A little gem from YouTube

Not quite the latest, but the best pest pictures I have...

I think there is something cool about this waterheater. Apparently no freezing cold shower blast when someone flushes!

The future kitchen and dining room

1 of the 3 bedrooms

The garage and covered balcony

My bathtub!

I think the sheetrock is up now...I'm getting so excited for my new house!

The Perfect Version of 'O Holy Night'

Not to jump the gun on the season....I know we still have Thanksgiving coming up this week! I love the fall and am not anxious to hurry it along. But I just had something on my mind about one of my favorite Christmas songs!

Last year my friend Barbara and I were so sick of the crazy versions of O Holy Night we were hearing on the radio. In my own iTunes, I have versions of this song from everyone like Charlotte Church to N'Sync (ok, i love this one!). But we came up with the formula for the perfect rendition that we wanted to hear:
1. Needs to be sung by a power-house diva, female singer--somebody with serious pipes!
2. Should be simple and true to the original version
3. Not too many runs, but enough to remind us that a diva is singing the song.
4. Mainly piano accompaniment, but adding in strings and orchestra are good too.

We searched all over the place (well, ok, just iTunes again) for this perfect version. Would you guess the one we found to fit all our criteria: MARTINA McBRIDE! It's the most beautiful song.

Do you agree with our conditions for the perfect song?

What I'm loving today

Glee!
I love the music--I can't help it! I also think that the show is genius--revenue-generating television that we can all still tivo through the commercials. Is it lame that I want to purchase the sheet music for SATB, pull a make-shift choir together and sing our hearts out on "Somebody to Love"? Anybody with me?


Battle Studies
by John Mayer, released 11/17

My favorite song so far: Heartbreak Warefare
Least favorite song so far: Who Says

I know JM is a bit of a tool, but I love him.

Construction Update

There is a second floor now!

My Birthday!

I had an awesome 29th birthday this past week--I celebrated all day at work and then all evening with my friends and family!
We had a beverage station that was awesome!The hardcore karaoke singers stayed and sang all night--gotta love Careless Whisper and Time after Time!

Thanks everyone!

ugh....car problems

So this was my car yesterday.....

Today it is all better!

Great Dinner, Better Friends!

Two Parts to Halloween

Halloween was a full day! I mostly spent the day with my sister's family for a fun evening of trick-or-treating with my nieces--E&H. But we did make them pose for pictures for seriously half an hour first. My mom reminded me that they used to take 1 or 2 photos of us on Halloween. Was I deprived....or were our lives just simpler??? I loved being a child of the '80's....so even though we didn't have digital cameras I think I turned out just fine!

But we got some super cute pictures of the girls in their fabulous princess costumes. Check out the wigs: hi-wait for it-larious! They were loving it!

But look, even at the end they were still having fun!!

Then later than night I went to our ward's Halloween party/barn dance. My high-heeled boots were not doing well in the dirt floor. But other than that it was a pretty fun night.

Big News

Before I get into all the witty banter (yeah right!) I have going on in my head that I want to publish to all of the world....I have big news. I am a home owner, or rather will be in the first few months of next year.

I have been planning on purchasing my own home in the next year or so, but all the pieces fell into place last week and I signed a purchase agreement for a townhouse. Here is what it looks like so far. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but a really fun one! Ha! It all went down on possibly the busiest day of the year--they day before my company's convention. I was getting ready to go out of town for a week and ended up having to do all sorts of mortgage paperwork.

Speaking of my job...our convention was INSANE. In good ways (sales) and horrible ways (CROWD CONTROL)! One morning I arrived at 7 a.m. to this:

If you're not familiar with this situation, and why would anyone be, it is a korean sit-in, that wrapped all the way around this large convention center. Yes, we had hundreds of our independent distributors from Korea, lined up in a organized protest, at a sit-in to be the first to get our new product. This is NOT something I want to encounter at 7 a.m.--let's be honest. Which, yay for us that we have a great product, but this group was taking the whole civil disobedience thing a little too far. They threatened to riot (ok, so i realize that's not part of civil disobedience), which I was personally hoping would happen. But alas, it ended with the fire marshall forcing them to move and a lot of yelling. I got to personally escort this line around the building. If I had not had some great work friends there to help--giant shout-out to HOSTING STAFF '09: Kristen, Whitney, Chieh, Susan, Russ and Ryan--I probably would have died, or been crushed by the out of control crowds. There were times I thought I was in Brazil at a soccer game---getting crushed up against a chain link fence. Just NOT a pretty picture.

Yeah, I aged about 10 years during this event. Kind of ironic, isn't it.

First Post!

Oh my gosh....I'm blogging. I am only about 5 years behind this massive trend. I realize that. I think this may just be a gateway drug to Twitter...which I am trying to avoid. So we'll see. But I love reading other people's blogs...but I'm ready to give this a try for myself.

Now that I'm here...will all you hard core bloggers give me some pointers about how to make mine cute? I don't want this blogspot default template forever.

I also accept comments, shout-outs and smart remarks!

MORE TO COME!