Road Trips, Family, and Weddings!

Well, since last Thursday, I have been in Tennessee celebrating the wedding of my dear friend, Katie Morrison Newton. Because plane tickets are so expensive (especially for a newly-wed) I begged my good friend, Melissa, to road trip it with me to the beautiful TN! With some prodding, she agreed. And so we took off at 9:30am Thursday morning!

Our first destination was Searcy, AR to stay the night with my cousin Ashton and visit her family. We arrived right at dinner and Ashton had a delicious meal ready for us! We saw her cute house, went out for ice cream, and then went on a tour of Harding University. We swung on the white swings, walked under the bell tower, and looked through old year books in the newspaper room trying to find old pictures of Ashton's parents and Melissa's dad-with success! After our tour, we drove to my aunt and uncle new house and visited with them for the evening.

Melissa and I took off the next morning and drove 6 hours to TN for Katie's wedding. We made it in time for the rehearsal dinner, which was such an emotional, but lovely event. Katie and Heath were truly honored. I spent the night at Katie's house with the Maid of Honor and ran around with them the next day as we took Katie to get her hair and makeup done for the wedding! The results were stunning; she was a gorgeous and glowing bride! I was one of the bridesmaids in the wedding and it was such an honor to be a part of Katie's Big Day. A few friends from ACU came and I was able to visit with them at the reception.

Our trip back had to be squeezed into one day because I work early Monday morning. Melissa and I left Sunday morning at 7:30am with the impression that it would only take 12.5 hours to get back home. Boy, were we wrong! It would have only taken that long, except we drove through about 5 horrid rain storms, which set us back about 2.5 hours. We made it home in one piece with only our boredom, exhaustion, and swollen throats (effects of our 2 hour burst of singing VERY loud and dancing like crazy... cabin fever does wonders to the body...) to complain about.

Poor Scott was left in Houston for the weekend because he could not get off of work. But! He invited several of his high school buddies to spend the weekend at our apartment and go to a music festival here in Houston called SummerFest. It sounds like they had a blast! The apartment was left unscathed (impressive, I thought, seeing as how there were 5 boys staying in it) and Scott came away from the weekend with only one noise complaint; a true feat if you happen to know these boys...

I am glad to be home again and look forward to what lies ahead! I start grad. school in 8 days, so please be in prayer about that. I am nervous!!

Blessings to all.

More of life and a weekend in Temple!

Dear friends and family,

I hope that your past week has been eventful, but stress-free!

Scott and I spent a great weekend with our family in Temple. We went home originally for the wedding of two of my dear, dear friends, Jana Pittenger and Justin Schofield! What a beautiful and blessed event! I grew up knowing Jana from about middle school-on and I became close friends with Justin my Sophomore year in college before he even knew Jana. It has been so neat to see their relationship over the past year and I am very happy they are finally together forever!

About a year ago I had some scary looking moles removed from my back, one of which came back with some cells that appeared "pre-cancerous", so my doctor told me to come back within the year to have more that one removed. So, I waited a full year (ha ha), and had more cells removed on Friday. There is now about a 1-inch long scar on my back with 6 stitches that will be taken out in 10 days. Hopefully the results of that biopsy will come back clear! I am pretty certain that everything will come back just fine. When Scott found out he would be taking out the stitches he said, "I don't know about that..." Ha! I might have to beg one of our neighbors to do it! On this same doctors visit I found out that what I thought was ringworm on both of my forearms is actually eczema--great..... Basically it is a chronic (meaning life-long) skin disease that appears on and off and for me, it is triggered by stress. It makes sense because it has shown up in this same place three times in the last year and a half; the most recent episode appearing right after our wedding, ha!

Small little interesting side-note: A new guy, John, started attending our small group last week. He is a medical student here in Houston and he informed us last week that his younger brother is the state champion Scrabble player in his age group!! He is 14 and could apparently soundly defeat anyone who attempts to play him in Scrabble. Scott and I LOVE Scrabble, so we were really excited to hear that state championships in Scrabble exist! Who knew?? Of course, we would never attempt to compete. I am the type that likes to keep my hobbies as hobbies; if competition enters that picture, it no longer stands as a hobby but rather a chore that I have to practice. If you know me, I don't like to practice much on anything, ha ha. If I'm not good at it, I won't do it. I should work on that...

Anyway. Blessings to all! We love you.

Our 2 Month Celebration!

So, Scott and I had a great weekend together celebrating our 2 month! We had some extra money this month, so we took the whole day Saturday and went to Galveston! It was a blast! We took off around 10:45 with our books and picnic lunch, arrived an hour later, paid $8 to enter Stewart Beach, and had a great lunch/relaxation time until 3:00. Afterward, we changed clothes in the car and drove the The Strand, which is a street filled with stores and little restaurants. The buildings were all renovated old grocery stores, banks, etc. from the mid 1800s, brightly painted and filled with the new trinkets of the present owners. We ended up buying a few little things at the first store we entered, which sold a variety of odds-and-ends from wonderfully patterned paper to French prosthetic eyeballs that looked SO real. We ate dinner at a steak and seafood restaurant called "Willie G's"; we spent $87 and I told Scott that it was harder to look at the restaurant tickets now that we are sharing money and it's not just HIS money, ha.

I worked the morning shift at Taft Street Coffee on Sunday morning, which was CRAZY. Taft is located inside of our church, Ecclesia, and it is funded by the church so the Sunday morning crowd is HUGE. The barista I was working with told me to make the drinks during the 11:00 service to see how I could handle the speed; let's just say that I had drank a cup of coffee and some caffeinated tea RIGHT before and thus my hands were shaking tremendously and my brain was functioning at 10x it's normal processing speed. I made $34 in tips, which is A LOT for this place!

Anyway. That was our weekend. Blessings to all and to all a good week.

Married for two months!

Scott and I have been married for two months today!! I really can't believe it. What a great new faze of life! We have adjusted to married life and shared life very well, despite doing the long-distance thing for so many years. I was warned that the annoying things would worsen with marriage but honestly, they haven't... not yet anyway!! I will continue to bask in my naivety until that changes.

It is such a blessing to be with and deeply loved by my best friend.

Blessings and peace to all.

Oh, Hobby Day!

Hello, all!

Scott and I just enjoyed a nice, relaxing weekend in Houston hanging out with friends new and old and we even took a day to just us. So nice.

Some of you know, others don't, that Scott and I opted to not have cable TV in our apartment. Partly for money saving reasons with me going to graduate school, but mostly because we thought it would force us to spend our down time enjoying each other, the outdoors, and our hobbies. Thus, on Saturday, we had an afternoon devoted to our hobbies that I so dubbed "Hobby Day". Scott has a love and gift for designing and building furniture that he has used to build some planters for his mom, a bookshelf for his college bedroom, and now a bookshelf for our apartment to house Mt. Lots-of-books that has taken root in our 2nd bedroom. The now vacant law office next door to our apartment was cleaning out some old furniture, amongst which were some bookshelves that Scott paid $20 for. He spent Saturday afternoon breaking apart these old shelves for their wood to make our new shelf! It will be a several weekend process, but he already has a really neat design laid out and a good part of the old shelves taken apart. If you know me, you also know that I have a ridiculous amount of hobbies. Painting, drawing, scrapbooking, sewing, cooking, baking, photography, crafts, card-making, etc.! I found a cute idea for some quilted coasters, so that became my Saturday project. I took some scrap fabric from my ever-growing collection and sewed some really cute coasters that match our living room.

I hope that each of you were able to spend some time on your hobbies this past weekend and, if not, I hope that you are now inspired to make time for your talents!

Blessings to all.