Birthday Recap

Well I've been desperately trying to catch up on dishes and more dishes housework, so I haven't done much crafting or sewing in the past week. I thought I'd give you the birthday recap I said I would. First of all, it was great. My family (especially Hubs) and friends made me feel so blessed and it was just an all around enjoyable day!

I opened some presents before we went to dinner. Hubs was smart and looked at my Pinterest boards for ideas. He saw a necklace, but unfortunately the link didn't work. So he looked on Etsy until he found the exact necklace! How great is he?? I was totally surprised and excited! I won't detail everything I got, but lets just say everybody must know me really well because I LOVED everything!

Note to self: must use flash in PF Changs. We got the waitress to take a picture, and silly me didn't check before we left to make sure it was a good one. It looks ok in black and white, but you should see the original orange version haha.

After PF Changs we walked around the outdoor shopping center and made a few stops. We hardly ever go into Macy's, but we were looking for a bathroom so we went in and I found a dress perfect for the Air Force ball this fall. On clearance. In my size. Happy Birthday to me!

Thanks to all of my family for making me feel so special and loved. And especially thanks to Hubs for taking me out and having a fun night even though he had a project due and ended up staying up late to finish.

Coming up sometime soonish on the blog:

• Post about the shirt that went horribly wrong and hopefully my solution to salvage it...I haven't exactly come up with the solution part yet
• I'm going to attempt to recover an old jewelry box with mod podge and fabric
• Possibly probably some baby item since I'm going to visit my niece in August

I hope everybody is having a good week so far!

Get Free Stuff

Wanna know how to get free stuff? Just be born. Seriously. I guess I've been gradually signing up for emails for different restaurants and stores and this year it just hit me how many free things you can get. If you aren't taking advantage of this, you definitely should. I could've eaten out for free my whole birthday week if we lived near any of these places. (Unfortunately our little town doesn't have about 75% of the places that sent me stuff, so I'll have to wait until next year.)

I thought I'd give you a quick run-down of who's giving what for birthdays. No one is sponsoring this post, I just wanted to share the birthday love! Also, to avoid getting a bunch of unwanted email I have a separate account that I always list when sites ask for my email. I still check it regularly, but I can usually delete most emails.

• Sunglass Hut - $20 in store coupon (no minimum purchase! And before you say there's nothing in that store under $20 think holders and cleaning kits.)
• Moes - free entree 
• Qdoba - buy one get one free
• Firehouse Subs - free medium sub
• Starbucks - free drink (I think this is because I registered my Starbucks card...which was also free from my bank hehe)
• Red Robin - free burger
• Cold Stone - buy one get one free (pretty sure this one used to be totally free, but oh well)
• Ihop - free Rooty Tooty Fresh n' Fruity
• World Market - $10 (no minimum purchase! I got a mug, a ring holder, and some chocolates and only spent 16 cents!)

I'm sure that there are others, but I was pretty excited about all of these! Next year I'm going to eat well (assuming the Air Force moves us somewhere that has this stuff)!  Tonight Hubs and I are going out to PF Changs to celebrate, compliments of my aunt : ) I'll try to take a few pictures at dinner (and of the goodies my family sent!) to post later. Have you found any other great birthday deals?

Playing Catch-Up

Number of blog posts started in the last week but not posted (or even halfway complete): 3

Number of hours I spent on the phone for work yesterday: 2 and 1/2 (with only about a 15 minute break in the middle). Did I feel like I was melting into a pile of blahness in my chair after being on the phone for so long? Yes.

State of our house: eh, not terrible but definitely not ideal (see birthday cooking mess below)

Birthdays: Bro-in-law's bday was last week...and his card is still on my desk...hopefully he knows we didn't forget about his birthday all together, it took us over a week to decide what to get him.

Hubs' bday was yesterday and a success, I think :) Although one present won't be here until Thursday. I'm telling myself that just means he gets to stretch the celebration out for the whole week! And here's the aftermath of cooking three meals plus a cake yesterday:

Whittled it down to just a few dishes last night, yay! 

 

PS - Do you see the lack of counter space I'm dealing with? I knew it wasn't much, but seeing this picture made it stand out even more. There's not really much available space on the other side of the kitchen either unless there are no clean or dirty dishes (no dishwasher, sigh). Also, now I feel compelled to do a post about how much we love our house because we really do. But when you live in a house that's almost 102 years old you have to put up with some annoyances of the things that give it character.

On a happier note - some other birthday highlights from yesterday:

Happy Birthday Hubs! You're awesome and I wish I could've

given you the day off of work yesterday for your bday! I'm especially thankful you 

were born because I got the best husband anyone could hope for out of the deal!

No icing on the cake due to icing failure

FYI almond extract is not always a good substitute for vanilla extract. 

Rather than mush together bits and pieces of three unfinished posts into one (you're welcome) I'll try to just wrap up with my new cleaning strategy. I say try because I'm finding that I have a terribly hard time staying on topic when I write! Guess Hubs is right about my train of thought being all over the place when we're talking :/

I don't like doing dishes, therefore the kitchen is rarely spotless. I don't really have a good excuse for the rest of the house. So I have a new game plan. I'm hoping that by putting it on the internet I'll stick to it because if it's on the internet, it must be true. Hah.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

Spend 20 minutes each evening picking up clutter and just generally tidying up the place.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday

Dishes. Do them. 

Sunday

Alternate between vacuuming and moping/cleaning tub and toilet.

So I'll let you know if this pans out. I'm hoping to have a sparkling house from now on and live happily ever after :) I think I can still get the happily ever after either way and we'll just have to see what happens with the sparkling house.