The Countdown is On....

That's right folks.  4 days until College Football.  4 more days until College Gameday.  4 more days until it's acceptable to sing Boomer Sooner throughout the house.  Oh, and for Ryan's sake I guess I better mention 4 more days until Aggie Football.  And believe me, there's no way I'm forgetting this with the daily reminder right next to our door :)

Birthday Boy

My little boy Benny turned three today!  Where has the time gone??  He is really growing up.  Well, some days he is.  Except for here, here and here.  Anyways, since we don't have any children yet I think is perfectly acceptable to treat my dog like a child and spoil him rotten on his birthday.  Ryan may feel differently but I made sure to sing Happy Birthday bright and early this morning in bed resulting in an ugly stare from a sleepy husband.  Ryan did cave a little later in the day though and we made a stop at PetsMart to pick up a new toy and collar to celebrate this milestone. 

It has been three hours since Bennett received his toy today and so far it has remained in one piece.  Maybe this toy will actually sustain the "extreme chewing" it promised!

And like any good Mom I had to get a picture with the birthday boy :)

Happy Birthday Benny!  Here's to another year and hoping that you really do grow up enough that we can trust you outside of your crate all day!  Nah... who am I kidding??

Photoshop Failure

As I have mentioned before I started messing around in Photoshop about a year ago.  I can't say I have come very far in that time, but hey, I'm trying :)

A couple of months ago my mom approached me about a beautiful moving announcement she had seen on Minted and asked if I could replicate that but use doors instead of shutters.  Sure, no problem.  This should be easy, right??  Boy was I wrong.  It was much more complicated than I thought.  I spent hours and hours trying to turn actual pictures into sketches to put on the invitation.  And the only good thing I can say that came out of this was that I learned a few tricks along the way.

Anyways, my future sister-in-law came to the rescue!  I'm not quite why my mother didn't ask her to begin with since she actually is going to school to study this but maybe she was just trying to boost my ego and give me a little confidence :)

Courtney kindly asked to see what I had come up with so far and a few short hours later she whipped a fabulous announcement together!  She took three different pictures of the doors and actually drew them in Photoshop.  I can barely make a straight line so I'm not quite sure how she did that.  Maybe that is why she gave me five books on the basics of Photoshop the next time I saw her....

Without further ado....here is the finished product...



Isn't it fabulous?!?  I would show you the whole thing but I don't want to give too much personal info out.  The envelopes and return address labels matched the announcement which really pulled it all together.

I'm trying to convince her she needs to start her own business and I even offered that she can use me to help build her portfolio up.  The holidays are right around the corner and I may need a super cute Christmas card to send out .... :)

Back to School, Part II

Exactly one year ago I wrote a post documenting Ryan going back to school part-time to get his MBA.  I mostly talked about how bored I was going to be in the evenings without Ryan here.  In that post I mentioned that the first evening he was at school I had taken Bennett for a run, made dinner, took a shower, played fetch with Bennett and watched two episodes of Property Virgins on HGTV.  Looing back, not much has changed since then for me.  Let's see,  tonight I took Bennett on a walk, I poured myself a glass of wine and made a salad out of a bag for dinner.  Then I attempted to watch TV while Benny the Brat barked at me because I wasn't paying enough attention to him....

I had high hopes that while Ryan was at school and studying in the evenings I was going to become a novice photographer and that I would master all photohop skills.  Oh, and let's just throw in there that I was going to run multiple marathans because I had so much free time to run the past 12 months. 

Haha, lets get real here...  While I didn't quite accomplish the things above (I might have set the bar a little high...) I will say that I enjoyed taking pictures with my Nikon and learning the different settings this past year.  I will say that I learned a few tricks in Photoshop and managed to create my own blog header and edit my pictures.  Oh, and I will say that I ran my first half-marathon and signed up for another one which I'm pretty excited about.

So while I'm extremely proud of Ryan for earning his MBA and starting his second (and final!) year of the program I also want to note that I have accomplished a lot for myself in the course of the year.  Now I just just need to come up with some new goals for myself.  Maybe I'll crack open a few cook books and actually learn to make a few things around here.  Nah...let's be real here.  Frozen pizzas and cereal will always be in our future.  Sorry Ryan... :)