It's Quiet Here

Daniel is on a hiking/camping trip this weekend. He left early this morning. So I've got tons of free time! I'm filling it up with fun things like laundry, craft projects, and facebook. =) Actually, laundry is no fun, and it shall never be fun. But it is filling up some of my time.

I am looking forward to Christmas and I've been listening to Christmas music at work during the day. I have created a few awesome Pandora stations that are perfect, and our house is totally decorated. 1- because we love Christmas so much, and 2- because we didn't really have any other weekend to do the decorating. Our schedules are crazy.

So to get you guys (all two of you...) excited about Christmas, here are some videos!







My favorite Christmas cartoon.

Four Things

I coped this from a friend of mine. Hers was way more interesting though...






Four jobs I've had:
1. Waitress
2. Spray tanner
3. Bank Teller
4. Imaging person


Four places I lived:
1. Mansfield, AR
2. Malvern, AR
3. Fayetteville, AR
4. Rogers, AR


Four places I'd like to live:
1. North Carolina
2. Colorado
3. Ireland
4. Hawaii


Four movies I've watched over and over:
1. Zoolander
2. Office Space
3. Waiting
4. The Princess Bride


Four shows I watch:
1. The Office
2. Community
3. Lost
4. 30 Rock


Four places I've been:
1. Paris, France
2. Niagra Falls
3. The Rocky Mountains
4. North Carolina


Four people who e-mail me regularly
1. Freddy
2. Jewel
3. Daniel
4. Heather


Four favorite things to eat:
1. Italian food
2. Chips and Salsa
3. Hyper Stripe Popsicles
4. Cheesecake



Four places I'd rather be:
1. at home being artsy craftsy
2. snow skiing
3. in Hobby Lobby
4. with Family


Four things I'd do with 1 million dollars:
1. Save it
2. Travel
3. Invest it
4. Pay stuff off


Four things I look forward to this year:
1. Thanksgiving
2. Christmas
3. Baby showers
4. Family time/making memories

FOR SALE!

1997 Honda Accord LX.

193,000 miles

4 door

Automatic

4 cylinder

Power windows/locks

Great mileage, between 25-32

Original radio/tape deck

Only two owners, including myself

ONLY $3,250!

Email me at mandyhamrick@gmail.com with any questions.

Customer Service

The other day I was at Wal Mart getting groceries, and getting ingredients for a dessert I wanted to make. The recipe called for Lady Fingers, but Wal Mart didn't have any. Actually, the lady I asked in the bakery was pretty rude. So I went online and Google'd Harps. they had an email address you could email with questions. I sent them an email, and it has proved to me that they go above and beyond to help customers find what they need. Here's the conversation.




Does Harp's carry Lady Fingers of any kind?

Thank you
Mandy



Dear Mandy,

Thank you for visiting our web-site and for your interest in our bakery products. We do carry Lady Fingers in select stores. They are unfilled and come 12 to a package for $1.99. If you will tell me where you shop, I will make sure we have some for you.

Best Regards,

John C.

Director of Bakery and Deli Operations




John,

Thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly! I live in Rogers and have not visited any of the Harp's stores in the area yet. Is there one close by in the Rogers area?

I also was wondering if Harp's carries Provel cheese. My mother lives in Farmington and was wondering, so I told her I would try to find out.

Thanks again for the quick response!

Mandy




Dear Mandy,

I would recommend our Harps store at 715 N. 2nd Street in Rogers.

John F.- Bakery/Deli Manager-Rogers (Not the same John as before)

John F.,

Do you stock Provel at your store? Also, please let me know if you have Lady Fingers in stock so I can tell Mandy. Provel is available through Kehe or DPI.


Thanks,
John C.




John C. , I do have Lady Fingers in stock. The Provel cheese, I will need to order and get in. The quickest time I will be able to receive the cheese is on 10-27-09. Thanks for sending the business my way. John F.



Hi Mandy,

Our store on 2nd street in Rogers has the Lady Fingers you were looking for and will be ordering in the Provel for next week.

Thank you for your business!

John C.





