A Day in the Life of Jess

One year ago today was the happiest day of my life.  It was the day I pledged my life to my very best friend, and life has never been the same since.  Marriage has been one wild, crazy ride so far, but I am happy to report that we are still loving every minute of it!  And among the many exciting things we had planned for this, our first wedding anniversary, there was one thing in particular that we were excited about.

The Cake.

It was absolutely beautiful, and everything I imagined.  Every layer was a different flavor, and it’s white exterior was decorated by a lovely row of purple flowers and white roses that wound its way from top to bottom.  It was perfect.

And this, friends, was the only bite of it that Alex and I had.

At some point over the course of our honeymoon, we somehow realized that neither of us had a piece of the wedding cake we spent so much time choosing and designing.  During the reception, we were walking around from table to table greeting our guests (Or at least the couple of tables full of camp friends.  We never seemed to make it past them, no matter how hard we tried.  Sorry to the rest of the guests.  We were totally pumped you were there, really.), while everyone was enjoying cake, so we never had our own.

There was one consolation.  Robin, our fabulous Cake Lady, told us that our cake was much bigger than was necessary for the amount of guests we were expecting (What?  We like cake.), so surely we would have plenty of leftovers.  However, what we didn’t take into account was how INCREDIBLE Robin’s wedding cakes are, and nearly every bit of it got eaten.  Even so, we knew there were leftovers waiting at my parents’ house, and we were excited to get home and partake.

Unfortunately, my family apparently felt the same way.  Because when we got home from our honeymoon, they sheepishly informed us that they had assumed we had our fill of cake at the wedding, and they had eaten all the leftovers.

FAIL.

When I got home from work yesterday, I instantly knew that Dante had done something mischievous and likely destructive, because he was not squeaking with excitement and climbing up my legs as soon as I came in the door.  In fact, he was no where to be seen.  My first thought, naturally, was that he was dead (anyone else have an issue with jumping to the worst case scenario within .25 seconds?).  But as soon as I came up the stairs, I saw his little nose poking over the top step in his typical “I’M GUILTY I’M GUILTY I’M GUILTY!” pose.  I braced myself for the worst and came the rest of the way up the stairs.

When I got there, I found the living room covered with the shredded remains of something red and soft-looking.  As I stooped to investigate, giving the pup his deserved death-glare out of the corner of my eye, I realized just what he had done.

At the end of last week whilst grocery shopping, I saw some pretty bouquets of flowers for sale and decided to get some for our house, in honor of our risen Savior.  Easter without flowers in the house just seemed … wrong.  So I brought them home and displayed them proudly on the kitchen table, on top of a pretty lace doily made by Alex’s great-great grandma.  No big deal.

The little red shredded things covering my living room floor?  Yeah, those were the remains of said flowers.  Well, at least some of them.  He really seemed to have it out for the carnations.  Sure enough, I found the glass vase tipped over on the table, surround by a puddle of water, poor ripped up flowers, and the lace doily laying in a sad heap.

After I moved passed the realization that the pup had killed the flowers, my next moment of shock came when I realized that Dante had been up ON THE KITCHEN TABLE.  I have no idea how.  All of the chairs were totally pushed in, and as far as I could tell, there was no feasible way for him to get from the floor to the table.

WHAT THE HECK.

I managed to salvage some of the flowers that weren’t totally killed, wring out the sopping doily and rejoice that the vase wasn’t broken.

So that’s something.  But really, Pup?  The Easter Flowers?!?!?

Say a prayer for the pup when you think of it.  The guy probably needs all the help he can get after his act of blasphemy.

As of late …

• St. Patrick’s Day has moved up on my list of cool holidays, not because I have any ties to Ireland or clovers or leprechauns (As far as I know, I am not even a bit Irish.  I mean, look at me.  I have dark hair and skin that tans in about five minutes, and not a single freckle.  Plus, my Irish accent sounds Indian.).  Rather, it is because I have discovered that there are so many awesome foods you can make on St. Patrick’s Day.  Lunch was our wacky meal and dinner was our authentic meal.  For lunch we had tasty green pancakes and green eggs, and for dinner we had three absolutely delicious things that I had never heard of or made before:  Beef & Irish Stout Stew, Irish Champ, and Irish Soda Bread.  Ahhh.  I am already excited for next year.  Plus, the parents-in-law and our awesome missionary friend, Sarah, came over to celebrate with us.

