Sampson Watching Birds

Here is a video I took on New Years Day while we were working on taking down the Christmas decorations. It was windy and the birds were spending a lot of time at the feeder we have in our front window. I have a really good video of both cats I will post later, but this one really makes me laugh. It shows how short of an attention span most cats have. Our cats can be tearing through the house like mad cats and they will suddenly stop, sit down, bathe a spot for two seconds (very hard) and then move on with tearing through the house. Crazy. Please forgive the fact that it is so long. I need to get some sort of editing software...you can also hear Scott and me talking. But, regardless of all that, it is too cute! This truly captures the personality of our sweet Sampson.

Randomness from Marcy

So, it has been a while since I have posted. Work has been crazy. I need to get into a routine and it is hard to do that when I work overtime so often. I am beginning to like my job better, I think, but I need to start sticking to my regular hours. That way, I can do more of the things I like, like spending time with Scott, blogging, scrapbooking, trying to learn to sew, and exercising (yeah, I really need to get motivated on that front). I am getting very close to finishing the scrapbook I started over the summer of mine and Scott's engagement. That was way back when we started having our little scrapbooking parties. I have acquired quite a bit more scrapbooking stuff since then. I have lots of things I want to scrapbook now.

Okay...on to the randomness...

I know you are just SO excited...

First, some certain people will be VERY happy to know that I have turned off the date stamp on our camera. So, now it won't be permanently imprinted on all my pictures. I liked this feature because I like to remember when things happened, but I realized that with a digital camera, as long as you have the date and time correctly set on your camera, it will save this information with the picture. So, that's that. It may seem unimportant to some, but to others, they will be glad.

Next, I finally added the Christmas pictures from our gathering with Scott's family for Christmas. That pictures pretty much tell the story. The picture up at the top is a picture of the painting that Scott's Grandma gave us. She painted this painting her self. She takes art classes somewhere close to their house. This will really be a treasure for us!

Also, I have added a feature to the left side of our blog that is entitled "Recipe Collection". As I post recipes, I will add them to this list. That way, if you think you might want to try one of my recipes, but don't have time to sort through all my previous posts, there they are! I have so many recipes to blog about. I have been taking lots of food pictures, but just haven't had time to post them. They will come in time and still be just as good.

Scott is not taking any classes this coming quarter at Gwinnett Tech, but he is going to study Cisco on his own. So, we'll see how that goes. Please be praying for him on that. Cisco is a big deal in the computer world, so I am lead to understand.

I failed to previously blog about some of the favorite gifts I gave and received at Christmas this past year. They are all made by my dear friend Amy, who is very talented. Amy made me a beautiful frame a couple of years ago for my birthday and I would post a picture of it here, but we put it in storage when we were told we shouldn't have too many pictures out by our real estate agent. But, for Christmas, she gave me a super cute frame of our cats, which I am on the lookout for a good picture to put in it and she made frames for Scott and I to give to Robert and Tracy (Scott's sister and brother-in-law) for Christmas. I will post pictures. They are really nice and cute. Amy puts tons of details in all the way to the little label on the back that she customizes for each frame. Here is a link to Amy's blog. She has a slide show of various things she has done. You should order something from her! She also does very ornate cards.

Amy did not paint these cats, but had her mother-in-law do that, but you can see how much thought she puts into things. She did a frame for each of the ladies in our Bible Study!

These are the frames I ordered from her. She is very good at giving ideas for what to make frames about too. I just love these frames!

