Weekend Wrap-Up

This past weekend was a busy one! I hope everyone had a fabulous 4th and was able to enjoy the time off. I know Kelly and I sure did! Before you get started with this post, you might want to grab a cup of coffee--it's a long one.

Thursday My weekend technically started on Thursday night since our office was closed on Friday for the holiday. And what better way to start the holiday than with a little sand volleyball?? Kelly and some of the guys from his office met up to play a game of sand volleyball so Cooper and I tagged along for the fun. We met up with the Smiths and their pup Sidney, and Shiner and Gracie, two of Cooper's litter mates, were there as well. The evening more or less turned into a play date for the pups, but Amanda and I didn't mind one bit. After the game was over we all grabbed a quick bit to eat at Chick-Fil-A (YUMMY milk shakes!) and then headed home.

Friday I woke up super early for a day off (7:00 am) and got started on our upstairs bathroom remodel. **SIDE NOTE--The rest of this post will be filled with updates on the bathroom remodel, and it took ALL of our four day weekend to get this task accomplished.** I couldn't do too much by myself, but I did manage to take down the mirror, shower curtain, light switch plates, and hand towel rack. I removed everything from under neath the vanity and got the room ready for demo!



After that I met up with Jen and we headed to Downtown McKinney for a day-o-shopping! She'd been telling me about how cute the stores were in the town square and I decided I'd better make a trip out there to see for myself. We didn't do too much damage and we had a blast hanging out and catching up. We don't get to see each other as much as we'd like, so it was nice to have a day together.

Once Kelly got home Friday afternoon, we got to work on demoing the bathroom. We removed the sink top (1980s seashell sink,) wood cabinet, and yellow linoleum flooring. Then it was off to Lowe's for all our remodeling supplies. We picked up tile, grout (and all the crap that comes with laying your own tile,) sink fixtures, sand paper, primer, and anything else you could image we would need. AND, we did this all in time to catch a 9:30 movie. We were definitely on a mission!! Here are a few post-demo pics...

Saturday We woke up in excitement to get started on the bathroom! I was in charge of hand scraping all the linoleum adhesive (from 1987) off the floor and Kelly tackled sanding the walls (the previous owner left a TERRIBLE texture job for us to fix.) After hours of hand cramping and sawdust flying, we were finally ready to prime the walls and lay the tile. Just in time for the Smith's to show up to help! They were so eager to help us with our demo. Taylor helped Kelly cut the tiles for the floor and Amanda and I primed the walls. It was definitely a group effort and much more fun when you have the extra hands to help out. We were finally done laying all the tile about 4:30 and it was time to call it quits and enjoy the rest of our 4th!

After a quick shower, Kel and I headed to Wes and Brandye's for a dinner off the grill. Wes and Kelly cooked some delicious pork ribs while Brandye and I ran to Tom Thumb to buy dessert. There would be no cooking on her part...she's about to pop with the baby coming any day now! The oven makes her house too hot, and with the crazy weather we've been having lately, she can't take any additional heat! We wrapped up the evening with a few round of Guitar Hero, and then it was time to crash!!

Sunday Kelly and I headed to church as we anxiously waited for the tile to finish setting. We grabbed lunch from Chicken Express (YUM) and headed home to get to work! I painted the walls while Kelly...well, I don't really know what Kelly did. But by the time I was done painting he was ready to finish grouting the floor. That is...until we had a minor mishap.

I was downstairs cleaning out my paint roller when all of the sudden I heard a steady stream of water spewing in the upstairs bath. I frantically ran up there to see what happened and found Kelly in a panic trying to contain the spewing water from the wall. Spewing really is the only word to describe this incident. In his eagerness to test his new pipe cutter, Kel forgot to turn off the water to the house. Well, he didn't technically forget, but he turned off the water to the outside of the house rather than the inside. Minor oversight.

That's when the panic set in. We were helpless and had no idea what to do. I called my Dad immediately and tried to explain the situation--in a hurry because our floor was now flooding with water. I ran downstairs to try to turn off the water myself and couldn't get to the knob. So I ran back inside to get Kelly a towel when I found ANOTHER problem brewing. The water was now leaking into our closet and ON TO MY SHOES! HELP! I didn't know whether to leave my shoes and take Kelly the towel, or save my shoes and let the water keep spewing. I think the next picture speaks for itself...

