Diane’s World

Hello world. How are you today?

The song playing (O Valencia! by The Decemberists) is one that John gave me. It’s great and makes me smile. You should listen to it.

I’m doing quite well actually. My unsettled and unsure life is slowly making more and more sense.

Lots has happened since my last post. Oh so much.

There was christmas. Which… honestly i don’t think I have any pictures of. Hum.

However, since the last post had no pictures, I shall over compensate with this one. Hooray.

I did get to spend quite some time with my absolutely delightful cousins, Dave and Trina.

They got me possibly my favorite present this year, my new best friend Poppy:

Yup. I do love a good cow every now and then.

I was very lucky to be able to join the Andersens, my brother and a few other church friends to go skiing at Crystal one day! It was an incredible day of exploring the slopes! Nothing compares to the freedom of slipping down hills on two thin boards. It’s been way too long since I’ve last been on the slopes, and I must thank the Andersens so much for arranging such a great day…

Haa haa.

I spent Christmas and the following week in Puyallup with my family. It was the week before Rachel’s wedding, and I spent most of my time being Rache’ls chauffeur. I had the pleasure of showing many of our out-of-town guests around Seattle while Rachel was busy finishing up her wedding plans.

Then was Rachel’s wedding. Hooray for Rachel! I’m very happy that she has found the love of her life and had a beautiful wedding! I’ll let the photos stand as testimony to that!(the photographer was Natasha Reed, she did a wonderful job!)

Our family is expanding so rapidly!

Ok so enough of that.

Shortly after Rachel’s wedding I spent more time trying to search for jobs, and I finally found one!

YAY EMPLOYMENT! This has taken quite a burden off my shoulders to finally have a job.

I am working in an Oncology Clinic and will have a few different roles there, but will be doing mainly general office work. I will also be able to dabble a little bit in graphic design/website design, but for now I have to learn all the fun roles of being a receptionist. After a few weeks I will learn other roles in the office as well, but only one thing at a time. It’s coming along, but I always hate the start of a job when I have no clue what I am doing.

Which also means I moved, once again, back to Puyallup. Have I mentioned how sick I am of moving? BAH! BEH! BOO! Only one more move this year left, when I am able to afford an apartment on my own!

Anyways. Not much else going on.

Oh yeah, I am now dating a handsome, wonderful, generous, strong and affectionate young man who spoils me to death. I suppose I should mention him as well. His name’s John. I like him.

Anyways, I am out of things to say. I have so much to look forward to in the next few months.

Anyways, I’m exhausted and I’m watching my first rugby game tomorrow. Weekends have never seemed so sweet to me as they are now. If only there were more weekends.

Have a lovely week, world! I’ll try to be a better poster from now on, especially now that my life is a lot more stable!

Much Love, The Deeds

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I suppose it’s about time I update. It’s been a month.

No pictures with this post. Sorry. Just boring talking. But hey – have a song, it’s a good one.

So.

Diane’s ever-changing life has changed.

Again.

Very dramatically.

I moved to Portland.

I currently am living with my absolutely wonderful cousin, Dave, and his beautiful and incredible wife, Trina.
God must have extra special rewards for these two in heaven. They are absolutely incredible.

I’m currently in a major job search (which is going well), and hope to soon be up on my own feet.

My decision was kind of sudden, but the reasons were plenty:
This is where I want to go to grad school.
This is where I’ve been wanting to live for so many years now. This city is incredible.
It’s close to family, yet not too close.
Portland has so many opportunities for artists.
And also, if I’m going to start out from scratch anyways, it might as well be in Portland – a city with more of my personality and a much larger job market than I was finding in Puyallup.

I am sad that I am further away from my parents, my sister, my brother, my brother-in-law, my best friend, my nephews, a certain boy and many of my high school friends, but I must continue reciting to myself,
“Puyallup is only 2 hours away. That is nothing.”

I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life being a 7-14 hour plane flight away from home. A 2 hour drive is much nicer.

