Home Sweet Home

Here's the house we're renting. I'm glad it's a nice day since the house always looks better with a blue sky above it. We are responsible for taking care of the yard, and Spencer was really excited to mow this week. We also bought a hose and had fun washing our car in our very own driveway!

We have a deck and lots of enormous hostas all around it.

The back yard is fenced in. To me, that means we'll have a little extra privacy (or at least no random kids running around back there). To Spencer, it's an indication that we need to get a dog. Ha!

Our New Place

As per request, here are some pics of the house we're renting. I don't really have a good ones of the outside of the house, but I'll try to take some in the morning- so stay tuned!

Our bedroom. We are anti-comforter in the summer, so we just use our sheets. Looks kinda ghetto, but it works. We bought the dresser at IKEA this summer. Spencer put it together, and I love it.

The 2nd bedroom, which we're using as an office. The closets in both rooms are pretty small, so I use the one in our room and Spencer uses the closet in this one.

The bathroom on the main floor.

The living room. I had a hard time getting a good shot of the whole room, and this was the best I could do. Almost complete, just needs a rug or something in front of the couch.


Our hobbit-sized kitchen. Yes, that is all the counter space we have. It gets pretty cozy when we're trying to make dinner together, but we like it.

The dining room. Do you like how I haven't actually put any flowers in that vase?

The bonus room upstairs. We rarely go up there since it's mostly big closets for storage, and then this room and another half bathroom. We eventually plan on having it be a guest room.

Although it's in the basement, this is one of my favorite things in the house! Our landlords bought them new for us, so we were really excited about that.

Attack of the Killer Mutant Centipede

WAIVER: Please do not read the following post if you ever plan on visiting us!

Ok, this all started last Thursday evening when Spencer was working on his computer at the desk in our spare room, and he screamed for me to come in there to see a bug. It was fat, long, and had many legs. In our attempts to catch it, it ran onto the wall and then behind the vent. Ugh. Then later that night it came back out for another visit, but this time it escaped under the baseboard where it isn't quite flush with the floor. Double ugh. We set out to Walgreens to buy some bug killer, but opted to hold out until we could get it for a better price at Target. On Saturday, we were armed and ready for anymore centipede visits.

Fast forward to this morning. Spencer was asleep and felt something on his head, so he brushed it off. Then he opened his eyes, not sure if what he felt was in a dream or if it was real. So he jumps out of bed, turns on the lamp, and says "Oh my gosh!" Thinking that he was doing this because he was late for class or something, I rolled over to check the time only to find that it was just after 5 am. But, as you've probably guessed, it was our multi-legged stalker that had been crawling on his head!! At this point it was on his pillow, and he wanted to kill it with Raid. After I talked him out of spraying noxious gases in our bedroom at such an hour, we decided catching it with the vacuum would be our best bet. When Spencer was at the ready with the vacuum hose, I found my camera and snapped a shot just before its impending death.

Click on the picture to get the full effect!

It tried to escape, but we were successful. As Spencer was verifying that it was in the vacuum (which he couldn't, so we put packaging tape over the nozzle of the hose), I changed our sheets. When we finally got back into bed, we both had that nervous itch where you feel like there are bugs crawling all over your body. We cuddled up next to each other, and about 15 minutes later Spencer said, "What are you going to put as the title on our blog." That made me laugh, cause during that 15 minutes I was totally planning this post in my head. Creepy, eh?

White Coat Ceremony

On Friday, August 3rd the Case Dental School class of 2011 had a white coat ceremony. Due to parking difficulties (there is no such thing as a free parking spot on campus - everything is metered and we only had enough change to buy us 40 minutes), I had to bail out after the first half hour to move our car. I thought for sure he would have his coat by then since we're so close to the beginning of the alphabet, but the brief comments from 4 faculty members turned out to be not so brief. Needless to say, I totally missed it when they announced "Student Dr. Spencer Bjarnason" and put on his white coat. I felt like a pretty bad wife, but at least we still got some pictures of him outside when it was over.

Taking a class picture. Can you find Spencer?

