Thanksgiving

Dan and I spent thanksgiving in Bozeman this year. We made a 18 lb turkey and lazed around the house all weekend. The robe Dan is wearing is one I made him the day after thanksgiving, I am very proud of it. We had a great time together, but we hope next year we can spend it with the rest of our family or friends. We miss you all and hope your weekend was as good as ours.

Pumpkins

Dan and I bumming it one night :)

All of our pumpkins on our front porch. You might be able to see that the ones in the front our molding, they were only a week old at the time.

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The two newer ones I carved on Halloween :)

Our first two pumpkins. Dan did a great job carving out the pumpkin for a different look.

If I don't watch out I might bite my tongue off. Thanks Grandma Donna for that trait :)

Dan carving intently :)

Here are the flowers Dan got me for no reason. He just thought I would like them. He is so thought full :)

Stone Creek Trail

Dan and I had a great short hike on Stone creek trail yesterday. It is up in the Bridger mountains, which I have been living here for 2 1/2 years and I have never driven up there before. It is beautiful.

Here is Dan with his really long hair. This is the longest I have ever seen it and he wants to grow it out more :)

The moon.

Dan striking a pose for me like always :)

It was a great hike and it gave us an idea where to get a Christmas tree also this year. We are going out to cut our own this year, it should be fun :)

Halloween

Well Dan and I had a great Halloween. We did not do anything special, we just handed out candy to kids. We thought we were going to get bombarded by kids, because of the little bike gang that is around our house 20+ strong :) But we did not get nearly as many as we thought we would and our candy showed it.

I think we had 4 gallon size zip lock bags stuffed with candy left over and we gave out hand fulls of it also. I put the leftovers in our athletic break room for everyone to eat, I did not want all of that at my house for me to eat. I am trying to loose some weight and that never helps :(

I will try and post some pictures of our pumpkins we carved this last week, they were good :)

Oh! I have to describe a group of our trick or treaters.

So I opened the door and I saw a group of bunnies. Abotu 5 girls 8-10 years old with bunny ears and leotards on, with bunny tails. Cute right? Well I kept looking and thought to my self, are they Playboy bunny's? No! Then they brought up a cute 1 year old boy in a velvet red robe and I thought to my self how cute are you. Then it hit me, bunnies and a guy in a robe. It was Hugh Hefner and his 5 playboy bunnies. I had to laugh, but I was also a bit shocked, who picked out the costume, the kids or the parents, scary!

Snow

Wednesday was our first snow of the year :) I have heard that it supposed to be bad, but I dont know how, snow, or cold? Well we will just have to see how it goes. I will try and be ready for it though. I have to pull out all of our winter close and put up our summer ones. Winter is here, wait, where was fall again?

Dan's Mom :)

Here is Dan and his Mom, Stacy. I love this picture :) She got to come up for the weekend and spoil us. I have forgotten how it feels to be spoiled, it is great. Thanks Stacy for a great weekend and great gifts, we cant wait to see you again :) Oh, and thanks for teaching me how to play Yahtzee, I love it! And great job on getting an all time high score of 500+, You rock!

Here is Dan and I in some of our new things Stacy got us. We both got orange hats for hunting (which we hope to do for the first time this year), and carhartt vests. We love them :)

Truman Gulch Pictures

These pictures are from our hike up Truman Gulch a few weeks ago. This first picture is from the spot on the mountain we stopped to eat lunch and head back down, so the highest point on our hike. At this point we were hiking for 2 hours and increased about 1600 feet in elevation. It was well worth the view :)

Here I am posing for day on our way up the gulch. I think we took over 100 pictures on this one hike, it was a beautiful place.

Here is Dan posing down for me, as you can see he loves the camera and it loves him :)

This is Dan by the creek that followed the gulch. This was about one minute into the hike, so we knew the views had to be even better as we kept going.

This was our view as we came out of the valley and into an open field. It was a million times better in person and well worth the sore and tired legs the next 2 days :) We ate our lunch just off to the right of this picture at the end of the tree line.

After this hike Dan and I decided that we really like hiking, but we should have worked our way into a 3.5 hour hike, instead of just jumping right in. I think the longest we had hiked before was about an hour and a half, so it was a big jump, but we had a blast :)

Fun Things

Over the last few weeks Dan and I have done some fun things. We decided to get our Christmas presents early this year. We each got a nice carhartt jacket and hat. Both jackets are dark brown, but different styles. It looks like we are trying to be matchy- matchy, but I swear we aren't, it just ended up that way. We love them!

Then a week later we decided that if we are going to start going on longer day hikes we need day packs. So we both got waist packs (they are like fanny packs that go on your back), very comfortable and easy to wear.

We tried them out the next day after we bought them on our first long hike, about 5-6 miles and 3.5 hours. I will have to post some pictures this weekend when I have time from this hike, it was a blast! Dan has some pics on his facebook. We had a great time and want to go on more, and even maybe try snow shoeing this winter.