So there you have it. They went to a lot of trouble just for me to make a dessert, and for my mom to have some cheese. So, if there is a Harp's near you, please go there and buy something from their bakery. It's the least I can do to thank them for helping me out.

My New Favorite Website

A friend of mine recommended this website (blog) to me a few weeks ago, and ever since I have been addicted. I check it daily for new posts, and explore all the past posts during the rest of my day. It is one of the best sites I have seen in a long time. It's just hilarious.

Check it out.

http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/

School House Rock

I used to watch this show when I was a kid! (along with everyone else in the nation..) This video is actually how I learned the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution. In the fifth grade, our teacher made us listen to it and memorize it for a week, then we could either sing the song or just recite the words. It has stuck with me since the fifth grade! I didn't sing it, I just chose to recite the words. I did hate listening to everyone sing though.

Video

My niece and nephew LOVE this guy. He's a Christian comedian.

Busy

We've had a lot going on! From working a little over time here and there, having people over for dinner and such, busy weekends, busier evenings, cleaning house, etc. One of the major tasks we've had is selling our living room seating furniture, and buying new. We had Daniel's old couch and recliner, and a hand me down chair and a half. They were fine, but we really wanted something bigger and nicer. So we decided to get a sectional! I'll post a picture in a later post. (the computer I'm on doesn't have the photos on it and I don't want to mess with it right now...)

After we bought the sectional (2-3 week wait for delivery) we decided to get all of our carpet shampoo'd. (shampooed..?...shampood?.....) That was a HUGE event. We had to move everything but the guest room in to either the garage or hallway. We couldn't move the living room entertainment center because it's too heavy, so we sat in lawn chairs to watch tv for a couple of days. Then the sectional finally came in! It's great. We had also decided to rearrange our bedroom furniture. We love it.

Everything has settled down and it's just in time for SCHOOL!!! Booo. I just want to be finished. I'm taking History of the American People to 1877. My class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work, so I start in 2 days! Just ready to be done.

I don't really know where I'm going with this post much...so I will end with an awesome explosion of the late 80's/early 90's.

D C TALK!

Rainy Day

We're having a great day being lazy, hanging around the house. I haven't put any make up on today. It feels great.

I have watched this video countless times, and could watch it every day and still laugh out loud. Hilarious. Also, this is my first time to attempt to put a video on here, so let's hope it works. Thanks to my friend Jana for the "how to" on this! Here goes nothing!!

Furniture: SOLD

Thanks everyone for your interest, but we have sold the furniture I was "advertising" in my last post.

Thanks!!!

FOR SALE!

We decided to buy a sectional so we could have a little more seating, so we're selling our furniture!

Couch, recliner, chair and a half with ottoman.

BUY THEM! =)

We're asking $200 for everything. Email me with questions or if you want more pictures.

mandyhamrick@gmail.com

Nice Little Saturday

The most I got accomplished today as far as household chores was the laundry. I managed to do every bit of it, washed, dried, folded, and put away. That is an accomplishment to me. It seems to take me a couple of days to get it all done most of the time. There wasn't a whole lot else that needed to be done, so I decided to make a couple of things I had been wanting to make. The first was salsa.

I had gone online to http://www.allrecipes.com/ and looked up several of the plain tomato salsa recipes. I gathered what I liked from most of them and decided to make my own concoction. I must say, it was a lot more work than I thought but it was my best salsa yet. Oh man it was delicious.

I began with quartering my tomatoes (from my back yard garden, by the way) and then broiled them a bit.


Before




After

I also stuck a halved home grown jalepeno in there to broil as well. I diced it and half of an onion, cut the tomatoes into smaller pieces, added a dash of salt and pepper, a large handful of chopped cilantro, a couple of tablespoons of lime juice and a dash of cumin..and......

Salsa!

It was delicious!

I got bored again around 6pm and decided to make another recipe. I have a recipe (again on the website) for "Whoopie Pies" which are like home made oatmeal cream pies. I didn't have any oats, so I found a recipe for chocolate chocolate chip cookies. I left out the chocolate chips, made the cookies, made the filling, and created my own Little Debbie snacks!! Ohhh Daniel was so proud. They were really good and adorable.

Where am I?

Ok, I feel stuck.

