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

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