After throwing all the shoes I could grab into the vicinity of bathtub, I ran upstairs to give Kelly the towel. He went back downstairs and outside to try to turn off the water and FINALLY was able to stop all the madness. My dad and brother showed up a few minutes later to help us "repair" the damage. Fortunately for us, we dodged a MAJOR bullet and didn't have any damage to our ceiling, floor, or tile that we had just installed. After a lot of cleaning up and drying out, we were able to finally grout the bathroom floor and call it a night.

Kelly's re-cap of the night: "That's the most stubborn thing I've ever done. I've never felt so helpless in all my life."

Monday I woke up and immediately sealed the grout and touched up the paint that had run down the walls the night before. We let the grout seal and headed to the gym for a workout and some pool time! Once we were home, we installed the base boards and waited for my Dad to come back over to install the vanity and toilet. A mere 3 hours later, we were looking at our final product!! What a relief to be completely finished with this project we've been meaning to do since November. We didn't have long to stand around and admire our work--we had to be at the softball fields for Kelly's double header by 7:45! Fortunately, they won both games! After an exhausting weekend, we were ready to climb in bed and crash!!

On the left is the look we were going for. I think we accomplished it, don't you?

Whoa, that was close!

While I was attempting to get my daily blog fix at the office this morning {bad girl, I know!}, I tried to go to our blog and I got this message: ACCESS DENIED! WHAT?! "Please try again later." Yeah right, more like try again right now! {Over, and over, and over again until my access was finally granted!}

I was immediately engulfed with panic! I guess you could say this is is how I felt...




I'm glad to announce I'm back in the land of the living (or blogging, whatever...)

TGIF anyone?

Learning curve...

If you've been following our blog for any length of time, you might recall my post on March 30, 2008 about making breakfast for our home group.

Well today was our turn (again) to host breakfast at our house. However, this time we have 9 couples in our home group, and have ample seating for everyone (which is a plus!) So in usual fashion I began to plan out what we were going to serve at breakfast to make sure we were prepared. Kelly loves a good ol' southern style breakfast (bacon included, of course!), and has no room on his breakfast menu for crêpes or pastries. So we decided we would serve breakfast tacos and hash browns. Well everyone knows, you can't just have a main dish and a side dish. Your morning meal must include an appetizer, right?

I thought I would try a new recipe in order to add another yummy dish to the (short) list of items I can actually cook. So, I selected "Pull Apart Coffee Cake." Sounds easy enough right? I thought so (that's why I chose it!)

The ingredients included yeast rolls, butter, butterscotch pudding, cinnamon, brown sugar and pecans. YUMMY! The directions said to spray a bunt pan with Pam and place the yeast rolls in the pan to sit out and rise over night. So I did just that.

This morning when I woke up, in anticipation of what my new yummy dish was going to look like, I was surprised to find this...

... a pure disaster. I just busted out laughing, for fear I might cry!

I hope our home group breakfasts don't turn in to a continuous comedy of sorts; however, I did learn my lesson.

Is there such a thing as too much football?

I mean, how can one really judge how much football is too much? Well, I can definitely tell you that my husband was on the brink of too much football this past Saturday. When I got home from the gym I found him crouched over the TV with cords, remotes, and controllers all over the floor. My first thought was, “what happened?” He said he was fixing the settings on the TV and it was “no big deal.” No big deal. Yeah right, I thought. I was running late so I left him with his mess and jumped in the shower. When I was finished getting ready, I walked back into the living room to find my husband in football heaven! He had fixed the TV so he could enable the picture in picture setting. This allowed him to watch a football game, while playing his PlayStation 3 video game at the same time! If you thought that was intense, just wait! He took the iHome from his bed side table and brought it into the living room so he could listen to the A&M game at the same time! He was so proud of himself. He looked up at me and said “I have three medias giving me updates on football at the same time!” Sweet thing. He was so proud, he was even wearing his A&M shirt during all of this.

Go. Fight. Win!?

Drama, drama, drama!

Have you ever come to depend on something so much, yet never realized it? Well maybe you’ve realized it; but have you ever imagined the impact it would have if all the sudden what you depended on so much quit working? Well, I can tell you.

