Dry Erase Frame

I've been in a crafty mood lately. A mood to create, which was often satisfied by writing essays or other things while I was in school, but now I get to create much more pretty things. So remember when I blogged about that photo shoot that I did? Well, I wasn't sure if it was going to take place in my bedroom or not seeing as it's pictures taken of me when I first wake up. Well, my bedroom is a bit boring, especially since it flooded in there a few months ago so we had to move stuff around. We have a big blank wall in our bedroom that desperately needed filling and I had the perfect idea.

I remembered when Lauren blogged about a dry erase frame that she made. So I went on a search to find that post on when she did it. I searched her blog and couldn't find it anywhere, so I e-mailed her. Apparently the designer that made the frame that gave her the idea made her take it down. Boo! Luckily, I figured out that you can still find the post.  If you're interested in finding the original post here is what you do. Google this: dry erase frame AND the little things we do. The link will come up on the search. If you click on it, it says page not found, but if you click the little button in blue at the end of the link info that says Cached, and it will take you to the page. Apparently Google has a snapshot of the page when it was originally posted so you can still see it! Sorry Lauren if I've flooded your blog with that search.

If you don't want to do all of that you can go to this more recent post and the bottom picture has a picture of the frame.

So here's the idea. You take a frame, you paint what you want it to say, leave some blank lines, and once the frame is all put together, you can write on the glass with a dry erase marker, and then you can change it whenever you feel like it! What a fantastic idea! So here's how I went about doing it.

I went to Roberts and bought a frame using one of their awesome 40% off coupons. I also bought some stencils, some black paint, and white and brown butcher paper since I couldn't decide which color I wanted to do. Then using a tape measure, I made lines where I wanted to letters since I can't do a straight line to save my life. I traced the stencils about a half an inch apart from one another, then I painted them black and changed a few things I didn't like about the look of the stencils, I ended up with this:

I had some issues with the first one I did, so then I tried it out on the white and the brown butcher paper.

So you have to help me decide which one I should put on my wall. I'm leaning towards the brown, it just seems warmer. What do you think? I really think this is such a great idea, thank you so much Lauren for sharing it!

Sundance 2011

This weekend Hal and I did something that we've never done before. We went to Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. We're so lucky to live so close to something so amazing, and neither of us have ever been. I remember last year we went to the Broadway Theatre downtown, where they show a lot of Sundance movies and everyone was talking about how Spike Lee was going to be there that night. Neither of us knew who he was, and we weren't there to see a Sundance movie...so we weren't too excited.

We didn't have tickets to see anything, we just wanted to see what Park City was like during Sundance, so at like 9 at night we drove up there.A tip? They have little signs that say this, but they're hard to read everything they say when you're driving. If you're going to sight see, park in Deer Valley. We parked at Deer Valley Resort and a bus came and picked us up for free and dropped us off on Main Street. It was sweet, their buses, at least to Deer Valley were free.

We drove up the mountain to some of the resorts before we headed to Main Street. We brought my brother-in-law along with us, and I wanted to see what Stein Eriksen Lodge looked like in the winter, and Hal wanted to show his brother how fancy the place we go for our anniversary is. I told Hal not to turn up the drive to the Lodge, because they always have people waiting outside to grab your car the moment you pull up, but he thought he could turn around and he wanted to see the Lodge....so he pulled in and sure enough 2 guys rushed up and tried to take the car. It was worth it though, the Lodge looks so beautiful with the snow. Too bad I don't have $1,000 to stay there during the winter...per night, Yikes. I was too much of a wimp to try and take a picture after Hal told them we turned up there by "accident". So this was the only picture I got....it down the lane from the Lodge.

It was so beautiful up there, I'm so bummed this was the only picture I got of it, it was too dark to catch how beautiful it was. They have a ton of snow up in Deer Valley/Park City.

After lying to the Steins guys we went back down the mountain to Deer Valley and parked and took the bus to Main Street.

In Park City, Main Street is it. It's where all of their little shops/restaurants/boutiques are. Well, where a lot of them are anyway. It's where you hang out when you are visiting Park City. So we went there and walked up and down the street. We didn't see anyone famous, probably because it was like 10 by the time we got to Main Street, so all of the shops were closed and there were just lines to get into parties and restaurants. But it was still pretty.

We saw a ton of papperazzi around some guy with dark hair. We didn't see his face and then I heard a girl at the edge of the group say, "Oh my gosh, that's Dustin" But I didn't hear the last name. The only famous Dustin I can think of is Dustin Hoffman...so pretty much I saw Dustin Hoffman.

