Life lesson: never leave leftovers unattended...overnight

So I made the crowd-pleasing chicken enchiladas last night for dinner, along with cheese biscuits and green beans, and afterwards decided I didn't feel like cleaning everything up (let me just tell you, it looked like i had cooked for twenty people there were so many things piled on top of each other in that tiny place) so I decided to wait and Chad and I proceeded to watch the Shawshank Redemption for his last night off for a while (watch that movie if you haven't seen it...great movie. not for the kids though...). Anyways after I said my "Ugh I'll just clean it up later" we talked about how its funny that Mom's are always in the kitchen afterwards scrubbing and loading the dishwasher and always say "Let me just clean up before ______". How silly, just put it off....how naive we are.

Well I learned why moms say this. This morning, on our way out the door, I realized I had forgotten to put away the rest of the ENTIRE dish of leftover enchiladas (about 5 or 6) that we had planned on being our meals for the next couple days. So that is strike one, no meals. Strike two came later this afternoon when I walked in from class to the smell of food, and not the good smell of "mmm fresh baked cookies!" or "wow apple pie!" or anything even remotely close. It was more like a "wow your trash really needs to be taken out soon..." smell. Strike two. The third was when i gave in and finally started cleaning up. Trying to rather. I rinsed, I scrubbed, I tried to conquer all of the disgusting smelling crusty leftover food stuck all over everything, finally accomplishing the task about an hour later. There is still one pan sitting on top of the stove that I didn't see and refuse to wash yet. My hands are still recovering.

Ok so while that was a bit stretched as to how bad it was, I really do understand why everyone wants to clean up right after the meal and now I believe I will as well. I want to extend a thank you to my Mom and everyone else who has ever cooked for me. I appreciate your hard work, and I sympathize with all of you who have gone through this same catastrophe.

Cake and coral

The day after our one month I made Chad this cake for after he came home from work because I wanted it to be a surprise haha. I didn't have an actual icing spreader so i used a spoon...the icing i did get was the pre-mixed bag that seemed easy to squeeze and even advertised it on the bag, HOWEVER, after i got done writing the heart my hands were KILLING me and i still had all that to go. The original plan was to color in the baseball with the white...obviously i quickly changed my mind.

Alright we have our underwater pictures! I'm going to put a few up here but i'll put a lot up on the webshots site too!

^There is the stingray we saw!

Well, this is the shark...the little round ^

head is poking out at the bottom. The

picture is so bad because I really was

freaked out....

[as a note...this is the first time i've done pictures on here so thats why they are so crazily placed haha]

One month down...

It's officially our one month anniversary. One month ago right now we were partying at the reception! Our personal finance teacher must have gotten wind of our exciting day because class was cancelled. How sweet of him :). Tonight we are planning on going out to eat - first night out as a married couple just the two of us since we've gotten here. So we'll do that and then we were going to partake in the $3 movies but there isn't anything out even worth that so we are just going to take it easy and rent a movie and have some dessert. Sounds good to me! Chad came downstairs earlier with a gift bag and handed it to me...part anniversary part birthday gift. It was a Cardinals jersey!! We had been looking for ones with Rick Ankiel's name and number (24) because he is my favorite player and hadn't been able to find one so i was quite thrilled. I've already planned on wearing it tomorrow which is exciting because I'll get to sleep in an extra 9 minutes knowing that I wont be trying on ten different outfits haha. Oh the joys of being a girl...

On a random note...bad things come in 3's right? Well i had my third this morning. I have broken glass for 3 days in a row now. First was a glass bottle i accidentally left in the freezer which exploded, second was a glass container which fell out of the refrigerator when i opened the door and shattered everywhere, and then today, as i pulled out the coffee container, it hit one of our glasses on the cupboard which fell and shattered and then some all over the counter (don't worry, not one of our nice glasses!). Good grief. But hopefully this streak has ended!? We can't afford to loose much more....I've already vowed not to pick up our glass carafe for at least 5 years.

