For My Mom...

... Christmas and Post Christmas decorations in my cute little hobbit hole.

For Christmas, I put the yellow accents away and added in some red and cream accents that went with my tree and nativities.

I really liked the red and cream (especially the super-silky fuzzy cream pillow), so I decided to leave them for a little while longer. I swapped the pointsettas for roses...

 ... took down the nativities and gave Toothless the glider,..

...  put away the Christmas plates and put up the new red Square we picked up this week...

 I think the non-Christmas red accents worked out really well!

New

Remember when I went to IF for the 4th of July (more on that adventure next week!) and left my home looking like this?

Everything I owned had to be scrunched into my kitchen because my sweet landlady, Lucy, decided that I needed new carpet. And I was sooooo happy that she decided that because, while I have always loved everything else about my cute little hobbit hole, the 37 year old gold and blue carpet was a bit dated. And a bit, well, grimy. This is Cow Town after all, and doormats can only help so much.

I was extra excited by the prospect of new carpet because I had recently made a few other changes to my living room decor.

Take my couch, for example. I love this couch. It lived in my parent's living room for years before moving to Cow Town with me. It is a good TV couch, a great reading couch, and a wonderful sleeping couch.

When it started looking a little tired, I got it a cover and some pretty pillow to try to snazz it up a bit. That worked for a while...

...but over spring break, after a couple years of fighting with a canvas couch onesie, I decided to use some of my tax refund money to get it a nicer, kinder, less ornery cover.

Kristie totally approved.Which really, is the most important thing.

And while I was couch-cover-shopping, I decided that it was also time to update the living room curtains. I am sure that those curtains had some serious swagger when Lucy put them up 37 years ago, and they were really handy when I moved in about five years ago and curtain money was not in my budget, I was really, REALLY ready for a change.

So my mom helped me pick out these great panels: grey blue with brown tree-branch details on the lower half. I knew they were meant to grace my living room windows. After all, the design is called "Alton"...

... and in my experience, anything called Alton HAS to be super cute.

 

Like, seriously cute.

The curtains didn't disappoint.They fit in nicely with the new blue and brown theme I had going on.

And just when I though I couldn't get any happier with my hobbit hole's redesign, the heavens parted, angels started singing, and Sister Woodhouse appeared in a pillar of light. She had redecorated her home and brought me some of the things she didn't need any more.

The yellow and gold items that she donated to the "Save the Mindy" fund added the pops of color that I didn't even know I needed. Sister Woodhouse is just oh, so very wise!

I was pleased with the results of the redesign, as were Bubba and Kristie, but there was still one obstacle in my pathway to complete home happiness: the 37 year old gold and blue carpet.

Fast  forward a few months and one giant cramming-everything-I-own-in-my-kitchen-weekend later and Voilà! The whole place looks brand new!

Sister Woodhouses' lamp? It looks brand new! My grandmother's antique desk? Looks totally new!

This adorable sparkly end table? It looks perfectly new! 

Wait...it is new. 

I just bought it. 

But still, you get the point, right?

My cute little hobbit hole is beautiful. lovely, of good report, praiseworthy, etc.

So the next time you are in the neighborhood, you should totally stop by and take a tour!

I am loving showing off my new carpet to everyone. The cable repair guy was very complementary, as was Val, my visiting teachers, the mail man...

... and the other members of our NEW ward Relief Society presidency. We had our first meeting in my NEWLY redecorated living room atop my NEW carpet. I guess my NEW carpet was just a harbinger of another, bigger, NEWER adventure.

Tracy (2nd Counselor), Rosana (President), Mindy (1st Counselor)

Home Sweet Homes

Guess who came to Cow Town last week!

After a very productive days working on lesson plans and camp songs in my home, my sweet mother and I decided to drive up the road a piece and look at some other people's homes.

I have lived in this cute little valley for almost eleven years and had never been up to the annual Victorian home tour. We started out at the opera house, one of two places in Oakley I had been to before.

The, using the handy-dandy map that the very nice lady at the opera house gave us, we walked the dusty streets to explore very old, very cool homes.

The townsfolk were super excited to have visitors. Each home on the tour had a gaggle of knowledgeable family members who served as tour guides who were so very, very happy to tell us all about the homes and the pioneers who built them.

The tour was a very educational and entertaining experience. At one of the homes, three generations of family members dressed in Victorian-era clothing. Super awesome.

So if you ever find yourself in Southern Idaho on the third Saturday in June, you should totally check it out. The townsfolk will be so happy to see you! I don't think they get many visitors...

If you were to come on a home tour of my cute little hobbit hole this week, there wouldn't be a whole lot to see. While I am hanging out with family for the 4th, my apartment is getting decked out with new carpet.