A local radio station is doing something called "Sundance Gawker" where people send in pictures of famous people they see up there. Man, we missed out! Maybe we'll have to go back during the day or something, because there are a lot of famous people up there. Paul Rudd, Zooey Deschanel, 50 cent, James Franco and tons more. I found out today that Elijah Wood is up there. How did I miss that? I was so obsessed with him in Middle School/High School. I'm so bummed I didn't know earlier! Oh well. This just makes me excited to actually get tickets and go to some movies next year! Thank goodness for locals discount tickets.

Defeat the xmas blues swaparoo

...So the holidays are over, and it's been really really cold. Apparently Monday was supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. It definitely wasn't for me, but it is kind of a bummer that the Holidays are done for a whole year. I found something today that will hopefully help cheer people up! I've been motivated to do things lately. I cleaned my entire house last weekend. It felt good...but what now? I've been working on a few projects, but now that I'm done with those I needed something else to work on.

Enter:

The lovely lady over a Putting It Out There is hosting a Defeat the Xmas Blues Swap! It's super easy, she's the one actually doing the hard part. You submit your info, and then she'll e-mail you who your partner is and then you send them some lovelies. You send them:

1. Something for good luck in 2011
2. A most delicious treat
3. One of your mostest favorite things

What if one of my favorite things is a delicious treat? I'm sure that I'll figure something out. I'm excited to see who I get paired with and what I can come up with to send them!

If you feel up to it, join in the fun, and submit your information, who knows, maybe we'll get each other!

Weekend Update

We had a pretty crazy weekend, who doesn't love an extra long weekend thanks to a holiday? It was my first Monday I've had off of work in forever. It felt so nice to just lay in bed and do nothing all day. Ok, so Monday wasn't included in our busy weekend since Hal had to go to class still, and I was super busy reading like 200 pages in my book...real busy.

My weekend actually started off on Thursday night, when my amazing wedding photographer, Duston Todd came over and set up this in my living room.

His equipment pretty much filled my entire living room. He is starting on a new project for a gallery showing in march. I was able to be one of his subjects! A while ago he did an exhibit on death portraits that he took, and now he's starting on portraits about sleep. You can read about both here. So he took some pictures of me first thing in the morning on Friday. Yikes, like literally right out of bed. I'm interested to see how they turn out.

Oh, do you see Hal's head in the bottom of that picture? Duston taught us how to download games directly onto our Wii. Did you know you can get old school games like sonic on sega genesis downloaded onto your Wii? Hello, that's the only video game that I ever really played. Duston showed us some cool demos and Hal spent the rest of the night in that exact spot playing them.

After some time later that day at the social security office I remembered that we had a wedding reception to go to. Oops, it's only Hal's best friend's little sister's wedding. Oops. So we maybe showed up in regular clothes and felt a little bit under dressed the rest of the night.  They were such a cute couple! I did have a little problem though, it seemed like every time I went to take a picture, a little how do I put this nicely...a little chubster got right in the middle of my shot every time.

Ug, He was the torture of my night. It seemed like every time I pulled out my phone he would appear out of no where and just happen to make it into the shot before the shutter closed. Boo on him. Anyway, that last picture was when they were doing a wedding march. It was something I've never seen done at a wedding. Maybe it's a latin thing? They had some latin music playing and everyone grabbed shoulders and traveled around the room in a march and then they went in to do some other things, like the arch that everyone goes under. Hal and I joined the line for a bit, but someone in front of us hopped in the line alone and messed up the whole thing. Not really, but sort of. We hopped out of the line before things could get too crazy. We stayed to hear He-Sam sing his song.

And that's probably the worst picture ever, oh mood lighting and trying to take a picture while dancing aren't the best combination. After the song we went and snagged some more yummy cheesecake and busted out of there.

All weekend we enjoyed ourselves a little bit of some Sweet Tooth Fairy. Don't even worry, I have a whole post coming that's devoted to how delicious that place is.

And the most boo part of the weekend, even more lame that the child who kept getting in my way, was my phone slightly broke. What am I supposed to do without swype in the English language? What kind of update makes the English part of swype corrupt after a while? Boo on that! I'm still dreading to call customer care and have them tell me to try a factory reboot like the guy at the store said they would make me do. Anyone have any suggestion on that because taking out the battery doesn't work...

Then we ended the weekend with a little bit of these:

via

P.S. If you're looking for a really good two player wii game, Donkey Kong is it!

Search Engine Traffic

Ok, so I was totally planning on blogging something else today, but I just laughed so hard that I decided I needed to blog about it.

Have you guys ever heard of Google Analytics? There are a lot of different websites out there that will help you track your blog. I have been to a lot of them. Not really because I cared about how many people were visiting my blog each month or really who was, but I saw on so many people's blogs talking about what people searched to find their blog. Now that's what I was interested in. It seems like some of the other tracking websites offer this, but I could never figure it out on them. Google Analytics is really easy to use (and no, they aren't paying me to blog about this...although, if they see this and offer I accept any form of payment), I just thought it was a really good way to track your website and thought I would share...and because I just read what people had searched in google to find my blog and I couldn't help laughing, so I thought I would share some of them with you now.