Move #8

Last Tuesday we started our drive to Cleveland, Ohio. Since we can't move into the house we're renting until July 31, we decided to take our time getting there so we could stop to visit some family along the way. We spent a few days in Indiana with Clarke, Char, Andrew, and Lucy. Spencer and I had a fun time having Star Wars light saber fights with Andrew, who was "Yuke Skywalker" and Spencer was Darth Vader. Andrew started humming the Darth Vader theme while we were fighting, and then he told Spencer, "You're not my father."

The look of a true Jedi warrior.

That afternoon, we went to a waterpark.

There was a free zoo nearby, so we stopped in to check it out.

I learned how to milk a fake cow.

Spencer and Andrew pet the miniature horses.

We even got to see Cosmo Cougar!

After saying goodbye to our darling hostess and the kids, we were back on the road.

We got to Ohio, and then headed to Wendy's house for a family gathering.

We enjoyed catching up with everyone, jumping on the trampoline, playing SPUD, eating a yummy dinner, and watching Dad demostrate proper ballet technique for Allison and Riley.

Riley and Allison are such girly girls. They love makeup, and they asked me to put some on them. Riley had a makeup stash that was at least twice the size of mine. Allison let me do her makeup, but Riley insisted on doing her own.

Since Friday night, we have been staying with my cousin Heather and her husband Jason in Cleveland. We went to Medina on Saturday for the wedding of my good friend Jesica. I couldn't find my camera for the reception, and unfortunately I missed some awesome Kodak moments (particularly of Jesica's 90ish-year-old grandpa cutting a rug on the dance floor). We spent the night with my Uncle Harry and Aunt Donna, and I found my camera in time to get a picture of their new puppy Dolly just before we left.

Harry Potter Mania

Last Friday, we jumped on the Harry Potter bandwagon and joined our friends Tras and Sarah at the Mall of America for the midnight party before the release of book #7. One of the Barnes & Noble workers told Spencer that there would be a boa constrictor and sharks that people could pet (there's an aquarium under the mall, and they were bringing up the animals). Anyway, we saw the snake but no one was allowed to touch it. Then we went to "pet" the "sharks", but they weren't quite what we expected:

"Petting" the shark meant using one finger to rub slowly down its back. Lame. And slimy.

We had much more fun scouting out people that dressed up for the costume contest. We saw many a Harry Potter character, including Mad Eye Moody:

Professor Trelawny, Dolores Umbridge, Dobby, and some random wizards.

We wanted a picture with this cute baby dressed as baby Harry (his mom had drawn a scar on his head and put a pair of round black-rimmed glasses on him), but when we asked to get a picture with him, this lady jumped in and said "Of course", and the mom and baby left. I forget her name.


Hermione (her dress was amazingly similar to the one in the movie), and Ron, who had one of the worst wigs I have ever seen.

And finally, Mr. Harry Potter himself.

We counted down to midnight, and then the balloons started falling.

We had our book by 12:15pm. I read 88 pages that night, and I look forward to finishing it on our drive to Ohio. When we get there, I will pass it along to my mom.

Last week, Spencer decided to start reading them too. He is now on page 3 of book #1.

Happy 4th of July!

For Independence day, we headed to St. Paul to enjoy the festivities at the state's annual "Taste of Minnesota" celebration. We had a good time walking along the Mississippi River before the fireworks started.

We were actually trying to get to the other side of the river where there was food and music, but the bridge to get over there was so crowded that we were content to get food elsewhere and then await the firework spectacular on a nearby grassy knoll. (It was actually a grassy median between 2 streets, but hey, it worked just fine.)

On our way to said grassy median, we were walking on an asphalt drive and I totally tripped over a camouflaged asphalt sidewalk that jumped up out of nowhere. It didn't really hurt, but when I looked at my foot a bit later I noticed that my clumsiness left me with an injury.


And just so you don't think we took the awesome fireworks photo above (since I know you weren't quite sure), I copied it from a Google search. I fully intended to post sweet fireworks pictures that we took, but this picture pretty much sums up all of our attempts at capturing them with our digital camera.


We hope you all had a great 4th!