Today I was boiling some water on the stove for pasta. As I was stirring in the spaghetti, some water splashed out of the pot and hit me in the stomach, resulting in a slightly burned belly and a damaged ego. I manage to burn myself on anything and everything!

Happy Birthday, Richard!

Today is Rich's birthday! He is a year older, a year smarter, a year wiser. I'm so grateful he's in my life.

Here are a few pictures of the apartment, as promised.


Living room


Other side of the living room (the view to the right as you walk in the front door)


The dining room (the view to the left as you walk in the door)

Yesterday, I went to Disneyland! And today, I am battling Disneyland hangover. Man, going to an amusement park really takes it out of you. A friend from church used to work at Disney World, and he gets into Disneyland free anytime and can bring up to 6 guests for free. Talk about an excellent perk! A bunch of other people had season passes, and so that's how I spent the day with a group of 13 people- 8 adults and 5 kids. We all had a blast, and I even enjoyed hanging out with the kiddos (believe it or not)! Richard couldn't afford to spend an entire day away from the books, so he opted to stay at home. That was really the only downer of the day.

Yesterday was the start of the Christmas season at Disneyland, so there were decorations everywhere and some of the rides were different. "It's a Small World" was transformed into "Joy to the Small World," and the "Haunted Mansion" was decorated like Nightmare Before Christmas. Also, the regular nightly parade was a Christmas theme, finishing with the impressive feat of snow on the parade route. Real snow- blowing out of snowmakers mounted to the top of buildings!

All in all, with the exception of Rich's absence, yesterday was a treat!

Tomorrow, I'll post some pictures of our living room and dining room of the new apt. Get excited.

We had our first house guests in our new home yesterday/today! Our good friends, Abigail and Brett, stopped by on their trans-continental Army-induced adventure. Brett has been serving in Afghanistan, and he has only been back in the country for a week or so.

Brett is a friend from the good old days at TCU. Brett introduced us to his (then) fiance Abigail at a wedding several years ago, and Abigail and I became fast friends at a lingerie shower that weekend. It's amazing how quickly you bond with someone when looking at another woman's underwear. Abigail has the incredible ability to throw herself into social situations I would die just thinking about- for example, attending one of your husband's college friend's lingerie shower. She even travelled from Washington to Fort Worth for another of Brett's friends' wedding last year without Brett! She is one brave cookie, and she is an incredibly graceful person.

Rich and I had a lot of fun seeing them, catching up, and hearing about Brett and Abigail's upcoming adventures. You can read Abigail's blog (which she updates with incredible regularity) at http://abigailsday.blogspot.com/.

Richard and I each recently wrote our senators, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, to ask them to support an act we care about. Richard has to date received a response from BOTH senators, while I have received a response from NEITHER! What in the world!? I'm beginning to wonder if they got my letters, or if they saw that we wrote from the same address and only responded once? Rich hypothesizes that he has received responses because he always puts "Rev." in front of his name. I think stretching the truth about your current ministerial status should not merit responses from politicians (or their interns).

Any one else have any ideas about what happened?

I may have mentioned that our new apartment has a dishwasher! We also have about three times the counter space, four times the cabinets, a double sink, and a full-sized oven for the first time in our marriage. And though I've always cooked a lot, since I am home all the time now, I'm making a lot more things from scratch. All of these factors have converged to form the perfect storm for my small kitchen appliance use. I've always loved my food processor, mixer, and blender, but never before have they gotten such heavy duty use.

Last week, I used the food processor three times: to chop veggies for the week's salads, to make graham cracker crumbs for a cheesecake crust, and to chop cranberries for vanilla cranberry coffee cake. The blender is used almost every day for smoothies for breakfast. The mixer is used for every single baked item- pizza dough, coffee cake, cheesecake, bread, whatever.

In the old kitchen, it seemed like using these appliances was often more hassle than it was worth. Each one took up at least half the counter and meant more dishes to wash (by hand). I only used the appliance if the task was impossible (or near impossible) to complete by hand. Now, it's no big deal to get out the blender, and I've gotten much lazier in my cooking (even though I cook more)!

Tonight, we're having butternut squash soup... brought to you courtesy of the blender.