Thank you to everybody who has supported me.

I have been shown such an out-flowing of love and generosity.

It’s incredible, I don’t remember a time that I’ve felt this loved.

I will be home in Puyallup for Christmas and Rachel’s wedding.
I’m absolutely excited to see all of my family again.
I’m so excited to see Rachel get married to a good man.
I’m excited to watch my nephews have that child-like excitement for Christmas.

I believe this year is going to end with me very much at peace.

My heart feels good about this decision.

I’m feeling uncomfortably optimistic.

2010… I’m ready.

So much Love,
The Deeds

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Howdy world! How are you doing today?

I had an absolutely wonderful week this week, and I hope all of you can say the same. There has been so much going on that I have a feeling that this will be a freakishly long post!

First of all the most exciting news….. there is a reason that I chose another Muse song for the song of the week…

I AM FRIGGEN GOING TO SEE MUSE!!!!!!!! AHHHHH! AHHHH!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

*SQEAAKKKK!!!!*

Believe me, every time I think about going to this concert I break out into a small happy dance.

HOLY CRAP, I AM GOING TO SEE MUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

***Insert image of Diane hyperventilating here****

I found out that Muse was chosen to be the Headliner for this year’s Deck the Hall Ball in Seattle…

Wow I am going to attempt to be close enough to Matt Bellamy so that I can smell him… or touch him… or get a restraining order…

My absolutely wonderful and amazing brother-in-law, Andrew, presented me and my buddy Michaele with tickets. I could never be happier with a gift. Michaele and I were planning on robbing a bank (not really, don’t arrest me!) in order to get enough money to go. BUT I’M GOING! I CANNOT WAIT!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just understand… I’ve been fascinated with this band since 2003. It’s on my list of 25 things to do before I die to see them in concert. I am convinced that Matt Bellamy secretly wrote the song “Map of the Problematique” for me. I am literally shaking with anticipation.

Ok enough boring my general crowd of people who don’t really care about Muse and my obsession with Matt Bellamy.

On to other things:

My marathon training has been going swimmingly well! I LOVE running. Here is my Nike+ running schedule for this month so far!

Yes, an easy 9 miles on Wednesday… I’ve still got it!

I’ve chosen the marathon that I’m going to shoot for next year, granted it doesn’t sell out before I have the money to pay for registration…

The cool thing about this marathon is that every mile they have a live band playing! And on their main page they have a picture of Death Cab for Cutie… so if that possibly means that DCFC is one of the bands… then I’m sure my running average will jump up a few seconds faster per mile!

It’s June 26, 2010 and is a run between Tukwila and Seattle! It is a marathon that gets sold out quite quickly, so hopefully I have a job soon and the registration fee ready before it fills up!!!! But I’m pretty psyched out to be running again! Yay!

And by the way… I’m absolutely enamoured with these shoes:

Also, in hopes of staying injury-free running this time around, I decided to read and take on the practices of ChiRunning… and so far it’s been doing very well for me! There is a lot of good advice on running technique.

With every other sport you have training with technique, but runners tend to just… run. This tells you the best way to run without putting excess strain on your body… which for me is Hooray!

Also on Tuesday this week, Sarah had me go on a special mission. I stopped by Lacey to pick up Michaeley Farfalley…

isn’t she lovely?

and we went on a nice long drive.

We stopped at a house that had a cow. Moo.

And we picked up an absolutely adorable new member of the family!

World, meet Mr. John Chrysostom… more commonly known as Jack 2.0. He is a 2-month old pure-bred Golden Retriever. He’s kind of a fatty and likes to lay down funny:

But he is such a snuggler. The moment I saw him I picked him up and he immediately started cuddling with me. He loves taking naps with me… here is us this morning:

He’s soooo cute to sleep with. I love this dog.

Yup. There is the new happy family.

