(Puppy-proof) Christmas at the Wiselys'

Attempting to decorate for Christmas with a year and a half old Golden Retriever is, well, challenging. Last year we had the tree-pocolypse; (aka: Walter eating a dozen glass bulbs, as well as the entire bottom 2/3 of our tree) so this year we decided to start lean and see what happened. With only a sparse collection of my beloved ornaments (my family let me keep the ones I've had since I was a kid; mixed with new ones from Bryan and friends), we set out to see what the pup would do. No super-special I've-had-this-since-I-was-four-years-old business this year. And for good reason too. The tree, the night we put it up:


See? Sparse. Alright. And yes, decorated on the bottom, but only fabric ornaments and things of the like. And here is our tree as of tonight, after Walter redecorated:




Much better in his opinion. No ornaments. One lone mitten we're keeping up there is left, to teach him 'leave it' (a day too late). It appears the pup is also stepping straight into the tree to reach higher; several boughs are nearly a foot droopier than they should be. I'm just thankful we invested in the ultra-mega-awesome Christmas tree stand at Target. Here's hoping it holds up through the rest of the season!

Also, on a side note-- I'm nearly finished Christmas shopping, and there are nearly 19 days left. This never happens. Now if only I could wake up on time in the mornings...

Ending an amazing trip!

For our last day in England, we had planned a jam-packed day of 'things we would be sad if we didn't try and see' while we were there list. So, to first start things out, we decided to go see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I'm not sure if this is how it was normally composed, because Friday was Rememberance Day (Everyone was wearing red poppies the whole week to commemorate the troops, it was pretty neat-- there was a huge outdoor display at Westminster Abbey as well), so the performance included the Palace Band performing also. Very neat! (Also noted, they warmed up to the Star Wars theme in the park-- you can imagine how happy this made Bryan :) It was awful trying to take photos, hundreds of people smoosh you into the gates because everyone wants to see, so this is one of the only photos we took that made a bit of sense:



After that we took a stroll through Hyde Park, which was gorgeous in November!! Leaves everywhere, needless to say we had to play in them. Nothing says "I'm a tourist" like taking photos of yourself frolicking in leaves, but we had so much fun I didn't care! (Hyde park is BEAUTIFUL. So many people warned us that going in November would be a bad idea; turned out to be warmer than here and perfect in autumn!)



To continue our explorations, we made our way to the Tower Bridge and to the Tate Modern Museum (Poor Bryan... I forgot how awful much modern is; we got to see a few Monet's and Picasso's, as well as The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even by Duchamp-- a nerdily favorite piece from my art history classes that I was excited to see) and onto the oldest pub in England, the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese-- AMAZING. The whole bar was 1300's, and remodeled in the 1600's-- full of little underground nooks to drink in, with an amazing old wooden bar-- very neat to be at! The food was great, too!





Then all that was left to do was wander the city and take as many last minute pics as we could... everything is amazing in the day, and even more amazing at night. We have millions of pictures from the trip; I'm going to figure out how to get them online somehow (Lord knows I've already nearly crashed my Flickr account by attempting to upload a few.. haha)





We got home safetly last night, thanks to being picked up by my amazing parents (Who also made us dinner-- thanks so much!!) and were very happy to see our puppy again, and to sleep in our own bed! (Except I tell you what, that time difference is killer-- we fell asleep on the couch last night at 7:30, and were ready to wake up at 3am-- hopefully this is an advantage to me who has to go to work tomorrow! Bryan gets an extra day to sleep in).

England was everything we had hoped and more! I will try to add a bit to some previous posts, most of the time we were too sleepy when we got back to our hotel to do much of anything but brush our teeth and fall over. We feel very lucky that we got to go, and are looking forward to going back to Europe sometime soon (plan right now is to possibly visit France next year).

Thanks for reading!
Sara

London! Day 5

Today was our first big road trip--to Liverpool! We woke up early and made the 4 hour drive over to Anfield, one of the oldest football pitches around. Bryan (and his brother Scott) are big Liverpool FC fans, so we needed to go check it out. Again, we took tons of pics today (I will be making a flickr page with all of them sometime soon) but here are just a few snapshots. We took a tour of the stadium, and got to see the areas where the players locker room was, as well as the trip out to the pitch--it's tradition to hit this sign on the way out, so of course we had to keep up with tradition:







Got to sit in the press room as well which was neat!


