Friday in Portland

Spence was gone a few days this past week, so my Mom graciously offered to give me the day off. She came over and watched the kids while Becky L and I went to Portland for a little lunch, art media and an AMAZING chocolate store. Happy Friday to me!

Becky L has this hidden talent of mat cutting. She can frame her own photos and art work if she has the frame and this is the store where she gets all her mats. It is a really neat store.

Just one section of mats.

Becky and Sam browsing.

I got Max a new poster. We have been hanging the alphabet up to help him learn his letters a little better. I thought this was a cute poster.

We had lunch at Papa Haydns.
People stop Becky ever where she goes to comment on how cute Sam is.

The Chocolate store we visited.

This is what I got, dark chocolate syrup. It says "chocolate topping" on the label, I don't know why, you don't need to put it on anything, just grab a spoon.

I also got a few caramels.

The samples.

The bill. I think it is how much we spent on lunch.

Thanks for going Becky and showing me the chocolate place.

Have a good weekend.

Just Because

Just because I have all these pretty pictures and no where to put them. I like taking photos of detail. I especially like the photos of the peppers. This was last September when we had breakfast around the Pike Place market in Seattle.

Almost....., the story of my life.

When I was in high school I was almost a good student.
-I worked really hard to get B's, an A was a phenomenon.

I am almost thin.
- I have 10lbs to go before i can consider myself a thin person, I'm not saying I'm a fatty, I just not thin.

I almost eat healthy.
-I try to get my 5 daily fruits and veggies, never eat white refined carbs, and eat lots of beans and eggs for protein, but for the life of me I can't give up my dark chocolate mixed with some kind of baked ginger goodie.

I am almost good at my past callings.
-I did an adequate job at teaching with good attendance at my lessons, but after each lesson I had a nagging suspicion that offended someone or misspoke.


My house is almost clean.
-If you come into my entry way, it's not too bad, the dishes are usually done, and most days the beds get made just don't creep upstairs and look in anywhere else, and for the love, please don't look closely at the carpet!

I am almost spiritual.
-I love the scriptures, read them frequently, love Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith dearly, attend church regularly, but I can't shake the habit of casual swearing, I can't stop listening to rap music, I can't stop drinking diet soda and I stop dead in my tracks whenever a vampire or Zack Effron is on television, I can't help myself, I just get lost in their eyes.


My point is NOT to get you to post compliments!!! Please do not, I am not a
"fisher of compliments", it is this... At what point does the good compensate for the not so good, is there a grand scale? Does everyone feel slightly inadequate in most areas, most people don't care about it as much as I do?
The other day on the radio I heard the d.j's playing a clip from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue photo shoot. They recorded the models response to the photo shopped photos and they were genuinely surprised that they looked good, I'm serious, genuinely surprised. So I guess we are all insecure in a lot of ways, some of us just hide it better and some of us, like me, wear it on their blogs....Is this post, as Simon calls it, "a bit indulgent"? I am going downtown tomorrow, I'll post more interesting things tomorrow.

Even on my worst day......

I'm glad I'm not pregnant. When my house is a mess, and I mean trashed, when one or more of the kids are sick and I know I am never going to get the smell of vomit out of the car seat entirely, when I have a kid talking back to me, when my back hurts, when it is 1 am and I'm up with a kid and I know I have to get up in 5 hours, I think to myself.... at least I'm not pregnant.

In this photo I am pregnant with Max and I still have over a month to go. I was hot and miserable and in pain. He was worth every minute of the discomfort, but I will NEVER do it again. I am very grateful that that phase of my life is OVER.

Not another hair post, sorry, it's the only thing I got going on right now and I don't like it when people don't update their blogs!

FACT: I am a natural brunette.
FACT: I look better as a blond.
FACT: It is an arduous, painstaking, expensive task to maintain fake blond hair.
FACT: It is worth every penny.

Dirty Little Secret: I do my own roots and it only costs $7.99.

DETAILS: I can't afford to go to a salon every time those dark brown (or lets be honest, BLACK and sometimes grey) hairs start poking there way through my gobs of hair, so I go to the drug store and pick up a box of Loreal 9 1/2 A ash blond hair color. It takes about 20 minutes and puts off my salon trip an extra 2 months.

before


After, soooo much better!

A close up of before and after.

The worst possible Double Date

Is there any trace of contempt here?

There is a man in Seattle who can predict divorce with a 95% accuracy rate! Seriously, this man is a psychologist at the University of Washington and he can predict divorce using a coding system. He assigns a number to a facial expression that a couple might express during a conversation.

Disgust gets a 1, contempt gets a 2, anger gets a 7 defensiveness gets a 10, whining gets an 11, sadness gets a 12, stonewalling gets a 14 and neutral gets a 14. After observing this couple for 1 hour he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married in 15 years. If he watches the couple for 15 minutes. his success rate is still around 90%, then he discovered that he can still remain fairly accurate with only 3 minutes of watching a couple talk! 3 MINUTES! Like I said in the title of this post, I don't want to go out on a double date with this guy and his wife,...or do I?

This man, Dr. Gottman, says that he has gotten so good at this that he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether the couple should start hiring lawyers and dividing up assets. He says that if he narrows in on one single emotion than he can really tell if the marriage in in trouble, that emotion is CONTEMPT. He says that contempt can even predict things like how many colds a husband or wife will get, because having contempt thrown at you is so stressful that it begins to affect your immune system. In case you are wondering how he defines contempt, well he says it is closely related to disgust and it is about rejecting someone from your community and it is hierarchical.

So as I make plans for Valentines Day, and I have, I made reservations at a French restaurant downtown, I will make sure that our conversation is completely devoid of contempt and disgust.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!