Well, I think that is enough randomness for tonight. I hope you are all having a great 2008 so far! Take care!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! I can't believe that another year has gone by. What did everyone do for New Years Eve? We didn't do much. We had leftover pizza and salads and watched several episodes of CSI Miami, then we shot off some fireworks. We invited our neighbors Bill and Jennifer to come down and shoot them off with us, but Bill wasn't feeling well. So, Jennifer came down without him and we had a good time. We only spent about an hour out there and came in probably around 9:30, because it was too stinking cold. Then, we layed in bed watching another episode of CSI Miami. We had planned to watch the New Year's Eve specials on TIVO, but we only have TIVO in the living room and didn't want to get out of bed, because it was too cold. So, we were going to just watch the rest of the show "live" and see the ball drop then go to bed. At some point in time, Scott flipped it over to football (for what he says was approximately 2 minutes or less) and I fell asleep (if you are surprised by this, you don't know me very well...everyone knows how much I LOVE football). So, he tried to stay awake so that he could wake me up just before midnight and he fell asleep. So, at 1:30, I woke up to the light and the tv on and woke Scott up just to tell him we missed the ball dropping! Then, we turned everything off and went back to sleep. Pretty lame, huh? I think that is the first time in my life I have slept through ringing in the New Year. The picture above is a picture that Scott and I took when Jennifer ran home to get her gloves. Hee hee.

Here is a picture of our "Grand Finale". It was called Main Squeeze. It went on for quite a while. It would stop and then start again. I was pretty impressed! Just an aside, if it had not been raining a good bit the last couple of weeks, we would NOT have done fireworks. We got almost an inch last week and then a little over 2 inches this Friday and this weekend.

This is our neighbor Jennifer. She is really sweet. Scott and I have also spent New Years Eve 2006 and 2005 with Bill and Jennifer at their house, playing games and eating food.

We have been fairly productive today, but not as productive as we probably would have been if there hadn't been a CSI Miami marathon on TV. What can we say, we like CSI Miami. We took down all of our inside Christmas decorations. I have cooked enough food for an army. Last week, we ate the last of some vegetable soup that I had cooked a while back and frozen and I realized that we had eaten all of our "reserves". That's what I call it when I cook stuff like chili, spaghetti, and vegetable soup that you can cook a ton of at once and then freeze what you don't eat in a couple of meals. Also, we are going to have a covered dish Sunday at church and I am taking a meal to Maggie on Saturday. I figured, hey, I will be home all day, I'll get some stuff cooked up. I had already planned for Scott's and my New Years Day meal to be a roast pork. Needless to say, I did a lot of cooking today. I cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, chili, two whole chickens minus the legs, which I froze for frying later (including shredding the meat off the bones to prepare it for inclusion in casseroles), and a pork roast with carrots, potatoes, and onions. Oh, and when Scott had gone to the store yesterday on his day off, he found a really good deal on some sirloins, so we prepared a marinade for those as well so that we can have them tomorrow night. I will say that I am a purist when it comes to steak and I usually will not put anything on them except for some seasoned meat tenderizer. However, we have found a few things that I will put on a steak: Scott's cousins who live in TN gave us a recipe for a really good rub made from seasoned salt (or maybe it's seasoned meat tendrizer), garlic salt, onion salt, and butter salt and his cousins who we visited on Christmas day cooked steaks with a marinade made from three parts soy sauce, one part jalapeno juice (from the jarred jalapenos), the juice from half a lemon, and a few chopped up jalapenos from the jar. Now, I will also tell you that I do not do super spicy stuff because of my stomach, but this was not really spicy. I really didn't think it was spicy at all. We tasted ours before putting our steaks in it and it was just right: flavorful but not a lot of heat.

Well, I guess that is enough rambling for now. Happy New Year to you all and we wish you the very best. May your blessings be overflowing and may you grow closer to the Lord every day!

New Life

Shana, Lauren, and I had the privilege to be present at the birth of Eli. It was an amazing day! Charles, Maggie, and Andrew are such a sweet little family and they have now grown by one! I cannot wait to see Eli grow up.

Maggie and Charles have done such a good job preparing Andrew to be a big brother.

