New Dishes

After the mini-road trip with my mom and ordering new Corelle dishes from the store online (those Target exclusive colors) they finally came in the mail.  I am loving the new plates and bowls, though I do miss my polk-a-dots.

 Although we didn't need the mugs and smaller plates they are quite nice to have.  Our polk-a-dots are cute but as you can see were starting to show what 3 years will do to not as durable as Corelle plates/bowls:

Chipped edges on the plates (3 out of or 7) and hairline cracks in our bowls (about 2/7)... and incase you are wondering we started with 8 of all our dishes.  We lost one large plate, one small plate and one bowl completely with only our mugs surviving.  Here is a comparison of the size difference (and major difference in weight too):

plate comparison corelle and dots

8 corelle vs 6 dots

I'm hanging onto the few un-cracked bowls and mugs and my momma is taking the rest to break and create into some project.  Love the square plates but wish the bowls were round instead of square-ish.

Happy Birthday Luke!

My handsome Manfriend is 29 years old!  For his birthday my parents took us to dinner and a Knighthawks lacrosse game last weekend.  We had our photo taken in the photo booth and later in the game they have the fan photo of the game...it was Luke and I!  Happy Birthday to Luke...the best lovie pie ever. The last photo is the winner.

mini road trip

Mom and I had a wonderful mini-road trip.  We started by stopping at the Corning/Corelle store so that I could get some new dishes.  I picked some out, not the ones I had my heart set on but they were nice.  Next we continued on since the whole reason we went was to get a giant plastic Santa face for my house.  My parents have one on their house and I found a hook type thing on the front of our house and thought, "a Santa would look nice."  Apparently they are very expensive on e-bay for the large ones.  My resourceful mom started looking on Craigslist.  They were willing to hold it for us until we made the trip (this was from back in December).  It's just like my folks giant Santa face and I'm super excited, though I will have to lock him to the house.

Boscov's #1

After that we drove onward a little in search of Boscov's.  It was closed when we got there (Sunday) so we picked a hotel and ended up staying near Mohegan Sun (in Pennsylvania).  We adventured to the Casino for dinner and mom ended up winning $28 and change with her freeplay money.  I was a loser.

Monday morning we got up and went to Target to return some things mom had in the car since Boscov's wasn't open yet.  Boscov's was an old fashioned city style department store (not mall).  Mom loved it and kept wondering when Jen was going call/text and let us know what she was having (boy or girl).  We stopped at Perkins and split a 5 stack of pancakes.  Mom loves their pancakes and there aren't anymore Perkins in our area.

After Perkins it was onto Boscov's number two of the day.  This one appeared to be like the old Mid-Town plaza.  You parked under ground and took the escalator up into the store.  This store was attached to a mall but it reminded us of Mid-Town plaza.  In the parking garage before we went shopping we got a text from Jen that was a picture.  "It's a pineapple," she declared with a photo of a pineapple from Hawaii.  The baker didn't have her cupcakes done so they were wandering the store.  Mom got really excited and thought I was kidding when I read the text to her (she was finding a parking spot and didn't want to wait.)  While shopping she received the text that it was a boy and was very happy (although she would have been either way).

Boscov's #2

We proceeded on to our third and final Boscov's of the trip.  Another city location.  Here mom returned some things from Boscov's #1 that were girl baby clothes (on sale really good).  We were Boscov-ed out.  Mom had a free night at Turning Stone Casino so we spent the night.  Very early in the morning we got up and went to the Casino to use our free play money.  I was once again a loser while my mom walked away with around $125.  She is just lucky like that.  

After the Casino we checked out the Oneida factory store and looked at the silverware.  I didn't need any but was curious.  Mom always looks for her pattern, which is discontinued.  You never know.  We skipped the Disney store in Syracuse since I can get stuff online and it was raining and we were tired.  The Waterloo Premium outlets was our last stop.  The bathrooms there were so clean and nice. We had lunch and then returned my dishes from the Corning/Corelle place since I just couldn't shake the dishes I wanted.  They were able to order my Target exclusive print from their store so I had success plus free shipping since Target is usually out of my dishes.  

It was a fun adventure with my momma and I am looking forward to many more.  

things I'm loving right now

Well, it is February Break... so no worries of a 5:30 am work call to sub.  Getting to take a min-road trip with my momma.  The way the sun comes in the windows and makes me think spring.  My new Mickey mug.

 Thunder Paws and Manfriend.  I love how she snuggles next to him on the couch while he works from home.  He's also super cute when he holds her and rubs his face on her and she nudges him with her face if he's not paying attention to her.

