Thursday, January 28, 2010

From Sweet Home Alabama To Sweet Home Chicago!

Am I on a roller coaster or an airplane?!
This is the BuMpIeSt flight I’ve ever been on and ever hope to be on again!!!!!!!!!!  I am dying here.  I am glad I can type with my eyes closed because THEY ARE!!!!!  We are flying through a bad storm ad we have to get though it… hopefully pretty fast.  Mono has his hands up like he is on a troller coaster.  He thinks this is pretty cool…. I think it is super freaky!!!  Okay, I can open my eyes now.  We seem to be through it – for now!
So, Mono and I are on our way to spend a week or so with my best friend and her family.  I am super excited to be going up there again.  I haven’t been to Chicago in over two years!!  We have lots to catch up on and LOTS to do! :)
There is this new thing at the Sears Tower (well, it’s no longer the Sears Tower, but I don’t know its new name.  It will always be the Sears Tower to me)… It’s a glass box that sticks out of the side of the building.  I am really looking forward to going there one of the days we are in the city.  I’m not sure if I will be completely excited or I will freak out a little being that it looks like nothing is under me!  What if it falls? ;)   haha-  But it should be fun!
I will have to post about my trip while I’m up here or wait and have one long one when I get home.  We shall see!!
So, this is random, but I have to tell you about the lovely adventures my new WHITE North Face fleece has had.  It’s one of those soft fuzzy ones.  Well it started out that I was up at Church one night and I had my arms leaning on my thighs and I ended up catching a glance of a now blue sleeve!  The dye from my jeans bled onto my white fleece.  The whole arm part that touched my jeans (from my elbow down) turned bright blue!  I nearly died.  I thought that was the end of my jacket.  But thankfully after two washes pretty much all of it came out.  It had a little down the seams, but that was a considerable amount faded compared to what it had been. I  figured I could live with it.  Then I talked to a friend of mine the next day to see if she knew of a trick how to get the rest of the dye out and she gave me some pointers.  So the following day I went to the store to get what I needed.  It wasn’t until later that night that I got it so I was going to wait until the next day to do anything with it.  Now it is Monday and I was planning on running a few errands and having lunch with Mono, then heading back home to wash my fleece.  Well, before I knew it, my nose started to bleed – pouring out all over my jacket!!!!!!  ( Oh, peanut break!! )  So now I have blue dye from my jeans as well as blood.  Thankfully when I got home I used the cleaners my friend told me to use and now… my jacket is back to it’s old self.  :)   One problem… things usually come in threes for me.  Am I going to have another fleece disaster?  I hope not!!

Saturday, January 16, 2010

A New Hair Cut And A New Class!

I did it!  I went and got my haircut.  I looked through many pictures online of what I might want my new hairstyle to look like and found found something I really liked.  I took it to the salon and showed my hairdresser what I had been thinking and she loved it…thought it would look great.  :)   My hair is a little thinner than the lady in the picture, but it still works okay.  It’s short, quite short… at least for me.  I have to learn how to really do it well like she did, but it is going well so far!  I bought a new brush today to help me style it better and I am on the hunt for some molding clay type stuff to go in at the roots.  She used some on my hair and they were out at the salon and no where around is selling what she used.  Haven’t found anything close yet, but I will!  :)   So I love my new ‘do!  And the second “new” in my life is my class that I am taking.  It’s a photography class.  I have always loved pictures, taking them, framing them, whatever.  I love ‘em! There is a girl I had come across online that really sparked my photo juices to start flowing and I immediately looked into classes.  She is an amazing photographer and a great girl!  She has really inspired me and has helped me already in learning more in this area.  She’s great and super talented and I really encourage you to take a look at her website!!  www.meganbeth.com  So, I went to my first class and am greatly looking forward to my next one.  :)   To make the class even better, Mon comes too! :)   I think it is a really fun thing for us to do together since we both like photography so much.  Hopefully we will learn a lot and it will be seen in the pictures we take in the future!

Friday, January 15, 2010

Jimmy And The Purple Covers

I’ve known for a while now that Jimmy (my 5 year old Matlese) loved my purple covers that we share. He sleeps in my bed every night and has grown to love my soft purple covers (you can’t help but love them!).  One night I was sitting on my bed reading and the covers were in a ball under a few pillows and I heard him scratching and turned to see what was going on causing him to be so unsettled… which is not like him.  And I saw that he was scratching at a corner of the covers sneaking out from under the pillow… he wanted those purple covers!  So to make it even better, when I got home tonight, the lights were all off in my room and he was not at the top of the stairs to greet me, like he usually is, so I walked into my room, turned the lights on to see him laying on the top of my couch (the top of the part your back rests on) and I couldn’t understand what would possess this little guy to sleep there.  You could tell turning the lights on woke him up.  Then I looked closer and saw that there were his purple covers on the top of the couch… so that is where he went to sleep.  Wherever those covers are, he is a happy boy.  Obviously that part of the couch is unsafe for him to be laying down on so I took him and the covers and moved them over to my bed and he happily went right back to sleep.  :)   What a cutie! :)

Saturday, January 9, 2010

To Cut Or Not To Cut!?

