This weekend has been nice and relaxing. Yesterday Doug and I went for a walk on the beach, got In-n-Out, then ate it on our balcony. Then we both took naps. 

Today I went to my parents and had dinner, did a load of laundry, and took a nap. Now I'm home before youth group. It's been really nice out the last two days. Today it was 80 degrees! Gotta love living in California. We think Luna was hot yesterday, cause we found her hanging out in here:

Crazy cat. Haha also, my plants are growing! These are the sweet peas:

Such a nice day!

There's lots of sail boats out enjoying the afternoon

She's content just watching from inside.

Last week when we were at Magic Mountain, when we were entering the park, the turnstile wasn't quite turned over all the way, so when I went to walk through, my leg jammed into one of the spokes. Ouch. I could feel that it was bruised pretty deep; it hurt to use the muscle the rest of the day, like for walking. It's been a week now and it still looks almost the same as that day. It would happe to me haha.

Just thought I would share...

This is what my list ended up looking like today:

Go running

Go to the bank for quarters

Do laundry (including towels and Luna's bedding) (minus two more loads of clothes)

Clean Luna's kennel

Dust the apartment

Sweep the apartment

Mop the apartment

Vacuum the couch

Vacuum our room

Do my Bible study

Make a good, healthy breakfast

Bake a treat for movie night

Give Luna a bath

Not bad, if I do say so myself. I give all the credit to Doug though, because he helped me out  A LOT. He got off early and texted me and asked me what he could do to help. He swept, mopped, and kept laundry going till I got home. I love my man :]

I actually baked two treats today. I made my chocolate chip banana bread just in case the other one wasn't as good as I hoped. The recipe that I was trying for the first time I found on the site Pinterest. It's called BTS cake. Depending on who you talk to BTS stands for different things, but the phrase most heard by our group is "better than sex." (I didn't make up the name of the cake!)

Pretty much it's devil's food cake with a can of condensed milk and caramel sauce on top, then a layer of cool whip, chopped up heath bars, and more caramel drizzled over the top. It was a success and everyone liked it. This is what it looked like:

While I was uploading that picture I saw a few others on my camera that I took last week that I haven't posted or updated about. So here's a week's worth of my life haha

This has been my favorite "healthy" breakfast to make (although today my healthy breakfast was oatmeal and raisins with peanut butter). I'm not one for omelettes and have never really liked them. I like my eggs plain, with ketchup. Although I guess this would technically still be a scramble. I like putting onions, green bell peppers, spinach, and mozzarella cheese in it. I still like my bacon and my buttered toast, but that's why I put healthy in quotes. This picture also shows the small side table that we got that's in between our rocking chairs. So now I have a place to put stuff when I'm enjoying breakfast on our balcony :)

I planted some seeds a couple of weeks ago. I'd love to have some plants to brighten up our balcony, and luckily a lot of plants need full sun, which we have plenty of. I planted Zinnias first, and then Sweet Peas. I watered them every day and have done my best to keep Luna out of the soil. I was watering them one day when I noticed some just starting to peak out from the soil. So of course I grabbed my camera. Only 2 of the 5 seeds I planted in the pot seem to have grown, but that's ok. Today I noticed the Sweet Peas starting to peak out too. 

 This is another recipe that I found on Pinterest that I made for movie night last week. They're pretty much just like S'mores. They're called Pampered Chef S'mores, and they were delicious.

I'm getting hungry blogging about all of these goodies! Time for bed though. Good night!

Happy March!

It's crazy how ambitious I get at night. At least for the next day. I have a to do list in my head of all the stuff that I want to get done, and I feel like I have the energy to do it now, but I have to wait till the next day. The problem is, when tomorrow comes, I won't have the energy or the time to complete everything that I wanted to. I'm in one of those moods now. This is what I want to complete tomorrow:

Go running

Go to the bank for quarters

Do laundry (including towels and Luna's bedding)

Clean Luna's kennel

Dust the apartment

Sweep the apartment

Mop the apartment

Vacuum the couch

Vacuum our room

Do my Bible study

Make a good, healthy breakfast

Bake a treat for movie night

Give Luna a bath

All of that would be doable if I had the entire day off. But I have work at 1 (possibly at noon). And I don't know what time I'll be off since it's shipment. I could be there for two hours or for five. And then I need to come home and get ready to host a movie night (not much to get ready if I get the cleaning and baking part of that list done in the morning), which honestly, is probably all that I'll get done).

