked on the street) and soon enough Scott headed back inside and told me the whole story.

It turns out the two of them were insanely drunk, and had come from a party down the street. They were bickering, and the woman was overreacting to the man following her. She had left the party, claiming she was just going to walk home (but she lived in Ogden, around 15 miles away) and the man had followed her to try to get her to come back so their designated driver (the guy in the parked car) could take her home. So, really it wasn't a big deal. We did find out that the guy had fallen pretty badly at the party and had a few broken ribs, so the police let them go and take him to the hospital.

We seem to attract trouble. I suppose that's what we get for being the unofficial neighborhood watch.

The gym I go to is closed on Sunday, much like many businesses here in Utah. Saturday I got in a really good workout (I'm still sore), and then spent the rest of the day with Kwiddens. Sunday morning I woke up and the whole day I just felt...blah. I really missed working out! It's only been two weeks, but every day I wake up and don't even have to debate with myself whether I'll go to the gym or not; it's always a yes. It's only a matter of when I can fit it into my day.

I am really loving my X-Biking classes, so I invested in a gel seat cover, which will hopefully make it easier on my derriere. I also bought some new shoes, since the shoes I have been wearing are really old and slightly too big. I wanted to pick up a heart rate monitor watch, but they cost more than I'm willing to spend right now.

We went to a new Chinese restaurant that opened recently a few blocks away from our house. I wasn't impressed. The worst part, however, was the CHRISTMAS MUSIC. It's SEPTEMBER. Also, Wal-Mart was putting up Thanksgiving stuff even before the Halloween stuff.

We bought more tombstones for our Halloween graveyard and materials to make a creepy rickety fence to go around it. We went to a seasonal Halloween store in the mall to check to see if they had anything that would add to the effects, but we were very disappointed to find almost the entire store dedicated to costumes, and just a tiny corner had decorations, which were all overpriced or cheap-looking (or both) anyway.

Halloween this year is on a Sunday, and for Utah that means that everyone will go trick-or-treating on Saturday. This would be fine with me if everyone in the community who wanted to participate were Mormon, or some other religion that prevents things like that on Sundays, but that isn't the case. So I'm not sure if I'm going to have to do Halloween on Saturday and Sunday, for the Mormons and non-Mormons, respectively.

Saturday when Kwiddens came over we tried to dye my hair back to my natural color. I'm tired of the pink streaks. We picked out a color that matched my own, applied it according to the directions...and it didn't work. The blonde bits are still blonde...you would think they would pick up the color just fine and become brown but NOOOO, that would be too easy. So I think after work today I'm going to head over to the beauty school and have a new color put on, just one color all over. Maybe I'll go a little bit darker for fall. We'll see.

That's about it. It's a Monday. The end.

Just Some Thoughts On A Friday

I got a haircut the other day, and the stylist gave me the longest, most relaxing scalp massage ever. I double tipped her.

I hate nearly all reality TV. But I LOVE Pawn Stars. Chumlee's freaking hilarious.

My neck has been all weird for the last few days. I think I slept on it wrong and now it hurts to move around. Then, my lower back started hurting. I think my nerves are pinched. It's getting better though.

I read Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. Oh wait, I didn't read it, I devoured it in two days. It made me want to be a mathematician.

We have all these yellow patches on our lawn. We've watered it enough, as there are lush green patches as well. So we had the lawn guys come over and they took a look, and we have grubs. $40 got us some insecticide, and now we're supposed to water lots and lots until the lawn grows back. I hope it works. We usually have the best-kept lawn on our street.

I had my company's summer party today. Scott met me there after we were both done with work early for the day. There was tasty food, and we got to just sit and relax and get paid for it. It did get boring after a while, though. I don't actually know and talk to very many people in my company at all: the lab people I see every day, and the couple people I bring paperwork to in the mornings, and that's it. So I sat by the people I know and we were getting bored...and then they started drawing for prizes! And guess who won a home theater system? Yes, that's right. Surround sound speakers and a new DVD player. I win. We have them hooked up now and we're watching Aliens. Subwoofer. Oh yes. Buster's not sure what to make of it, though.

