3 years!!

So today is our 3rd wedding anniversary, and I decided it would be a good time to take a quick little trip down memory lane with some pictures. Sam has been gone at Camp Lu Jo all week, so I've been reliving our wedding day on my own today with the pictures I've collected from friends who had cameras on our wedding day! (I'm still waiting to get our "official" wedding pictures back from our photographer...I accidentally waited almost 3 years to order them!)

This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole "decorating" process. My brothers, Cody & Corey, making BRIGHT pink bows out of fluffy tulle onto the back of the chairs in Fellowship Central. As you can see, Corey is learning a lot from Cody's tying method.

Here is a (somewhat blurry) picture of the room after we were completely done decorating. I was so happy with the way everything looked--it was definitely worth all the hard work!

This is a picture of the candy table from the reception. We had lots of parents come up to us right before we left thanking us for allowing their children the opportunity to fill up COMPLETELY on sugar at the dessert reception!

Here's a picture of our lovely cakes. I still think the Italian Cream flavor of my cake was the BEST wedding cake I've ever had. I know I'm a little bit biased, but it was G-O-O-D. Take note of the dark chocolate fondant squares all over Sam's baseball cake for a story in few pictures...

Here is a picture of me, my beautiful mom, and her gorgeous dress that took her up until the week before the wedding to find. (Talk about adding stress to the bride!! :))

Me and my bestest friends in the whole world, Amber & Marie. Love you girls!!

Okay, so apparently this is one of the only pictures I have of me and Sam together from our wedding day that was not taken by the professional photographer. If anyone else has pictures from a regular camera from our wedding, please send them to me. I'll love you forever! And I'm not quite sure what Sam is whispering to me in this picture, but I think it was something along the lines of, "I'm sorry that I chose to feed you a piece of FONDANT instead of actual cake for the 'cutting the cake' picture!" I tried really hard not to make a gagging face in those pictures! :)

I think next time I'm going to post the comments UNDER the picture for less confusion, but hopefully you can see which picture goes with which comment. I can't figure out how to cut & paste to rearrange this post without deleting everything, and if that happened, I'd probably be done blogging for the rest of my days. I'm going out to visit my sweet hubby at camp tonight--it's been an AMAZING 3 years and I can't wait for MANY MANY MANY more to come!!

Double Vision

So about a week ago I had something happen that I thought was pretty hilarious and thought, "Man, this would be a funny story to share with people!" And then I promptly forgot about it. And then this past weekend I worked outside all day Saturday & Sunday planting flowers, repainting the shutters, etc. and I thought, "Wow, I wish that I would have thought to take some before & after pictures to put somewhere." And then I remembered, "Oh yeah! I HAVE A BLOG." So I signed in to my blog, which has been long forgotten for the past 2 months, only to find the DISGUSTING picture of my sweet little beagle destroying a squirrel. (Thank you Sam for that post!) So I decided it's definitely time for the squirrel post to move on down the page...

Obviously since I don't have any before & after pictures of the house to post (I'll work on documenting my life more consistently with the digital camera, I know pictures are way more exciting than words), I'll resort to Idea #1: Funny Story. So last Sunday I was getting ready for church and I had just put my contacts in. Normally it takes a few blinks for them to feel right, but that morning I had blinked about 239 times and the right one STILL didn't feel right. I took it out, washed it off, and put it back in again and it felt okay at the time. We got to church and were in the auditorium for a grand total of 5 minutes before it started bugging me so badly I just had to take it out and hold it. (Consequently it dried up, which really made me mad since it was a BRAND NEW contact!)

Skip forward to after lunch that day. I went to take my usual Sunday afternoon nap (for those of you who dont' know this about me, my Sunday afternoon nap is something I take VERY seriously) and go in and pop out the left contact before I lay down (remember, the right one had already been removed during church). When I get up (2 + hours later...haha) I go into the bathroom and put the old contact back in the left eye, and get another brand new one contact to put in the right eye. Wow, this story is getting long. Hang in there, I'm getting to the good part...

I get out to the car to go to the store and the stupid right eye starts acting up AGAIN. I march back into the house, telling Sam that my dumb contact STILL doesn't feel right, and I go in and take it back out. I'm looking in the mirror at my eye and I notice a line on my eyeball. At first I thought it was an eyelash, so I start pushing around a little more but can't seem to get anything. I call Sam in for assistance (I mean, he's going to be a dentist, but I figure he can help with a small optometry problem as well, right?!) and he squints into my eye for a few seconds before exclaiming, "You already have a contact in there!!" I double check to make sure and he's RIGHT--I DO have a contact in there already.

