Month: May 2010

Woohooo Presents for Doti!

I met Doti in college. We had similar majors (both housed in the agriculture department) and we went to be in the same sorority together. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a sorority girl. The agriculture department had a Professional Agriculture Sorority and my parents made me join. It wasn’t even linked into the Greek organization. I really didn’t want to join but I did b/c mom and dad were paying the school bill and I didn’t want to upset them where I had to pay it :). Anyway back to Doti. It’s so funny because my hometown is only about 12,000 people so you run into people you know a lot or people that know you, etc. Well she wound up moving to my hometown. I finally came back here also after college. In almost 5 years we never ran into each other, EVER. It’s crazy until one day we staged a run-in at the Mexican restaurant. After that never saw each other until our second staged run-in. It was right after we both got engaged and we met at the Mexican restaurant to celebrate engagements. Then I finally ran into her at the Wal-mart (or Wal-marts as people call it around here but I’m pretty sure it’s just singular 😉 haha). Well her big day is June 12. She had a bridal shower over the weekend and I was invited (as you saw in this post) and of course I went!!

hey that’s my present!! 🙂

It even came in a polka dotted box :). It was a bunch of little things that she registered for.

There is the “Marriage Survival Kit“

I so wanted to steal those, they are purple after all 🙂

I was playing with the settings on my camera… I got it a little dark. I bet photoshop could have fixed that but I’m tired~!

a drying rack for when she washes dishes.

I don’t remember but the box was HEAVY!

This was the same thing from another guest as the previous. They were super heavy.

I think that was the wrapping paper they talked about that was pre-stuck. no tape needed.

I can’t remember what this was either. Boy I’m bad at this game!

I fell in love with this hamper! I want one, PC are you listening 😉

It’s Doti the blushing Bride to be 🙂

Here’s Doti with her mom on the left (White sweater) and her FMIL (Future Mother in law) on the right (b&w shirt)

And finally the story

Ok the story I promised to share with you. And I’ll tell you Prince Charming reads every one of my posts and he’ll feel bad again, but I don’t tell this story to make him feel bad… I think it’s cute and funny. That’s just the way I roll.

One of the new things at weddings is to do (and not so much new but not something even really in the 90’s) is to have a slide show of the couple growing up. Well I knew the first time I saw that at a wedding that’s just what I wanted to do if I ever got married some day. Well it wasn’t to long after we got engaged I started hunting photos down for our slide show and we started discussing how we wanted to do it and where to place it, etc. The hardest part of it is finding photos of Prince Charming. There are baby photos of him and then it skips a bunch of years and then all I was finding was photos of him and his daughter. Now don’t get me wrong, she is going to be in our family but the wedding is about us. She’ll get her day someday and I’ve included her in some of the photos also. Another problem I ran into was some of the younger photos of him, he had his wedding ring on and I’m not allowing that to be in a slide show for our wedding. That’s just weird. So I’ve been hounding all of his friends and family to hunt down photos of him for me.

So before I actually had all the photos of him, I had a bunch of mine I wanted to use so I got on his Mac and started to create our wedding slide show. Then I’d add his in when I got them and add affects, music, etc. Yeah not the brightest move on my part b/c I got to the point I wanted to move things around but I already had it him, me, him, me, etc that it was difficult. We figure I probably had about 10 hours put into this project.

Now jump forward a couple weeks and we went to Kentucky to see his friends. Well he wound up swapping Mac laptops with his friend Tim. He was doing a back-up on his so he wouldn’t lose any of the work and I was mouthing him about not losing my slide show. About 30 minutes later he goes…. Uh oh, you’re going to be mad at me. I mouthed off, why, did you lose my slide show? and he answers Yes. I looked at him and just grinned and laughed and he gave me a funny look. I said you know had it been the week of our wedding, I might have stressed a little bit, not gotten mad, just stressed a little bit, but actually I’m not upset at all that you lost it. They all looked at me like I’d lost my mind. So I explained: I was getting frustrated trying to move things around but I had so much time in it already I hated to scrap it. This gave me a reason to start fresh!

Tim helped me out with more photos of PC and I’m pleased to announce, I’m about 95% done with the show and it was 10 times easier and looks 10 times better. I have to add in 2 more photos, transitions and songs and I’m DONE!!!!

I also have all photos saved on my computer too so if this happens again, piece of cake!

But I thought I would share some of the baby photos of us for you after my huge long story 🙂

Baby PC with his mommy.

This is me. I was only a couple hours old here. This was the hospital photos they take.