Scott turned 26 this past Tuesday. Em's birthday was the same day, so last weekend we all met up for dinner. It's so rare that Kwiddens, Isaac, Nyah, Em, Jorg, Mim, Scott and I ALL get together. We're all so busy and we have schedules that don't mesh very well, plus we all live at least an hour away from each other. Then, yesterday, Kwiddens and Isaac had some things to take care of at Hill AFB, so she stopped by and I got to hold the baby. I can't believe how big she's getting. She can almost hold herself up!

I want...ice cream.

And that's about it.

Mim's Room

This past Memorial Day weekend, aside from dying Em's hair Mim and I spent hours and hours and hours talking and talking and talking and brainstorming and plotting and planning and we decided to paint Mim's room.


This seems to happen a lot. We will be talking about something totally random and all of a sudden we decide to paint a room in Mim's house! This time we needed to do Mim's room, because we're trying to create a sanctuary for her in there where she can go sit down and lock the door and think happy thoughts involving the happy colors her walls will be.


So every time this happens, Mim has already chosen a color to match the "mood" she is trying to create. It's always a very specific mood, or a feeling...it's hard to describe. Anyway, she has already attempted to pick colors, and sometimes she has already bought a little sample color and painted swatches on the walls, and sometimes she has already painted the entire room and it has turned out terribly in either case, so I have to step in.


So next we head down to the hardware store down in Payson, where we start browsing for colors. We pretty much start from scratch because I am WAY better at this than she is. So we spend about an hour looking at colors and I make lots and lots and lots of suggestions with different combinations and make sure every suggestion coordinates with the pillowcases we brought with us to make sure everything in the room matches.


Finally, after bickering and lots of "Well, um, hmmm, I'm not sure...maybe?" I suddenly hit on The Perfect Combination Of Colors, and the heavens open and you can hear angels singing really awesome rock songs.


So this time we picked this very serene pale blue (with just the teeniest bit of green mixed in) and a slightly darker version of the same color, but with just a teensy bit more green than the light color, and the dark color is going on one wall and the alcove above her bathroom and the light color is going everywhere else.


I tried to take a picture, but the best part of this whole process is that we don't decide to do this until the hardware store is about to close, and by the time we get home it's dark, and we stay up very very late painting, until we are all giggly and we finally collapse into bed and pass out.


So, here are some pictures, some taken in the dark, so you can't actually tell what colors they are so I'm really not sure why I bothered but I love putting pictures here, so there.



Now, Mim has a really nice room with all sorts of architecturally interesting bits, and one of these is this cool alcove above her bathroom. This was definitely the fun part to paint, especially because by the time we got there we were already in the giggly tired phase.


So the only way we could paint it was to climb up there!



At one point she needed to turn around so she could paint the other end of the alcove, and the alcove is only about 2.5 feet wide, so turning around involved some giggle-inducing acrobatics:



We only ended up getting only one coat of just the darker color done before we were so tired we decided to finish later. Which we didn't. So it still isn't finished, and probably won't be until I get the chance to drive down there for another weekend.


The awesome part is, we needed painting snacks, and since we're trying to be healthy we made our own salad. It has romaine, raspberries and blackberries and strawberries, and pineapple (which didn't end up fitting in with the rest of the fruits) and grapes and black olives and poppy seed dressing and OH BOY was it good, so of course I took a picture.



Just try to tell me that doesn't look like a bowl full of heaven.

Red To Blue

So this past weekend for Memorial Day I went down to Mim's to spend the weekend. One of the main events was dying Em's hair. When she's in school she has to stick to "natural" colors per the school dress code (technically, her shade of red is against the rules but the teachers all like it so much they never write her up for it!), but as soon as it's summer it's time to kick it up a notch.

So here is my beautiful sister Em with her old color:


It's actually more vibrant than this but you get the idea.

Right before we started:


Isn't she adorable? I mean, ahem, totally cool?

Anyway so the game plan was to bleach her hair as white as it would go and then put the blue dye over it to get an icy blue sort of color all over.

We applied the bleach and waited...and waited...after about an hour we figured we should probably rinse it out and this is is what we got:



Not quite as white as we wanted...that red was so stubborn! So, we had Mim go buy another bleaching kit... We applied that and waited...and waited...but it had faded all it was going to fade, so the plan had to change. We decided that the blue over the red would make purple and she was ok with having blue roots and purple tips, so on we went.

