House Proud

Justin Gresham

I hope the day never comes when my wife has to choose between me or Nate Berkus. I think I would lose.


Do you watch The Nate Berkus show?? Justin posted the above quote on FB the other day and while it is NOT true...I do love me some Nate! If you love design,  DIY projects, etc. and do not know who NB is...promise me you will dvr his show soon....you will love him, too. ;)


I know Justin struggles to understand why (which, is actually OK with me:)), but I am an unashamed NB groupie. I cannot help or avoid it. One of my favorite parts of his show is his "House Proud" segment where people submit photos and videos of elements of their homes they are proud of. I love seeing all the creativity and unique ideas people come up with and it makes me ITCH to be in a house, soon. Don't get me wrong...I do love our 3rd floor bungalow! There are so many limitations with an apartment (i.e. only allowed to paint ONE wall. Well, I guess we broke that rule) that make it feel fairly un-workable, sometimes. Sometimes, my head will spin with ideas to make this place come even more to life, but I quickly curb my ideas and put them in a mental file folder until we are in a space that allows us to rip up carpet, paint an entire room and stain our kitchen cabinets. I keep thinking we might really help out the apartment complex rent out our space if they did allow these things!! Not so sure they agree with me on this issue!


Hopefully, soon, we will have a House Proud of our own and mayyyyyybe can score a seat on the NB show!!! ;)

Yuck.

I hate being sick. Really hate it. For the last two weeks I have been battling some crud like crazy and I think (hope) I am at the end of it. Justin joined me in on the fun halfway through my journey, so we have been sickly little ones for quite some time now...no fun!

Not to fret, though: we are all hyped up on meds. For real. Our medicine cabinet is chock-full of all the 'nighttime sniffling sneezing coughing aching' gunk you can imagine and surely we are non-contagious at this point. We have felt much older than 26 this past week, constantly reminding each other to take their respective pills. Dang germs. 


Aside from getting our money's worth our Netflix subscription by watching many, many SVU episodes (as in close to an entire season), we have tried not to miss out on too much life (I'm sure contributing to why we are taking so long to get better!) 


Last weekend, we celebrated Justin's 26th birthday by bowling, touring Rahr & Sons brewery in Ft. Worth, getting him his first massage, a good 'ole Palio's pizza birthday meal followed by a trip to the Minute Clinic -yahoo! I did not get to 'shout out' to my sweet husband on his birthday via bloggerworld, so here it is in all it's glory: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, J!! Pretty glad you were born and I absolutely adore and love you more than you know. :)

The "gingers" blowing out their brownie cake. Sam is a 

Christmas baby!

Some of the bowling group. Good friends :)

In one of our more 'under the weather' moments, but

still having a great time at Rahr! ;)

Main take-aways from this blog: Happy Birthday, Justin and everyone should bump up your Vitamin C intake!

Cheers to staying healthy~

Where there's smoke, there's fire. Or is there....?

So, we spent this past weekend at Justin's grandparents lakehouse in East Texas and just had a grand 'ole time. Pam & Steve (wonderful in-laws) just got a new boat and it was so fun finally getting to take it for a spin. We fished a little, Justin ski'd (skied?!!hmm..), watched most of our sports teams lose their games - boo!, did a little yard work, slept late, and ate some goooood home cookin'. It was 80% relaxing. That 20% of non-relaxation time was made up of Justin and I venturing out and attempting to accomplish a real 'survivors' task. What were we trying to do, you ask? Well, I'll let you take a guess from this short video clip. 

Yes, folks, we were trying to create fire with sticks. Which, I am now convinced is almost like trying to create fire out of thin air! Anyhow, recently we have been hooked on watching survival-type shows on The Discovery Channel. Some of the favs that are DVR-ed lately  "Man, Woman, Wild", and "Dual Survival." Ok...these guys (and gals) are some serious outdoorsmen and we have watched them time and time again, create shelter and fire for themselves in times of need. They always say these are the two most important things to do first. So, while at the lake this weekend, the most logical thing for us to do was try and build our own fire. We wanted to know that if ever put in the situation, we could do it. As you may have noticed above, there was no fire. However, what was not fully captured on film was our relentless fury to produce a flame. I'm not kidding...our sweat and blood went into this task. We would like to think we had all the right elements and experimented with different wood types, techniques, and angles along the way...all of which were exhausting. I kept telling Justin that "nightfall and the cold were quickly approaching," so as to maybe create a more urgent mental sense of desperation for this fire. Ehh...it didn't work. BUT, I will say that we had positive attitudes (they say this is also really important in stressful situations), some smoke and lots of heat goin' on! After pumping out several minutes of this exhausting bow-drill technique (yep, learned that from TV), the drill wood was SO hot that it would burn your finger and you could literally smell a fire...but sadly, no ember produced. Eventually, our positive attitudes burned out much like our non-existant fire and we wanted to watch the Rangers game. So we did. True survivors if you ask me ;)


Though I was an Indian Princess many moons ago with my dad (yea, I just heard you laugh and that's fine...it was an experience;)), I thought this would have been one of the skills they taught us. Guess I missed out on that lesson and we will just have to keep watching survival shows until we get it. Either that or make sure we have a lighter on us if we are ever stranded in the wilderness. :)