If you thought the
big snowstorm of 2013 was the most interesting thing to happen to us this past week, you'd be wrong. A whole lot of other great things happened this week. Let me show you!
Monday
Both Jonathan's and my extended families do a Christmas name draw every year. I haven't known a Christmas without it, and I wouldn't change the tradition for anything in the world! When we got married, I was thrilled to find out Jonathan's family does it, too! This Christmas Jonathan's aunt and uncle sent us Amazon gift cards. Could there be a better gift for a young couple working to outfit their new apartment?? We were thrilled and knew we wanted to use them for things we needed for our apartment. We waited until most of the kitchen items we'd gotten for our wedding arrived, and then looked through our stash to see what we still needed. Below is what we got: a bamboo utensil holder, a bamboo flipper (to replace Jonathan's plastic one from college that was getting pretty floppy and useless), a can opener, a spice funnel, and a hand-crank paper shredder.
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| Our awesome Christmas presents! |
I love them all, but guess which one I was most excited about?
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| Yep, the shredder, haha! |
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| It's cute and little AND my arms get a bit of a work-out each time I use it!! |
So then, what did I have to spend the rest of the day doing?? Why, going through papers from college and shredding those with too much personal info on them (like grade reports), of course!
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| How in the world did I get 100/100 on this French test when my essay had tons of corrections? |
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Apparently drawing the Vancouver Olympic symbol was more important than
taking notes in World Religions... (as was writing notes to Jonathan) |
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| The Recycle Pile at the end of the day |
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| The shredded remains |
Tuesday
So the big decision of my day was how to organize my office supply drawer. After we got the new utensil holder, we were going to give the plastic one Jonathan had from college (which was too small for our new silverware) to Goodwill. As I walked by it on Tuesday afternoon I had an idea that it could be repurposed into a office supply organizer, at least until I get the rest of my things. So before you know it I'd reorganized my drawer and loved the new look. Then I realized I hadn't taken a 'before' picture, and since I'm insane, I actually took a few 'after' pictures and then did another quick re-reorganize, putting all the things back the way I'd originally had them. The only problem was that I re-reorganized better than I had originally organized, and all the things fit into my drawer much better than they had at the start. So then I really had a dilemma: which option to choose? I just couldn't decide, so I left it up to my Facebook friends, haha. Most people voted for the silverware organizer, and I agreed that was the better choice anyway, since I was then left with the little white bins to organize the top drawer of my nightstand. Win-win, and now you get to see two pictures instead of one!
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| The reorganize (winner) |
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The re-reorganize (loser). Two of those little white bins are now in my nightstand
and the third is holding small cooking bottles in my kitchen cupboard. |
Wednesday
Two awesome things happened:
- A plumber/electrician from our church came over in the morning, and he and Jonathan worked together to fix our blocked-up washer drain. It took them two hours, but they finally got the blocked section cut out, then rigged up a new system with PVC pipes. Yay, we can do laundry here finally!! It is already a million times better than going to the laundromat. I am thrilled!
- We finally found the perfect pantry cabinet!! For about a month we've been looking for a pantry cabinet to add more storage space to our kitchen. We even bought one from Lowe's, brought it all the way up the stairs, and opened the box before realizing that flimsy thing was not going to work for us. Back to Lowe's it went, and I started keeping an eye out for a cabinet on Craigslist. My vigilance finally paid off this week when I spotted a cabinet for sale right in a neighbouring town. We called and it was still there, so we hurried off to pick it up. Getting it into the house was a little bit challenging, but we managed (mostly Jonathan's doing, haha), and then we spent a good portion of the afternoon reorganizing our kitchen and putting all our nonperishable food into the cabinet so we could put more of our dishes in the other cupboards. Ahh, it feels great to have a kitchen space that is useful and comfortable for us!
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| Freshly-washed laundry air drying (our electric dryer isn't hooked up yet) |
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| I love our new pantry cabinet! |
Thursday
Valentine's Day!! I love Valentine's Day (but I'll admit that I love every holiday - even Groundhog Day is special to me, haha)! But, that's enough for now, so more on that tomorrow! :)