The next fun thing we did was spend this last weekend with Dan's Mom. She came out for the weekend, bought us Christmas and birthday presents, lifted weights with us and taught me how to play Yahtzee. I never knew how fun that game was, I am hooked :) Dan and I are both glad we got to see her again, it had been too long since we had seen her last. It was a great weekend!

Well now back to work, I wanted to just give you an update on our life, things are going great :)

A Quick update

Well again it has been a long time since I have posted, and a lot of things have been going on.

First school has started here at Montana State and that means a lot of work for Doug (my boss) and I. Practice for everyone was in full swing last week, which means that our hours in the weight room are 11-14 hours a day. We also get in 8 hours on Saturdays for home football games and another 3 hours for football lifting on Sundays. Oh how I love football season.

Dan and I are doing great! We are going to try and hunt this fall for deer to get some cheep, lean meat. Our friend Eric is helping us out, two people who do not know much about hunting :)

We also bought Carhartt jackets this last week and made a trip up to Highlight (a mountain range and lake near town) to break them in. It was a blast, we made a fire for smores and watched the stars come out. It was a blast.

Well I have to get going now, I have a few athletes that just walked into the weight room. I will right more soon :)

My First piece of Furniture

This is the first piece for furniture I have ever made. It is made of plywood, some molding, and a piece of wanes coding we got for free. I still don't know what to call it, I know it has a name. It is a bench/coat rack with storage for hats, gloves and scarves below.

I made the design with some of Dan's ideas and pictures of similar things online. So I did not follow a pattern, I made it up. I am so proud of my self, I have built other things, decks and help with building a house, but I have never made something from scratch. Here are all the pictures of the progression of me making it. Oh Dan picked out the colors, well not picked them out, but gave me the idea of using the colors of a rug I bought for the entry way. It worked perfect, he is so smart :)

This took me about 2 weeks to make after work every day and one weekend. It cost under $100 to make with all the materials, that is buying a hammer, paint brushes, screws, plywood, paint, drop cloth, molding and hooks. I think most things like this cost about $300, so I think I did pretty well :)

These are my drawings of what I was going to do (I don't know if you can read it)

As you can tell I did not have much space to work, but luckily our hall way and entry room were big enough to work :)

this is the bare bones of the bench. It is made out of mostly 3/4 inch plywood and some 1/2 inch screwed together for the sides and bottom support.

This is after I put the seat on.

Now I am putting the wanes coating on to make it look fancy.

I know this is a great picture of me :) Dan snapped it at the right time.

Now I have gotten the molding and the shelf at the top on and wood brackets to hold it up.

Then I primed it all and part of the drawers (I ran out of primer).

Then the first color on and being messy about it :)

Then I put on the dark brown and taped off the molding with electric tape. I did not have painters tape and I didnt want to spent the $7 a roll for it. I already had the electric tape and it worked fine.

I also started to paint the drawers on the inside and bottom.

Then the final product with the front molding painted with out the drawers. Some of the hooks are a little crooked, but you can barely tell. There are going to be coats on it anyway :)

I decided to paint the front a totally different color so the green drawers stood out more.

And now when we come home from work we can kick off our shoes and hang our coats up on something I made. Thanks Mom and Dad for all the skills you gave me to make this. Now Dan is telling me we need a shop for me when we get our own house, I say YES to that :) I love building thing

Our New House

Here are a few pictures of our old apartment. It was a one bedroom with a small living area and one bathroom.

This is our old living room :(

This is our old kitchen, dining room, office area :(

This was our bathroom area :(

And our bedroom :(

Now we have a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house with a huge kitchen, living room, entry room, laundry room, walk in closet and a little yard (not fenced). We love it! We can actually relax when we get home rather than trip over each other on our way through the door :) And we can have people over because we have 2 queen size guest beds.

This is our kitchen.

This is the other side of the kitchen and you can see part of the dining room.

This is the laundry room, which has another door the outside behind the hamper.

This is the door off the living room.

This is the living room, with the free entertainment center we got off of craigslist again.

Here are the curtains I made for our front and side doors. They let light in, but do not let anyone see in:)

This is our extra room in the front, this is all that is in it besides my new piece of furniture I made, tools and leftover wood.

This is was an old cork board we got for free from craigslist with a queen size bed. It was pretty beat up, so I decided to cover it up with fabric and put some ribbon on it so we can put up pictures and cards we get.

Here is the view from the front door looking into the kitchen before we moved anything in.

This is looking at our front door before we moved anything in.

This is a head board we got for free also with the bed and I reupholstered it. Before it was a mustard yellow velvet form the 70's, it was ugly. I found some cheep fabric and changed it. I have never had a head board before, it looks like we have a real bed now, even though it is on the floor :) Dan and I tried to have it up on just a metal frame, but that lasted about 5 min. Just lying in bed if you moved your head or hand it squeaked loud. So we took the bed apart in the first few minutes after getting in bed. Some day we will get a real bed frame :)

This is our master bathroom! I think with this and our walk in closet together it is as big as our old bed room :)

Well that is our new house. Dan and I love it so much and are so comfortable now, it is a million times better than our apartment.