Right as I was putting the blue dye on Em had a stroke of brilliance and thought it would be awesome if we left a little bit of it reddish orange in the front, so I sectioned off some and left it while the blue dye did its thing.

So originally it was going to be all blue but I think this turned out much cooler:



Some reddish orange in the front with blue roots in the back and a frosty purple on the tips.

My sister is SO Rock 'n' Roll!

Now, short rant:

When I was Em's age I would have LOVED to have blue hair. Or really any color other than my own. But Dad was so strict...he didn't want us wearing any makeup or even nail polish, let alone dye our hair. Finally Mim convinced him that it would be ok for me to dye it a little, and so I got to dye it a slightly lighter shade of my own natural hair color. So exciting, I know.

Anyway, now that Dad is out of the picture (mostly, anyway) Mim has seen the light and relaxed and realized that it's FREAKING FUN to have crazy colors in your hair, and is a lot more lenient with Em and Jorg than she ever was with me and Kwiddens.

Totally not fair.

Just another gem of a memory from my childhood.

Rant over.

The Whole Family

So this weekend I went down to Mim's house to hang, and Kwiddens drove down there as well. I had a lot of fun, since it's been a while since I've been with the whole family.

Friday I got off work at 1:00, which was further proof that I'm INVINCIBLE SUPERCHEMIST because I completed my work and a large chunk of my coworker's (he had the day off to hang with his family). I went to the mall and bought my new phone (Samsung Rogue, LOVE IT) and get its screen in protective film. This took a long time for whatever reason, and by 4:30 I was on the road. I got into Orem at about 6:00 and got a table for Mim and myself, and Mim got there and we ate tasty food and talked about lots and lots of things, which we haven't been able to do in a while, so it was really awesome. Right after we paid, Kwiddens called and said she had made it into town, so we all went to Cold Stone and got ice cream, and Mim thought it was gross. Because she's crazy. I have to admit, though, that the ice cream there has a different texture, and that was what she didn't like about it. Oh well. So I headed down to the house, and they had some errands to run, and came later, and we stayed up late talking and joking and just having fun.


Saturday I woke up and took a long relaxing shower and then Mim and I went to the Math Lab at UVU to tutor some of her students and she let me write the test for one of her classes. Once I finished, she looked it over and as she was reading it she got this evil grin on her face...yes, I made it tricksy. Kwiddens was supposed to meet with us, but she got stuck in traffic for like two hours because of traffic for the Festival of Colors at the Hari Krishna temple near Spanish Fork. So eventually she got through it and we met in Provo and ate at Los Hermanos, which was a little disappointing and the service was SO SLOW, but they had absolutely amazing strawberry lemonade so it was ok. This past week I've been feeling sick every time I eat, so I just went back to Mim's while they went to the mall. Once we were all home we all went and hung out in Mim's bathroom while we did each other's hair (her bathroom is huge so it's super awesome).


So my panels that were bright red last time had faded so they're fuchsia now.
Ignore the messy hair, I had just washed it and you know I can't be bothered to dry it.


Anyway, so after that it was pretty late and I drove home and went to sleep.


Today I pretty much slept all day...I felt like I had been drugged I was so tired. Anyway, now I'm watching Stargate and trying to decide whether I should work on Kwiddens's baby blanket. I'm feeling particularly lazy today (as demonstrated by sleeping all day).

Utah Weirdos

A blog friend suggested I post about some of the interesting/weird things Utahns do. The problem with this is that most of these things are more of a Utah Mormon culture thing. So I'll list a few things, and try to keep it kind, and you'll think it's hilarious!

Instead of saying "the eff word" they say Flip! or Fetch! or Frick!, which I find hilarious, because we all know what they're actually thinking...

As everyone knows, A LOT of Utahns are Mormon, and they're not supposed to drink coffee, but there are so many people I know who drink like ten diet cokes a day for the caffeine (the rules aren't specifically for caffeine, just coffee and tea, so some people interpret it as no caffeine and some don't).

Weird names. Not even kidding. Kwiddens says she knew a girl named Bronwyn.

Nobody here knows how to cook. Meat gets overcooked to the point of being like leather. Pasta gets mushy. Vegetables are wilted. Foods that should not be combined are...like cauliflower and mayonnaise...and Jello with vegetables in it...Utah definitely has a Jello thing. It's like its own food group.