On Thursday I got to teach a high school class! A friend from church is the teacher to Tacoma Baptist School, and he invited me to talk to his class about Acrylic painting / contemporary art. It was pretty exciting… and I loved doing it. The students were a lot more curious and interactive than I thought they would be, and I really enjoyed teaching them.

And on Saturday, of course, was my 4th Annual Pumpkinfest!!!

On the menu this year was:

Pumpkin Beer

Pumpkin Gingerbread Trifle

Pumpkin Mousse Cheesecake

Pumpkin baked Ziti with Italian Sausage

Pumpkin Hummus with Baked Pita Chips

Pumpkin Cookies

Pumpkin Bread

Pumpkin Cupcakes

An Orange-Chocolate cake for Pumpkin Haters (aka Sarah)

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Pumpkin Spice Coffee

we also had a real pumpkin in there. We had fun “carving” it. Here is Sarah making anal-retentive holes into a pumpkin. Andrew was a little skeptical:

Here is me making holes for the fun of it in Sarah’s pumpkin:

If you look closely at my shorts, by the way, Sarah embroidered the awesomest thing ever on to them:

Yes, this is love. She got the pattern from urbanthreads.com which has a lot of designs that I’m crazy about.

Back to Pumpkinfest… Michaele was very gracious to come help me out with the baking. She made some absolutely lovely pumpkin cupcakes, and spent many hours working as a functioning jungle gym for my nephews.

Thanks Michaele!!!

Sammy also tried to be a big help, but ended up looking more like a lobster instead.

Then the guests that came were Michaele and several people from my high school class! We had a blast that evening.

We played one of the best games in the world… I think it’s called Pictonary Telephone. How it works is everybody has a stack of papers. The first person writes a sentence, and then passes the stack. The next person draws a picture on the next piece of paper that describes the sentence. The next person only gets to see the drawing and writes down a sentence they think the drawing is trying to show…. the next person does another drawing, then another sentence.

Here is one of my favorite examples from the game last night:

Michaele started this brilliant round with the sentence:

My friend David then drew this lovely picture:

Charissa interpreted this picture to mean:

Autumn then drew this lovely photo, which is freakishly similar to David’s:

Which Sarah translated to say:

Andrew then drew this lovely picture:

Which  I translated to say:

So I hope that makes sense to the world. It’s the best game to play when you have a large group of people. My favorite drawing of the night was this one:

so yeah, life has been good to me! Except I’m starting to feel threatened in this house. Every time I look at the “to-do” list on the refrigerator, I see a new idea like these three:

Hmm… should I be worried?

Also, Sarah and I made a collaborative bundle to sell. Her cloth diaper embroidery skills and my new yarn dyeing skills:

Cute, no? Currently I am entertaining the idea of starting my own online yarn-dyeing business. We’d call it “Deedle Dye”. I just have to make an inventory of dyed yarns before I could really figure it all out! So that is an exciting possibility!

OH and ONE MORE AMAZING THING!!! ELFYOURSELF IS BACK!!!! WOO HOOO!!!
Here is my lovely family :

Anyways, I think I’ve talked long enough! I hope you all have a lovely week!

Love DeedleDee

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Hi everybody! Look how well I’m posting these days. What a good girl am I.

I have to admit that the hardest part of writing this blog is picking out the song of the week. I just sat here for the past half hour dinking around my music collection.

The sad thing is that I know that half of you either A) can’t even hear my music in some countries (like Germany) and B) even more of you shut your sound off the moment you reach my website.

Oh well. Turn your music off. See if I care.

Well anyways, what you are (or aren’t hearing) right now is a song from Muse’s new CD, “The Resistance”.

Many of you have heard me gush about Muse as my favorite band, and over and over again have I praised the genius and absolute-incredibleness of my dearest love of loves, Matthew James Bellamy, lead vocalist, guitarist, pianist and songwriter  for this marvelous band:

However… this CD is… different. If I didn’t love and respect Matt Bellamy’s musical genius as much as I do, I might just give up on him. Unfortunately this CD sounds a little bit of a weird mix of Queen / U2 / System of a Down / and Indian/Arab music. I never thought I’d have all those words in the same sentence! Generally: If you don’t know MUSE very well, please don’t start with this CD. Start with Absolution or Origins of Symmetry… those two were flawless.

