*Cough* *Hack* *Sneeze*

It's another day and I'm still not feeling well. Branden did a wonderful job of taking care of me yesterday but I think he was really hoping for my sore throat to cause me to lose my voice...

I will admit it, I am completely pathetic and miserable when I'm sick. Whenever I was sick growing up, my mom would get me cozy on the couch, let me watch tv all day, and bring me anything I wanted. Branden's mom did this to him too but he didn't enjoy it so much. He said that he would go crazy just laying around all day...I find that silly.

I sometimes think that he knows me too well for us to only have been married for 2.5 years. Although I think we spend more time together than most any other newlywed couple. We had a conversation last night in bed that had me laughing and amazed at how well he knew my mind.

Branden: You are already needy when you aren't sick but when you are sick, you get extra needy. (note: "Needy" isn't a bad term in our house. It usually refers to our need to be cuddled and loved on) Any little thing can cause you to go into a tantrum. Like when I gave you your hot toddy and you tried to put it on your side table but there was another mug in the way.

Me: (In my head I'm thinking, Oh yes, I had too much stuff on my side table so there was only one place to put my mug...but another mug was in the way and I didn't know what to do. All I did was let out one miserable moan of frustration and Branden seemed to know instantly what my "dilemma" was.")


Branden: That's why when you whined, I instantly told you to just hand me the empty mug. You were on the verge of losing it just because a mug was in your way! If you weren't sick, you would have just put it over on the dresser but when you are sick, you can't seem to make any extra effort and expect everything to be done and perfect for you.

Me: (laughing at how scarily spot on he was) That is exactly what I was thinking! It's kind of freaky that you know me this well. I'm sorry you have to deal with me when I'm sick and miserable. You take such good care of me.

So yes, I am a miserable whiner when I don't feel good. Luckily Branden knows how to deal with me well enough but he's off to work all day today so I have to handle my tantrums on my own...and my night table is still cluttered...

So who wants to come take care of me???

Maybe there is such a thing as too much chocolate?

Somehow yesterday, I completely forgot to also mention my string of lights that I made from needle felting.

It's hard to see but I have blue, red, yellow, and green felted bulbs sewed to a cord. I have made other ornaments but I just haven't taken photos of them.

Today is a weird day. I got a lot done yesterday, we sent out the boy's toys, went to the bank, and even met up with some friends for the most amazing hot chocolate. I had a cinnamon dark chocolate and it was practically like drinking 3 melted chocolate bars...which isn't as good as it sounds. It was so thick, I started to feel a bit sick and had everyone else help me finish it. As Branden and I walked home, I started to feel more sick and more sick. I ended up sticking close to the bathroom for a few hours and then I went to bed at 7:30pm.

I don't know what it is about sleeping while sick but I always seem to dream that I have a lot to do, so then I end up having very stressful and restless sleep. Finally at 3am, I took advantage of something fabulous that Chrissy sent me and I just got on Saturday...Tylenol PM! It was a generic version but worked wonders! We don't have fabulous things like that over here so I was grateful to have it last night.

My stomach is better today but I still feel off. My throat is scratchy and phlegmy and I am wiped out. I think my body is debating on either to give me a cold or a flu but is taking it's time deciding. Luckily Branden has today off so he's been taking care of me.

Well, I may just take a nap. Hopefully my body doesn't decide to kill me as a third, random option. There are lots of fun Christmas movies and shows on so at least I will die happy. Too bad nobody over here knows what "A Christmas Story" is so I can't flip to a 48hr marathon of it at any given time.

6 days to go folks!

Less than a week until Christmas!!! That means my nephews probably won't get their toys in time because we are finally getting in to the post office today...oops! Bad Auntie Moo and Uncle B!

Hunter wanted some more needle felted dinosaurs to go with the two that I made for his birthday. I had a bit of fun making them and I think he'll really like them too.

The yellow one is my attempt at a brachiosaurus and the blue one is my attempt at a triceratops. Here's another angle of them.

For Brady, I made him a stuffed penguin that he can chuck at his brother, bite its head, or stomp on it if he wanted to.

