fitzgeralds

so heather, my dear sms friend, asked me to take some pseudo-engagement pictures for her. this is heather.

last night she and jace had a party at a friend's house, so we decided to take some before the party. i warned them that i am by no means a professional, but i would love to do it! so here are some preview pictures...

we had so much fun. the party was a shrimp boil, and the shrimp was amazing!! here are a few fun pictures from the night...

heather looooves red beans and rice, so there was a bar for it! amazing.

shrimp tables. YUM!

i dont think all of our eyes were open.

me and heather.

me and the husband.

lust.

i rarely lust after things for long. these however have been lusted after for a while. not only does PW wear them, which is reason enough for everyone in america to go buy a pair, but they're just beautiful! and on top of that, they're totally worth it.

i could wear these with jeans and a tshirt, jeans and a going out shirt, dresses, skirts, everything. if i had had them at the time, these might have been the boots under my wedding dress, instead of my these lookers...

so for all those readers of mine, if you're really loving me today, here's what i want. consider it a birthday present to last the rest of my life. i'll take a size 8 in redwood. thanks. until then, i'll be looking online for cheaper versions of the my loves. i'll keep you posted...

wish me luck! tomorrow i am officially taking my very first set of non-professional engagement pictures! my dear friend heather has asked me to take engagement pictures for her and her fiance, and i have said yes. this is sarah, heather, and me at heather's lingerie shower. excuse the horribleness i was feeling that night. not a good picture night. they both teach at sms with me, and they went to ole miss too! perfect! 

i looooove photography, but i haven't had much time to take fun shots. i'm looking forward to it, and i'm doing it for free since she is my friend, after all. i'll post some sunday, since we'll be busy tomorrow and she has a party tomorrow night. i hope it's great weather! 

cinco de mayo

i actually had a teacher walk up to me yesterday and ask what the date is. is it the 6th she asked? no, i said, it's the 5th. Cinco de Mayo! she looked at me like i had lost my mind. cinco de mayo, i tried again? still a blank stare... so i said it one more time, because maybe she just is old and hasn't woken up yet...cinco de mayo! the mexican holiday? nope. nothing. she had no idea. how does that happen? i thought everyone celebrated with mexican food and beer. maybe that's just me. apparently mexicans don't celebrate it, and it's their own holiday, but leave it to americans to kick mexicans out of the country, then celebrate one of their holidays. i'm for it. and i'll keep doing it. in celebration for the wonderful cinco de mayo, i made a mexican lasagna. my sister got to see it going into the oven, via gchat video. it was scrumptious. i also made some mexicanish hominy...although i don't think hominy is at all mexican.
i ended up eating alone because our air conditioner was being fixed, and trust me, i would rather eat alone every night than go without heat at this time in memphis. so i ate alone, and drank my beer alone, while the husband vigilantly watched the sketchballs who were sent to fix our AC. i suppose i shouldn't say he vigilantly watched, since he was working in the garage for the most part. this is what my garage looks like most afternoons...

now he is a wonderful husband, so he moves both cars out, works, then moves them back in. but still. this is my life.

and these two pictures show the sides. they're like this all the time. we just got a lot of this wood the other day though, and john's going to build us something glorious from it. 

beautiful tongue and groove boards for a new kitchen table. 

isn't that so pretty!? 

see the tongue and groove? 

both ends have tongues. perfect for teaching children not to stick their own tongues out. good thing we don't have to worry about that yet. 

adventures in babysitting

so usually i'm used to babysitting perfect angels, such as this one ...

he literally ran into his room, stood there waiting for me, pointed to his bed, and again waited. i put him in the crib, and this is what he did. what a kid! and he's only 1 :)


well i recently took a nannying job for this summer, and i was over there babysitting last weekend. there are 2 girls and a boy, and the oldest girl had a friend over. they decided to play beauty parlor. i of course was chosen as the victim, and i was warned that if i didn't like the hairstyle they gave me, i would be sued. that's right. 3rd graders will sue me. well this is how my hair style went ... in case you can't tell, they took a comb and began teasing my entire head. i have a long summer ahead of me.

