it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Alex and I set aside this Saturday for Christmas decorating!!! Of course, this primarily revolved around selecting, setting up, and decorating the tree. So, this morning we set out for the Home Depot to make our selection. Chicago had it's first major snow last night, so a lot of the trees were coated in snow and therefore would be soaking wet when we wanted to bring it in the house.

Thankfully, the one we ended up with was under a covering, and quite dry :) It's about 7ft tall and filled up the space in our place really well:


After getting it in the stand, we let it dry for a little while. I worked on Christmas cookies and Alex worked on the rest of the decorations. When we were done with that, it was time for lights! You'll notice, these lights have white (i.e. super noticeable) cords. When I first selected these lights 3 year ago, it was my first time with a real Christmas tree and I didn't know you were supposed to buy the ones with the green cords so they blend in. Whoops.


After the lights we hung the ornaments - my favorite part :) So many of the ornaments have special significance and fun memories associated with them. Here's the finished product (minus the tree skirt):

We love it! Now our place looks really festive and we're feeling the Christmas spirit :)

recommended reading

when it comes to reading, i'm what i'd call a "binge reader". once i get started in a good book, i can't put it down. this weekend i even made us late to a social event because i just HAD to finish the book i was working on :)

in fact, it was such a great book that i wanted to recommend it to you all here - it's called "April 1865: the month that saved America" by Jay Winik. it's non fiction, about the final month of the Civil War with portraits of the major players woven into it. it covers Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln's assassination, and so many critical events in our nation's history. the reconstruction of the United States was not a forgone conclusion after the Civil War, and this book made me really appreciate the greatness of our leaders at the time.

i learned a whole lot from the book (did you know the succession process for the VP to take over if the President dies is not actually in the Constitution??), but it's not a heavy read necessarily. it's about 380 pages and i got more invested the more i read. if you're looking for a good read over the holidays, i'd highly recommend it!

now, it's time for a novel - on to "The Help" for book club!

we (meaning alex) know someone (sorta) famous!

last night, alex got his first interview with an actual professional football player for his blog! he spoke with none other than W&M's own Derek Cox, starting corner back for the jacksonville jaguars! alex knows derek from his days as the student-athletic-advisory-council vice-president (derek was the president) and they've kept in sporadic touch since graduation.

although derek has NO idea who i am, i'm a big fan of his and love seeing someone i (sorta) know on TV. we watched his first start ever against the indianapolis colts last year, when he picked off peyton manning in the end zone on their first drive. we happened to be in Indy at the time, watching the game with my extended family, who are all big colts fans, and we LOVED rubbing that in :)

any famous or sorta famous people in your lives??

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 :)