5 dryers full

Well so much for daily writing...there has actually been a ton going on, however, almost too much so that finding time to write down everything became a problem. And then i wasn't feeling well so typing was low on my to-do list. However, I am feeling wonderful now, my to-do list consists of laundry (which is currently washing...5 loads. thats right, 5) and homework, and so I figured taking a few minutes on here wouldn't be too bad. At least I'm getting something productive done at the same time. And it's the weekend- who does homework at 7 on a friday night. Alright so LAST weekend, on Sunday night, we had 2 people over, one being my cousin Steven and the other is one of Chad's good friends Peter. Chelsie said she was coming over later but the 4 of us hung out until then. I was trying my hand at cooking again - this time with poppy seed chicken which Chad mentioned he loved. Now not only had I never cooked poppy seed chicken before, I don't think I have ever actually had any. The only thing I knew about it was that you could get in trouble with the cops if you had to take a test after eating poppy seeds...but why the cops would give you a urine test if you didn't even seem remotely tipsy is beyond me. Anyways it seemed like it was going well but the recipe called for 8-10 chicken breasts. Now, if we had 14 people over, maybe. But we had 4. 4 people eating 10 breasts of chicken is ridiculous. So i decided to cut that waaay down but being the genius i am, had already mixed together the regular amount of cream of chicken and cream of mushroom soup. SO i just added chicken until it looked decent (not really knowing what it was suppose to look like in the first place) and then poured it in the 9x13 pan....and it barely covered the bottom. So my expert cooking knowledge told me this wasn't right so i put it in an 8x8 instead...where it was very thick. I just didn't care anymore but then made the "topping" of smashed Ritz crackers, butter, and poppy seeds which didn't cover all of the 8x8 even so i was just thoroughly confused. Of course this was the night people were actually judging my cooking abilities for the first time, of course. OH well, it cooked and i was frantically mixing up the garlic cheese biscuits and sticking them in an over that was about 100 degrees cooler than they were suppose to cook in but couldn't do anything about it because i even had the toaster oven occupied with our baked potatoes (first time for that as well). Whew. Anyways it came out of the oven and was rather soupy at first but set up a little bit, but we served it in bowls since it was runny. And guess what, everyone loved it, the cheese biscuits were gone and they were asking if there were any more. Yess. I thought it was a little salty but everyone else loved it, had seconds, and made compliments! So i guess it was a good night overall. :) After that we went out in our "backyard" which is HUGE, but technically not "ours" because its shared by the entire apartment complexes and Harding intramural fields...but it looks like its ours! So we went out in the back and played bocce in teams - Steven and me, Chad and Peter. Steven and I won of course, ha. [OH and just for those of you who know my mosquito problem...before we went out i COMPLETELY doused myself in bug spray....i received 3 bug bites that night. Unbelievable.] We came in and then taught Steven how to play Settlers which ended up being pretty fun....I won :) Chelsie came in towards the beginning and brought dessert! It was sugar cookie crust with cream cheese and strawberries, bananas, and blueberries on top. SOOO good! So she watched as we played the rest of the game and then afterwards we played this card game called Swap. Basically we coined this game as "uno for dumb people". It's the same as uno except only colors...no numbers. So we all felt like we were in the first grade again and it was hilarious because we were just cracking up at how dumb we felt playing the game....which therefore made us laugh and have fun in the process. So its been an inside joke to keep asking people if they want to come over and play swap. Whew...that was sunday night. Monday is my long day - 2 horrible classes and then art at 4:30 for two hours which has the most uninteresting teacher ever. So after that adventure I came home and then around 7 people started coming over for our second "smovie" night with Steven, Peter, Chelsie and one of her roomates and then one of Chad's roomates Barrett and the girl he's dating Shay. Full house. This time Chad wrote out a menu that had 3 smoothies on it to choose from and then one joke smoothie that had garlic, canola oil and some other stuff in it. He named it after one of the girls there which went over real well haha. So all the smoothies were made and drank and then we decided on the movie Clue and yes, we watched all 3 endings. It was good, nothing i'd beg to see every weekend but it was good. Then people left randomly but everyone was gone around 11:45. Tuesday I made this really good chocolate fudge cake which turned out great but its one of those that you just add water so I want to try it again with milk instead so it tastes a little better. Chelsie hung out at night to keep the streak alive of seeing her haha but then Wednesday is when I wasn't feeling well so no one came over then. But yesterday Chelsie came back over when Chad was at work and fixed me dinner! It was so sweet :) we had chicken fingers and this 4 cheese rice that was really good. She also fixed croissants and we just hung out and ate and talked and then I had a bunch of homework to do so she left and then a little while later Chad came home. Not much besides that has gone on besides all that and school/work. I've been job hunting - applied to 3 places so far so tomorrow I'll be going to more places. Thursday in financial aid we went over this project that we have to do for next week. It consists of budgeting out EVERYTHING...finding out your income (including loans, checks, savings, etc) and all these things to pay with food and school and insurances and cars and every single tiny thing...and we both just sat there overwhelmed and thats the day I was set on finding a job asap. I've been knowing I need to get one, but had a lot of stuff going on to keep my mind off of it - but that sure got me back on track. Hopefully something works out!