• Due to graduating, we got way more tax return money than expected, so we shelled out some cash monies and got a new kitchen table! Something about the table makes our house feel like a house rather than a big apartment, because we can actually have multiple people over for dinner, at the same time.  Plus, the people we bought it from really wanted to get rid of this pretty, antique hutch so they gave it to us for super cheap.  Love it!  The hutch went downstairs so that we have a place to serve snacks and drinks for all the wild parties Bible studies we plan to host down there.

• Speaking of new furniture, we were recently blessed to have been given a full-size couch and love seat set!  We had just started saving to buy some, so this was an awesome surprise.  Yay for having places to sit!!  In a couple weeks, a rather large Bible study is going to start meeting in our house, and I am very happy that I will not have to ask our guests to sit on the floor!  Thanks, Shaners!!

• I am growing onions on my kitchen window sill.  No joke.  I read somewhere that you could put the root tips of green onions in a cup of water and the green onions will re-grow themselves, and I decided to give it a go.  I put an entire bunch of onion tips leftover from the Irish Champ in a small glass of water, and by that night they were noticeably taller.  What the heck!  By today, they are nearly a half inch to an inch taller.  Observe – the green parts on the tops have all appeared since Saturday.  I honestly did not expect it to work.  I’m totally done buying green onions.  Are there any other veggies that regrow themselves??

And that’s the scoop.

Alright all you green-thumbed readers (I know you’re out there), I need your help!!  I noticed some green things sprouting up in my front flowerbeds, so I decided it was time to clean them out.

And so I did.  To the best of my ability, that is.  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, but they sure look a lot better.  The thing is though, I have no idea what it is that is growing out there.

That’s where you come in, eh.  I need you to tell me what the following mystery plants are, because ladies & gentlemen, it’s time for …

Guess That Plant!

Mystery Plant #1

Maybe it’s to early to tell what kind, but looks to me like some kind of flower.  I hope it is pretty and colorful!

Mystery Plant #2

Pretty pink and yellow blooms with sort of fuzzyish, low to the ground leaves.  There is also a second one that hasn’t bloomed yet.

Mystery Plant #3

There are six of these bushes all together.  The kid next door claims they are roses, but I didn’t see any thorns.  Guesses??

Mystery Plant #4

Some kind of vine/ivy thing that has taken over one whole end of the lower bed.  I pulled some of it up because it was kind of strangling one of the bushes.  Hope I didn’t kill it.

Mystery Plant #5

Some kind of low-lying green leafy thing.  Possibly a weed?  I was scared to pull it up!

Mystery Plant #6

This one I am particularly curious about.  It is spiky and kinda prickly, kinda like a very small, flat Christmas tree of sorts.

Mystery Plant #7

There were tall, dead, stalk-like things coming up in the middle of these little shoots (which I broke off), so I’m guessing these are new ones coming up.

Mystery Plant #8

There were a couple of these stalk/bushy things that looked dead, so I broke them off.  I hope new ones come up!

Mystery Plant #9

This was another stalk/bush dead thing.  It has cute little flowers, though.

Mystery Tree #1

There is also this little tree.  It has some little buds on it.  What do you think??  I’m hoping for a pretty, blooming tree!

Mystery Tree #2

There is also this big tree in the front yard with little stubby bud things.

Please let me know if you know what any of these are!!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I, Jessica Nicole Laird, have a color addiction.  I absolutely demand to have color in my life.  It’s why we painted our apartment, even though we knew it was a temporary living situation, and it is most definitely why we painted our house.  I don’t do well with white or beige walls.  They are just so … uninspiring.  Boring.  Bland.  Blaaaaah.

This is why we decided to cozy up the living room/dining area with some color, because the whooooole thing was this off-white beige color.  Everything just kind of blended together – the ceiling, the walls, the carpet.  Now, I don’t mind such colors as an accent or a compliment, as long as what they are complimenting is some warm and cozy color.

Like the color Graham Cracker Crust, for example.

Our fabulous new painting from Deda!

Remember the painting our talented friend Deda was making for us?  The one that we were trying to choose a verse for?

Well, great news!  It is finished!!!

Drum roll please …

Oh my goodness, it’s gorgeous!  I completely love it and am so amazed at the incredible talents God has blessed Deda with.  Amazing!

And as you can see, the verse we chose was “Be still and know that I am God.”, Psalm 46:10.  I think it is totally perfect.  We’re going to pick it up after dinner!  Whoohoo!

