baby shower for Adri

Two weeks ago we had a shower for Natalie and baby Adri here at the house. After talking to Jill today I realized that I've been really slack in getting some pictures up! So, here is some evidence that it really did happen :) It was a lot of fun and Adri got a lot of fun stuff!

Brooke and Natalie

Adri has no choice in being a baby Tiger! :)

Yay for fun baby stuff!

Kayla, Crystal, Angie, Turner and Stephanie
Natalie's youth from Piedmont


Kelly, Lindsay and me

Clemson stroller!


Me, Natalie, Brooke and Leslie.

It was a really fun night! And Adri will be here in just 3 weeks... I'm so excited about getting to meet her... and spoil her as much as possible :)

snow!

There's finally snow in South Carolina and the roads are too bad to drive on, so the day is being enjoyed at home!

AI in MS

So I flew down to Mississippi today for work and will be here until Saturday. I'm actually staying with a co-worker who is a good friend of mine. We've been out of the country together a couple of times and in those situations you usually end up loving or hating the person. Lucky for me it's not the latter! ha!

Anyway, we went to the gym tonight so I could rack up some more steps. Oh, and get some exercise. :) Anyway, we ran back by the house after a worship service at church before going to the gym to pick up some extra head phones b/c according to rumor, this gym had tvs attached to each treadmill, stairmaster, eliptical machine and bike. I was thinking, ok, this will be good b/c I'm used to watching tv while I run/work out after work. Well, it's Wednesday people, and I'm going to admit something... I'm an American Idol junkie. I know, some of you who know me find this very hard to believe, but it's true. So, you can imagine my elation when we get to the gym, I find that the rumor about the tvs IS true and then I realize what time it is when I see someone already watching AI! WOOHOO! Struck gold on this one, I did.

Let's just say that a few wonderful voices and a few snarky comments from the lovely Simon Cowell helped me get through the 49 minutes on the treadmill today. Thanks, AI! hahahaha!

Weekend in DC

First of all... it snowed today!! I know, you're jealous. People were slipping and sliding all over the roads and I saw more firetrucks and ambulances and heard more sirens today than I have in a long time. Scary. Anyway, I enjoyed the snow :) especially since I wasn't driving in it.

This is my grandparent's house. My great-grandfather bought this 1929 house in 1934 for $4,000! I'll let you imagine how much it's worth now...!

View from my mom's apartment balcony. Yay snow!

This morning at church my mom was ordained as a deacon. She is such a servant and loves people, so this is a perfect way for her to live out her faith. I'm so proud of her!

She sings in the choir... hence the robe :)

Today was my cousin Karlyn's 2nd birthday, so we celebrated with cake and ice cream and Tinker Bell. Check her out...

Finally, I got to see my other baby cousin, Alejandro. You know, it really stinks that the kids in my family aren't cute... ;)

One step at a time...

Apparently each day we are supposed to take 10,000 steps. Yes, you read that right, 10,000 steps. Well, I've been wearing a pedometer for a few days and yesterday evening after I got home from church I had gone 8,400+ steps. Well, it was about 9:30pm but good night, I was almost there!! So, I did what any normal person would do. I started running in place in front of the tv, I ran up and down the stairs as many times as I could, I walked the peremeter of every single room in the house (and all of this was after I had run a mile and a half and walked another mile while working out in the afternoon!).

My calves were screaming in agony and my heart was pounding. I went upstairs to get ready for bed and before brushing my teeth, I looked down at my pedometer... 9,668 steps. Dang it! So, I paced while I brushed my teeth and ended up having to go downstairs again for something. I came back up expecting to have to run in place for another few minutes but when I looked down, it read 10,049 steps! WOOHOO!! That was about 4.6 miles that I walked yesterday and close to 500 calories burned.

I don't know that I can do it every day, but man, I definitely got a work out!! lol!

Extras! Extras!

The things I have done on my "List of Things to do Before I Die..."

• Go Skydiving (check)
• Fly in first class/business class (check, check)
• Live overseas (check)
• Visit each continent, excluding Antarctica (i've been to 3 of the 6!)
• Be in a movie (the first step has been taken!)

Yep, I went and applied to be an extra in a movie last night. They will be filming Leatherheads toward the end of next month and have had 2 of their 3 casting calls here in Greenville, SC. Who knew that George Clooney would ever come to the place that I live! I know, it just took him a little while to find me. haha!

The movie is a football romantic comedy set in the 1920s and the first casting call they had was for Caucasian males, between the ages of 20 - 35 years, about 5'9 to 6'1 tall and weighing 160 lbs to 250 lbs. Obviously I do not fit that description... at all! Well, I am between 20 and 35 years old, but that's about it. ha! I was a little disappointed that I couldn't go but my friend Mac went though, (read his story) so maybe he will be cast in the movie!

Well, I was really excited when I heard they were having another casting call for any and everyone! Yep, I fit that description alright! So, I found a picture to take with me and drove to the Palmetto Expo Center after work yesterday. I was afraid that the line would be wound around the building, but when I got there, there wasn't even half of the crowd I was expecting. "Oh no! Did I miss it?? Was I too late??" As I walked inside, I passed a girl who was leaving and asked her how long it took her. "About 30 minutes," she said. Sweet! So, I went inside and stood among many other hopefuls. There were moms with their kids, there were 20 something guys and girls, there were men, there were women, there were babies and even one guy in a wheelchair with his family. The whole thing was very low key but exciting nonetheless :)

So, I get to the front of the line in one of the larger rooms and am then directed to a table where I was to fill out a form with my information and then have one of the "stapler people" attach my photo to my form. It was a typical form wanting your contact info ("Be sure to write legibly so that we can contact you!"), height, weight, sizes, hair color, eye color and hobbies/interests/talents/jobs. Well, all was fine and dandy until I got to my waist size. How am I supposed to know that?? So, as any honest American and former student, I looked on the paper of the girl sitting next to me. haha! I then snuck a look at her waist and determined that she was a little smaller than me, so I added a few inches to my own description :) As I was filling out the hobbies/interests/talents/jobs section I heard her say something about cheerleading and dance. OH! I've done those!! So, I added them to my list. I don't think of it as cheating. I mean, can you really cheat on an application to be an extra?? I think not.