Luna has won the war of the bed. Doug and I discussed it and decided that since we don't want her to have to spend every night of her life in a kennel (plus it'd be nice to have that room back again), and the impossibility of her understanding that she's not allowed on it, we decided that we're not going to fight her about it anymore. She's been loving waking us up at 6 in the morning by biting our knuckles and ponytails, crawling over my face to get to the flowers on my nightstand, purring loudly in our ears as she tries to suck on our earlobes, and sitting on our necks. I guess it's preparing us for having kids, whenever that may be. 

Last weekend a group of us got together to go to Six Flags. Doug and I have season passes and so do our friends Mark and Elyse. We have coupons to bring friends for cheap or free, so we got in our other friends. It was rather busy so we didn't get to go on too many rides, but when you're there cheap/free, it doesn't matter quite as much. We ate a lot, screamed a lot, and talked a lot. It was awesome.

Walking up to food/rides

"Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know"

Any ideas yet?

We took most of our pictures in line for Batman. It was ridiculous how long that line was for such an old ride, but it's a classic. We couldn't not go on it.

Prom picture

We may have gotten a bit loopy.

Whenever Doug and I go anywhere, we seem to collect change. We collect it throughout the year when we use cash, and when we find it too. When we have enough we cash it in, usually around the holidays to help pay for presents. We usually make a contest of it. This time we joined forces and took on Allison and Brian mainly. Let's just say we kicked their butts. (We collected $1.36!) This picture is of Doug reaching under the fence to get one.

Allison and Brian

View from the other side.

Making sure we got a good one

James and Kaity

Andrew doesn't smile for photos. I've known him for 9 years and he does not smile for photos. This is the closest you'll get.

Allison and me

In every picture someone's blocking someone. Oh well. 

One more time!

If I have any hope of getting my list done I should get to bed. I did clean the kitchen and the bathroom tonight, so that's a start. The bathroom's the most important part anyway. Nothing's more embarrassing than a dirty bathroom when you have company over. 

Ramblings

This is going to be a very random posts (but a lot of them are...)

I still haven't heard anything back from Wells Fargo. I'm having the attitude of "No news is good news," especially when that means that they haven't said "NO!".

I've been in a funk for the past week and have no clue why. It's putting a stress on everything though and I don't like it. 

The other day Luna was playing with me on the couch and I noticed that her paws were a little odd. I inspected them and discovered she'd been playing with the lilies on my nightstand again...I had to sit on her in order to get this picture, but it cracked me up. It's like catching a kid with chocolate all over their face and a look like, "what?"

We've discovered that she really likes our friend Andrew. When the whole group was over last Friday night, she only jumped up on him. The rest of the time she snuggled with his stuff.

We also celebrated Allison's birthday that night. And I made a cake! (I'm getting better at writing with icing, I think).

On Sunday morning I didn't feel like going anywhere. I didn't sleep well the night before and was exhausted. So we stayed home and made waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Doug was nice enough to run to Target for the whipped cream since we didn't have any (Luna loves it too, I let her try a small bit today. I thought it would scare her when I sprayed it in her face, but it didn't at all!)

There was another beautiful sunset tonight. The kind that's pretty when the sun's going down but then just gets amazing after the sun is gone. I didn't even bother putting the ones of it setting because they just didn't compare.

We love where we live.

Doug loves doing this to Luna and it is so funny to watch. It makes me laugh so hard. Once again, it's like having a little kid when they're discovering their voice. The video's kinda dark, but he shakes her on the couch and she meows and that's the noise that you hear. 

In honor of Fat Tuesday, I ate both a mug of cookies n cream ice cream and an ice cream sandwich.

Chicken!

I wrote too much for a comment, so I'll just make a post about it.

I'll try to write out my chicken recipe, but I kind of just wing it :)

First I melt a little butter in a pan on the stove over medium eat. Just enough to cover the bottom for stickage. I then put a splash of lemon juice in with it. Once it's heated, I put the chicken breast in. Usually I'll put it face down, and then flip it, so that it gets the butter lemon mixture on the top of it. Then flip back over. Then I sprinkle some garlic powder, minced onion, and lemon pepper seasoning on top (the lemon pepper seasoning I found at Krogers for a dollar). Then I cover with a lid and let it cook for a little bit. I'll turn them over with tongs from time to time. It takes about 10 minutes to cook on the stove. You can either cut it open to check that it's cooked, but you can feel the texture change too. I've never had it still be cooked. I like making it on the stove because it's a lot juicier than when it's in the oven, and it takes a lot less time to cook!

Accidental Valentine's Day

Doug and I usually don't do Valentine's day since we don't really believe in overpriced love. I had my interview this morning and then work, and he was at work all day. We had been planning on going to youth group, but Doug's boss randomly told him to take the night off. So I cooked us an impromptu candlelit dinner and then made chocolate covered strawberries (with Ghiradelli chocolate!). The strawberries were on sale at Target (and they're huge!), and turns out Ghiradelli chocolate chips are the same price as Nestle. Who knew? Now they're still chilling in the fridge till we're ready to eat them.

