• happy happy birthday!!

My husband is pretty much the funniest guy I know! Every day I laugh multiple times because of something he says or does. I wonder what it's going to be next!

Dave- I hope you have the happiest of birthdays tomorrow! I love you!!

I'll let you in on some of his funny moments captured on film!

Yes, we are supposed to be grocery shopping!

At his dad's retirement party this past May.

I hope you have someone in your life - perhaps it's my husband - who makes you laugh! It's good for you!!

• baseboards completed!

I have been waiting for a long time to say these words..."our baseboards are all up"! Now we just have to caulk and paint, but hallelujah they are up! Over winter break we usually do Christmas with our families and go on a ski trip with my sister-in-law Gina, her husband Max, and some other friends. This year was the first time in quite a while that we didn't go anywhere. While I was a bit bummed, staying in town gave us a chance to get our baseboards finished up.

Many measurements were taken, my hand-drawn map of the walls labeled, and later baseboards were cut down to size at the store (somehow miraculously fitting into my little Saturn).

We started working mid-morning and got pretty far. It was Saturday night around 10 or 11 when we quit for the night. I'm sure the neighbors were happy...David's miter saw makes quite a bit of noise!

David barely squeaked out the last few cuts on Sunday before the rain started to pour down! While he was cutting away I decided (for some reason) to trim our plants down in our back patio area and also the neighbor's bouganvilla tree that hangs over our fence. The townhouse next to ours is actually empty (bank owned) so I was being neighborly and helping out! {If you're looking to buy something and want some awesome neighbors (Dave and me!) look no further than next door!!}

As the rain started coming down David cleaned up his mess and then helped me pick up all the bouganvilla trim piles I had accumulated. By the time we got indoors we were pretty much soaked! After drying off a bit we finished nailing up the last of the boards!

Now it's time to caulk and paint, but we'll save that for another time! Everything seems to look more complete with baseboards, even if you can still see the nail holes.

Here's my favorite piece. (Is it weird to have a favorite baseboard piece!?!) Fits like a glove!

For New Years Eve we partied hard at our local movie theatre and The Cheesecake Factory! We saved our dessert for after our movie and came home to drink champagne and eat Oreo Cookie Cheesecake. Yum! We hope you have had as great a year as us with your family and friends! Here's to 2011!!

• grillin' & paintin'

It's been so busy that I haven't had time to post all the happenings! We've had some photobooth events going on recently and our letterpress business is finally starting to come together! I can't wait to share the website with you! I promise it will be soon!

On the home front...we finally bought a grill- one that's perfect for us and our patio. We did a lot of research and went back and forth between the Home Depot and Lowes stores by our house, and finally found the grill for us. It seems we were the only two people in the state who wanted a grill still in the box- not already put together for us. We finally found a store that had the grill still in the box, and luckily it was only a few miles away! We got it home, Dave put it together, and we grilled our first meal that night! It works like a charm!!

A few months back Home Depot ran a sale on interior doors. Buy hollow doors and get a free upgrade to solid doors. I was all over that deal! The doors that we've had have actually started to come apart all on their own. We went down to the store, completed our measurement sheets, and put in our order! Two weeks later eight heavy doors were sitting against the wall in our kitchen. The first one hung with no problems. We weren't as lucky with the rest. All the rest needed to be trimmed by at least 1/4". Our friend Tom Fink came by a couple weekends ago and helped us trim the bottoms of every one. Then it was painting time! David stacked all the doors and sealed them with white primer so the doors won't expand with the heat. Four days later I was at work and David put all the doors up in under two hours! Now we just need to paint the doors and trim.

As Dave worked on the door project I spray-painted a piece of wall art we got over the summer. Originally it was bright purple, but I took care of that with 2 cans of gray! All that's left to do is hang it up and make some clothespins cute. Instant wall art!

• an organizer's dream

I can't believe how much our birdhouse has changed! I was just looking back at the first pictures we took of this place to find one of our master closet. Wow! Talk about memory lane!! Since we moved into our house we've been talking about how to fix our master closet. It wasn't just that it was outdated; one of the shelving units/rods that was installed didn't use the space efficiently. There was a whole 5 square foot area behind the one shelf just open. Weird.

This week I've been on fall break. Most people plan a small trip somewhere; we plan for home improvements. (I'm not sure which is more expensive!) We started Saturday morning by ripping out the existing shelving/rod things and then taped down the new carpet so we could paint the baseboards. We didn't have time to paint our new baseboards at the time because the carpet was installed the very next morning. While I painted the baseboards David spackled the areas where the old closet shelving had been. After that David painted the ceiling white and I did the top edging with the same color as our bedroom.
  

Sunday we taped off the top of the baseboards so we could trim and paint the rest of the closet. We had to finish early since we were celebrating my dad's birthday with a dinner at his house.

Monday we did some home improvement stuff at Gina & Max's house- installing a ceiling fan and a bathroom light fixture. Tuesday we started the day off by making our trip to The Container Store to buy our closet pieces. We got home around 5:30 or so and started hanging up the top track. The cool thing is that's the only part that gets drilled into the wall- everything else just hangs from that track. The closet we created is pretty basic compared to what you can do- jewelry drawers, gliding baskets, etc. We just wanted some closet rods, shelves, and shoe racks.

We finished later that night and then stayed up late to put everything back in. It's so nice to walk into our closet now. Everything has a spot and our shoes are no longer on the floor in the back "hiding" spot. We installed our new IKEA track light and wa-la- awesome closet!!

• love is in the air

Today I've been thinking along a timeline- wedding timeline that is! All day long I would catch a glimpse of the time and then think back to what I was doing two years ago this very day. We celebrated our two year anniversary today by "living in the past". We went to Oregano's for dinner last night (our rehearsal dinner location) and dinner at Cafe ZuZu tonight since we got married at the Hotel Valley Ho. What is it about love that is just so lovely?!

• a weekend of training

The Heidelberg has arrived! Actually it arrived a few weeks ago, but this is the first time I've had a chance to post anything about it. The studio is coming together! Yay!

Here's a short video with the press in action.

• getting caught up

The summer seems to fly by! Part of June was spent teaching a web design class to middle schoolers for summer school and then part of July (okay...most) was spent vacationing in S.D. The Monday after we got back school started up again. It feels like you finally start to relax and catch your breath and then bam! time to get back into it. There's no easing into it either- one day you're on vacation, the next you're working 12 hours straight.

Before we left AZ we had dinner for my sister Sam's birthday (holy crap she's in high school now!) at The Keg. Yummy food and a fun time together:

Gina and Max were working on their house and getting the studio in the back more completed:
Master bathroom-

They basically gutted the entire thing, had to move their drain and shower head, and get a new shower pan. The shower's pretty much completed and usable, but the rest of the bathroom still has some work to get done.

The studio-

Here it's just the seams that have been taped. Now, the drywall has now been mudded/textured and we've begun painting. In order to get electricity over to the studio a trench was dug, wire was laid, and the trench was filled in. My dad came over and finished installing the a/c unit so we could actually get some work done in there. :)

In San Diego it seems like all we did was eat, eat, eat. (Not that I'm complaining!) Of all 21 days we were over there we only had 5 days of sun. So much for spending all our days at the beach!

Frosty's for the fam!

Original ice cream shop at The Grove in L.A.; it's been there over 100 years!

A stop at The Yogurt Mill is always a must when we're with Kelsey & Joe!

All things considered we did have a great time away! Went to Sea World, the bayside, rode bikes everywhere, and were just generally lazy!