Old Lady

I think we all have a little bit of 'old lady' in us. Some knit and others wear crocs. The most old lady thing about me is that I want a gnome in my garden.

Oh yeah, and I also read obituaries. What's 'old lady' about you?

Rusty

Since I'm the only poster here, most of you don't really know my husband Rusty. So I thought I would do an "intro to my husband" post.

Name: Rustin Spencer. That's RUSTIN, not Justin or Dustin. He decided that he would start going by Russ lately so that he doesn't have to say his name 2 or 3 times before someone gets it. Frankly, I hate it. Russ sounds like a balding accountant. I did not marry a balding accountant. So if you're someone who thinks his name is Russ, please stop calling him that.

Education and early life: He's originally from Port Orchard, Washington. He served a mission in Raleigh, North Carolina and graduated in Psychology from BYU Hawaii. He then got his masters degree in Experimental Psychology from University of Hawaii-Manoa.

*Important note. Just because someone says they graduated in psychology doesn't mean they can interpret your dreams. Stop asking them to do that.

*Another important note. Just because someone graduated in psychology doesn't mean they're a shrink. They may in fact, make fun of shrinks.

Job: Market Research. Market research is kind of like consulting, but with actual statistics involved. He works for a company that will fix problems in businesses. If you've ridden the Seattle ferries recently and have taken that enormously huge survey they've been passing out, I apologize on behalf of my husband.

Biggest regret: He didn't kiss more girls before he got married. He brings it up all the time. I kissed one more boy than he kissed girls, so he feels like he lost. And you know what? he totally did. Or maybe it was me that lost because of the kinds of boys that I kissed...

Biggest dream: He wants to fly. Next summer, we're skipping out on all family reunions and we're going to Jackson Hole for a week while he takes some seriously expensive hang gliding lessons.

Personality: He's really laid back. He tries to pretend that he has opinions on things, (things like the temperature of the house or the color of our lawn) but I know the truth. He's really smart. For fun, he likes to read articles on Real Clear Politics and bore me with them. He's very supportive and is a wonderful father. I really couldn't be any happier. :)

That time we were homeless...

I referred to that in my earlier post and figured someone would ask why and when Rusty and I were homeless. No one did, but here's the story anyways.

When we were first married we lived in Hawaii. As students, we were only allowed to work 19 hours a week on campus. The only place to work in Laie is on campus, so that's what we did. We were SO POOR! Our rent was $550 a month for one bedroom. And when I say one bedroom, I really mean it was one bedroom - no kitchen, dining, or living room. Just a bedroom in someone's house. (We shared a bathroom with the owners and their 3 kids). We had very little money leftover because of prices likes these:

Yes, that gallon of milk was on sale for $8.49.

Luckily, we were moving to a place the following semester that was a bit cheaper with more privacy (meaning it was still a bedroom in someone's house, but we didn't have to walk through someone else's living space to get there). Because we had no money for Christmas presents for each other, we decided to move out of bedroom #1 a week before we were to move into bedroom #2. The only problem was that we were left homeless for the week, and I subsequently got eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was a great first Christmas together!

Here's a couple of pictures of bedroom #2.

From the front door.

Our bathroom/kitchen. Yup, we could shower and get breakfast at the same time.

But who really cares how small your house is when this is your front yard??

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It's pretty much my new favorite show. If this clip doesn't convince you that it needs to be your new favorite show, too then I don't know if we can be friends anymore.

I need to run faster!

I started a Couch to 5K program this week. For those of you unfamiliar with the program, it's a 9 week running program that gets you running a 5K by the end of week 9. Anyways, I started on week 3. But I'm not running fast enough.

Wanna' know how I know? Because mosquitos have been landing on the backs of my legs since I started on Monday. From the top of my knee to my mid-calfs I have gotten 42 mosquito bites.

All things considered, I think that breaks my record of 55 that night when Rusty and I were sleeping in our car because we were homeless.

Who are you?

So I know who the three people are that always leave me comments, and I obsessively check sitemeter and blogpatrol, so I have a pretty good idea of who my readers are, but there are some that visit from random states that I've never even heard of! OK, that's not true either ;) But I've certainly never been to (insert random state here) or know anyone from there either. So tell me who you are! Don't be ashamed of being a blog stalker. Embrace it!

I WON I WON I WON!!

Remeber this post? Well, Stef told me I should enter it into a photo contest and I WON!

http://www.diplomaframe.com/pages/666_proud_to_be_an_american_photo_contest.cfm

I have only won one other thing in my entire life. That's when we were in Hawaii and I won the Lost trivia challenge on the news and I got a Lost towel. Anyways, this is WAY cooler.

Some Randomness

I had a dream last night that my other toe nail ripped off. And I was really excited because then I had something to blog about. That's really sad.

So I'll really make a concerted effort this week to do something amazing so that I don't resort to talking about my dreams again. Or toe nails for that matter.

But while I'm at it, I might as well tell you all my other dream. I was an assassin (I think I've watched too many movies lately) and I was assigned to kill Lacey. Now Lacey and I have had our differences, but I harbor no grudge and I don't want to assassinate her. Freud may disagree, but what does he know anyways?

The Power of Mind

I willed my toe nail to reattach.

I know what you're thinking, you thought I only had one super power. Well, you were wrong.

Breakfast Time

Breakfast usually starts earlier than it should. Ashlyn will wake up and go run to see if Austin's awake. This is what follows:

Ashlyn:
quietly "Austin, are you awake?"
yelling "MOMMY AUSTIN'S STILL ASLEEP - OH! LOOK MOMMY! AUSTIN'S AWAKE!!"
And then she giggles like it's the best coincidence ever.


I really like the age that Austin is at. He's so easy to please. Ashlyn HAS to have purple milk (the lid is purple - not the actual milk) in a red sippy cup. That's just one example though, it's different every meal, every day.

While there is the problem of Austin eating rocks, he's perfectly content eating anything, anywhere. (This is a picture of him scrounging off the floor for the rest of his breakfast.

Home Improvement

Our house is in need of some personality and the kids were in need of some entertainment. Anyways, Rusty designed and built this playground from scratch! To say I was totally impressed would be an understatement. He did a great job and the kids LOVE it!

He designed it after those playground kits you can buy. We considered buying one of those, but they're way too big and way too expensive.

And we also did some painting. I need to go back and fix the edges, but I'm waiting to decide if I want to do the rest of his walls in a light green or keep them white.
Ashlyn was jealous of Austin's name. So last night, as soon as she fell asleep, I painted her name. I didn't want to spend anymore money on those ridiculously expensive wooden letters, so I just painted it on. It'll go nicely with her fairy tale themed room.

Back to Bloggin...

I'm back from my bloggin hiatus. I've been toying with the look of my blog, and I'm still not quite satisfied with it, but I needed a break.

So here are two things that happened this week.

We said goodbye to Nanee and Papa. They're off to China for a year to teach English and they had an hour layover in Boise, so we dropped in to say goodbye.

I developed a fear of small aircraft. Yes, that is an airplane. It doesn't look very big and it looks far away, but when it was right outside my window I was grabbing the kids (and not my camera) and getting out of the house. I thought he was going to crash into it. He spent about an hour swooping in over our neighborhood. There are undeveloped lots a few blocks down from me and he was flying about 10 feet over those. Crazy drunken pilot. Now whenever I hear a plane I run outside to see if it's the crazy yellow one.

And no, he wasn't doing any crop dusting.