Shana's Birthday

Shana turned 22 this past week. YAY! Mom and Dad had a birthday dinner for her at their house on Sunday.

Mike's 24th birthday was the day before Shana's so we sang to them both.

The cake was certainly big enough for two birthdays. It was a delicious German Chocolate Cake made by Liz. Aren't they a cute couple?

Doug and I chillin' on the couch.

Shana and Mike chillin' on the couch.

After dinner Lizzy played the piano for a little while people danced.

Johnny preferred dancing with Melissa :)

My Life In Hell Is Over

Ok maybe I'm being a bit dramatic. But the truth is on Saturday I took the GRE and my life can finally resume some normalcy. I was spending a lot of my extra time studying for that test and it seems to have paid off. I got a 1280 which didn't quite reach my goal of 1300 but it should be good enough for both of the schools I'm applying to. When I got home from the test Doug and I decided to go out to get our last Rita's of the season. It's not exactly in our diet but I learned in my Psychology class that the brain runs on glucose and since I had just used my brain so much I figured that it needed to be replenished if I wanted to have normal brain capacity for the rest of the day.

Yum!!!

So far my favorite by-product of this new diet we're on is that I made sushi at home for the first time. The recipe that I got from the book used brown rice so it's still really healthy. And since sushi is pretty much Doug's favorite thing to eat he's pretty happy too :)

Missy This One's For You

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. The bold ones are the ones I've read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare---hmmm, I'm not sure if I've read them ALL
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy--(does half count?)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding--Is this seriously on here?
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt-
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Rat Race Begins

Unfortunately I don't have any interesting pictures for you right now but I just wanted to let everyone know what we are up to. Doug and I started back to school two weeks ago. It's been a little overwhelming for both of us. This morning I was seriously doubting my decision to go back to school. But I'm sure that's just a passing emotion...hopefully. I am also studying to take the GRE in two weeks, which I'm pretty nervous about since my math skills are nil. Doug is working very hard putting in 35-40 hours at work and then also taking three classes. I don't know how he does it. He also decided last week that he's going to start an exercise plan. So on Friday he got up and ran at 5:30 am before he went to work. YAY Doug!
One other new thing for us is that we have started a new diet that will hopefully help me with a couple of health issues I've been struggling with for awhile. The diet involves eating LOTS of vegetables and fruit, more fish, less red meat, and practically no refined flour, sugar or rice. It hasn't been as difficult for me as I thought it would be since I have a huge sweet tooth. Maybe after awhile I will be able to ease into eating a few sweets :) But it's mostly just common sense healthy eating and I've kind of wanted to eat more like this for awhile so I'm glad I came across this diet. Fortunately there is no restriction on my dairy intake because I don't think I would be able to handle that.
So life is generally good for us. Mostly we are just trying to stay balanced without getting stressed out while maintaining some semblance of order in our home. Well I guess Doug doesn't get stressed out so mostly I'm trying to not get stressed out. Anyway, we love you all! And I'll try to get some interesting pictures together soon.

Utah and Idaho

Last week Doug and I got back from a trip to Utah. We had a lot of people to visit so it was really busy but it was a lot of fun.


Here's a picture of the mountains as we headed into Salt Lake. Our first stop was Provo where we stayed with Miah and Missy and stayed up late every night playing games to our hearts delight. We also got to see Micah and Erin every day we were there which was wonderful. Micah made us a "bread" themed dinner in Doug's honor: bread salad, chicken with bread sauce, cheesy garlic bread and chocolate bread pudding (made by Erin). It was delish.


We went with Miah and Missy and their kids to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Salt Lake. It was really nice to see them. Grandma made Isabelle her own hat, scarf and slippers which she wanted to wear right away. What a cutie pie!


Grandpa and Isabelle.


Me and Joseph. I miss my nephews and nieces :( While we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa our camera broke so the rest of the pictures are taken with a camera phone and didn't turn out so great.


After three days we went to visit Doug's Mom and stepdad Matt in Providence, UT which is right next to Logan. They took us on a picnic up in the mountains in a place called Tony Grove. It was so beautiful. Unfortunately the camera phone pictures don't do justice to the place. I think I appreciated the beauty of Utah more on this trip than I have on any other in the past.


A view from the other side of the lake at Tony Grove.


Here we are at Bear Lake which is right on the border between Idaho and Utah. We drove to there after our picnic. The view was breathtaking.


Bear Lake.


After our visit to Providence we packed up again and headed north to visit Doug's Dad, stepmom Jennie, and sister Bonnie in Weston, Idaho. The drive up was really pretty.


Here are Doug and I at his Dad's place. We had a lot of fun playing games and talking with Doug's family. Also we got to go to the hot springs in Preston which was something I'd never done before.


Here is the sun setting in Weston, something Doug always says PA sunsets don't even compare to. Doug said this wasn't a prime specimen of a Weston sunset, but I thought it was beautiful all the same. The next morning we packed our bags and headed back to PA. What a trip! I am so glad we got to see so many people. Thanks to everyone who let us stay at their houses. We love you.

Pickin' Peaches

This past Saturday we went to Linvilla Orchards with our friends Laura and Brian to pick peaches and tomatoes. It was the perfect day for it: warm and sunny. They were a little late so Doug and I got our picture taken and had some ice cream.


Then we all climbed onto the hayride that took us out to the peach orchard. We only had about fifteen or twenty minutes because they were closing up but it was plenty of time to pick a big box of peaches and tomatoes.


Here's Doug reliving his glory days as a unicycling juggler.


Here are Laura, Brian and Doug picking tomatoes. The tomatoes were really good. Brian used them to make us some delicious bruschetta later on that evening. As for the peaches I never got to taste them because they all got left at Brian's house. But that just gives us an excuse to go back and pick more :)