Not literally stuck like "My car is stuck in the mud" but stuck like I am walking along only to realize that this path doesn't really go anywhere. And then I look around and there's nothing but grayness all around me, no color, no trees, just "blah". And I'm going no where. I spend all day trying to get somewhere and just go in circles. But then I get home and it's like I have (what seems like) 12 minutes to do everything I have been dreaming of getting done, but there's never enough time. And the timer goes off after the 12 minutes is over to tell me "it's time to get ready to go back to purgatory."

I feel stuck.

First, you can probably guess I am feeling this way about my job. Let me clarify, I do not have an awful job! It is very secure, there is a lot of opportunity there, and the people are very friendly. I even have a very nice boss. The thing is, the work that I actually DO pins me to my computer the entire 8 hours I am clocked in. It is very monotonous and never exciting, extremely predictable and flat out boring. Yet what I do is vital to the entire company. So, why am I even talking about this? I don't know, maybe I feel like talking about it will make me feel better, maybe I am hoping that someone will come along and say "You're in luck! I happen to have an opening for your dream job and there's NO INTERVIEW!"........maybe I'm just whining. I just wonder if anyone else has felt this way.

I enjoy being able to help people in a way where I can see it happening and can see the result. I cannot see myself helping anyone there considering that I never see anyone while I'm there. At the branches, you could help people all day long, but the branch had it's down side too. (as does every job) Everybody was in everyone elses business and it caused drama a lot, and I always like everyone to be happy all the time. It was hard for me. On the other hand, your days would fly by, and even if they were slow, at least you had down time. There is never any down time in my job. There's always work to do. In fact, there's so much work, they make you take breaks for you to get away for 10 minutes. You would think that with all that work time would fly by....but you try sitting at your desk looking at page after page on your screen typing in account numbers and going to the next page to do the same thing over and over and over....

I don't guess I even know where I'm going with this. All I know is that I feel frustrated and stuck. It is a good job for me to have and it has been good for the family (no working saturdays, no hour long commutes, more money) but it's still hard to do it. I am going to school in order to have an opportinuty to do something I enjoy, but I am crawling at a snail's pace with one or two classes each semester. I feel like I'll never be close to graduating.

Daniel and I have talked about it and he understands how I feel. We're just in a weird place right now and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to change it. I am trying to be positive but with all the negativity I encounter every day (everywhere) it makes it mind numbing. I try to think of the reason why things are like this. There always seems to be a reason for things. God, can you maybe let me in on the reason? I just need to know that there IS a reason...please? Maybe? Just tell me something like "This is preparing you for the best job ever, so you will appreciate what you have when you have good things" or maybe "This is going to teach you how to deal with the mediocre" or even "This job will help you when you interview for a position when you're 43 years old." Something!!

After thinking on these things, I went to (in my opinion) one of the best books of the Bible: James. Here is what I found and it seems to fit.


James 1

2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. 4 Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. 6 But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.


I guess I do need to take this to heart more.

Thank you! / I'm sorry

HOORAY!!! I do have readers! Thank you so much for reading AND posting comments!! I'm sorry that I had no idea anyone made comments... I am used to getting email notifications when people write on my wall or send me messages or comment on Facebook, so I don't get any on here therefore I have to go in and check to see if anyone posts comments. (There may be a way to set that up, but I haven't figured it out yet.)

As you can see I have taken your helpful advice and made some changes to my blog. Thank you! It was very easy to do once I figured it out. Pretty awesome.

Random: When I was in college I found a few websites here and there that I bookmarked on my computer. Now that I use Daniel's computer all the time, I never get on mine so I don't see those bookmarked websites. Well, I got on my computer tonight and took a trip down memory lane to find a pretty cool site! I thought I would share it for fun.

Uncommon Goods http://www.uncommongoods.com/

Anniversary, Cookouts and Fireworks

Well, we made it through the week!! We had our second anniversary on June 30th and we decided to take the day off from work and head to Tulsa to visit the zoo! It really was a super fun day!

The sloth was sleeping while hanging. lol

These bats were hanging right above our heads.

The poison dart frogs in the rainforest exhibit were my favorite!!! You could have reached out and grabbed one if you wanted...then possibly died from the poison..but still, so cool.

