Joyful Abode

He does such a good job of it!

If I’m vacuuming, I just move the vacuum around furniture in swirly ways. I’ll move chairs, but not much else. In open areas, I’ll do short little zigzaggy lines because I don’t want to walk backward and forward all the time.

If he’s vacuuming, he moves every piece of furniture (except for way heavier stuff) OUT OF THE ROOM. Dining table, chairs, and barstools go into our kitchen. The coffee table goes into the entryway. The guitar and my little trunk go on the couch. Then, he goes back and forth making perfectly parallel vacuuming lines, all the way across the room. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

The other day when we had friends over, one of my girlfriends said, “Oh, you vacuumed. You didn’t have to vacuum.” I told her the guy did it, and her response was, “Oh, and he does the lines!!!” The guy seemed pretty proud of himself when she praised his vacuuming skills (though now he’s pretending not to remember).

I took a video of him vacuuming (it’s so awesome), but I’m not sure how to upload it and embed it here. I don’t want to use youtube or something where people not reading my blog can see it (I dunno, that just seems odd to me). Any tips?

I love you, and I’m happy to be your copilot.

Thank you for being by my side these past 7 years, even when we were far apart.

I’m looking forward to what the next 7 years brings us.

We’ve been married 7 months (and 3 days)… this is only the beginning of our adventure!

“Look to this day for it is life; the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the realities and truths of existence,
the joy of growth, the splendour of action, the glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory.
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore
to this day.”

The other day, I read a post on an internet forum that asked the question, “The more _____ a man has, the less likely he is to stray.” Well, I asked the husband, and he immediately, with no hesitation, answered, “food.”

Other husbands on the forum answered “home cooked meals” and “good food” along with other answers I’m sure you can think of.

What’s your answer? Or ask your husband and let me know his answer.

Anyway, if your guy is like mine, this recipe is a really great way to use up the leftover egg yolks after you make Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins.

Delicious Nectarine Crepes

Delicious Vanilla Crepes Recipe

You Will Need:

• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 3 egg yolks
• 2 Tbsp. vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 2 tbsp sugar (I used brown sugar)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 5 Tbsp. melted butter

Mix together the milk, egg yolks, and vanilla. Stir in flour, sugar, salt, and melted butter until well blended and bubbly.

Meanwhile, start your filling.

Fruit Filling Recipe - Nectarines

You will need:

• 3 nectarines, sliced thinly, though I’m sure fresh peaches would do quite nicely too.
• a little bit of orange juice
• a generous sprinkling of brown sugar
• some cinnamon, if you like that sort of thing

Throw it in a saucepan and cook over medium heat, covered while you make the crepes, stirring occasionally.

Heat crepe pan over medium heat. Use nonstick spray if you need to, but my pans are so awesome I don’t need it.

Pour 1/4 cup of batter into the pan and tip in a circular motion until the batter is spread thin to the edges. When the edges pull away a little bit and it’s easy to shake the crepe in the pan, it’s ready to flip. A few seconds after I took this picture, I flipped this one.

Flipping in the air is best, because it’s just awesome.

Cook for a few seconds on the other side.

Keep going until you have a stack of them and you’ve run out of batter.

By now, your nectarines have cooked fully and are swimming in a delicious syrup. Put a bit in the center of each crepe, folding the crepe over, and top with some more of the fruit mixture. Delicious!

These crepes are fantastically easy and I’m sure you could fill them with almost anything. In fact, later in the week, we had some leftover chicken and rice with a creamy sauce, and it tasted fantastic wrapped up in a crepe for lunch.

I can’t wait to try them with fresh strawberries and whipped cream sometime. Mmm… The strong vanilla flavor can’t be beat.

Yesterday was the guy’s birthday. After dinner, he started bustling around in the kitchen.

Me: Don’t clean up! I’ll do it.
Him: No, I have to. I can’t get out of practice, because then tomorrow will be weird.

Hehe!!! I’m so lucky.
(I still did clean up most of it, though I stopped when my fingers got prune-y because I can’t stand to touch anything when my fingers are wrinkled like that… it feels too gross.)

Check out: How to get your man to wash dishes.

Someone commented on this picture a while ago (picture taken in SC) that I needed to write instructions for how to get men to wash dishes.