Christmas With Marcy's Family

As you can see, I have added a slide show to the right of the pictures I took at my dad's house and at the nursing home during our visit with Meme this past Saturday. Some of these pictures are particularly funny and I feel they deserve an explanation. There is one picture where Paul is playing with Kristyn's Barbie. I just felt this was funny, so I took a picture of it. I am not sure if he was actually playing with it or trying to do something for Kristyn, but I took advantage of the opportunity. Ha! Next, you can see that Emily is heading into that teenage stage of not wanting her picture taken. We have many pictures of her trying to keep her picture from being taken. So, there is one picture where Scott got her unaware - eating a cookie. He was quite proud and earned an especially dirty look. Hehe. My dad and Stephanie have two LARGE dogs, Sadie, the dalmation, and Jack, the Great Dane mix (apparently mixed with some other breed of large dog). Well, these two are quite hyper and Daddy and Stephanie are nice enough to lock them out of the house while we are there. I can't stand it when they jump on me because dogs' nails don't retract and I end up looking like I have been abused. But, Sadie apparently did not appreciate being locked out and she kept jumping up on the back door and scratching at the screen door. At one point in time, I peeked out the window from the office and both dogs saw me and looked right into the camera for me. It was a cute picture. Kristyn loved to stand in the doorway and watch Sadie scratch. She even took a video with my camera. Lastly, you will see how many attempts it took for us to get one good family picture. The first few ended up looking like we were separated into "family groups" and the second group is funny because of my Daddy. He only really smiled in one of them and in one of them, notice the surprised look on his face as the picture took just as he was finishing scratching his nose! One picture is particularly funny because Scott forgot to set the timer and he accidentally took a picture of all of us "preparing" for the picture. We also took a "silly picture" so that Kristyn could give her dad reindeer antlers! The picture at the top is of my sister Wendy and me. We don't look anything alike, do we?!

Here is the video Kristyn took of Sadie scratching at the door. Most of her scratching fits were much longer than this. You can hear me in the background trying to torment the dogs into scratching so that Kristyn could video them. Poor Sadie and Jack.

Well, that just about sums up our visit in Dallas this weekend. We had dinner, presents, and family time. Scott, Paul, and Daddy even got to watch football while we ate.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope everyone is enjoying today! Scott and I have had a wonderful Christmas so far. Our weekend was great as well. All of our family gatherings were a lot of fun! I took a ton of pictures so I am going to have to pick out the best ones and do a slide show soon. The ones of Scott's family are going to require quite a bit of red eye reduction as they all have blue eyes. My family, on the other hand, being brown eyed (except Paul and one of his daughters, Kristyn), are much easier to photograph! This picture is of my family. The back row is Daddy, Stephanie, Me, and Scott. The front row is Emily, Wendy, Paul, and Kristyn. (Paul is my sister's fiance and Emily and Kristyn are his daughters).

Sunday's church service and Last night's Christmas Eve service at church were wonderful. Pastor Lee talked about how it is okay to enjoy the secular parts of Christmas as long as you are not allowing them to get in the way of your worship of Christ. If that is the case, you are making them idols. He also discussed, last night, the incarnation of Christ. I am so amazed and so thankful that God would take on human form and come and live as one of us in order to save us from our own sin. How awesome!

Scott's parents and grandma came to our Christmas Eve service last night and then we went out to eat at the Waffle House. Mmmm. Gotta love a patty melt plate!

I enjoyed exchanging gifts with our families as well. I love giving gifts. It's so much fun to see people react to the things you bought for them. But, I must admit that I also enjoy receiving them. I received so many great gifts this year. I have completed my collection of Tim McGraw CDs (I was only missing the most recent one), I have the entire Bible (ESV version) on MP3, I received a new Bible in the NASB version, which is what Pastor Lee uses, and I received both of the sewing books that I wanted. I think that I am fully prepared to start attempting to sew. I have received many other things that I also really wanted, but those are the highlights. Scott got lot of new things too. He received all of the books from Christian Books.com that he wanted, his GA Tech windsock that he had been wanting (exactly like the other one he had bought for himself recently, thanks to Tailgaters Alley Stores(Discover Mills and The Avenue at Webb Ginn), who are owned by GA Tech graduates, and he received both of the movies he has been talking about wanting since they came out: Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Also, his boss had given him a gift card to Game Stop for his birthday and Scott went out and bought a game that I had almost bought him for his birthday, Super Mario Galaxy. He is playing it right now...and he played it quite a bit yesterday while I was at work. He loves it. Scott's boss also gave him Harry Potter 5 (the movie) for Christmas. Yay!