This bird was wandering around.

The pink flamingo's reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.

My favorite animal of all time!

After the zoo, we cooled off at Jamba Juice, went to a Super Target (has a grocery section, and everything), then caught Transformers II at the Tulsa IMAX! This was Daniel's first IMAX movie and he loved it. We went to Red Robin for dinner then headed home around 8pm. It was a great anniversary.

On the Forth of July, we had almost everyone in Daniel's family and my family over for a cookout! It was a blast. We had a great time together.

Later that night we went to the Arvest Ballpark to catch the fireworks show. I have an amazing setting on my camera for taking photos of fireworks. It takes the photo over a span of a few seconds. Amazing.

Finale!!

On Sunday we had a birthday bash for my sister, Laura who turned 35 on Monday the 6th. Happy birthday sis!!!

My Favorite Show

I love the show "Wipeout"! You go through one obstacle course after another until someone is left standing to win $50,000. Awesome. Here are some awesome photos.

Baby News!

No, we're not pregnant. But my brother and his wife are!

(They realized they spelled Christmas wrong after the fact...still cute though!)

They told all of the family today! We were all holding hands and having our Sunday lunch prayer, and little did we know that when Dad said "Amen" we would look up and see a message on their shirts!! So surprising! What a cute way to tell us! Dave's wife Sarah is due December 23rd and we are all so very excited.

Today was also Father's Day! It was a good day. Dad had a great time and Dave really thought it was a special one since he is almost a daddy himself. Here are a few pictures of Dad with his gifts.

We had a blast and really enjoyed being with the whole family.

So I need some help. Does anyone know how to customize your blog a little better? For example, I wanted a background of my own, one that wasn't from the few I can choose from on here. Can you tell me how to do that? That would be great. Also, can you explain to me on how to create a list of link's to other people's blogs that will appear on my blog? That would also be great.

Ok, that's all the questions I have for now.

Quick Post

It's been a while since my last post. I apologize to all five of you who read this blog...which makes me want to address something...

Would anyone else like to follow my blog? Come on, you! You know you want to. I've recently found some friends blogs, and have added them to the blogs I follow. I just wanted a few more followers myself.

Summer has arrived, and we are enjoying every minute of it that we can. Our back yard and patio are looking fabulous, (will post a picture soon) and we have nightly popcicle dates together. Daniel loves popcicles. We talk about our day, discuss future plans for the house and our lives, tell each other the joke that is on our popcicle stick, and enjoy all the work we have put into our yard. Speaking of our yard...

We have a vegetable garden! We're growing tomatoes, jalepenos, okra, broccoli, and strawberries. So far we have enjoyed a few ripe strawberries. Two jalepenos are almost ready to be "harvested", and we've got an explosion of little green tomatoes everywhere. As far as the okra and broccoli go, well, nothing's happening with them so far except plant growth. I guess that's a good thing though. I am really looking forward to the day where I can make actual garden fresh salsa.....ahhh....OH and we have herbs too! Cilantro, garlic chives, lavendar, mint, chocolate mint, and pinnaple mint.

I will leave it at that for now. More to come later this week!

Spring? With snow?

What is up with this weather! I cannot stand it when it starts to get nice and warm and things are greening up, just so it can snow again. Grr. We had to cover our flower bed in the front because some of the plants had already started to come back and start growing. Better safe than sorry!

I've been super busy with school lately. I had my first mid term on the 20th (Biology) and I'm just glad it's over. Didn't do so well...but that's neither here nor there. (..what does that even mean?...) I took that day off because we were heading to Branson for the weekend! So I took my test at 9 am, ran home, and we were out the door by 11! We got all the way to Garfield when Daniel realized we left our tickets to Silver Dollar City at home! We were going there the next day with his entire family! So we turned around to go back home and get them. Good thing, because we got there and I found all of Daniel's clothes hanging on the closet door. He had left them and wouldn't have had any clothes in Branson!

We had a blast though. It rained all day on Saturday while we were in SDC but we still had a great time. Sunday we met my parents at the malls and shopped a while before heading home. Here are some photos of SDC!