I've been doing some cleaning up/organizing of things around the house and it feels good.  I've been scanning and sorting pictures, donating bags of clothes and other trinkets, keeping the counter mostly cleaned off.

8 Years!

Wow, time has just flown by.  I met Luke 8 years ago and we had our first date on February 17th (also my Grandma Pearl's birthday).  We had met previously through a mutual friend and had chatted on the phone a couple of times.  I had to travel into the Buffalo area to drop Jen off at the airport for a long weekend to NYC to visit Bob.

 I called up Luke and we met at UB when he got out of class.  From there we went to play pool at Slick Willies and then went to the movie The Aviator.  Long movie and not really my style... not really Luke's either, but we went since it was nominated for awards and stuff.

 After the movie I went back to Fredonia, but stopped to grocery shop at Wegman's.   Almost a year later he traveled with my mom, dad and I to Disney for me to run my first Goofy race.  He put up with my crazy racing shenanigans, my coaching and my attitude and I knew he was a keeper.

 Happy 8 years handsome!

Check out my Magic Kingdom visit...

I broke down my latest Disney trip in January into pieces about Magic Kingdom on my running blog.  Check out before 9:30 am,  and 9:30-10:30am.   More Magic Kingdom posts will follow so that you get the whole day broken down into chunks.  Don't worry, they aren't all just about an hour.  First thing in the morning was all the new Story Book Circus and Double Dumbo attraction as well as the new Fantasyland Be Our Guest restaurant (10:30-11:30/12).  If you back track a little bit you will be able to also read about my Goofy Race #8.

new windows and some snow

We got our new windows installed on Wednesday and we love them.  Home Depot did a wonderful job.  The guy that installed them (yes, just one guy all by himself) did a fantastic job cleaning up and then gave me a tutorial on how to tilt in for cleaning.  While he was here installing Cinder Ella and I hung out in the office.  For a while she was content to sit in her window seat until he started work on the window under the office.

She saw him outside and did a grumble/growl at him (so protective of me).  After that she curled up in my lap while I scanned photos of Uncle Jack into the computer so I could upload them to my smugmug photo account.  Peeling the tape of the back of 3 poster boards of photos was not fun, but I did enjoy getting to look at all the photos.  I also had a bag full of photos to scan as well.

Here is a before and after of our kitchen window.  They are making a huge difference.  We have no more draft in our kitchen/family room area.  Our bedroom is also warmer (we've been kicking off the down comforter at 57 degrees at night).

Our kitchen window was a stained wood window and now we have white vinyl.  I think we are going to leave the trim the stained wood since it matches the beams in the family room.  Friday we were getting a ton of snow (but not anything like Boston).  I decided it would be good to take Cinder Ella out since she was begging.  See how much she loves her leash...

She did not want to come in, despite the fact she kept shaking snow off her paws.  She was super cute though until she tried to climb the pine tree.  At that point I scooped up the growling fur ball and brought her in.  Don't know what she saw looking up the tree that she had to try and get.  We are buddies again, she doesn't stay mad at me very long.

New Windows and other "small stuff"

We are getting new windows in some of our rooms tomorrow.  We picked the extremely drafty and bad ones to replace and will eventually also replace others in the house as we feel needed.  All of our windows have storm windows on them.  I did the plastic shrink wrap on the drafty windows and as you can see they needed it.

That is called ice/frost on the INSIDE of the plastic wrap from the terrible draft that is also minimized by curtains.  After the kitchen table window came off in my hand while I was opening it on a warm fall day the decision was made to get new windows.  Our bedroom window had ice on the glass and the storm plastic "glass."  BRrr.  Home Depot is coming tomorrow to install 5 windows.  That will leave us with 9 windows for the future (one was done prior to purchasing the house along with the sliding glass door).

  

We finally got around to installing our programmable thermostat that Jen and Bob gave us for Christmas.  We really don't adjust the temperature that often in our house, or by that much.  The above is our old one and below is our new one.  We turned off the circuit breaker and labeled wires to reconnect and it was actually very easy to do.  

It turns the heat up from 58 to 63 degrees around 4:30 PM (so it will be warm when I get back from a run and Luke is home from work.  Turns back down to 58 around 9 PM so it is comfy for sleeping with our down comforter and stays at 58 until 4:30 PM.  Weekends it kicks on the heat during the day instead of staying at 58.  It is nice not having to remember to turn it up or down.

And since I said other "small stuff" the lady at the grocery store gave me a paper bag for Thunder Paws.  She loves it and is very cute how she drags her toys in there to play.