I can tell you I spent the entire week last week realizing the impact the loss of my cell phone would have on me.

On Monday night I was in the grocery store picking up a few items we forgot on our trip to the store over the weekend. I apparently had too many item to hold in my hands, because as I was putting everything on the counter, my cell phone slipped out of my hands onto the tile floor. For a minute there, I thought time was going by in slow motion. It felt like I was watching my life bounce on the ground; eventually crumbling into pieces on the floor of the grocery store. Not that my life is wrapped up in my cell phone, but as soon as it happened, I felt as though a piece of me were missing. I had no way to communicate with the outside world! I was running late in getting home that evening, and I couldn’t even send a quick text to let Kelly know I was on my way home. So he calls my parents to see if they’ve talked to me, and of course, you can imagine what kind of impact that had on them! Needless to say, I was fine… I was just going to spend the better part of the rest of the week fixing this minor problem!

Tuesday after work I planned to meet up with my brother in law, Ryan, to borrow one of his old phones. However, my friend Jaclyn had a phone that she was willing to let me borrow, so I stopped by her place instead. She helped me activate her old phone and she updated my account online. We plugged the phone in to see if it would charge. Sure enough it did – so I was set and on my way. Or so I thought. I went to the Verizon store to get my phone numbers switched over into my “new” phone. What an ordeal. It took the “oh so helpful” Verizon worker almost 30 minutes to get my phone numbers transferred over. And when she was finished, I looked to see if they all transferred over, and they transferred over backwards. So instead of my contacts being in my phone as “Kelly O’Donnell Cell,” they were displaying as “O’Donnell Cell, Kelly.” NIGHTMARE I tell you. At this point in the evening I was running late to bible study, so I had to put off dealing with this saga until later.

Wednesday morning I woke up and my “new” cell phone was dead! No charge, not even an ounce. So, once I got to work, I borrowed a regular charger and plugged this puppy in to charge all day long. I also had a car charger that I was able to use to make SURE my phone was charged.

So Thursday the phone was working fine, until I left work that afternoon. As I got ready to make a phone call, I realized my phone was dead again! Thanks to my trusty car charger, I was able to call Ryan and ask him if I could get his old phone since this one obviously had a bad charger outlet. So at 5:00 pm on Thursday afternoon I headed downtown to meet Ryan at his office. I got his phone and headed straight to the Verizon store to get my numbers transferred back into this “new” phone. An hour and a half later I was still at the store and the numbers still weren’t transferred over. Some kind of “technical” difficulty… story of my life, right?

So, I had to go home, get my broken phone and bring it back to the store on Friday afternoon to have them transfer my numbers again. FINALLY! After a weeks worth of inconvenience and headaches, I was finally reconnected to the wireless universe! Boy am I glad that’s all over!

My little handful...

For those of you that know my husband well at all - you know he can get himself into more trouble and somehow always come out squeaky clean! (I think it's his smile that gets him off the hook.) But, lately he's been up to no good as my Grommie would say. Here's a quick recap:

* About a month and a half ago, he sprained his ankle. Only to turn around one week later and re-sprain the same ankle. He's recovering slowly and checks the swelling on a daily basis.

* In the past week he's managed to lose both of our keys to his car. He left one in Midland after the wedding and lost one in our house. We got the one from Midland back, but the search is still out for the missing one in our house.

* Last week while we were grocery shopping, I was heading to the produce section when all of the sudden, I turned around and found my husband in the cart pictured below. I couldn't help but laugh and then promptly instructed him to "put that up!" To which he replied, "but my ankle."



And even in spite of his quirky habits (for lack of a better term), I still love him with all my heart!!

Mechanic anyone?

I think I need to change the title of this blog to “A Day in the Life of…” or “The Adventures of Me.” I swear, the craziest things happen to me – I guess that’s why my friends and I have always said we should write a book. Don’t know who would buy it – but the documentation of these day to day adventures would be worth the read.

So, let me proceed with today’s sequence of events.

Well, I guess it really started last night. Because that was when I noticed that the tire was low. Just low, not flat, so I had time to worry about that later, right?

Wrong.