I just hope he doesn't pull the tail off as soon as he gets it. The red blotch by his tail is a heart. I had to put some mushy Auntie thing on it.

Oh and as for the gloves I made out of an old sweater, which I also made the penguin out of the same old sweater, here's a shot of those.

Branden had to tie the bows because I suck at bows. Anyhoo, I hope you all have a fantastic week leading up to Christmas and my shared music today isn't the normal music type thing. It's actually a really cute video I saw on a friend's facebook page but it does have a cutsie song at the end so I'll call that close enough. This is a video of the Christmas Story told by some adorable Australian kids. I couldn't get over how sweet they were, how cute the sheep were, and how miserable the poor donkey must have been! I hope you enjoy it! We got a bit of a laugh out of it!

Christmas via My Brain

Wahoo! It's Friday! I know that this typically means nothing to me since my 'forced retirement' when we moved here in March, but it does mean something for Branden! Finally after weeks and weeks of him sitting at the desk, looking totally sexy and taunting me with his wavy hair and good style typing out the first chapter of his PhD he turned it in this afternoon, which means he can pay more attention to me relax and be done with school for a while! Of course he still has work and he will be working more over Christmas as most of his co-workers are taking time off and he's covering for them, but at least his mind can be a bit more at ease and he'll stop using such big words all the time.

He had me edit his chapter yesterday. Considering that my most exciting read in the past few months has been Wind in the Willows, I decided that I should get my thinking cap out. It took a bit of searching, but when I finally found it, it was half buried in dust, some mice had chewed some holes in it, and I'm pretty sure it shrunk. After 3 hours of praying that there were no spiders in the cobwebs, I plucked up the courage to put it on and start editing...all 21 pages...

Talk about a killjoy! Currently he's writing about representations of the Virgin Mary in the Nativity scene in late medieval Ireland, and considering the time of year it is, reading this sucked a bit of magic out of the season! Now I won't be able to sing "Away in a Manger" because when I get to the part where we sing, "...but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes..." I will just be thinking, "The Biblical account gives no detail to how Jesus was as a baby but because a Franciscan monk back in 1300 or something, decided that the Son of God would not be a baby who cried, we have stuck this idea into our Christmas carols!". Sure it's a nice idea that Jesus slept through the night and never cried but how would he have notified the mortals around him that he had pooped? Did the Franciscan monks consider a crying baby to be unholy but a pooping baby was totally fine?

And don't even get me started on Mary breastfeeding! Branden has a huge section on that because there were a lot of depictions of Mary breastfeeding baby Jesus and some of them are quite hysterical!

I suppose now that I know the meaning and significance behind this type of image I can't laugh as much, but the first time I saw images like this in Branden's text books, I was giggling like a hyena! Basically, the "simplified Maggie version" is that back in medieval times, breast milk was considered to be white blood. So Mary was giving her blood to Jesus by breastfeeding him and thus when he died and shed his blood for all of humanity, Mary's blood was part of that, thus making her a key role to salvation in the church at that time. Images, like the one above, show her milk to have healing powers and to be sacred, as Jesus's blood was considered.

Ok, now that you have all learned something for today (some of you should probably wake up now and stop drooling on your keyboards), I can basically sum up my frustration in that most all of our Nativity scenes and ideas of how the Christmas story went came from late medieval monks. Now that I have read where they actually came up with their ideas and philosophies, I am forever ruined. Ignorance really is bliss!

Oh, and on a side note, Branden will also be looking at representations of Mary at the foot of the cross so now my Easter will be ruined as well!

Google Hits Make Me Giggle

My world could not look anymore picturesque at the moment. I have a nice warm, winter sweater on, my fluffy white comforter is keeping my toes toasty as the winds howl at the window, and both me and my husband are plopped on the bed engrossed in our own laptops! Of course the stuff on his laptop screen is much more boring as he types away at his school work, but mine is full of blog friends, facebook, and my addiction: Pinterest! Oh, and did I mention that my laptop is bigger than Branden's...