for those who don't live in the area, you may or may not know that tennessee was hit by horrific storms this past weekend. for some reason it hasn't made national news very much, although almost 30 people were killed just in TN. anyhow...it was awful. the husband and i woke on saturday to the sound of sirens. tornado sirens. if you don't know me, you don't know that i hate storms. when i say hate, i mean despise. they nearly kill me, from miles and miles away. i begged my dad to build a storm shelter in our old backyard. it didn't happen. so this storm comes, and the husband just lays there in bed. i'm warning him that dave brown says we should be in the bathroom in the middle of the house with shoes, clothes, and an ID on us. he doesn't move. i'm preparing my escape, planning my outfit, wondering if i should call and say goodbye to my family. he doesn't move. i turn up the volume, turn off the fan so he can hear the sirens. he doesn't move. for about an hour i am glued to the viper radar on channel 5, and i'm trying to heed dave's warning to take cover, but the husband just sits. it finally slowed down, and the tornado went away for a while, so we ventured out to the living room. i looked out the window, and this is what i saw...

our poor swing is under water. if you look right above the black grill in the middle, there are 3 sections of fence that are pouring water into our back yard. turns out we got over a foot of rain that day.

yes, that's a portion of the mississippi river flowing through our front yard. and this is about 2 hours after the rain stopped.


well we ended up making it outside and went to run errands. it was a fairly eventful day, and we did somehow manage to live through it. then at 1:30 am that night/next morning, i again sat up to turn off the fan, and yes, sirens were going off. again. they said we wouldn't have more storms! not so. i made the husband turn on the news, and we watched as the storm raged through the area north of us. good thing we lived through that one too. i think we're in for it the next round...


well on monday after school, the husband picked me up and we went to oakland to get wood. now, 2 years ago, that sentence would have never been uttered from me. i couldn't have even told you where oakland was, and i never would have been going to buy wood so that i could make something on my own. i would have been heading to east memphis to hit up pottery barn for some good ole original antiques. not so anymore. i have learned to bargain hunt and watch lovingly as the husband builds me things.

so we went to oakland. he has a friend there who tears down old barns and sells the wood. he goes to illinois because those barns are made with wood. that's it. not like here in memphis where people use steel and such. he likes the old beams and neat pieces of wood. and so do we! so we went to get some.

this is his place. there's wood everywhere. it's pretty cool really! maybe we'll go back when we have more money.

i really wanted these beams, but since we aren't building a house, i don't know what we would do with them. 

here are the friends. we bought a bunch of this because the husband is going to make us a corner cabinet for our pyrex. in case you didn't know, we collect it. pictures of the actual cabinet building to come later...

ketchup

it's that time. i'm playing ketchup. sure, it's CATch up to you yankees, but here in the deep south, ketchup works just fine. here's what we've been up to...

today i'm in third grade. i'm actually in my old third grade teacher's classroom. that's what keeps this ole job interesting. i never know when i'll be asked to fill in for my own old teacher, and then the students spend most of the day asking if the chairs are the same as when i was here, which desk was mine, if the wallpaper is new, etc. today they are actually all about me. they love me, naturally, i mean, who wouldn't? they've taken to calling me mrs. awesome. ill keep it.
most classes have a fun book that the teacher reads to them during breaks or something, and this class is no different. they are reading the nickel-plated beauty, and they checked it out of the sms library. when i see a library book, i immediately open the front cover and find something i love. check-out cards. we used to write our names in the lines each time we checked out a book, then the librarian stamped the date for when the book was due back in the library. well i found a good card in this book. here it is, for you readers out there...

If you can read through the blur, you'll see my class!! Casey in 4-D on the top line is Casey McGhee, or so I think it is, and she was in my grade at one point. Martha was in my class, 4-M, and her book was due back on Jan 10, 1996. Wow. we were 9. love it. i think i tried to pick out books that my sister had checked out before me. i thought it would make it cooler. i guess she never read this book, because my name isn't on this card.


as far as cooking travels have gone, they haven't gone far. i did recently make a super delicious sandwich that john swears was the best sandwich i've ever made (thank you pioneer woman!) it was marvelous, and i might have to make it again this week just 'cause. i also have recently had my very first try at cooking deer meat. john killed 3 deer last season, and we haven't eaten hardly any of it! it's been frozen down at his shop, so i made him bring some home. i just browned the meat and made a deer spaghetti type dish. it was pretty good, if i do say so myself! here it is...