One note about Liverpool, if you're ever on route to go visit Anfield-- do NOT judge this city by, well, most of the area around Anfield. If you added a few hundred zombies, it would be the absolute scariest, best backdrop for the scariest movie I've ever seen. Everything is run down, closed, burns, and falling apart. And by everything, I mean it. I think we only saw a handfull of people the whole time; and they looked pretty unfriendly. No bueno. Convinced we didn't drive 4 hours only for the field, Bryan had convinced me to explore... after finding the 'city center', I still wasn't convinced. Business parks. Scariness. Huge amounts of not-what-we-were-used-to-so-far-on-this-trip ordinary areas. And then we went for a walk, where we discovered how wrong I had been... about a solid hour of Bryan and I with our jaws dropped; Liverpool is filled with CRAZY amounts of landmarks, very giant and interesting-looking history museums, and possibly the largest church I've ever seen in my life-- (Seriously. This thing appears in the fog like a mountain. Sorry for the corniness, there is absolutely no way to describe how large this was:)



Here was the 'bombed out church', a cathedral which had been attacked during WW2 (completely filled with plants, and today also a couple practicing tai chi):


After that, we stumbled across a HUGE city center/outdoor shopping area (we got lost, a beautiful mix of NYC and London-- we didn't have nearly enough time to see it all.) Here's another snapshot of just another 'random' beautiful building-- there are so many of these things here they are pawning them off as student housing and such. Man. Crazy, I say.



Again, surprisingly overwhelmed by how amazing things are here. The day started out with a bit of football history and a super sketchy town-- and ended with figuring out how we could make our way back here one day. We bring the car back tomorrow-- and will miss it! Bryan has taken very well to driving on the left side (much to me fussing over everything, because it's very difficult to get used to at first-- even just sitting and watching! You get that jumpy feeling every time you turn a corner...) So Bryan-- THANK YOU FOR DRIVING!

London! Day 3 and 4

Day 3 and 4 are grouped into one post-- I feel like every time we get home I'm too exhausted to do anything but plop on the bed and rub my tired footsies! Here is what we've been up to yesterday:

Hampton Court (Home of much of the royal family, notably King Henry VIII:)







Today was Stonehenge and Bath, here are a few shots from Stonehenge:






And Bath: (Only had a few hours here-- but could have spent DAYS!! If anyone ever asks you what to do in London, tell them they HAVE to visit Bath. One of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.)


The Bath Abbey (There are so many Abbey's in Bath-- I think we counted 4?!! Incredibly gorgeous!)












Today we also survived our first trip in the car-- crazy, but Bryan is doing very well! Tomorrow is a trip to Liverpool, hopefully I will post a few pics documenting that as well!

London! Day 1 and 2

Today is the first time I am able to sit on the lappy and type a day-overdue post-- Bryan and I were lucky enough to go to London, and I'm going to do my best to document it! Today is day 2 (although my computer is telling me it's 4:40 pm, it's actually 12:40am here) and I'd have to say, already we've taken to London quite well. After a 7 hour flight and an interesting layover in Iceland (so dark over there! And sleepy... perhaps we'll have more stories on the way back over) and another 3 hours to London, we've managed to get lost, (quite horribly actually) find ourselves, and already are learning how to do things quickly and cheaply. Our hotel is beautiful, and the city is amazing. We are staying in Kingston, which we hoped would be lovely-- turns out it very much is! Kingston is a large city with tons to do, and we're quickly finding adorable pubs and shops to keep busy. Today was the first day we went to London (by train), and here is a few things we've discovered:

1. Locals are wonderful. Everyone has been super friendly and helpful-- but directions are USELESS. 'Straight' has no meaning to roads. No road is straight, and each block has a different street name. Locals don't care about either, they will tell you it's 'down the street' but actually 2 miles in the other direction. We ran into lost locals tonight, which made me feel better.

2. The Tower of London isn't just a tower as I had originally imagined it. It is a small 'town' like walled-in grouping of amazing and oldness. To put lightly. Mix in a TON of history, stories, and eerie corridors and you have it. (I could go on, but I'm quite sleepy. Perhaps more later!)