Don't ask me how this happened, because a week later I still can't tell you where this extra mystery contact came from. What I DO know is that for the entire day, the reason my right eye was giving me so much grief was because there were TWO contacts in there at the same time. Apparently the contact I took out during church was just 1 of the 2--the other one stayed in there until I layered it up again with ANOTHER contact after my nap. I THOUGHT it was a bit strange that I wasn't really having any major visual problems with only one contact in (or so I thought) but it turns out I had a contact in both eyes the whole time and didn't even know it!

Okay, so maybe this story was funnier to me than anyone else. If you read this post and feel like you just wasted a few minutes of your life, I'm sorry to tell you that you did. I must remind you though, people wanted me to start a blog despite the lack of blog-worthy events in my normal everyday life, so this is the type of story that you get. The moral of this story is this: If you wear contacts, make sure you only put ONE in EACH eye at a time. I hope your day is going well and your vision is clear as a bell today. I'd like to say I will post again soon but that isn't a promise I'm comfortable making. Just in case that doesn't happen, I'll see you in a few months...

My Dog, The Beast

So if you didn't know already, we have a dog. She is a little 30 pound Beagle named Zoey, and she is the cutest, smartest dog in the world.

She's also a monster. A bona-fide angel of the darkside when she chooses to be. So the fact that she is super cute and really smart/good at tricks is a great benefit for her, because they are most likely the only things keeping her alive. Zoey has a tendency to eat things. ALL sorts of things. A shortlist of her dietary choices includes: dog food, squirrels (at least 3 to date), her plastic water dish, her old toys (which she chews up and swallows whole once they are stuffing-less), dirt, concrete, rubber, tree limbs, tree roots, grass, shoes, tennis balls, a sheet, towels, blankets, a hat, pajama pants, her nails, and lately, a sheet of sandpaper. And remember that she doesn't just chew these things, she ingests them. We've only had 2 instances of indigestion, both involving plant roots and both involving me having to 'help' the roots out so the stupid dog wouldn't hurt herself. Below is evidence of her eating an entire squirrel from head to bushy tail. No evidence remained.

Well, yesterday, we came home and found that our 2-week old internet was no longer working. I checked all the connections and the router and the computer, and no dice. So I went outside and started poking around at things and I noticed that our ground wire was looking a little scruffy. I took a closer look and I am proud to announce that Zoey can add cable wiring to her consumption list. The repair men are coming tomorrow, and it's likely to cost more to fix this little issue than it cost to buy and install all of the necessary equipment and to purchase internet service for a full year. It may be true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but there is absolutely no limit on the number of new objects they will find to chew and/or completely devour. You know, forget that she's cute, I may kill her just to spare my undamaged belongings the horror of a ripped-to-shreds demise.

-Sam

Let It Begin...

The time has come, my friends. Sam and I have officially decided to start a blog. This is something I've been threatening/promising to people for the past several months, and I think now is finally the right time. Some of you may be fascinated to know that a few months ago I actually created a blog, set up the whole page, changed all the settings, fonts, layouts, etc. and then immediately deleted it without ever posting anything. The reason for this is more complicated than you may think:

1. I couldn't come up with a blog name that I felt worked. Creating a blog name is much more intimidating than I ever anticipated. I would compare it somewhat to naming a child, though given the fact that we have no children yet, I'm guessing there are quite a few parents out there who would disagree with me on that point. I'll get back with you on that in a few years when we are actually responsible for naming a human. Until then, thank you for joining in the birth of our blog baby...

2. The daily happenings of the lives of Sam & Crislyn are not QUITE as intriguing as many unsuspecting people are led to believe. It is true that we find OURSELVES to be quite entertaining people, but aside from work, dental school, and a little beagle named Zoey, there may not be anything in this blog that is of any interest to you. If that is the case, no hard feelings. Just leave some constructive criticism notifying us of how bored this blog makes you and move on.

3. We just got the internet at our house last week. You read that right--we ordered internet service at our house for the very first time on March 6, 2009. Yes--TWO THOUSAND AND NINE. I realize this gives the illusion that we are extremely antiquated, but I can assure you that we've been incredibly resourceful over the past 3 years. Did we ever go up to OC just to sit in the parking lot and use the Wi-Fi? Definitely. Do the people at Panera Bread, the Edmond Public Library, and Qdoba know us by name as the "cheap couple who won't just bite the bullet and get internet at their house"? Absolutely. Have we occasionally stolen a stray wireless signal from an unsuspecting neighbor from time-to-time? No comment.

All resourcefulness aside though, the combination of Sam not having internet access to his ever-exciting dental studies and the switch to digital TV which no longer allowed me to record my shows on VHS led us to the conclusion that life may, in fact, be a little better if we splurge and get our VERY OWN internet at the house. And so far, so good. Sam has been studying like a good little student and I have been trying to stay out of his way by watching my TV shows online. And finally starting a blog...