30 Before 30

30 Before 30 Update: numero dos

December 31, 2013 By amusingmjblog 6 Comments

So as 2013 comes to a close I am now 7/12ths (or a little over halfway for you non-math types) through my 29th year and New Years always makes me reflect on what I’ve accomplished this year! I came up with this 30 before 30 list just a short bit after my 29th birthday and thought New Years would be a great time to update y’all. I know you are waiting on pins and needles to see if I accomplish my whole list!

My 30 Before 30 list:

~~Run another half marathon~~ I’m kind of marking this off. I trained and was mostly ready to run this, but the Dallas Marathon was cancelled because of Ice-maggedon. So I kinda half ran it, since the training is half the battle, but I really would love to run another one, so I’ll be registering for another one, but maybe not before my 30th birthday.
Start a vegetable garden
~~Build my own built-in-closet (modeled after Sandra’s AWESOME closet)~~ Because the timing worked out and I got a friends and family discount, we decided to do Elfa in our closet instead of building a built in one… and it was totally the right choice. It was quick and easy and my closet is STILL organized.
Book a trip to Europe with my husband (and maybe a few friends)
Find a farmer’s market near my house to visit on a Saturday morning
Finish my t-shirt quilt (2+years in the making)
~~Learn to cook 5 new meals~~ I learned AT LEAST this many during my two weeks of my Whole 30
~~Take my husband to visit my favorite city: Washington DC~~ DONE. And Done.
~~Go see Lion King (kind of cheating… I already have tickets to this… but it’s a show I’ve always wanted to see!)~~
~~Pay off part of my company debt~~
Finish another sprint triathlon (again… bonus points if I beat my previous time)
Build a pergola in my back yard
~~Help my twin brother fix up his house (as payment for letting me use his pool whenever I want!)~~ Blog posts coming next week on this!
~~Spend a Saturday without ever leaving the house… no projects, just laziness.~~ Thank you Ice-mageddon… but I wouldn’t mind doing this again!
~~Take a weekend getaway to Beaver Creek. (I bought a couple of free nights at a silent auction… now we just have to use them)~~ Check out our visit here.
~~Go Skiing with the church youth group… as an ‘adult’ sponsor.- I’m signed up and ready to go!~~
~~Get new Christmas Stockings for my husband and I for our first Christmas as a married couple.~~ See how cute they are?
Learn how to put crown molding up in my our house
~~Give 10% to charity or the church for 2013~~
Get my husband certified to Scuba Dive–in progress… he is about to sign up in the spring!
Finish changing my name to my married last name… who knew there were so many things to change!?– Just a few more to go! And seriously… American Airlines Miles Program needs more info than my credit card?!
Organize the whole house- no seriously… every cupboard, closet, under every bed.
~~Take a spa day with a friend~~ Just did this last Saturday– Thanks Ashley!! And seriously, I think I need this about 3-4 times a year. It was A-MAZ-ING.
~~Host a dinner party~~
Make homemade ice cream
~~Make a wedding book for each set of our parents and ourselves~~ Done… I’ll post about this soon!
Save enough money to install double ovens in our kitchen
Get to my ideal weight- Working on this…
Get better at using my SLR Camera (kinda hard to measure… but maybe I’ll know it when I get there?)
Throw a 30th Birthday Party for my twin brother and myself

So I have 14 of the 30 left, and since I’m a little over halfway, I think I’m doing pretty well! I’ll post a few semi-resolutions tomorrow for New Years! I hope everyone has a wonderful, safe New Years Eve… and I’ll see you in 2014! (Seriously… can you believe its 2014??)

Filed Under: 30 Before 30

O Christmas Tree

December 16, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

Every year I love getting our Christmas tree. I love the fresh smell of Christmas it brings into the house, and picking it out among the others on the Christmas tree lot. Finding one that fills the space, but isn’t too tall for our ceiling.

Well like I mentioned last week, we had ice-mageddon last weekend so my plans to spend Saturday picking out and decorating our tree were thwarted. However I did convince my loving husband to trek out in the ice on Sunday afternoon to pick out a tree. It was FREEZING and we had to knock about 3 inches of ice off the top of his car to secure the tree, but we found the perfect tree and figured that a couple of days in the garage would melt all the ice off. (BTW… 2 days… not enough time, we were still picking chunks of ice off after we brought it into the house Monday night.

But after the ice melted, and the tree was decorated, it was beautiful! For some reason it never feels quite like Christmas until my tree is up and decorated. But enough talking… want to see my tree?

I had been borrowing a tree skirt for the past few years, but that person wanted it back, so I happily obliged. Especially after I saw this tree stand from Crate and Barrel. (we bought it this season, but I can’t find it on their website, so maybe they are out?) I love the clean/rustic look of it. And it leaves plenty of room for presents! PS… don’t mind the pine needles on the floor. It is impossible to keep them all swept up.