I get a lot of searches for Greta Garbo, 1940s, puppies, Snooki and A Lot of "Married Couples that look alike". I don't think Hal and I look that much a like, I mean we're both have similar hair color and are white, except in the summer when Hal gets a tan and I don't and he looks like he's of a different race, but that's about it. I can't help it the name of my blog is The Married Couple. I'm guessing that's where it's mostly coming from. Well lately I've started to get some unusual searches that somehow led to my blog, here are the best ones.

I can sort of get ones like this, I blogged about my nails once:
- bent back fingernail
-weird pointer finger nails

I can maybe get this, since the search says married couple:
-a video camera sale to married couple
-pictures where you can put faces with a married couple
But when have I ever blogged about a video camera or pictures where you can put faces with married couple? Does that even make sense? I really have no idea what they were going for there, yet there were multiple searches from it. Weird.

From there things just get even weirder:
-"i * get glasses" -lasik  Umm is that English?
-joshua.partington@gmail.com How is this associated with my blog at all? Maybe I should e-mail him for fun.

And the strangest award goes to:

-bet.com movie you do or you dont a black couple barely getting married
There are no words. 

You guys should sign up for this, or any site that offers search engine tracking, and then post about it because I find it hilarious what leads people to websites.

Just Dance

For Christmas Hal and I were fortunate enough to receive both Just Dance and Just Dance 2! We were pretty excited because we didn't expect to get it because video games are expensive! So actually right before Christmas Hal bought Just Dance 2 because it was on sale at Amazon. Well, I was telling my sister about this and how I was excited to play it while she was still in town, she got all bummed...apparently she did buy it for us for Christmas. So, then it turns out that my brother in law also got it for us for Christmas. Good thing we hadn't opened the copy that we had bought yet, so we got Donkey Kong to replace one of them. Which, just in case you were wondering, is a really fun 2 player game.

Christmas night we made sure to put our Wii to use and started playing Just Dance like mad men. My dad let us borrow his projector and we hooked it up to the surround sound and we had some serious entertainment for hours!

Have you ever watched somebody playing Just Dance? It's really funny. You're following a dancer on the screen so a lot times you end up doing some ridiculous dance moves. The first time I played this my friend told me about Ring My Bell. She said we had to make the boys do it. I managed to record it, but for some reason when it uploads onto YouTube, the video seems like it's on fast forward. Watch it at least to the part where the guys have to pelvic thrust and spank themselves!


I took one more video of my brother in law and my nephews dancing to We're The Kids of America. On this one you can even hear the music, even though it's rather shaky. But definitely, find someone with a Wii and play this game, it's fun and funny. P.S. My favorite one so far is Rasputin on Just Dance 2.

Free New Year

This past year has surely had it's ups and downs. Overall it definitely wasn't the best year, but it had some really good times. It's alright to have a bit of a downer year, because then you can look forward to a fresh new start of a new year. This year, I'm not making big resolutions. I've never really been good at that. I won't mention the resolutions I made last year...because well...most of them didn't really get done. But It's nice to blog about them in a place where you can look back and easily find them and see your progress. This year, instead of making really specific resolutions I'm going to make some goals...and not really specific goals, just generals ones, that will hopefully benefit this new year, and will hopefully benefit my life.

So, This year I'm going to try new things. I'm going to be open and honest. I'm not really the free spirit type, but I'm going to try and be less rigid and more flexible. I am going to attempt to broaden my horizons, and see what happens. I don't really have much in mind for this right now, other than generally just going with the flow instead of fighting the change. I have a bit of a problem with change. It immediately strikes fear within my heart, so this year, I'm going to remember this, and be more open. Maybe I won't get to the point where I embrace change, but I'm no longer going to resist it. I have found that resisting change doesn't do me any good other than fighting the inevitable, and holding on to something that is no longer there.

                                                                           all via weheartit
I'm really open to trying new things, so please, if you have anything really interesting that you do, any cool hobbies or talents that you put to use, let me know! Also, I've been wanting to broaden my network of people in my life, so please share advice of how you have made new friends since graduating from college. It's hard to meet new people when you're not constantly around a source of new people. It has been hard to stay motivated to try new things and to meet new people since graduating and not being pushed to do things all of the time. I've been thinking about taking some sewing classes or something to get out there and build skills and meet new people. Please though, share your experiences, thoughts, or advice!

I saw this poem a while ago and I loved it so much I printed it out and put it on my fridge. Apparently it is often miss-attributed to Mother Theresa, but is actually authored by Kent Keith. So this poem will be my new mantra for this upcoming year. I'm going to try and check back and make sure that I'm sticking with it, so please check in on me too to help keep me motivated.

Anyway

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
-Kent Keith