view from the top!

last weekend, alex and i took a last-minute, spontaneous trip to our nation's capital to see friends, and we had such a blast! we got to relax, play games, watch football, and just generally enjoy everyone's company :)

as an added perk, we got to take several special tours, including the Dome of the Library of Congress! located across from the Capitol, the LOC Dome gives you a great view of the city and the National Mall. i took this shot with my phone, so it's not the best, but here's an idea of what we saw:


alex, who is afraid of heights, was a real trooper, particularly on a windy day, until i started getting closer to the edge to take a picture of the flame on top of the LOC Dome - then he was less than pleased :)

pick a persona!

since i spent most of my days at a desk in front of my computer, i find it pretty easy to get bored with my surroundings. thankfully, someone brilliant at Firefox has found a way to help me combat that - they created "personas" which are basically banners that run across the top of your window, and they have all kinds of themes and colors.

whenever i'm feeling the need to a change of scenery, i change my persona, and then change the colors of my gmail to match. today, i'm trying out a new one:


and i can't decide how i feel about it. it's really bright, which i like in theory, particularly as it's getting dark outside so early, but it might actually hurt my eyes to look at it all day. what do you think? what tips do you guys have for making "desk life" more interesting?

Home Improvement

in addition to being an awesome show with Tim Allen & JTT (jonathan taylor thomas for those that were never jr. hight girls), home improvement was also the theme of the past few weeks around our house.

we started with painting. when we moved in (as most of you saw), the walls were blah. i mean really blah. well, we finally got around to adding a little color! we started in the kitchen, painting the one open wall a deep red color. then we moved on to the living, or at least a portion of it. we painted that a deep caramel color. painting goes pretty quickly with two people!

at first i was panicked about the caramel color. it looked pumpkin, which is cool for fall, and not so cool for the rest of the year. but we plowed on with a second coat and thankfully it became much more tan and much less orange. success.

then last night, we added some decor while improving our kitchen's functionality - we hung a pot rack! we have very little cabinet space, and until last night we'd avoided getting our new pots out of their box because we had nowhere to put them. well now we do!

it was a bit of an adventure to get it on the wall (smaller than ideal drill bit = alex guestimating the correct size of the hole and me fretting in the corner that he's going to destroy the wall/lose a finger), but eventually we did it and it looks awesome!

pictures of our home improvement efforts to come...now we're anxious to keep going!

2 months of wedded bliss :)

as of today, alex and i have been married for two months! it seems like it's been longer and shorter than that at the same time. however, it's been plenty of time to start learning funny things about each other, so i thought i'd share a few insights :)

1. sleeping in the same bed can be treacherous. for me, most of the pain has been physical - poked in the eye, elbow to the shoulder, etc. for alex, it's emotional - i have an unfortunate and startling tendency of sitting up in the middle of the night and carrying on conversations, all while sleeping away.

2. we have very different cleaning styles. i'm a "make a mess and clean it all up at the end" kind of person. alex is a "clean as you go" kind of person. unfortunately for him, this means he's often cleaning up after my messes along the way because i just haven't started cleaning until i'm all done making the mess!

3. grocery shopping for two people with different tastes can be tough. particularly when he's shopping for me, as i am admittedly picky about stupid things, like the thickness of my deli meat. i like it falling apart thin - he likes buying whatever's on sale that the deli has pre-sliced. i can't help it - it's how i was raised.

4. our TV tastes are more aligned that i expected. or at least we're patient with each other. we spend a lot of the weekend watching football (or researching, as alex calls it, for his new blog StarBust Football Inc) and then during the week we unwind to Glee, House, and all my/his other favs.

5. we really love being married. and i think we're gonna keep doing it for a really really long time :)

click for a good cause!

sorry for two posts in a row about animal rescue....i don't know what's gotten in to me...maybe it's time to get Leonidas a sibling, haha.

anyways, the organization we adopted Leonidas from (Homeward Trails) is in an essay contest to win $1500, and all they need is people to click to vote. no registration or anything, just clicks. whenever they do things like this, i like to pass around - we don't have a lot of money to throw their way, but i'm happy to help them win some from someone else :)

so if you get a chance, click here to vote. thanks!

Rover rescued!

yesterday on my way home from work, i saw this little puggle (pug/beagle) wandering by the side of the road without a collar. after turning around and driving past him 4 times, i decided to stop. he appeared to be well fed (i.e. kinda fat), neutered, nails clipped, not itchy (i.e. no fleas), so i decided he must be someone's lost pet.

well, i couldn't leave him by the side of the road, so i picked him up (no leash/collar), put him in my car, and drove him to my vet, where i knew they could scan him for a microchip. turns out, he had one! they called the owner and left a message, i left the dog with the vet, and they promised to call me and let me know what happened.

about an hour later, Rover (his name) was picked up by his owner! apparently, they'd been visiting cousins and he'd wandered out of their backyard. now he's all safe and sound!

feeling tech savvy?

this weekend, alex and i made the switch to our own family phone plan, and with that, we were able to get a good deal on new phones! we were excited to shop because we had decided to make the switch to Andriod smart phones and say a fond farewell to our old faithful "messaging only" phones.

we both ended up going with the new Samsung Facinate, which just came out for Verizon a few days ago (we felt so trendy, haha). i've got to say, i love it. seriously love it. it's touch screen only, no keyboard, and the screen is super responsive and easy to use. it's also got the biggest battery of any android phone, so in theory it's supposed to last the longest (so far, i've been impressed - 36 hours and i still have half a charge left).

but, what i'm MOST excited about is i finally have access to the games that previously i could only play on my dad's iphone, like Jewels (similar to Snood) and Paper Toss (requires you to flick crumbled paper into a waste basket, paying attention to the wind speed of the nearby fan). after all, that's what phones are for right? no? well anyway, it's fun and mindless and keeps me from doing what i should be doing like reading...oh wait...haha.

anyways, if any of your are considering a phone upgrade, the Facinate has my vote!