Anyway, who knows if I'll be the next Julia Roberts. Hey, a girl can dream, can't she? Before leaving, they people in charge said that some would hear soon or some may not hear from them for months. It would just depend on what they were filming when and what type and how many people they needed. Keep up with the project on the The Clooney Project website.

So, just be sure that I will probably be walking around with a sharpie in my bag ready to sign autographs at a moment's notice. I have to be prepared, right? ;)

Please Pray

It's been a strange evening... after going for a run to get out my frustrations over my Clemson Tigers losing the Music City bowl game to Kentucky I came home to hopefully watch the Gamecocks lose their bowl game. No such luck. So, while keeping the tv on ESPN I dove back into the 5th Harry Potter book that I am reading for the third or fourth time.

Somewhere in the midst of that I decide to check CNN.com to see what's going on in the world. Immediately I was reminded that Saddam Hussein was hanged tonight. That was around 10pm, which was about the time it actually happened (6am in Iraq). Needless to say, my mood and mindset changed as soon as I saw the news. Not too long after, a friend texted to remind me to pray for our troops, including her brother and sister-in-law as there will be celebrating AND riots in Iraq today.

The thing that gets me is that it seems that people like Saddam and Castro should only be people I read about in history books... not people that are on today's news. Go figure that with all of our "progress" and technology and everything we have "learned from history" that we still have people like them out there today.

PLEASE say a prayer for all the troops (regardless of what country they are serving), for the Iraqi civilians and all news crews. Most importantly pray that God will make Himself known during all of this and that He will be glorified... regardless of whether we understand what He is doing or not.

205 Olympics

Well, it was more of a track meet than the Olympics, but that is beside the point. You are probably wondering how we began the track meet this evening at 205, but I am also wondering the same thing. All I know is that one minute I was sitting on the couch watching ESPN and the next minute Robert and Lindsay are home from the Clemson basketball game and I'm on the floor trying to determine who can jump the highest. We are pretty sure Lindsay won that event.
Next came the long jump. Yes, we had the long jump in our hallway! Since only 1/3 of us even participated in track back in the day, Lindsay was the one who jumped the furthest. Although, I came pretty close! The funniest part was when Robert took his turn in the standing long jump... when he landed, he fell into the wall and we all laughed because it would have been really funny had his elbow gone through the wall! But, it didn't. So, there will be no trips to Home Depot this weekend.
There was talk of finding soft things to jump onto from the upstairs in the foyer... but we determined that we didn't have anything adequate enough. So we thought about jumping from the railing on the deck onto the grass to practice since there is a little less distance and the ground is softer than the laminated floor in the foyer.

The closing ceremonies will probably take place tomorrow evening. Please let me know if you would like to attend and I will email a (free) ticket to you!

There was no alcohol involved in this evening's activites...
believe it or not.

Yay!!

Not only did I get to see my nephew last night, but I got some one-on-one time with him while his mom went to get pizza for dinner. Every time I see him I am amazed at what a great kid he is. He's definitely my favorite 7 year old on the planet! We played his little pool game he got, watched a little tv and played some video games (ok, so I watched him play video games). With this pool game that he got, he could play pool, soccer, basketball or target shooting. We set up the target shooting and he had to fire the small ball off and towards the targets, which was some card stock folded and sitting there with 9 holes in it. He got various points for getting the ball through the different holes. The thing that blew my mind away was that he added all of his points up in his head! He's 7!! Granted it was like 100+20+50+30+... but still. His mom told me that he's at the top of his class, that his report card is always good and that she and his teacher were really impressed with his standardized test scores. Wow!

He told me at one point that his dad (step-dad actually) told him he was stupid. Um... negative. I told him he was the furthest thing from stupid and that I personally considered him a genious. Not that I'm biased at all... :)

As I was leaving, his mom told me to give me a hug and it was such a great hug that I made him give me another one :) I told him I loved him, he said he loved me too and I left. The first place I stopped was at Walgreens to get the Star Wars Gen. Grevious that he said he wanted for Christmas. I told him that if I didn't see him before Christmas then I would definitely get his gift to him before 2007.

There are many times I leave there extrememly frustrated or times that I don't get to see him for months at a time. But, last night was all I needed for Christmas from him. He told me about The Hangar at church (they go to First Baptist from time to time) and was telling me a little about God when we were looking at the globe I gave him last year. I know that he isn't being completely shut off from the Gospel but I don't know how much of it he's hearing. But, I have hope. God is far from done with him and his family!

Weekend at the Cabin

You know the weekend was fun when...

...there is an incriminating picture of John in the hot tub

...Jill almost caught a diaper on fire in the microwave

...Wes was really excited about figuring out just what was in those diapers during the shower

...we were sad when the Hillbilly putt-putt golf was closed

...we almost got a picture of 13.5 of us at Old Timey Pho-tos

...all of the noise in the house stopped when the steaks were ready

...all the noise started back once Nurts was in full swing!

...we got Josh on video doing a running man impression during a round of Cranium

...Allen survived not only meeting all of us at once but survived the entire weekend!

...we're already planning to go back next year for a 3 day weekend!

I love my girls!!

(but we really missed Leslie (&Philip) and Brooke!)