I need a new hairstyle!!!
It’s so hard to find some style that fits me just right.  I don’t have super fine hair or nice thick hair, but there is just something about it that isn’t workable.  I’ve tried the bang thing, multiple styles, and my hair doesn’t want to cooperate.  I’ve done long and layers and short and straight.  So now I am thinking of short with a style to it.  Maybe?  I really don’t know what to do.  I think I will just have to go to my hair salon and go in for a cut and see what they say and just come out with a slight trim if nothing else.  I also need to do something with my color.  Secret… I have grays!  So I need to do something about covering that and I had gone darker, but now that has washed out and it is kinda an in-between color, that I’m not all that fond of.  I think I want to go back to my lighter more natural color, but how do I go about doing that and have a nice color still?  I need a real professional or someone that really just has a good eye. HELP!!!!

Friday, January 8, 2010

10 Things I Love (Materially)

1. magazines
2. silver jewelry
3. my purple covers
4. Nivea lip moisturizer
5. purses
6. my North Face fleece
7. a camera
8. photos
9. my journal
10. stickers – for scrapbooking

Those Are The People Who Make The Clouds!

One day, years ago, I was in New York with my little sisters and one of them said to me with such excitement in her voice, “MARE!!!  Look!  Those are the people who make the clouds!”  Looking in the direction she was pointing, I saw that there were smoke stacks filling the sky with what looked like clouds and she was so excited to see that sight, a sight she had never seen before.  She had to only be 5 or 6 at the time.  Now I look at her, a beautiful girl, 13 years old, smart, funny, loving and kind, and I think back on days like this and see how much she has made me smile in life.  From day one all of my sisters have put a smile on my face.  There’s times that I am strict or seemingly hard on them, but only for their good.  And I love them with my whole heart.  Now, want to know something?  They aren’t sisters by blood.  These four girls are my sisters in my heart though.  In 2000, they moved to America with their parents, speaking not a word of English, as refugees from the Bosnian war.  The oldest was about 7 and the two youngest were 4 (they are identical twins – That took me a little while to tell them apart, but now they are both beautiful individuals that I can very easily tell apart).  They have a remarkable story!  I love them to pieces.  And then, back in 2003, my youngest little sister was born here in America and I will never forget that day!  She has a picture of me holding her in the hospital, and always says she remembers that!  haha- Good memory little one! :)   So there are many memories I am very grateful for given to me through my 4 sisters…other than that, I am an only child.  So they bring an extra special brightness to my life! I love you girls!

A Best Friend

Friends come in and out of your life in so many ways, shapes and forms.  The funny thing for me is, it seems as though the rule to be my best friend is for your name to be Kathleen.  My two best friends have the same name.  One lives in New York and I have known her since the day I was born and we have been the best of friends since.  I am horrible to keep in touch on the phone so I don’t talk to her as much as I would like or as much as I should, but I think about her ALL of the time.  The other Kathleen, who is from Chicago, has been a friend for what feels like my whole lifetime too.  I don’t really remember a time without her.  We have been friends for years and met through our home school year book.  We started out writing letters for years, then added in talking on the phone and meeting in person, then going on vacations together and just keeping each other in each other’s lives as much as possible.  I love both of these girls more than anything and I am so blessed to have them in my life.  There have been other friends that I have met that have blessed me tremendously and taught me a lot in life and I am so thankful for those girls too.  There have also been people that have come and gone, who I have had to learn the hard way about true friendship, but through it all, I have come to appreciate what true friendship is.

What Would You Do If You Either Won Or Were Given 10 Million Dollars? It Has To Be Something For Others And Not Yourself.

Not hesitating one bit, I know what I would want to do.  I would want to start up an orphanage of sorts.  It’d be on a large piece of beautiful land, and it would be a home, not a cold building.  It would be for boys and girls of all ages.  I’d build a large home, boys on one side, girls on the other (their bedrooms and all) and then in the middle of the building would be all the common areas.  It would be colorful and fun, a place to be creative and learn, to use their imagination and always feel loved.  I LOVE kids and the thought of children being unwanted by someone and alone, not having a family or even the feel of a real family is a crushing feeling.  Kids bring so much joy to your life and I want to bring joy to theirs!  So for those kids that didn’t have a family to love them, this orphanage, or home, for them would provide that.  There would be other kids and adults that work there to love them and make them a part of one big family.  I’d LOVE to do this.  I don’t really know if there are any orphanages in this country, but to have something like this would be my dream.  I don’t know how much money it would take to accomplish or what all of the legalities would be, but if I ever receive a large amount of money to be able to start this, I would!  :)   Now even though I would be the one winning the money and doing it to help others, it’d almost feel like it was for myself because it is such a dream and thrilling thing I’d love to do.  It’d make me so happy!