I’m Blue Da Ba Dee Dab Agave.

I left you off with this shot of the current dining situation:

And the fact I appear to not be able to make up my mind when it comes to updating one stinking room:

I loved the white rooms with simple accessories and high contrast/ dark furniture I’ve been searching on the internet. I even loved it in person. It brought in so much light that the wood paneling sucked out. However, as much as I love to look at those spaces, and really favor them online over anything else, I realized I just can’t live without color in person. Also, I’m indecisive. And possibly just like having one more thing to frustrate the Hussy. So I set off to find another paint color for the room!

I even did custom mixes and fell in love with several colors, but tried to make sure it fit in with the rest of the house’s color schemes. Not like I really care, because I don’t mind the whole small house/jarring painting scheme from room to room thing that the pros tell you to avoid. But I did want a slight cohesion so I could mix and match accessories.

And after all that work playing with colors, I ended up with that one blue color that happened to be the exact shade I planned to put on a buffet to use as my pop of color.

I have to thank Behr personally for their staff emailing me the color used in one of their commercials, and I took it a shade lighter and ended up with this gorge room color, Agave:

Which reminds me… I haven’t done a Thrifty Thursday in many, many Thursdays. So we’ll save Mr. Owl for that one But one thing you can’t see in the photos is my touch of quirkiness/stupid lolspeak to help remind you what to do in this room.

lol. nom nom nom. bon enjoy-your-meal.

Winter Diningland.

Remember yesterday when I showed you that silly little Christmas tree we shared our' first Christmas together with? I used to keep it up at work every Christmas, but since I have a 7 foot legit tree in my office (since I’m front desk, lucky me!) I don’t need to take it to work anymore. I hated to not use it since it’s been bringing me joy faithfully every year since 2005. I needed a table centerpiece in the dining room, so in she went!

I loved all the colorful balls I got when I was my most daring with color, and since I picked up that cute runner from Target a few months ago, (YES I’M OBSESSED WITH THAT PLACE. DON’T JUDGE ME!) it worked out perfectly. Hussy tried to put it away this weekend, but I raced after him yelling NOOOO!!!! THAT STAYS FOR THE PARTY!!!! OMGZZ YOU CUHRAZY! and some junk like that. I’m sure he’s not thrilled with the idea but COME ON! It’s a holiday party! I can at least use this excuse for this weekend. Until I come home from work and it’s put away. (yes hussy, I’m on to you.)

And if you have really good eyeballs, you’ll notice I changed the dining room again.

Yeah… more on that later

O After-Christmas Tree!

Every year around Thanksgiving I go Christmas crazy. We put up our wonderful white tree and decorate it Thanksgiving weekend. I tune to our local radio station that plays nothing but Christmas songs until Christmas day. I also set my Christmas Pandora station at work until I ran out of time on my account And now I even get to decorate the work Christmas tree too. I’m so obsessed with holiday cheer that it’s hard to take down the Christmas tree. Which I can attribute to my childhood, since we’d usually be found with it still up in March.

We always hit Target after Christmas for all the clearance deals and pick up next years Christmas cards (which is always a surprise a year later to remember what we picked out) and I hit the ornament aisles for next year’s color theme. We started dating on Christmas Day 2005, so our first legit xmas was 2006… where we had a 2 foot tall Barbie Tree:

Then the day after Christmas he surprised me with my white tree… which he brought home in his Miata with the top down.

We had pretty much NO ornaments or a tree skirt. But we had Cooper and that was good enough. After Christmas we picked up more red/white/black ornaments for 2008’s Christmas.

And added even more after that Christmas for 2009.

But after 2009’s Christmas, I was sick of the red/white. I switched over to blue and purple to match our other decorations. However, after Christmas this week, I went a little crazy when I saw all the kitschy, perfectly “me” ornaments they had this year:

And here’s how she looks now:

A little crazy since I just threw the new ones on in between what I already had on there, but I love these new ornaments so much! We’re throwing an After-Christmas/New Years party this weekend, so I may put some of them away and keep out the new ones. I can’t bare to put them away already! Also, MUST SHOW OFF NEW STUFF!

No Excuses.