3. No one uses paper towels. And toilets flush silly.

4. Bar food is incredible.

5. The accent never gets old.

6. I will never describe anything in Washington as 'old' ever again.

Here is a tiny selection of photos from the past two days-- we have tons!! Can't choose them all. Big Ben is spectacular at night. Thanks so much to Josh for letting us borrow his camera :)






So, here are a few of big ben and parliament-- and the gate in front of Buckingham Palace. More to come tomorrow!

Gettin' ready for Halloween

As always, I get ultra excited about pumpkin carving season. It's a close tie between getting to play in pumpkin guts and making art out of squash. Either way, we had fun this year! Bryan kept it traditional, and I tried my hand at making a dia los muertos pumpkin:









Also-- I had no idea how creepy my picture of trees was until it was photographed covered in spiderwebs with creepy pumpkins in front of it. Go figure! Very headless horseman-esque...

An Evening of Art

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to go see Art Chantry's exhibit and speech in Tacoma with my sister and her boss, Ken. Art's work is fantastic-- (I've seen it before, keeps getting better!) and the company was great as well! Always great to have a night out with Amy, and it's been awhile since I've gotten to see Ken (I took an intro to art class at Pierce right when I started getting interested in design... definitely got me excited about doing it for a career!) So fun overall! Art is an amazing speaker and always makes me want to go home and make things. Then throw them outside. Then Xerox them. Then make them AWESOME.

My sister and I:


Me, Ken, Amy:



Art:

A Wonderful Birthday!

Today ended a wonderful birthday weekend for myself! My actual birthday was today, but yesterday night I was super spoiled and had a few friends over for a night of pajamas and wine-- so much fun! A few of us found some particularily cozy footie pajamas (Dr. Seuss pajamas? Check.) and ended up having a great time! A few pics from the evening:




Tonight we went over to my parents for some pizza and relaxing, and also got to prepare for our food-on-a-stick potluck (the birthday celebration continues!)-- so, with the help of my mom's amazing pie dough recipe, I present pie pops! (courtesy of the wonderful Bakerella)



My mom has been on a pinning-marathon as well, and made some apple butter-- which I used in my pies! It tastes fantastic, I'm so excited to try them!



Walter helped, of course.







I am so luck to have such amazing family and friends! I'm feeling incredibly spoiled. Right now I'm finishing off baking the last batch of pie pops, snuggling with Bryan and watching Totoro... yup, it's been a great birthday :)

Dreaming again...

The neat thing about having a house that's been remodeled a few times is the interesting little nooks that are left behind. In our 60 year old house's case, it happens to be a rather large nook in the back of our kitchen. (Which; there is no photo of; partially because I'm feeling lazy, the other part being I don't care to show you that it's currently the spot my treadmill and recycling live-- and that the treadmill is more of a clothes rack these days) Woops!

If there's one thing I've learned whilst dreaming about extravagant things to do with this nook (mostly involving renovating our entire kitchen) it's that kitchen things are expensive. Countertops? Expensive. Cabinets? Especially expensive. And floors for a kitchen nearly the size of our living room it seems? Expensive. Which is why I'm currently dreaming about an idea like this:



Bam. Add a bit of drywall. A pocket door. (Heck, even regular pantry-type doors.) Some shelving/maybe a spiffy little stainless steel island from Ikea.) Easy-peasy. Sad, sad empty space that I keep my well-used treadmill dry my clothes in? Fixed. And pretty useful too I would say. (Because be honest-- who has room to have all their appliances out at the same time?! Half of mine sleep in the laundry room.)

So, added officially to the 'dream' list. Done.

Fence? Check.

It's official. After this morning, we screwed the handle on our new gate door-- our new fence is OFFICIALLY finished. Huzzah!









After the last week of craziness, it was nice to relax this weekend-- even if it was because of our poor puppy being out of commission. Yesterday Walter left the realm of the 'studs'... and has been laying the guilt on pretty thick. It's definitely working. Yesterday he spent five solid hours laying on one of us... (that's my foot in the pic below, looks a tad odd) but its well worth it. He's not as drugged looking today but still pretty slow-moving. Poor puppy!