i made PW's garlic cheesy bread too (to die for!) looks good huh? 

scrumptious. 

i love our table. 

we had a really really really bad storm on saturday. john and i were helping out at our YL yard sale, and we were driving home afterwards when the skies blew up again. i asked him to pull over. i begged. i pleaded. he kept driving. he had to run into the post office, and i sat in the car, because i'm just so sweet that the rain would have melted me. i sat, i listened to the radio, and i watched. i just knew i was going to see a twister fly out of the sky and suck the white pickup into the air, and i'd be catapulted out the window. i knew it. i waited. it never happened. the lightning scared me half to death, but then eventually the husband did emerge and we were alive together again. we drove home at about 5 miles an hour, partially because the rain was so strong that we couldn't go faster, but mainly because i was gripping the door handle and john's leg, begging him to slow down. we did make it home alive, but only barely.


yesterday we had our final YL club of the year. it was a little sad really. this year's senior class was CRAZY, but i loved them. i'll really miss the girls that i grew close to, but i'm excited for them to go to college! i'll post pictures from last night later.

chicken litter

that's right. litter from chickens. you can imagine for yourself how one might obtain chicken litter before it's put into that nice clean MiracleGro bag and sold at WalMart. i however, will choose to overlook that, and will just use it from my bright shiny bag. and that's just what we did. when the husband and i decided to grow our garden (i'm sorry i keep raving on and on about it, but it's a big deal for us! it's like practicing raising children!), we asked his mother's neighbor for some advice. he's grown gardens for a few years now, and seems like a pro. he told us that pro-mix and chicken litter is the way to go. sound a little bit like trying to read obama's healthcare plan? yeah, i agree. it doesn't make much sense to me either, but the husband and i are diligent listeners, and we found out that pro-mix is the perfect mixture of dirt, sand, and something else that i forgot (apparently listening doesn't stick). so you pour that into your garden, or in our case Lowe's buckets, and you fill 'er on up. well you stop in the middle actually. then you sprinkle about a tablespoon of chicken litter on top, then fill up with pro-mix. then you dig a little hole for your plant, sprinkle a tiny bit more chicken litter, and put your plant in there!
the chicken litter is really supposed to help plants grow super strong. once the litter gets in there, it helps nourish the roots. then the roots go down, and they hit that second layer of chicken litter and they go wild! we'll see how it goes...

i took some more pictures because they're just so cute! enjoy!

i love that color! then we ate it. YUMMMMM!! 

i have an OUTSTANDING guacamole recipe that i can't wait to use this in!! 

we went to dinner with the scoggins family on friday, and then stayed to hang out, as usual. their adorable daughter addie, who i want to just take for my own, got ice cream with her dinner, and i was playing with the camera, so naturally, i took pictures of her. bask in the sheer cuteness of this child. 

she saw me taking pictures and thought she should smile. i told her to keep eating. 

so she ate and looked.

then i stole of a picture of the husband, but he, like addie, thought he should pose. go figure. 

i just love her!

how does your garden grow?

so i may have mentioned that we are growing a garden. our backyard is pretty ugly, so prepare yourself before you look at the pictures. you've been warned.
we are growing a container garden, too. not just a normal one. we're trying to move...anywhere...and if we do get that chance, our garden is portable!! we went and bought some beautiful buckets from lowe's...you'll soon realize that's sarcasm. and my dear darling studly man of a husband built us a raised garden that we can take apart and move too! it's just dreamy.

so here it is...

isn't it cute!? we have 4 tomato plants (2 are in the raised bed), zucchini, squash, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, and something else but i forgot what it is. on our cute little pot bench in front are rosemary from john's mom, basil, and cilantro.

i'm growing some flowers. i think they're going to be dahlias, which are my absolute favorite, but i can't remember for sure if that's what i planted.

our little raised garden!! we have onions, garlic, and tomatoes over here. i can't wait!!!!

working hard to drill water holes for our pots.

now it will take some time for them to grow, but i promise to post updates, as i know you are DYING to see how it turns out. if you're lucky, i'll mail you a yummy southern tomato.