When I got into the parking lot at the office, my tire was all but flat. Then I started thinking, it’s going to rain today. A flat tire – in a SUV - driving in the rain… well now that’s just asking for it. So, after some investigation, I found a screw in my front tire and a nail in my back tire. Really?! Come on now! The front tire was way too low to drive, so I had to put my spare tire on. Can’t you just see me down there cranking up the jack? Hahahaha!

Anyways, after almost two hours of dealing with the tire situation – both tires are plugged up and ready to roll… at least for a few more miles.

Too many cooks in the kitchen?

So yesterday it was our turn to host “breakfast” for our Home Group. Our group (consisting of 8 couples at the moment) has breakfast together twice a month, and this weekend it was our turn to have it at our house. Or should I say at our 1 bedroom apartment with seating for 7 if you use the metal folding chair.

Anyhow, it’s always so much fun to plan out and prepare family recipes to share with friends! Kelly would call this “hosting a party.” Any time we have someone over, to him, it’s considered “hosting a party.” He thinks it’s funny that I plan out what I’m going to serve, where I’m going to put the platters of food, and when I should set out the juice. I told him he shouldn't find this interesting as I've been hosting tea parties since I was a little girl. However, our hosting skills were put to the test yesterday as we turned up the heat in the kitchen.

As our favorite recipe of sausage rolls was cooking in the oven, I had French toast duty. Mind you, I've never made French toast before, but how hard can it be to watch it bake? Kelly was making eggs on the stove and I figured he’d check on the Sausage Rolls when the timer went off. I guess I shouldn't assume, because before I knew it I was rushing to save the Sausage Rolls from burning completely! In my absence from the griddle, the French toast began to burn too! I felt like a fire fighter rushing to the scene. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of damage to clean up. Needless to say, I think I've mastered the social aspect of “hosting a party,” but I think my food timing skills could use a little work. No harm, no foul, right?

I've included the recipe for our Sausage Rolls below! Enjoy!

Sausage Rolls

2 Cans of Crescent Rolls
1 lb. Jimmy Dean Hot Sausage (the hot adds a little flavor, but isn't overbearing)

Roll out and spread one can of the crescent rolls on a foil covered cookie sheet. Make the dough into a rectangular shape, with all sides touching one another. Spread the second can of crescent rolls directly on top of the first layer. Then, evenly spread and mash the sausage into the crescent rolls. Once all the sausage has been used, roll up the end of the rolls to make a "log." If you've had the crescent rolls and sausage out of the fridge for awhile, you can put it into the freezer for about 20 minutes to make it easier to work with.

Slice the roll into pinwheels with a serrated kitchen knife. Bake at 375 degrees for 13 minutes. Flip the pinwheels over and bake for another 10 minutes. (Check the crescent roll's cooking time to be certain, but the pinwheels should be cooked evenly on both sides.) When ready, crescent rolls should be golden brown and bubbly. Cool and serve with syrup and/or honey.

Isn't it ironic?

You know as you read that you started humming the Alanis Morissette song, “Ironic.”

Anyways, I think “Good Morning” is an ironic phrase. At least today it is.

When you think of a good morning, what do you picture? Waking up on time? A peaceful breakfast before you head out the door? Making it to work on time? Well today, all of that flew right out the window as I sprung out of bed 20 minutes late…

…I rushed to get ready, kissed Kelly good-bye as he headed out the door (on time might I add), and then the morning fell apart. I couldn't find anything. I couldn't find anything to wear. I couldn't find my lunch box. I couldn't find my jewelry. I couldn't find the remote. But what I finally found were my keys and then I quickly rushed out the door.

Rushed being the key word there. In an attempt to make up the time I’d lost by waking up late, I hurried to the office. As I made my way down the highway I didn't even look at the speedometer. Bad move. Next thing I know I see those lovely blue and red lights behind me, signaling me to pull over. Well, the rest is pretty much history. You know the story – I handed over my driver’s license and insurance card, and in no time I was signing my name on the dotted like of a 4-part carbon copy ticket. I mean 55 mph in 35 mph zone, does that really warrant a ticket?? All I can say is at least I didn't pass a stopped school bus like I did once in college. Now that was SOME ticket!

So, as you can see, this morning is not a “good” morning. In fact it’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, morning.

P.S. My yogurt just exploded all over my shirt.