Let me know if you are in need of some fabulous artwork – I can totally hook you up!

We have a longstanding problem with paint fumes.

Long ago when Alex worked at camp, he practically poisoned himself painting the inside of some big storage area and was in bed for the next couple days.

During his best man speech at our wedding, my inherited brother told the story of how he found me flopped on the floor of their spare bedroom when I was helping them paint their house the summer after Alex and I were first dating.  I had been going at it for hours with no ventilation whatsoever, and the result wasn’t pretty.

A similar thing happened when I was painting the laundry room at our new house.  Yikes.

I don’t want to know the total amount of brain cells Alex and I have lost to paint asphyxiation.

Well, it happened again – this time to our whole entire house.  Alex and his Dad have been working on one of our final house projects: repairing/painting the stair railings.

It’s been quite a process.  The railings had originally been installed in a very bizarre way.  They were both nailed down with many more nails than necessary, and amazingly enough, one was still quite wobbly.  Plus the paint was chipped and old.  So they pried them out of the wall and floor and sanded them down to be painted.

Unfortunately, it has to be at least 70 degrees for spray paint to adhere, so they cranked the heat up in the garage and went to town.

You see where this is going, eh?

Two cans of spray paint, two large metal railings, one very hot garage and zero sources of fresh air.  Not a good combination.  By the time Dante and I got back from our walk and stuck our heads in to see how it was going, you could hardly see from one side of the garage to the other.  It was totally full of a dark, hazy, smog.  My poor husband and father-in-law looked like raccoons from the black paint all around their face masks.

We all escaped into the house and quickly closed the door behind us, sure that we had sealed the toxic air out.

Wrong.

Awhile later I thought for sure I could smell paint fumes in our office.  I assumed it was just coming from Alex since the paint had clearly seeped into his pores, but even after scrubbing himself clean, I could still smell it.  I convinced myself I was just going crazy with paint paranoia, so I ignored it.  Even so, just I was drifting off to an early daylight-savings-time-conquering sleep, I still could have sworn I could still smell a whiff of paint.

When the alarm went off insanely early this morning, Alex and I both woke up with horrible headaches.  Just like the headaches I got painting my brother-in-law’s house and our laundry room.  Ugg.  We determined that the paint fumes had seeped through the thin wall to laundry room and to the heater, getting spewed into the whole house.

Fail.

Leaving for church was especially awesome, because it meant delicious fresh air.  It wasn’t until we got home from church stepped inside did we realize just how bad the paint fumes were.  Thankfully it was warm out, because we opened every single window in the house to get some ventilation.

And if that wasn’t enough, we then discovered that they had accidentally painted the railings a deceivingly dark shade of green instead of black, so it all had to be done again.  Needless to say, they ran the risk of dust spots and painted the railings outside.

All for the sake of our paint-damaged brain cells.

Today I decided to jazz up Javier a bit.  His old pot was a bit, well … just look.

Kinda gross, possibly molding.  Not pretty.  And so, after buying a fun new pot from Target, I did some research about Christmas Cacti and repotting methods and determined the best course of action was just to smash the old pot with a hammer.  Woot!

Smashing things with hammers seemed like a very manly job, and so I enlisted the help of Alex.  He was pleased.  What guy doesn’t like demolishing with his bare hands?

First things first, though.  I wanted a drainage hole in the bottom of the new pot, and I found the words “Drill drainage hole here” on the bottom of the pot.  Drilling holes into pots also seemed like a manly job, so it was defferred to Alex as well.

Unfortunately, he was a little overzealous.

But hey, water will certainly drain through it, and that is what’s important, right?

Time for smashing the pot!

Success!  As you can see, Dante was a huge help.

No big deal.  The manly work finished, I took over.

Next came the messy job of gently shaking off all of the old potting soil without hurting any of the roots.

See that?  It’s called the root ball.  I know.  I checked.  Online.

Poor Javier looked pretty pitiful afterwards.  Around this point I started worrying that maybe I had killed him and decided to get him in his new pot ASAP.  I dumped in a bunch of fresh potting soil, plopped him in, and filled in the rest with the new soil.

Ta-da!!  As good as new!  After breaking off some dead leaves and flowers, we carried him back inside and placed him on his brand new fancy stand.

Doesn’t he look so much better?