Our tree is mostly red and silver ornaments that I’ve gotten from my grandmother’s basement, or picked up along the way. But I have two ornaments, well one is really a set of ornaments, that are my favorites. The first is a set of six silver round balls that say wishes on the front of them… you can barely see the word on the picture below.

But they open up and you can put strips of paper inside that hold your wishes every year. I got these as a present from my sister-in-law a few years ago and it is always really neat to open it up the next year and see if my wishes have come true. Some have, some haven’t, but it is always a neat experience to get a peak inside my head from a year ago.

Now that I’m married, my husband and I do this together at the end of our tree decorating and those 6 are the last ornaments to be put on the tree. I’ve also been writing the year on the back of the strips of paper and keeping them all in a plastic baggie… I think in a few years I’ll enjoy looking back at what my wishes were a few years ago.

They don’t sell the same set, but they have a set of stars now, check them out at Red Envelope.

My other favorite ornament is one my mother found and modified. I have mentioned it before, but I work for my family’s construction company as my day job. For as long as I can remember our job superintendents have driven Red Chevy (or GMC) trucks. So when we have our company meeting, there is truly a fleet or red pickups in the parking lot.

One year for Christmas my mom found a hallmark ornament that was a red pickup truck and cut out one of our logos and glued it to the side. I love seeing this ornament front and center on my tree. It reminds me of the gift my family’s company is and how much I enjoy being in a business so full of history and tradition and so intricately intertwined with my family.

Next to the tree is our fireplace and we hung our stockings there with care. (or I did… the husband doesn’t love to decorate and I’m perfectly fine getting to make it look like I want it to!) If you are keeping track, this means I have checked another thing off my 30 Before 30 list… I bought the husband and I real stockings!

And after I sent my mom a picture of my mantle, this is how the conversation went:

Mom: You have a nutcracker?

Me: Yes, you sent it down in the box with all my Christmas decorations from your house.

Mom: That’s not yours… that’s AJ’s (my brother).

Me: Ummmmm… can we not tell him that until AFTER Christmas?

So SHHHHH… no telling him that I’ve kidnapped one of his Christmas decorations. I promise I’ll give it back after this year, but look how cute he looks on my mantle!!

And one last picture of my tree all lit up at night:

christmas7

I love sitting in the dark at night and watching the lights twinkle on the tree.

What about you? What makes you feel like it is truly Christmastime?

Filed Under: 30 Before 30, Holiday

SCOTUS

December 7, 2013 By amusingmjblog 3 Comments

Or more accurately titled: my older brother’s day in the court.

Sorry I’ve been a little MIA this last week. I took some time off for Thanksgiving with my family, then we took another family vacation to Washington DC because my older brother was able to argue his first case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. Or in legal jargon… SCOTUS. Here’s the deal… my brother is a borderline genius and unbelievably hard worker. So his resume as a young lawyer is pretty impressive: Stanford Law School and Clerk for Justice Scalia just to name some of the highlights. He’s been working for a firm named Bartlit Beck for about 4 years and one of the cases he’s been working on made it onto the Supreme Court’s docket for Dec 3rd. And he wrote the brief and was chosen to argue the case for his client.

Since this is a pretty huge deal, my family decided to all fly out and watch. Jameson has some pretty fantastic friends who helped arrange for us all to have tickets in the gallery to watch. (although neither case for that specific day were all too controversial or popular among non-legal types, so there is a chance we could have gotten in on public tickets, it would have just been more uncertain and we’d have had to wake up earlier). If you get the chance to ever watch arguments at the Supreme Court, it is worth it. There is a lot of tradition and respect involved in the court proceedings so it is fascinating to watch. You can really see each judge’s personality show through in their questioning and they clearly expect a high level of intelligence and response out of the lawyers arguing. I’d have been scared out of my mind, but my older brother was calm cool and collected.

I’m not much of a legal type, but I had read enough about Jameson’s case to understand what was going on. He is the lawyer for Static Control Components and the issue for the lawsuit is whether or not they have standing to sue Lexmark, the printer company. If you are interested you can read the transcript here. The most entertaining part of the morning revolved around Justice Breyer, who is somewhat notorious for coming up with entertaining hypothetical questions during oral arguments. In this particular case he decided to talk hypothetically about an ice cream shop and poisonous chocolate, so I spent most of my morning craving a milkshake (minus the poison).

Here is my family as we were headed into court to watch him:

scotus2

They don’t allow electronics into the court, you have to put them in lockers complete with the little orange keys, so unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the inside. It was an amazing day and such a privilege to watch my older brother! The decision likely won’t come out until the spring, but according to the SCOTUS blog and my interpretation of how the oral arguments went down, I think it is likely the court will rule in SCC’s favor.

Later in the day we were still wandering around Capitol Hill when Jameson joined us, so we took the opportunity to take a few more photos in front of the Supreme Court building.