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Here Comes the Bride

So my friend Doti is getting married next month. We’ve agreed this is our year! Saturday she had a bridal shower and I was invited and attended :). Prince Charming and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get her bridal shower present but also I did a side present too. One of my favorite things to do is a Marriage Survival Kit. (Ok so technically I’ve only done this one other time but it was such a great hit the first time, I had to do it again.) And so far it has come from the girl that isn’t married… but whatever 🙂 that’s going to be over this fall :). Really, the best place to get the stuff for this “Marriage Survival Kit” is the everything’s a dollar store. They have fun things and use your imagination and be creative.

Pail with Shovel – To fill in any holes you may dig yourselves in to.

Paperclip – To hold your life together

Toothpick – To remember to pick out the best in each other.

Me at His Age

Yesterday I shared photos of Prince Charming 7 years ago. While he was in the army and had a new baby, I went a different route. I was in college, running in queen contests, traveling, etc. I thought I would find a couple photos of me about 7 years ago (give or take) so we could compare :).

I was 18 here. My Freshman year of college. I was in a class that went to Costa Rica for 2 weeks down to their Agriculture schools. Here I’m eating Sugar Cane. I don’t think I was all that impressed….

Milking one of their cows. My professor was obsessed with “milking” me. He would hit me with milk from the cows and the goats we milked.

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DWTS – Week 8

Haha so this has just been a stressful and taxing week. I know it doesn’t do good to stress and worry because that won’t do anything but drive you to the looney bin, but if I go, I want to meet Buggs Bunny :). So when I was making up my little picture, I screwed up the week, yup, look down there, it says week 7 not week 8 and I’m being lazy and not really in the mood to change it so we’ll all know that I made the mistake and we’ll move on :). Don’t tell anyone!

I always get told not to tell on myself anyway… so we’ll just pretend that I never put that on there and we’ll pretend I’m not lazy and we’ll pretend that the 7 looks like an 8 and so on and so forth :).

I woke up this morning to heavy down pours and thunder/lightening. Then got to work just before 8 and heard that there was a tornado on the ground about 40 miles from here and it had taken out a Pizza Hut in another town. I got to work and people shared photos. Guess it hit around 7 this morning. And yeah that doesn’t really fit into this post at all but I just thought I would share.

So on to Dancing with the Stars Results from this week:

1. Erin really upped her game. I think she has potential she’s holding back but she’s starting to break free and show that potential.

2. Evan is pretty consistent. He and Anna had a futuristic Cha Cha Cha. It’s funny because they did a lot of the robot. Now my favorite Futuristic dance was the Paso Doble that Derek and his partner last season (Joanna Krupa) did. That was phenomenal imo.

3. Niecy seems to actually do better with ballroom than she does the latin dances. She upped her game this week and it showed. When it came down to it, she went home though.

4. Chad was in the bottom 2. My mom heard the Entertainment people saying their predictions would be he would go home this week, Nicole would win followed by Evan but never said who would have 3 and 4 spots. Their predictions were wrong. He’s still in it.

5. Nicole… OMG what can you say. She’s excellent! She pushes herself a little much which sometimes causes flaws but she’s basically flawless. Sometimes I think Len is a little to hard on her with his scores/criticisms and OMG their 1950’s style Paso Doble was outstanding. Derek is a good choreographer when it comes to that type of thing!

Click here for past week results!

Oldies but Goodies

I’ve been messing around with old photos lately (boy do I have a fun story about that, I’ll share when I share some of those photos) but I found a couple I thought I’d share with you right now.

It’s crazy how in just a few years we can all change. Babies grow up, we ourselves get taller/shorter/skinner/heavier, lose our hair, grow our hair, get facial hair, cut our hair, shave our head, whatever floats our boat. In digging for some photos for Tbugs scrapbook, Her mom helped us out with some photos plus she ran across some of these that I’m about to show.

Look how skinny Prince Charming was!! He’d just gotten through basic training with the army, came home and on his way back hit a semi in his Chevy S-10. He was able to “walk” away from it, or more like belly crawl. It messed up his leg but the doctors were able to fix him up, but that explains the wheel chair.

This was taken roughly 7 years ago when Tbug was just out of the hospital after being born.
(PC isn’t sure who the other girl in the photo is)
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Total Randomness

Yeah so I’m not sure there is any rhyme or reason to this post… So bare with me (or bear if you’d like).

1. Big Red Truck died.
Prince Charming’s truck had some major piece go out and it was getting harder and harder to start so I told him to get the piece to fix it. They said b/c his truck is a 2005 (or newer) it has to be programmed or it won’t run.