BAD DRIVING. I'm sure this is true everywhere you go, but it really does seem particularly bad here. My biggest pet peeve about Utah drivers is that they run red lights like crazy on left turns. After the light has turned red, usually three or four cars go ahead and turn even though they weren't even in the intersection when it turned red. Stoplights here have an extra few seconds between green lights in each direction, and I can only assume that this is why.

Also, for a state that gets snow every year, nobody here knows how to drive in snow. Pathetic.

The higher up on the mountain you are, the higher your social status. People assume Mim is incredibly wealthy because her house is up on the mountain, and she's just as broke as everyone else in the world. The funniest thing is, up on the mountain is right along the fault line...really the stupidest place to build a house, if we have an earthquake.

Remember in the 60's when women would back-comb and hairspray sections in the back of their hair so it was poofy in the back and on top? Yeah. They do that here. It's ugly as hell, too.

There are other things, but they're more negative and more related to Mormons specifically, and the last thing I want to do is Mormon-bash, so I'll end it here.

Happy Valley is a weird, weird place.

Dye: An Adventure

So.

I had a birthday this past week. 24!

I got some birthday money from my grandma and grandpa (there'll be a post about that) so I decided to treat myself to something fun. I've been wanting to do something cool with my hair for a while but have either been broke or too busy.

Whenever I want to get something done I go to the beauty school. It's cheaper, and the instructors are there every step of the way so you know that even if there's a mistake it will be fixed.

Which I experienced firsthand.

So last time I dyed my hair (September) I had a lighter brown on top and a much darker brown on the underside and I loved it. It was the perfect color combination for my complexion and added depth to my own, boring, mousy brown color.

So this time I decided to do the same colors but add a little zest: hot pink peekaboo panels!

I went in and my stylist's name was Amanda. Let me just say that through this entire thing she was awesome.

So I told her what I wanted and she whipped out the color book and we decided on what colors to do and everything. Then she went to get the supervisor to ok the formulas.

Now, they kept the formulas from last time on file. And they worked perfectly last time. So you would think that they would use them again. But this instructor, RUTH, was an absolute moron and told them "No, you should use this developer instead of the other one" and when they took the dye off the top my roots were ORANGE. Not like, redhead orange, but orange like the Jayne hat I made earlier.

So, at this point they had bleached the panels to put in the pink, so they decided that they would put in the pink and then re-dye the roots with the correct developer this time and fix it. So, they went back to mix the colors and they came back out...they had failed to check to make sure they still had pink. Yep, they didn't.

So, out came the color book again, and we looked at all our options, and I was very disappointed because um, hello, pink is my favorite color. But, it was already bleached and ready to go, so I just chose to do fire engine red instead. Red tends to fade more quickly than most other colors, so I figured once it faded I could reapply pink and my stylist said she would help me get a hold of the right kind of dye later, and what the heck, red is fun too.

So they put the red on and then reapplied the new, correct, dye to the roots on top. We let it process and then went to rinse it out. Immediately we could see that the red was PERFECT AND AWESOME AND WOW COOL! However...my roots were still orange. Very very orange.

So, we called yet another instructor over (we'd gone through like three) and they decided on another formula to mix up to try to fix it again. So we applied that and waited...and they were still orange.

So, another instructor came over and pow-wowed with the other one, and came up with another formula, and they put it on, and while we waited for that I put in a formal complaint to the manager that it was, in fact, an instructor that made the wrong formula in the very beginning, and she should have known better. Oh, and she was really rude to me too and that bugged me.

So then we rinsed that off and it was wet but it looked better, so we dried it...and that took a long time because my hair is very thick.

But, once it was dry, the roots were almost exactly the same color as the rest! WIN!

So anyway. That was fun. I got there at 3:45 and was there until 9:45...6 hours. But it was fun, and I was in a good mood.

My attitude was basically this: that's what you risk when you go to the beauty school to get your hair done. Someone is bound to make a mistake somewhere and as long as they are willing to fix it, I'm cool with it. The only reason I was pissed off was because it was the freaking instructor that messed it all up.

So here's a picture of the back...it's really messy because I slept on it but you can see the red peeking through. It's all around, like a halo, and when I move you can see it peek through and I LOVE IT and it actually looks redder than this:

SO rock and roll.