I also made Doug watch a chick flick. Made is too harsh a word. He was actually very nice about it and went along without any complaints. I did use Valentine's Day for some leverage as to why we had to watch one (just waiting for Halloween to bite me in the butt...). I chose The Time Traveler's Wife, and he said it was pretty good. I feel like I like the good chick flicks though...I don't think I've steered him wrong yet.

Our strawberries!

Lately I've really been into trying to eat healthier. (I ate three donuts last night though...and one today...). But I've been having some fun with some cooking. I tried making my chicken a new way and now that's the only way I cook it. I have a hard time with changing recipes once I find one that I like. I've also gotten into brussel sprouts. I don't know if how I make them is healthy, but they're delicious. And I've never liked them before. I make a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice, garlic powder, minced onion, and salt, and then roll the brussel spouts in it (I've only used frozen too as they're super cheap at Target that way). Then I roast them at 400 for about 30 minutes, turning them half way through. They are so good. I've eaten them 4 times for dinner this week. I've been pleasantly surprised to realize that I like many more vegetables than I despise (brussel sprouts just switched sides, but lima beans are still on the despise list). 

As I stated earlier, I had an interview today. It was for a teller position at Wells Fargo. I was online and searching for jobs and thought, "Why not?" So I applied and got a group interview appointment. I feel like it went well, but I felt like we were all on a similar playing field, so I don't really know how they are going to choose who to extend a second interview to. Pretty much, either a hiring manger from a branch will call me or I'll be emailed a rejection. I guess after that I'll really know how I feel about this position. Right now it's pretty casual. Not that I don't care about the position, but just knowing that if it doesn't happen then I'm not supposed to work there. Simple as that. 

Luna has discovered our bath mat (I called it when we first got her) and has been loving it. She "fights" with it and plays with it. She bites it and hides under it. She's hilarious with it. Here's a video of it (you also get to see her ninja somersault that she does)

Haha she cracks me up

Worth

Lately I've been struggling with worth. Not really self esteem though, but just what I'm worth.

I know that my worth is in Christ and what he did for me. I know that I'm not worthy of his grace and mercy, but he made me worthy by choosing to die for me. That is where my worth is. God loves me, chose me, saved me, and wants a relationship with me. Bottom line.

But how does that work with the world that I'm living in? In a world where a woman is almost expected to keep up with a man. If you can't play with the big boys, don't bother trying out. Women are expected to do the same as a man does. And if anything, we have to work harder to get less (the whole glass escalator/ceiling analogy). We have to work hard to be taken seriously, to get respect, and to be worthy.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't some feminist rant. My views are far from feminism. In fact, I blame the feminists for giving women this burden to carry. I am in awe of women who are able to work 40 hour weeks, raise their children, and take care of their households. I don't know how they do that. I don't know if the family unit suffers because of it, but they do the best they can. I feel like I have barely enough time to take care of our little apartment with no kids and working part time.

I do not believe that a woman shouldn't be able to work. Power to those that want to. Women are amazing workers with different passions. I'm having a hard time because I feel like I'm not worth anything in this world. Not that I need to find worth here for my citizenship is in Heaven, it just makes it difficult.

It's difficult to talk to people about your career when you don't have much of one. When you don't have a passion for a career. Some people get it. And some don't. And look at you like you're crazy. Or worse, like you're lazy. I'm not lazy. When I want something. I work for it. I work hard. When I put my mind to something, it gets done. But when people hear that I'm not working towards a career, that I don't want to be a lawyer, a psychologist, a manager, an executive, they make me feel like there's something wrong with me.

And with me wanting to be a homemaker and stay at home mom, I don't foresee this feeling changing in the next twenty years.

I like my life now. I like that I have a job with various hours. I like being able to have time to do laundry, clean the apartment, cook dinners. Time to take a yoga class, a Bible study. Time to volunteer at our church's youth group twice a week and to help lead a book discussion. I like having one night to spend with our friends and an afternoon with my parents every week. I'm okay with not having a full time job, but the world is sending me a different message, and has been since I was little.

Even more amazing with me being okay with who I am is that I married a man who loves who I am. He is proud of me no matter what I do and supports me in everything I do. He finds me worthy and always will. I have been blessed with an incredible man.

I have a job interview on Tuesday. I'm not really stressed about it because my life isn't depending on it. I'm just seeing if there is a path here. If the answer is no, then so be it.

God loves me.
God knows what's best.
God is in control.

That's the bottom line.

(By the way, nothing ever came of the manager position at my current job. It hasn't come up again, which I'm okay with because I never really made a decision).