So Big Maroon Truck (dad’s truck) had to tow Big Red Truck to town…..

Bad photo, taken following them with my camera phone. 🙁

Update, Big Red Truck runs again!!!!!

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Weekend fun

Usually my life isn’t always so busy but it seems like since we announced we were engaged/getting married, started looking for/buying a house, etc it’s been so stinking busy! I’m ready for a slow down but I hear that doesn’t happen, instead it just goes faster and faster and faster and faster and well you get the point!

It started Thursday night, my dad bought a load of Alfalfa hay so we all brought a change of clothes with us to work, dad hauled the trailer in and after work we headed to the hayfield. I think the bale count was 110. Mom drove, Dad & Prince Charming threw bales up to me and I stacked. Then we tied them off and headed home. Since we came straight from work PC & I followed the loaded trailer in my Mustang and I’ll tell you, I’m glad we tied it down! There have been many loads we haven’t but this one leaned to the right bad! We made it home though!!! and got all the load put up into the loft. I had a nice blister on my finger b/c I was using PC’s gloves and they are to big but I couldn’t find mine. So Friday morning dad said we were going back Friday evening. This time we all ran home, changed clothes and headed out to the field together. Again another 110 bales. I wrapped my blister in a bandaid to give it extra cushion and then finally found my gloves, which I might add STINK! I need new gloves!

We all had our same positions as the night before but dad had mom put the truck in 4×4 high instead of low and she threw me all around the trailer going and stopping so PC had her kick it into 4×4 low and it was much better!

Saturday we all got up and headed with my dad to get feed and wanted to go to the flower shop but they weren’t open yet so we went back home, unloaded feed and went back to the flower shop. Got PC’s mom a rose bush for Mother’s Day, my grandma a flowering plant, a couple flowers for our new house and then headed to town. Got a bunch done, walked around Home Depot and Lowes for ideas, got a bridal shower present and a wedding present for 2 different people, mom picked up some make-up and the make-up lady got to meet PC finally (she did my make-up for our first date :)), went to the store… busy day. We got home around 6. Then fixed up the crockpot ingredients for Mother’s Day dinner and headed to bed.

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Wrangler Ad

Ok so I got addicted to reading the Pioneer Woman’s website. At first just the blogs, but then saw her photography site so after reading just blogs, I started to tackle all old photography blogs. I so would love to get better! I admit, photoshop has taken away some of the greatness that people strive for in shots b/c oh photoshop will fix that later, etc… but I’m still trying to learn it anyway. It cracks me up that she always has shots of her husband and other cowboys in their jeans &/or Chaps or chinks, but I’m a country girl, I dig it!

So anyway one day I was at my house playing around with my camera and decided I wanted to create my own cowboy butt shot (yup I just said butt, you can call it a hiney, a gluteus maximus, a tuckus whatever you want, it’s still his backside). Prince Charming and my dad were riding horses and since one of our mares is getting ready to foal, PC has been riding my show gelding so I’ve been footing it or else riding the fence (not literally, get your mind out of the gutter ;), just a figure of speech… others that are said is riding the pine). So I took it upon myself to make my butt shot!

It still needs a little work but this is really only my third attempt at photoshop. I cheated by using some of the PW Actions. My first goal was I did the burned edges. The I sharpened it and then turned it black and white. Changed the opacity so some color came through, then I hit it with Seventies twice. I think I did something else too but I can’t remember now, I’d have to go get the original. I’ve tweeked it a little since this shot and PC really likes it. My fave part, isn’t he going to love his rear is on the internet :). The best part is it really looks like a Wrangler ad out of a magazine….

So what do you think?? (and avoid looking at my dirty saddle please!!!)

The End! Lots of Love,
Nicole 🙂

Some Cute Little Funnies

Ok I cannot take credit for these, I just thought they were cute! But I am adding my comments to the end if i feel there should be one 🙂
1. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.— Haha I gotcha back!
2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.— fully agree with this statement! Then you have to admit it…..
3. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.— yeah I love my sleep but really I think I did when I was a kid too though…
4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.— I had a friend say they did, it was called Times New Roman (what he types in every day anyway)
5. How the heck are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?— um… very carefully?? yeah it is a little difficult.
6. Was learning cursive really necessary?–I don’t agree with this one… I write in cursive most of the time anyway….
7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I’m pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.— sometimes it’s helpful to know which direction out of your neighborhood it wants to take it you… now my fiance’s GPS system likes to drop me off in the middle of housing developments….
8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.— that might make the more sad though…
9. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.
10. Bad decisions make good stories.— sometimes… not always

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