Anyway. So I got birthday money and I was going to have fun with it and I knew this was going to be expensive. The instructor at the beginning was going to charge me $20 for the base color, and another $6 for adding another color to the underside, and then she wanted to charge $3 per panel, and they ended up putting in 20 panels (there's a lot more red in there than it looks like in that picture) and so it was going to be about $90. And that was fine with me, because it was birthday money. BUT, when the stylist sent me up to the register to pay she wrote down that there were only 5 panels (yay! saving money!) so that was going to be only about $40. AWESOME. So I brought the formula slip up to the register and they were like "$14 please" and I was like, "Um, you didn't look at the slip, I had panels and everything" and they were like "Yeah (sneaky looks on their faces) we're having a special". The instructor that had priced it out earlier was gone so they were able to fudge it and I had like $100 worth of work done for $14.

And that's the story about my birthday hair dye.

Another List

1. Scott put change on Buster's back and he actually stood still. He's worth about 10 cents now.2. Scott and I sleep with separate blankets. If we share one I hog it. I also hog the bed, which is why we are going to buy a king after this whole mortgage thing gets done and we have money again.

I am currently sleeping with a blanket I have had since 8th grade. Mim wanted me and Kwiddens to like our room so we painted the walls and got rugs and candles and such and we got these matching sheet/blanket sets. It's wavy blue and green and teal and purple stripes. They're all but threadbare but I still use them. Scott is currently sleeping with the yellow quilt my Nana made me when I was in 3rd grade. Surprisingly, it's in better shape than the one I'm sleeping with.

3. Here I am, working on my cross stitch. Allene is also working on hers. We look like old ladies.
I finished all the stitching on it and I just have to clean it and frame it and then I'm giving it to Mim. It's hideous, and that is why she will like it so much!

4. Another lab we sontract with gets to move into a new building, so while they are moving I get to do ALL of their heavy metal testing. I also have monthly water testing tomorrow. I will be staying late, probably all week.

5. I feel like a big fat failure because after losing all that weight I've gained some of it back. I'm still way smaller than I was in January (YAY) but I still feel dumb...I've been eating out a lot, and you know those portions aren't exactly small. Plus there's the ice cream addiction and I eat a lot of Pop-Tarts (speaking of, Scott had never in his entire life tried a Pop-Tart until this weekend. It made him sick. He will never eat one again. I don't understand this.)

BUT, I have my new treadmill and I actually exercised today, and I drank Slim-Fast instead of getting one of those amazing greasy breakfast rolls from the gas station on the corner. The taste left something to be desired, but I felt better, both physically and emotionally.

Someday I will be thinner.

I wish ice cream had no calories.

Life just sucks sometimes.

6. I actually put away some laundry today. Yay me!

7. I went to the beauty school on Saturday and got a haircut and color. I like the haircut very much. The color turned out to be a little too brassy, I think. It looks ok though, except for when it's wet, and then it looks orange for some strange reason.

8. Something is not working out. I haven't missed any meds and I still feel like I'm spiraling downward into a depressive phase. I was a little manic a few weeks ago, so it's about time, but usually the meds make it so I can't really tell when my moods are changing. This scares me a little. It's a scary thing, being lost inside your own mind.

9. I am so amused by the new fish gadget on my sidebar. If you click on it it puts food in the water and they come eat it. They also follow your cursor around. I thought grass would be a funnier background than water.

That's all I can think of. I'm really enjoying blogging, can you tell? There's just something about getting it all on paper (or hard drives, whatever). Maybe eventually I'll be able to talk more about my feelings. Maybe.

Blue! Ice Cream! Not blue ice cream.

Last night we stayed up way too late, and then after we had stayed up way too late, we remembered that we were going to do my hair. We did, which resulted in being up really late, and we kinda got a second wind, and ended up in bed, side by side, with two laptops (also there are two computers in the basement plus another laptop, and also on the night stand next to Scott there was another small internet-PDA thingy, plus we had 3 cell phones and 3 or 4 mp3 devices...we may need an intervention, because we just ordered another laptop, for me, it's pink, I'm in heaven, the end.). Scott was YouTubing and I was reading on dooce.com because Heather is a freaking amazing GENIUS and I can't put it down.