Ahhh, life is sweet and nothing can spoil it...oh wait, the house cleaner just arrived, and as usual left the front door wide open regardless of the fact that we have 65-75mph winds, it's freezing outside, and our heater only comes on for about an hour, 2 times a day! Branden went out and closed the door (after she had already been here for a good 5 minutes) and tried to tell her to close the door, but she speaks very little English...see, it doesn't just happen in America! First World problems, I know, but it's not like I even arranged for this person to come clean the house. It's my landlady's staff and I'm sorry but they suck. It would be less bother if they just soaped a cat and dog up and let them loose in the house to chase each other... things would probably be more clean that way too. I'm really hoping our landlady comes by because she is the only one who has a key to the heating system, and despite complaining already, has yet to change the heating settings from what they were back in October! Plus, she has this ridiculous thing about having the water heater shut off from 10am-4:30pm, but somehow it has changed and we sometimes don't have hot water again until 7pm. I have taken many a cold shower since living here and no, it still doesn't inspire me to wake up any earlier. We also have mold in our room and bathroom. A lot of my American friends would flip out over this thought but I have yet to find a place that doesn't have mold over here (including Scotland). The air is just damp, no matter what the temperature, and my windows are dripping with condensation every day (we even have nice double paned windows!). I have found the easiest way to defrost my windows is to put candles on the sills...except I am out of candles at the moment...handy.

What contrasting paragraphs! Sorry for my rant. I just needed to get that off my chest. I actually did have something for your enjoyment planned today. My blog stats have been basically doubling ever month and it does have a bit to do with all of the search engine hits I get now. Branden and I love looking at my search engine hits since they can be so random and hilarious! Here are some recent ones along with my commentary.

statue with ugly christmas sweater: I love the thought of the Lincoln Monument dressed to the nines in a 3D, light up, Rudolf, tinsil attrocity! That would be quite the hit, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, so I wonder what this searcher was expecting to find? The only statues I know of that get dressed up are the statues in Fremont (Seattle) by the bridge. Random people love dressing those statues up and it's pretty awesome actually!

I suppose I could understand that person's quest, but the person looking up perverted ugly christmas sweaters...ewwww! I hope when you found my site from your searching that it chewed you out and washed your brain out with soap!

Moving on, do you remember my rant about leotards? This caused a slew of google hits, including these doozies:
fashion leotards:  I find this to be an oxymoron
men in leotards/leotard man:  why?why?why?
platypus leotard:  ummm....? Where do you even come up with that?

Do you also remember my rant about idiots on Pinterest who didn't know anything about animals?? That is the reason for this next search hit.
baby owls have long skinny legs:  and I'm so glad you know that dear searcher, because then you would know automatically that the photo of the 'baby owl' wasn't legit since it had tiny baby hampster legs! I have come to the point where I don't even look at the nature or pet section on Pinterest anymore because too many people are insanely stupid and gullible. For instance:

Click Here for Photo

This has been all over Pinterest and labeled: "Baby llama OMG!"...do you see how small those blades of grass are??? Did you not ever have a grandma with creepy stuffed toys all over her house??? It's just a toy!

Maybe my ranting has been all brought about by these slightly insulting searches that have managed to find me:
blogspot humiliation:  am I that bad that I should feel humiliated? Did a post have toilet paper stuck to the bottom of it and I didn't notice?? I know Branden hasn't been able to edit all of my posts lately but is my grammar that bad??
gross girl:  my hair is still wet from my shower, I'll have you know! I am far from gross and I have a husband to prove it (oh wait, so did half of the Jerry Springer guests...although some 'spouses' were livestock)

Although, I will say that I felt my blog status raised to a new level of cool when it was discovered usuing this google search:
omg don't tell superman:  That's right! He'd be pissed to find out that I was much cooler than him! True, my site has a smaller following than Superman, but apprently Google recongnizes that I am a threat...

And finally, just another way for my husband to show off that he's a genius:
смешные новогодние картинки: I looked at this and thought, "What in the world??? Where in the world???" and Branden takes one look at it and pipes up with, "Oh, it's Russian!". (show off!) And of course he was right too. I put it through a Russian translator to discover that my Northern readers are finding me by looking up "funny Christmas pictures". It's good to know they still have a sense of humor and it hasn't frozen off after many a cold winter spent in Russia!