How many cups of sugar does it take to get to the moon?

Last weekend I took a road trip up to Nauvoo. It was great. I'm loading my pics here, because, yeah, Facebook sucks.

Carthage Jail:



Nauvoo:

My little hotel room:






Angie, Julianne, and me

The temple

Operation tourist trap is a go.

I was thinking this week that I should have taken a minute to write about my Labor Day. I decided to act all tourist-y.

I saw the KC History museum, which is housed in Kansas City's 1st million dollar
home (actual cost in 1912: $738,000).






It was a pretty fascinating story because this guy (R.A. Long) was a lumber baron and was compared to Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Seeing this house made
me wonder how much the Biltmore cost to built and furnish, because
this was huge with 70 rooms, but is totally dwarfed by the Biltmore.


(See what I mean? The picture is way too big, even for the screen. Check out wikipedia.)

I also went to Independence's fair/carnival/festival. They call it
Santi-cali-gon to celebrate the frontier trails that met here. They
had a ton of craft tents set up, and it was a lot of fun to walk
through those. Sometimes though I just think, well, I could make that.

do you really think I would hide presents under the couch?

I've been horribly slack and negligent. My furniture arrived last week. I have a couch!

So here are some pictures of my couch, and my two chairs - that seriously are the most comfortable things I have ever sat in. I also bought heavy duty picture hangers and got my pretty pictures on the walls.

Next projects - make a pillow cover, and maybe two lampshades.

Oh, and this little side table in the above picture isn't permanent, because it's a little too tall and kind of goofy, but it's functional for now.





My dining room, with a lovely new picture hung on the wall.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Too good to pass up.

A student describing his dream house: "I'd also have a special room just for mirrors, so that I can just go admire myself whenever i want to."

That's the secret, grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow. You spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum.

It's that time again. Funny student writing.

So they turned in a rough draft and a student wrote about American Idol. One sentence was "Taylor Hicks is not heard of, like the infamous Chris Daughtry."

I circled the word "infamous" and made the comment word choice and that it does not mean what she thought it meant.

She "revised" and turned in a new paper. She changed that sentence to say, "Taylor Hicks is not heard of, like the infamous (highly famous) Chris Daughtry."

After shaking my head and sighing, I looked up infamous, just to make sure this rampant misconception hasn't made it into the dictionary yet. It hasn't.

I took her to the hospital and the doctors tried to save her life. They did the best that they could - and she is going to be ok.

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote about falling. Actual literal falling, and how scary it was to fall while I was running.

I don't think I've ever fully articulated this, but I really had a list of the top 3 scary moments.

Moment #1: The dog in Boone.
It was summertime in Boone, and I was outside running. Boone is the little hippy mountain town that I lived in for grad school. There were two highways that intersected in the middle of town, so I would run down (the sidewalk) of one, to the intersection, then turn left up the other, then run back to my apartment on a side street.

I was maybe half a mile down the first highway, and a dog started barking at me, from the other side of the highway. I looked up, and it charged me. From the other side of a 5 lane road! Fortunately for me, I was saved by the cars. It got out in the middle of the street, and cars just laid on their horns. So it turned and went back to it's side. Still going crazy barking at me the whole time. Yeah, that's right, not bothered by the cars, just bothered by me.

And of course we all know, "I don't do dogs. I had a bad experience!"
Go to minute 6 on this video.


Moment #2: Falling down on Truman Road
Shortly after my move to the great Midwest, I was running and was almost back to my apartment when the sidewalk grabbed me, and pulled me down.

This ranks as 2nd most scary because I fell face forward.

Moment #3: Falling down at Lake Jiacomo
I fell backwards, but it was a little scary because there was nobody immediately around me that I could have appealed to if I had truly hurt myself.

All these moments were totally obliterated by what happened yesterday.

I was hit by a car.



I was running down the main street in my super safe, super pedestrian friendly neighborhood, when I approached a side street. I saw the car pulling toward the stop sign on said side street, so I stopped. The car stopped, so I proceeded to cross the intersection.

When I was directly in front of the car, she pulled forward and bumped my leg, but I turned and slammed my hands on the hood of her car. She stopped, and I yelled at her, and moved to the driver's side, so I could yell at her some more, and she sped off.

How do these things happen to me?

Oh, just to clarify, I'm totally fine. I hit the hood of her car before she could really plow into me, so I don't even have a bruise. I did call the police. He told me to be more careful. And... I adjusted my car insurance. But now I am thinking I need to rig up a "safety pouch" to carry while I am running with... I don't know... but phone numbers of people who could actually come pick me up.

Or, I'm just going to quit running outside entirely. These kinds of things don't happen at the gym.

I've decided to make you my new project.

More projects to show off. Tell me what you think.

Project #1. I decided to hang the Italy pictures at the bottom of the stairs.



Project #2: The chair. I spray painted it dark brown. "Espresso" is the official title, I think. And for whatever reason, the camera can't do any justice to the actual prettiness of the fabric that I chose. So just trust me on that.



Project 3. These are the shelves I have been thinking about getting for several months, and they went on sale at target this week.



The funny part of this is that I moved the books from my current bookshelves over, and thought, "Perfect, I have a lot of space left." And then I started filling in the books that I had hidden around the house... Not so much space left.