Anyway, the other day we went to Wal-Mart, because it's got everything and we're simple folk, and we looked at the cameras just to see what they had, and there was a nice 10 megapixel with all these bells and whistles for $109.00. Magic! So we bought it, and someone (cough Scott cough) hasn't put it down since. Hence the YouTubing last night. He's made lots of videos, and we are now chronicling everything photographically because, well, because we can.

So, of course, we chronicled the dyeing of the hair.

This is me washing it out in the sink. Unfortunately, since we are new at owning a camera, we forgot the part where Scott had me bend over and put all my hair in my face, and he spent probably ten minutes trying to get every last blond hair away from the black hairs because of this whole OCD thing. We also forgot the part where he had put the dye in and he was trying to clip it up so it wouldn't stain my neck and everything else blue, and the clippie thing flew out of his slippery dye hands and landed in the toilet. So in lieu of a clippie thing we marched downstairs and put foil around it and then scrunched it up and then I held it there while Scott fished the clippie thing out of the toilet and cleaned it THOROUGHLY because eww, then clipped the foil to my head somehow, and at that point I was standing in the bathroom using the blow dryer to put heat on it and since I didn't want to stain any of my clothes I was just wearing a towel, which kept falling off, and eventually I got sick of putting it back on only to have it fall off two minutes later, so I gave up and just stood in the bathroom naked, with foil all over my head and a blowdryer. Magic.

So back to the rinsing out part. That was cake after the rest of the fiasco. Here it is after rinsing and before becoming a normal-looking human being again. In order to isolate the blonde streak in the back we had to put the rest of my hair out of the way and that meant in my forehead like some kind of a freak unicorn. And P.S. by this point I had put the towel back on, so this picture is not naked.
Here is the finished, dried result. I like it very much. It is more teal than blue, but that's ok. The neat thing is, it only shows when my hair is up, so if I need to look nice I can just leave my hair down. Now I was working on Mim's socks, or sock I should say since I suck and still haven't even finished the first one, and I was absolutely sick of it because if I hadn't needed to frog them fifteen hundred times I would have been done by now. So, I switched gears and began playing with my rose-colored cashmere blend laceweight yarn. I had made a scarf from it months ago and never posted a picture because I am lazy and forgetful, but anyway I wanted gloves to go with it, so I messed around and in two days (I forgot how much FASTER I crochet than knit)I had these. They are very delicate and beautiful, but just warm enough that I will not get hot and have to take them off, and then get cold and put them on again in an endless stupid cycle. I also decided to make them fingerless since I do everything with my hands and once again I hate having to take them off and put them on again to do something with my fingers, so voila!Now, our two year wedding anniversary is coming up on Monday, and we decided to celebrate this weekend since we don't have time to really do anything during the week. So Scott took the day off and I took half the day off and we planned to go to Maddox, which is this amazingly super awesome restaurant in Perry, which is like an hour and a half away from our house. So the plan was for me to come home early, change and shower so I not only looked like a person with normal clothes (as opposed to the giant tee shirts and nasty baggy jeans I wear to work because I don't like wearing a lab coat and also don't want to ruin any of my nice clothes) but I also wanted to smell like a normal person who didn't work in a place that smells like weird vitamins and acid. Then we were going to drive up there early so we could eat a bit earlier and beat the rush and still be able to get home in time and go to bed somewhat close to our normal time because we are OLD PEOPLE. Then Scott's work decided to explode and they needed him all day. We found that out on Thursday. Now, it wasn't in any way shape or form Scott's fault, but I still made him make it up to me by taking me out to dinner Thursday AND Friday night, and then Cold Stone after. So here, in all its glory, is the whole reason I am glad I have been married for two years: Ok, not the WHOLE reason. Not even close. Scott is amazing to me and to be with. I could never have asked for anything or anyone better ever. He understands me, knows how to deal with my disease, and makes me feel like a person, a person who is real and worth something. He tells me I am beautiful and means it, and somehow he knows when I need to hear it. He is adorable and accepting, kind, generous, loving, protective, selfless, and as devoted to me and our marriage as I am. Simply amazing.

The only thing left is to leave a picture of Buster, because he's so freaking adorable I can't help it. Why aren't you giving me people food? Don't you love me?

Yes, but not enough to clean up your diarrhea after I let you eat my anniversary ice cream. So GO AWAY and stop sniffing it. Go eat your own food, fatty.