Tales of the Tail: The One with the Welcome Committee

Kip is the official welcome committee at our house. He always greets our guests at the door...including the bathroom door.

I guess he figures the odds are pretty good that you're going to trip over him -- which leads to you being on the floor at his level -- which obviously means you should pet him.

Studies show that your blood pressure lowers when you pet your companion animal. Natural health remedies...just another service he provides!

Hoot.

My mom wants me to drop out of grad school. She hasn't said those words exactly, but it's the only reason I can think of that she would send me a cupcake decorating book during the middle of the semester.

We have a screech owl that lives in our backyard, so in his honor I made a batch of owl cupcakes:

The book is full of really cute ideas. I chose the owls because they didn't look too difficult for an initial attempt at cupcake decorating. I found the instructions to be easy to follow, and although mine are not as perfect as the pictures in the book, I think they turned out pretty cute.


It took me about an hour and a half to make 8 big owls and 8 baby owls (is a baby owl called an owlette, or am I making that up?), not including the time to actually bake the cupcakes. Once I made the first few, I got the hang of it and picked up speed from there.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with them now. They're so cute that I don't want anyone to eat them!

Sunday Stitches: Follow Your Truth

I don't have any stitch-by-stitch pictures of this one - I know everyone is really disappointed by that! I finished this piece a couple of months ago and just picked it up from the framer yesterday. I have it sitting on the mantel for now, but I'm not sure where its permanent home will be. It is a monsterbubbles design, stitched on a 24-count stitch band with over-dyed Sampler threads.

Flashback Friday

BD and his dad, circa 1988ish.

This is a picture from a vacation BD took with his dad and step-mom to the Bahamas. If I'm remembering the story correctly, they took him on this nice vacation and all he remembers from the whole trip is a huge tree. He also refused to eat any of the fresh seafood available on the island and instead insisted on eating Pizza Hut.

I hope our future children get his memory genes - I'm just going to take them out in the backyard and tell them we're at Disney World.

Life is Good Today

Carolina Basketball tickets are here!

Hello, World. Remember Me?

Hoo boy! So, no one warned you that the second year of grad school is the year they try to weed out the unfit, huh? Yeah...me either. I've got about 6 more weeks to survive until the fall semester is over.

Although we've pretty much given up on Carolina football at this point, we did get out to a couple of games earlier in the season. I never thought I'd see the day that this SEC-football-born-and-bred family would ever wish for basketball season to start sooner.

This is the band spelling "Tarheels" during the pre-game show.

And the team taking the field to start the game.




Kip is up to his usual tricks....making himself comfortable on our bed

and resting his head in weird, uncomfortable-looking places.

We bought new art to hang in our freshly painted stairway. I couldn't get a good angle, but you get the idea. It came from this site on Etsy.

You can see that our life is just so exciting that I barely have time to blog about all the things we've been up to lately!

Letters from First Grade

My oldest nephew recently started first grade. They are learning about writing letters, so I have the privilege of being his pen pal for the school year.

I received my first letter in the mail on Saturday.



Translation:

Dear Aunt [LA],
How are you?
I have been working very hard at school.
How is Uncle [BD]?
I wish you were here.
How is Kip?
Love, [nephew]