I am leaving you with a little video I took of Sam trying to fit all 5 of the cars that Scott and I gave him for Christmas in his hands at one time. So cute.

Small Group Christmas Party 2007

I finally got all the red eye I could removed from these pictures and got them uploaded to Slide. I hope you enjoy!

This, That, and The Other

Hello all! It has been a while since I posted. So much has happened! First of all, I will say that one of the biggest reasons I haven't been blogging much lately is that my computer was sick for a while and it was just not fun to play on. Some of my more recent slide shows were done on Scott's computer. Scott has fixed my computer, though. We had to wait until he was done with his classes before he could work on it. He just decided that since my computer is about 6 years old, the operating system had gotten corrupted over time. So, he wiped it clean and reloaded everything. My computer is much happier now! It is great to have an in-house IT guy!

Well, the season of Christmas parties is in full swing! Scott and I went to his office's Christmas party at the 1818 Club on Sugarloaf Parkway in the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce building on the evening of December 2. I must say that I was not looking forward to this one. I really did not enjoy this one last year...but, it turned out a lot better this year. We sat with some really nice people and it was just all around more enjoyable. On December 9, we went to a Christmas party for everyone at my office at one of the VP's, Wayne's, house. Not everyone from the office came, but it was fun and Wayne's mom was there and we were just all able to sit around and chat. Then, this past Wednesday, December 12, we had our Ladies' Bible Study Christmas party and gift swap which was a ton of fun as always when we get together. Our church small group Christmas party was Saturday night (December 15) at Amy and Josh's and that was a lot of fun, too. We had a white elephant gift swap. If you don't know what this is, it is when everyone brings a gift (we set our limit at $10) and wraps it and everyone draws numbers. Person 1 has to unwrap a gift and then person 2 can steal his gift or unwrap a new gift and then person 1 has to unwrap another gift if his is stolen, and so on and so forth. It is really interesting to see what people bring. Follow is a list of the items brought to ours: fireworks, a gingerbread house kit, a twin pack of enemas, a nail glam kit, a miniature bowling alley, a Starbucks gift card, a little snowman that wore bling and sang "Ice, Ice, Baby" while bobbing his head and moving his little hands around, a little ceramic pill box that had Jesus on the lid, a crazy green hat with an attached veil, a calendar with the ugliest dogs you have ever seen on it, a little reindeer on a keychain that pooped cola flavored candy, and an insulated back pack complete with plastic place settings, corkscrew, and bottle opener. So as you can see, a lot of crazy stuff! Scott and I came off pretty well - we got the miniature bowling alley and the gingerbread house kit (which we brought, actually). Then, tomorrow, Scott's office is having a "holiday lunch" and my office is having a "holiday lunch" on Thursday. Saturday, we are visiting and swapping gifts with my immediate family (which will include a visit with Meme) and then on Sunday we are visiting and swapping gifts with Scott's immediate family. We will probably go to Scott's cousin's house on Christmas day out in Monroe and then we'll see my extended family in January.

Scott and I made our gingerbread house on Sunday afternoon. It is very cute. The picture on the box is kind of deceptive, though because it shows this huge base with plenty of room for two gingerbread people and two trees, but you really only have space for two out of the four. So, we took pictures with everything there and then ate the trees. Mmmmm. My friend from college, Mary, has also made gingerbread houses with her husband. She has pictures on her blog, which you can visit here. Below are pictures of our gingerbread house. One with and one without the trees. Please, no laughing. We have never claimed to have artistic talent...I mean, we are a Network Administrator and a CPA for goodness sakes!
