For my absence… except I really actually have some. Like my busted laptop that crashes every time I open a Windows program (WTG FOR REMINDING ME WHY I WISH I COULD AFFORD AN APPLE!). And my crazy crazy job that wears me out. And all the pictures I had saved in folders on my desktop are locked. Which were conveniently labeled “best shots” and is where I throw every good+ edited photo I ever took. The best part is Windows jerked out on me, and now my screen looks like it’s from 1995. I can’t even change my toolbars! Yay me!

However, I’m still getting super sweet comments and emails from you guys even while I’m completely MIA from blogging. And my delightful husband lights a fire under me all the time to get back into this, since I enjoy it so much. SO. I’m going to deal with the crashes until I get a new laptop, which could be anywhere from now to never.

See, I work at this super awesome company that gave everyone in the company a bonus. And they didn’t just send a mass email to all the employees saying “go you for working for us! here’s $400 pretax as profit sharing in our bajillion dollar company.”  I was thankful for anything after not getting a raise for years because of The Economy. Yes, I capitalized The Economy, because it’s a lame excuse for everyone’s financial lives sucking so majorly in at least one way. Anyhow, my new company knows no matter what you do, you’re a big part of the success of the first full year of our hugely successful start up company. We hit a major milestone. Major. And the CEO personally rounded us up to personally hand out personally signed bonuses. To every single employee! It was at the top of my most incredible days ever. It was also very humbling to see someone give back from all her hard work invested into getting her company rolling to the rest of us in such a big way.

The best part about this is that we wanted a camper. Not just any camper, my dad’s old camper. My family stays at the lake most weekends, and it’s so peaceful and relaxing to just get away to this place.

We used to go to a different camp ground back in the 90’s (grandma moment! I’m reliving the glory days!) that had a cafeteria, dances on the weekends with loud music, and lots of hot guys. Ok, so I was 13. That’s pretty much all I cared about other than the music. I wanted so badly to have my own little camper to stay in my own little campsite with my own little family. We made a deal with my dad to buy his camper once he found an upgrade. He found his upgrade, and we’ve been saving like crazy for our a) camper b) campsite which seemed easy enough. But no, we need c) jet skis plus SOME electricity from d) generators. That $1,000 camper deal quickly turned into $6,500. But remember that bonus? It perfectly paid for the camper. Like they KNEW we were going to spend our entire fall and spring cooped up in our house saving for our leisurely spring and summer next year. So. Very. Thankful.

Also, this means no more of this:

Though it was kind of fun until it rained at 3am one night. Which really sounded kind of awesome to be one with nature… until nature made me have to pee, and the bathroom was a 3 minute walk down the road.

OH! And super awesome company also gave out Christmas presents on top of the bonus. THE most comfy blanket ever. Color me jealous of even myself

Scary Mantle-O

What up lame Barry Mannilow pun? Thanks for kicking this post off!

I’m only blogging about this (hey to you, too, regularly scheduled posts again!) because a dear friend asked if I was. How can I not at that point? For starters, work is throwing a Halloween Party. I’m on the party planning committee.

(holler at Michaels slicked back hair!)

So I was given the delightful task, as a design obsessed employee, to help come up with centerpieces. I basically threw together a bunch of random ideas that can be spread about the tables.

I got the skulls, crow, moss rocks, critters, moss and the insides of the ghost at the Dollar Tree. The rat is borrowed from many years ago. The vase, tea kettle, and candle sticks are from Goodwill. The sticks and acorns are from my yard. Lastly, I got fabric and flowers from Joann and went to town.

I stuffed a bunch of acorns in one silver dish, and in the other I filled it with moss and made a skull peek out of it :) The glittery skulls came pre-glittered, which is awesome for $1. The ghost insides are simply a styrofoam ball on top of a styro cone, with two twigs coming out as arms. Then I draped white knit fabric I scored for $2/yard over top and instant boo-tastic ghostness appeared. I don’t own candlesticks. I keep meaning to go shopping for some, but in the meantime I just stuck some small skulls on top of the sticks.

The vase is stuffed with moss, topped with hydrangeas, and oozing with centipedes and twigs with rings and skeletons dangling. I have more ideas up my sleeves, but for a grand total of $25 I was able to whip this mastermantlepiece into shape, an hopefully give you an the rest of the party planning committee some good ideas!