Diane’s World

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

2 comments

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

4 comments

Howdy world.

So it’s been forever since I”ve  used one of my top three bands as the song of the day. So, have some Postal Service Good Washington band for my first post from living in Washington again!

So I’m really really really sore right now… I worked out yesterday and got my butt kicked. I feel like such a weakling! So currently I am being lazy on sarah’s tempur-pedic mattress.

Wow, I want to steal this mattress.

No really, it’s amazing. Anyone who has a whole lot of extra money to spare should buy me a tempur-pedic mattress.

Anyways, lots has been going on. I’ve been getting used to living here in Washington. I have been mostly staying at my sister’s house to help out with crowd control and help out around the house.

A few days after arriving, we had Ethan and Patrick’s joint birthday party. As fun as having 9 kids wreaking havoc in a small house can be, the adults were soooo exhausted after this small ordeal.

The theme was star wars.

Yup that was a darth vader piñata. Amazing, I know.

Here’s all four kids in their star-wars related outfit:

And if it isn’t obvious, this is Darth Vader, R2D2, Yoda and an Ewok. I love them.

Anyways, since Sarah now has season passes to the Point Defiance Park Zoo, one day we decided to escape the house and play in the zoo with the little ones.

Here is Spider-Sam.

And Spider-Pat

Little Liam got to just chill the entire time. Isn’t he cute?

Patrick attacked the artwork. It’s kind of tradition to do so.

Sammy the snail.

Sammy the anemone.

Ahh! The Flanagan clan is being eaten by a shark!

Me, Ethan and Patrick riding the merry-g0-round

I wanted to have some fun too! So I did.

Well I’m loving it in Washington. There are some things in life going on that is making life extra happy. I especially love being closer to my nephews

They make life so wonderful for me… most of the time.

Also I’ve been working very hard on my graduate school applications. It’s a pain that they make you pay in order to most likely be rejected. Bah! But I feel like I have a very strong portfolio this year, and I’m very excited and proud to show it to the five schools I am applying to!

Yup, I’m really hoping that this will be my year to get noticed. Despite what happens, I am feeling more confident than usual. Hooray!

I was also the recipient of some absolutely beautiful flowers this week. Just thought I’d share.  They are so pretty!!! And make me smile every time I see them

I have some other pictures on my phone that I wanted to share, but the computer I”m using doesn’t seem to want to cooperate! Sooo… that’s all folks!

Life is going great! All I really need now is to finish grad application and get a job finalized! Besides that, life should be running rather smoothly!

Well I hope you all are having a fantabulous week!

2 comments