Our house is all decorated for Christmas! I love it when we decorate for Christmas! I just realized that I haven't taken any pictures of the house yet this year. I am going to run out and take some so that I can post at least the night-time view here...be back in a minute....okay, I am back, and frozen. I mean, it is officially cold! I was getting so tired of the cold weather and then it heated back up into the 70's for about a week and then all of a sudden, it got super cold again. Brrrrrr!
Here's the best picture I could get of our house. I had to take it at an angle because the for sale sign was in the way, so it looks like Scott only hung lights on half of the entrance, but there are lights all the way around our entrance. The deer are a new addition this year. We have been wanting them for years, but could never find them the day after Christmas, so we bought them this year anyway.

This wreath is an example of the wreaths we have on each window of our house. They look really cute during the day.

Thankfully, we got some rain this weekend! We have a rain gauge in our front garden and we got about 1 inch this weekend, which is really good! Did anyone else get rain recently?

I really enjoy buying Christmas gifts for people. It is just so much fun. In the past, Scott and I have not really exchanged gifts. We usually just don't get anything at all from each other with the basis being that we buy ourselves things we need and want throughout the year. Last year we bought our digital camera, which as you can see, the newness of that has NOT worn off yet. But, this year we have wish lists and so that makes it much easier to just click on the things we want when we think of it, so it is a lot easier for us to save those little things we want instead of trying to remember them for when someone asks us for a birthday or Christmas list. So...we are actually going to exchange gifts! I don't know if you have checked out wishlist.com, but if you click on one of our wish lists to the left, you can see what I am talking about. It is like the wedding registry at most stores, only it is not store specific. You can find what you want online and link to it but the buyer does not have to buy it from that spot, they can simply click "buy it" and put in their email address and then go to the store and buy the item there or find it on another website cheaper. Also, you can give the same list to multiple people and not be afraid that you will end up with duplicates because a responsible giver will mark the item off. The beauty of it all is that when I sign in to my wishlist, I CAN'T tell what anyone has bought me! I have not even looked once, which is saying a lot. All of the ladies in my Bible study have a wishlist too. We are all big fans! I had finished all of our Christmas shopping except for my gifts for Scott, so I took this past Friday off work to do all that. It was really nice to just have a day to drive around Snellville and Loganville and shop. I even went grocery shopping and got to grab lunch at Moe's, of which I am a big fan!

Here is our Christmas tree. I like the picture with the gifts the best, because it looks more complete, but I had to show you all the picture of the tree about 5 seconds after I had put down the tree skirt...Sampson claimed his spot under the tree!

Okay, so this has been a long blog. Sorry. But, it has been a while. I will post a few pictures in this post, but I'll probably do a couple of separate posts following this one to post a couple of slide shows from our various events.

**Just as a note, I really did not misspell the word "This" on the title of my post. I looked at it at work today and it was spelled correctly and now it is spelled "Thia". I have corrected it now. But, I have had an "s" in one of my posts turn into and "a" in the past and not been able to correct it. Has anyone else had this problem?

Scott's Birthday Celebration

Last Saturday (Dec. 1), we had some friends over to celebrate Scott's birthday. We had a potluck dinner and everything was delicious. Scott and I made Dr. Pepper Tenderloin, which is a recipe out of my Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine. We ate, talked, and ended up playing Wii. I think we all had a good time! Below are the pictures.

Happy Birthday to Karen!

Last Thursday, Cathy and some other ladies threw a surprise party for Karen's anniversary of her 21st birthday (I won't say which one, since she doesn't look anywhere near her age). It was a lot of fun. Gayle is really good at "table scapes", as you'll see. Karen's birthday is on December 10 (next Monday). Don't forget to wish her Happy Birthday when you see her this Sunday!

Here are the pictures:

(I did them like an old film...hehehe...if you want to see them in color, I think you can just click on the link to the slide website and view them there).