The most redeemable point of this CD is the last three tracks, which you are currently listening (or not listening) to. Muse wrote a Symphony! Hooray! It’s called “Exogenesis” and I believe they did brilliantly, though I am waiting for my classical geeky family to tear this statement down. *and now I’m holding my breath for negative comments*.

And to make matters MUCH MUCH WORSE (believe me, I’ve cried over this already), MUSE SOLD THEMSELVES OUT… to none other but the horrifying vampire-crazed teeny boppy series of Twilight! *gaaaaaasp!*

Which I know even more about because I actually watched it this week. I almost choked on the sappiness. My sister Sarah, however decided to marathon it through reading all four books this week… and yes, she managed to read the entire series in 9 days.

So I’m threatening to buy Sarah a Edward cut-out for Christmas, though I wouldn’t want Andrew to get jealous.

Anyways… I have exciting news!  After one painful month-long hiatus from running, I am back on the road again!!! Hooray that Washington weather is temperate for me to run outside most of the year, and that the Washington terrain is a lot more interesting than in Iowa. Unfortunately, more hills makes my mile average slag a little bit… I’ll be a much stronger runner overall because of the terrain.

Here is my stats for my Friday run!

So yes, it’s a bit slower than usual, but what’s to be expected?

And my new Nike LunarGlides?  I’m in love! My feet have never felt so cushioned and so light at the same time! So hooray for that!

Wow, I really missed my endorphines.

Anyways, I’ve been primarily living at the Flanagan home lately. I absolutely love the atmosphere here… it’s just rediculous.

I mean, this morning I woke up to Sarah saying, “DeeDee, get out here. You HAVE to see this.”

Dragging myself out of bed, I walk into the bathroom to see this lovely scene:

That wasn’t even all of it… there was a lot of foam lining the hallways. I guess they just wanted to help me clean the bathroom, right?

Like when they did this to the back window two weeks ago:

They were just trying to be artistic.

I love being with the nephews. Today me and three of the boys had an impromptu dance party to “ABBA” when their parents left me to babysit them. The boys love ABBA. Good job raising them, Sarah and Andrew!

And yes, the boys do like to run around mostly naked most of the time. I don’t care how many times you try to put clothes on them, they just keep coming off. So it’s not that we don’t clothe them, I promise!

Sarah and I decided to try a new hobby today… we were dyeing OBV fabric with shaving cream. Although the results quite literally went down the drain (there is a lot of tweaking to be done before we get this dyeing thing right!) we had a lot of fun in the process!

Maybe too much fun:

(Yes! I remembered to wear gloves this time! I can’t go to church tomorrow with green hands now, could I?)

So… yup. I don’t feel much like explaining what we are doing, because we failed miserably and the less you know the better. Just look at the purty colors!

So yes, my day started…. and ended, in foam. That’s the life of living with the Flanagan Clan.

Ok. So that’s all there is. I’m still jobless. It’s kind of nice. Sarah and I took our blood pressure in the mall the other day and mine read 76/50. Though I know it’s most definitely that the machine was broken (we had the kids with us for goodness sakes! Just seeing the four little monsters together adds about 70 points to my diastolic number), I feel like I’ve been a lot more at ease and healthier than when I was working myself to death in Iowa. I hope never to do that again… Diane will not do crazy hours anymore.  Diane will find a less-stressful job. It’s a promise.

ANYWAYS::: Next week is my fourth annual PUMPKINFEST!!! (hooray!) So look out for a post in a week. If you live in Washington and are my friend and haven’t been invited yet, then let me know and I’ll invite you.

I hope all of you are having fabulous weeks.

Much Love, Deedles Marie

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