I love just about everything about my little home, but I will not shed a single tear for the 37 year-old blue and gold carpet that is being kicked to the curb in the next few days.Tears were very nearly shed, however, when  I realized that the new carpet process would require the relocation of all of my stuff. Because I have a lot of stuff. Like, A LOT.

And where is all that stuff now? In my kitchen, of course.

My poor, poor kitchen.

So, while I am looking forward to a not-extremely-extreme home makeover, I am NOT looking forward to sorting out that whole mess when I get home this weekend. But once I get everything back in its proper place, I will be happy to give you a virtual home tour of my cute, newly refurbished digs.

DIY

I think I should begin my very first post of 2014 by saying that Heavenly Father loves me very, very much.

I know that He loves me very, very much because He did not allow the Arctic Vortex to settle anywhere near my cute little cow town this week, a week that I was assigned outside lunch duty.

Sure, we got a some snow, but it was soooooo much easier to warn the kids that throwing, kicking, or in any way propelling snow would result in four hours of Saturday school without chattering teeth and icicles forming in my nostrils.

And, even though I know the weather is not a contest, I would still like to point out the differences in temperature between my home and the towns where my niblets reside. And then I would like to point out that, if the weather WAS a contest, I totally would have kicked trash this week.

This first week back to school after the wondrous and beautiful two-week break, was kind-of-sort-of busy. Besides the start of ward conference season, it was also the week before semester tests (a.k.a The End of Course Assessments, or EOCAs).

The kidlets had two full weeks to forget everything they have ever learned about English, communications, and creative writing. Over the break, months worth of information leaked out their ears and into their pillows. So this week was my last chance to try to sneak some of that info back in before testing begins on Tuesday.

I have to admit that I was kind of looking forward to getting back in my classroom after so many days off. I was really hopping that, while I was gone, the tech people would have received and installed the new projector my awesome principal bought for me (I think he might have sold one of his kidneys to finance it...) 

When I walked into my classroom Monday morning, I thought that maybe my new projector would be waiting on the ceiling with a big red bow on it. But alas, when I turned on the light, the corpse of my late-projector was still decaying above me.

I have been able to use the library projector since mine bit the dust back in October, but the whole situation has made my life more difficult that it needed to be.

Having this expensive equipment perched precariously on an unstable cart from the late 80's, taking up a whole aisle in my classroom, and various cords stretched across the main thoroughfare was very dangerous. I mean, have you seen junior high kids try to move around a room? Watching them try to navigate their spazzy little bodies kind of makes you think uncoordinated aliens have taken them over and are trying to steer using their toes on an old computer joystick. It is a miracle we don't have more injuries every day even without the the cart of death in the middle of the room.

Things started to look up on Tuesday, however, when my principal hand delivered my new projector to my classroom. There was great joy and rejoicing in 1A English that day.

But now I am waiting for the tech folks to take the projector from down here...

... and put it up here. And let me tell you, waiting patiently has NEVER been one of my strong suits.

For Christmas, my awesome parents got me an adorable standy-uppy cupboard thingy from IKEA. I couldn't WAIT to put it together, so I broke into the boxes to sneak a peak at the instructions.

Upon opening the instructions, I was happy to learn that I can speak Swedish fluently (probably a pleasant side effect of eating so many Swedish fish over the years). and was quickly able to discern that I should not attempt to put the standy-uppy cupboard thingy together by myself.

I have very tool-centric home teachers who I knew would be more than willing to help me when I got the thing home, not to mention a best pal who is married to a retired tech center principal/current building supply store guru, so I wasn't worried about getting it put together. I just didn't want to WAIT. So my mother, a 20 year veteran of cub scout wood working projects, agreed to help me before I even left.

WARNING: THIS SECTION OF THE POST CONTAINS VERY SPECIFIC AND TECHNICAL FURNITURE-BUILDING TERMS. PEOPLE WITHOUT EXTENSIVE FURNITURE-BUILDING BACKGROUNDS MIGHT NEED TO ARRANGE TO READ THIS SECTION WITH A PROFESSIONAL NEARBY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS. 

We put together the big rectangularish part. Then we put together the base part with the cute little feet. That way, once I got it home, I would only have to attach the base feety part to the big retangularish part, slide in the shelves, slap on the doors, and I would be good to go.

I wanted to finish up the little project as soon as I got home, but between time consuming school stuff and spirit lifting Relief Society stuff, I didn't get time to work on it until this afternoon. Thanks to all the work we had done at my parents house, it didn't take very much time or effort to finish it up. 

I think it looks great in my guest room (Thanks Mom and Dad!). 

Putting it together went so smoothly that I started thinking that maybe I could take on another Do-It-Yourself project this week while the kids are silently (Ha ha!) taking their finals. I mean, how much more difficult could it be to take a projector from down here...

... and put it up here? I think I could do it.

As long as the instructions are in Swedish.