Yay!  Javier is helping our big downstairs room to look like more than just a big empty space.

And just because I love to torture him, here’s one with the pup.

Well, we have acquired another plant.  A, um, rather large plant.  Meet Javier.

Here he is with the pup for perspective of his large size.

Javier is a 25 year-old Christmas Cactus.  He used to belong to a former missionary couple of our church, and somehow found his way into my office to be claimed by whoever wanted him.  After a week of people asking if he belonged to me, I decided that he probably should.  I mean, come on.  The thing is 25 years old, which is, in fact, older than I am.  Leaving him there unclaimed felt something like disrespect for elders, or whatnot.

And so, he is now the sole item in our big downstairs room, aside from my shelf of yarn that the pup destroys roughly once a week.  Next week we’re getting couches for down there so its not just a huge empty space.

The funny thing is that I don’t know a darn thing about plants and gardening and the like.  I think I’m doing alright so far, though, because Diego is clearly flourishing.

I’m totally giving the whole gardening thing a try this year, and I am so excited!  I’m very curious to see what comes up in the flower beds in front of the house – the kid that lives across the street says there are roses and pretty purple flowers, but he seemed like even less of an expert than me.  It looks like there was also maybe a vegetable garden in the backyard at some point.

I’ve started researching when the best times are to plant vegetables and flowers and such (did I mention I don’t know anything about gardening?), so we’ll just see what happens!  Until then, Diego and Javier are my gardening guinea pigs.

Although, I’m going to feel totally awful if Javier dies at my hand have surviving the last quarter of a century just fine.  I already broke a large branch off of him in transit (shh …).  Maybe I’ll buy him a new pot today to get on his good side.

Guys, I have a paralyzing fear of spiders.  True story.   Have my entire life, and I’m pretty sure it has only increased with age.

My dear mother has tried her hardest to rationalize and condition me out of it, and my mother-in-law even tried to get me to accept spiders by reminding me that they are one of God’s creatures, and all of His creatures are special.

Bless their hearts and their efforts, but it hasn’t worked.  Not even in the slightest.

When I was a camp counselor, there was a massive black spider living on the ceiling of my cabin when I first moved in.  It was horrible.  I couldn’t think, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even relax.  I didn’t know anyone else there, so I couldn’t bring myself to get someone to kill it or let me move in with them.  Instead, I wisely opted for absolutely terrifying my poor campers by having awful nightmares that the spider was on me and leaping out of bed screaming at the top of my lungs in the middle of the night.

… for three nights in a row.

It’s a serious problem.  One that I probably should have grown out of about two decades ago.  I’m a late bloomer, apparently.

I haven’t had a spider-induced nervous breakdown in quite awhile, until a dear old friend sent me this.

Horrifying Spider Article

Normally I would post pictures from the article, or at least it’s correct title, but I’m too scared to actually look at it again.  It involves terrifying pictures of spider webs blanketing whole fields like snow, weighing down huge trees, and even capturing small dogs.

*SHUDDER SHUDDER SHUDDER SHUDDER*

Honestly, I could not even bring myself to read the article.  I skimmed it, felt my heart rate rising, and closed it.  But it was something about a flood in some other country (Australia, I think?) that causes thousands and thousands of spiders to flee to higher ground.

What I don’t get is why photographers flocked to take pictures of this so-called phenomenon, and no one thought, “HEY!  This is our chance!!  They are all in one place!!  NOW LET’S KILL THEM!!”

Honestly, people.  Priorities.

That was Thought #1 in my mind as I tried to calm my breathing.

Thought #2 was something along the lines of … OH MY WORD, I LIVE IN A FLOOD-PRONE CITY!!!

No joke, ya’ll.  There was a completely awful flood here in ’08, and even though I now live further from the river than I used to (when I could see it out my living room window), I’m pretty sure the waters still would have made to the neighborhood.

Observe.

Guys, that is my adoptive hometown totally under water.  And as horrible as this is, I can’t decide which is more awful … the knowledge that everything was covered in water, or the knowledge that somewhere in a lonely cornfield, the spiders of the city were demolishing everything in sight, including small dogs like my own.

So this was Thought #3, which caused my heart rate and breathing to rapidly increase.

WHAT IF IT FLOODS AGAIN????!?!?!?!?!?  They will be everywhere.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to banging my head on the wall and packing for my move to sub-zero temperatures, where spiders and their spawn cannot survive.