Cleaning House

Ever since getting back from vacation, I've been on an organization rampage. Take note of last weekend's transformation of our basement storage room:

The rest of our basement is finished, and looks great. This room, however, is not my favorite room of the house because of these:

These beauties are called cave crickets, and they love to get into my storage room, especially in the fall and spring. They jump like crazy when you try to kill them, and love to hide in the places you least expect it. I honestly get a queezy feeling in my stomach just looking at them. But not even they could stop my from conquering the storage room.

The one thing I have not figured out how to conquer are my pillow demons. This is how I like my couch to look:

But is spends 95% of it's day looking like this:

The answer would obviously be to just get rid of the pillows, but instead I just rearrange them a dozen times a day. It's as if my kids make it a goal to never let the pillows rest undisturbed for more than an hour. For some reason they haven't quite made it on board the Organization Express.

Photoshop Love

I went over to my friend Rebecca's house this morning for a little photoshop lesson. We went to a cute little field that had hay bales (the big round kind) and took some pictures, and then she helped me edit them with photoshop. I don't have the "before" pictures, but I guarantee you the "after"s are significantly better. Thanks Rebecca for the lesson (and for the snacks!).

This is Mason holding the ladybug. I love this picture!

Here's one I did when I got home:

Dropping His Pride, and Overcoming His Prejudice

When we were in Australia, I used a story from Pride and Prejudice in a talk I gave at a mission conference. I used the part where Mr Darcy says he doesn't have great social skills, and Elizabeth responds that she's not as good at the piano as she would like but she has always assumed that it's her own fault because she won't practice.

The other day, Ryan mentioned that he has used that story a couple of times in the past few months. I let him know that he had no business using a story from a movie that he derides whenver it is mentioned. If he can't value the source, then it's off limits.

I'm not sure if it was that or whether it was the husband of a couple we stayed with while we were in Utah admitting that he really likes "Sense and Sensibility"--either way, the other day Ryan told me that he thought we should watch "Pride and Prejudice" together.

I had to think, "Who are you, and what did you do with my husband?" In 10 years of marriage, Ryan has always claimed he'd rather stick a fork in his eye than endure watching that movie. But every night since then, we've been down in our basment watching an hour or so at a time. And I am happy to say that, although I'm sure it's not his favorite movie, he is actually enjoying it.

I mean, what's not to love?