Well I can’t give instructions, but I can say that it is NICE… and research in other countries (Australia and Japan were the ones I read about) shows that for every hour men spend helping with housework type things (not just mowing the lawn, guys), the rate of divorce goes down significantly. Of course, this is a correlation, not necessarily causal.

So, I was going to tell Topher this, but I only got to, “For every hour men spend helping with housework,” before he interrupted me with an excited, “more sex?”
Which is funny because the research showed that the fertility rate (children per couple) went up with every hour men helped too. Again, that’s a correlation. Still interesting though.

I just asked him if it would be ok to tell that little story on here, and he said it was fine, but added that probably the real reason the correlating fertility rate was higher is that guys who are more likely to help out are the family-oriented ones. I got a smart one, didn’t I?

So basically, you have to get a guy who WANTS to help by washing dishes, vacuuming, or doing laundry. And then? I think you’re good to go.

The wedding was fantastic-ly beautiful. Everyone kept telling me at the reception that the food was delicious and all of the decorations and flowers were breathtaking. The food and decorations were conceived and executed by my talented stepmother. The wedding was unlike anything the lady who works at the park (and has seen hundreds of weddings there) had ever seen… surprising and gorgeous. I sadly only got a few bites of food, which I guess is how most not-sit-down-dinner-receptions go for the bride and groom.

My sister did an amazing job with the flowers. I had no idea what she was planning, but I trusted her completely and didn’t worry about it… they were more beautiful than anything I could have picked out of planned myself. My sister’s husband said it was one of her most gorgeous weddings, probably because she had free reign with it rather than putting up with a picky bride. There were cattails and pussy willow, lotus seed pods, pitcher plants, and all sorts of gorgeous stuff that I don’t know the names of.

I thought the DJ was pretty great, but he surprised me with bubbles during our first dance… I’m not a big fan of the bubbles. I whispered that to him later and he didn’t bubble us again. They’re fun in general, but from wedding pictures I’ve seen, they often seem to screw with the focus and stuff in photos…

The photographer was really nice and I like her personality, though I wish she had taken charge a bit more during posed shots, especially since we had talked about what my guy and I wanted beforehand… she kept looking to me for what to do next, and that made everyone else look at me and I feel like I made people mad. Posed pictures was where I felt the most anxiety during any part of the day… besides a snafu with my hair, but Catherine saved the day on that one. Also, I later found out that she didn’t take any photos of just my groom and the groomsmen… she just did me and bridesmaids, and then both of us with the whole wedding party… and me and my guy together of course. Oh well, I’m looking forward to seeing her pictures, because then maybe I can see the wedding the way guests saw it, instead of in a crazy blur.

The honeymoon was lots of fun. We stayed on Tybee Island near Savannah, GA, and mostly beach-bummed around and ate fabulous seafood. We went into Savannah for one day… showed up at Lady & Sons (Paula Deen’s restaurant) at 9am to get put on the lunch list. We got to come back at 11 to eat the best fried chicken I have ever tasted. Ever. And I’ve eaten a lot of good southern fried chicken! I got tickled there too, when my guy told me that he likes my cheesy garlic biscuits better than Paula’s. Woo! I win again! So far my biscuits have beat out the Woodlands Inn’s biscuits (reeeeeally upscale place in Charleston) and Paula Deen’s biscuits.

We walked around Savannah near the river and visited almost every shop. We should’ve started at the museums though, because by the time we got down to that area (around 4:30) everything was getting ready to close. We entertained ourselves until our 8pm ghost-story carriage tour. Pretty fun!

The beach was fantastic, and it was very cool that it was east-facing. That meant we got to watch the sun rise over the ocean from our little ocean-view balcony. I’m really looking forward to getting to go to the beach every weekend in Florida though! Pensacola beach is delicious.

Maybe pictures later? We didn’t take a lot of beach pictures… mostly just Savannah stuff, but there are a few from Tybee.

In any case, we’re back! We’re married!

My mother sent me her flickr album with her pictures in it, and here’s a great one of me and my man, his best man, and my maid of honor. The lady crouching in the background is our photographer.

More later, I’m sure.

Today, we’re packing up the U-Haul trailer, and tomorrow we’re driving down! Not sure when the next update will be, but I’m still here!

I was struggling to cut a piece of canteloupe from its rind.

“Man, my knives are really horrible.” - me

“I have nice knives. Why don’t you marry me, so you can use my knives?” - T

That’s as good a reason as any, right?