No Excuses :(

I have no excuses, so I'll just start off by saying that I feel just as bad as the dog in the video below for not writing since August.

How cute is he?! Poor Denver :(

Now, a lot has happened since I was last on here, way too much to catch up on so I'll just get into what's going on now.

This is Lady Bella's new sleeping spot, on the floor in front of my night table on a nice fluffy blanket that she's taken over. What a life..

Chester of course, sleeps on the bed with us cuddling up next to me. He wouldn't have it any other way, even though it means that I have to sleep in all sorts of weird positions.

..and when they're both on the bed, it kinda feel like this, lol.

In keeping with the cat theme, its a little hard to see because of the glare but, on my way to work on Friday I was behind this person.

If you look closely, her passenger side head rest it looks like a cats head! Okay, okay, it might be a stretch but it was the first thing I thought of.

Aside from not blogging for a while, I've also neglected exercising my craft muscles so yesterday Mike and I decided it would be a lazy, do nothing kind of Saturday.  While he played some PS3 I took some time to get crafty!

At work they have this Healthy Living program where if you take a health survey they give you a $75 AmEx gift card.  I think 15 minutes is worth $75, and that extra $75 meant that I can go to Michael's and have a little fun!

I had 3 crafts lined up but only finished 2 because the last project has been a work in progress for a while now, I'll post the finished project later on.

Project #1 was this cute little gnome I found in the ceramic section of Michael's and I love gnomes (I'll post a pic of my small collection later on too).  

I was going to paint him with the typical red hat, blue shirt, white beard but I set myself to spend only $20 because I had originally planned to use the gift card to get a haircut. So I decided not to spend $6 of my $20 on all the different colors I would need and I went with just blue.  The example piece they had on display was painted in this pretty teal blue and it was so shiny like a finished ceramic piece.  I bought the ceramic paint and slapped two coats on this lil guy and in 24 more hours, in the oven he goes and hopefully he'll come out looking shiny and glossy like the display.

Project #2 was one that I had seen on Pinterest a while back and finally just got around to.

I bought two 12x12 canvases painted them charcoal grey, which took two coats to get that dark and I had only bought a tiny little bottle of paint not even thinking about having to paint two coats. It actually worked out well, and I still have some paint left over.

I found some state outlines online, printed them out and traced them on to scrapbook paper and cut them out carefully with an x-acto knife. I used a small heart paper punch, cut the hearts out and stuck them on where Monroe and Winston Salem are <3. Once the canvases dried I stuck them on there and that was that! Overall it was pretty simple just took a while for the paint to dry.

 (I don't know why the colors are so off, I took the pics at the same time.) 

The third project, Chester tried getting creative with lol! The paint is non-toxic so I wasn't too concerned with that, but more concerned with him leaving his paw prints all over the apartment lol.

I have to say he did give me an idea tho, if I had pink and blue non-toxic paint I could have taken his and Bella's prints and made something cute with them :)










So other than that, it was just a quiet Saturday afternoon spent crafting and watching House Hunters and Island Hunters. Actually, I can't say that I did absolutely nothing because around 9 o'clock I got a surge of energy and decided to clean out underneath the sink.

Here's the before and after:







What a mess!

Woah! Who knew I had all that extra space!

 
I was replacing the hand soap and I was going to take the price sticker off and I thought that I should share this little gem just in case you hadn't known about it.

Its a bit hard to see in the pic, but you have your typical Target clearance tag, on the top right I circled the tiny little number in yellow.

That little number is the percentage off that you are getting. This was 15% off, so it really wasn't that great of a deal, but it was a lot cheaper than the other name brand soaps.

So the next time you go to Target and you see a clearance tag take a look at the top right corner to see how good of a deal you're getting. Some clearance items can go up to 80% off!

While I was cleaning, I found my Cameo stainless steel cleaner in the back of the cabinet.  I only point this out because after reading online about how great of a cleaner baking soda is I decided to give it a try.

Baking soda is amazing! Not only does it scrub off burnt food and oil but it leaves it looking so shiny!  Also with the baking soda, you don't have to worry about what dangerous chemicals you're putting on your eating surfaces. 

I'll save the Cameo for the bottom of the stainless pots in case baking soda can't get it done.

I also found 6 packs of sponges!  The story behind this was that Walmart had mis-priced one of the SKU's and it was ringing up at $0.50, meanwhile the others were ringing at the regular $3.48.

Guess who stocked up! Thanks Walmart!

And lastly, today I got up at 9am, dragged the Mister out of bed about 45 minutes later because he kept saying "5 more minutes, just 5.." lol

We went food shopping at Walmart, picked up some rolls at Food Lion, chicken and cold cuts that were on sale at Lowes and I had planned on getting my produce there too since it is fresher and better quality.

But we decided to hit up our new produce spot instead, Trader Joe's!  Last weekend we went to check it out and it was a little more pricey than your normal supermarket but the quality is a lot better.

Whole foods is another good spot for produce, they also have a really big selection of cheeses, artisan breads a really nice meat department with grass fed beef, wild caught seafood, actually they have just about anything you can imagine that's organic. They even have fresh sushi, a hot buffet area, a cafe and really good desserts.

If I had to choose though, Whole Foods would be my choice, sorry Trader Joe's. 

The rest of today after food shopping was just spent cleaning, doing laundry and watching Breaking Bad with Mike.  Not too bad of a weekend if you ask me, and the days are getting longer too so that just makes me happier overall. Soon enough it'll be light out when I get out of work at 7!

That's it for tonite, sorry for the long post.

Enjoy!

<3  J