Melarky

A couple years ago, Valentines Day, Mark decided for my gift he would fill my night stand drawer full of chocolate. This was a perfect gift for me, it combined my love of chocolates and gluttony. All day Mark tried to get a second alone to make the switch from socks and underwear to chocolate. This proved hard because I wouldn’t leave him alone. It was Valentines Day and I wanted to spend every second with him (we were still kinda newlyweds). I remember he was trying to get me to go to the store. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to come, why he didn’t want to spend time with me. I remember at one point during the day, in his attempts to get “rid of me” I cried. The day was okay, definitely not what I expected. That night I got into my drawer for something and there were the chocolates. I was so surprised and happy, I said, “This is the best Valentines ever! No wait. It’s not, today was really crappy”. For weeks I ate the chocolates from my drawer and slowly they helped me forgive him for the kinda stinky first half of that Valentines Day.

Valentines Day is coming up (9 days to be exact). I enjoy Valentines Day. They’ve sure changed over the years especially with kids now, but my feelings have also changed towards the day (Marks thinking, “Awesome, I don’t have to get her anything”). When we were dating and even when we were first married I put too much emphasis into that one day. If Valentines wasn’t romantic, perfect, if he didn’t meet everyone of my expectations then I was disappointed. It didn’t matter that he did all those things 364 days out of the year, if he didn’t spoil me crazy with gifts, attention and romance on Valentines day he would be “in trouble”.

While out on a walk the other day I saw a trail of red rose pedals. They stopped in the middle of a bridge with a note that said open me. It looked sweet.

Over the years I realized that that one day, Valentines day, didn’t matter that much. I cared more about how he treated me the other 364 days. I’ve also learned, romance shouldn’t always be left up to him. I could plan a date and take him out. I could give him gifts, spoil him, show him that I love him. One time I surprised him with a sort of scavenger hunt where he had to find clues. The clues led him to me, sitting at Adam’s park with a pic nic dinner.

It’s fun coming up with special dates and activities that surprise him are specific to Marks likes, but reading someone else’s ideas doesn’t hurt especially if your adding a little romance into your marriage.

This site is great and they have many ideas for date night, romance, holidays and tons more! It’s really worth looking at for a minute.

I hope everyone has a great Valentines this year and remember to treat your husbands the way you want to be treated. Spoil them, surprise them, let them know you love them. And don’t be disappointed if Valentines doesn’t go quite how you expected. Communicate, be realistic, and maybe even take the lead this year.

P.S. to Marky. I didn’t say anywhere in there I wouldn’t accept a gift if you were thinking about giving one.

There is a built-in pop up flash on my camera and Wellington loves it when it pops up. He can’t take his eyes off of it as you can see in this picture.

Wellington came up with this next pose all on his own. He said in a whisper, “I’m dead.” (You can tell he’s dead cause his tongue is sticking out). He likes to pretend he’s dead sometimes (weird kid). He also likes to play hospital and get bandaged up. What a funny kid.

Dear Vista,

I’m not really sure how to tell you this but it’s time for you to leave. Ever since you were installed on our computer, you’ve been a bit of a pain. It’s not me, it’s you. No, I don’t think we can still be friends.

Please don’t call.
Melanie

P.S. Mark made a back-up of all our stuff, and wiped the computer of everything including you Vista. He now has installed Windows 7. Windows 7 seems like a way better OP system than you (Troy, I know your laughing. Or else your crying because I make you sad).

Wellington was so excited when I told him to jump on his bed then jump off his bed into some pillows. He thought it was great! Plus it gave me a chance to try out some things on my new camera. I’ve still got a ways to go when it comes to figuring out what’s what on the camera. Marky was so sweet and got two how-to books from borders the other day for me. I’m really excited to read those and get some more practice. Developing my photography skills has been a little dream of mine for a while.

From a young age I was interested in art. I remember being in my first art class in 5th grade. I loved it. I thought it was so cool to learn how to draw a cube instead of just a square. My favorite was to use a pencil to shade things and give them depth. My Dad, who is a bit of an artist himself, always encouraged me. We painted things together and used to attended art shows. Last summer we even went to the art walk together. My Dad still has a couple of my paintings hanging in his house right now. It’s always kind of funny when I go there and see things I did from way back, It makes me feel so loved that he still talks about and hangs up paintings I did from the 90’s.

I took art classes all through school. In 9th grade, my art teacher was Mr. Baker. He made a big impression on me, as well as the other kids in the class. I should give a little background, cause it’s hard to explain why Mr. Baker made such an impression on me without sharing some more of the story.
Click here to read the rest of this post…

I’m done, more than done, changing Wellington’s bum. I love him but changing his bum stopped being cute a long time ago. He turned three last November. I had these great plans of potty training him way before that (like by age two) but it never happened. Now that baby Hilyard is a little older, I feel like I can devote more time and attention to Wellington.

Gotta love Potty Scotty!

I’ve been kinda gearing up for this potty training stuff for a while. We would practice here and there and even made him a promise that if he went number twosies in the potty, he’d get a bike. Which he did finally get right as summer was winding down. A few months passed and sporadically he’d go in the big boy potty, but he was still basically in diapers.
Click here to read the entire potty post…

I got a new camera and here’s the first shot I took with it and here’s the second one (I had to get Hilly in there).

We watched the movie Fantastic Mr. Fox with Welly a little while ago, and he has been LOVING it (and it’s not so bad for adults either). In case you missed it, the movie is a stop motion adaption from a Roald Dahl book of the same name, directed by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, etc…).

Because the director doesn’t normally do kids movies I was a little worried about content, but after checking out the movie on kids-in-mind.com, I felt it would be ok to watch with Wellington. Good thing I checked too because Welly has been repeating tons of lines from this movie (like weird bizarre lines I wouldn’t expect him to repeat, i.e. there is a part in the movie where Mr. Fox is telling people their Latin names, and a fox is Vulpes Vulpes. Took me a while to figure out what welly was saying because he pronounces it “Bulpis Bulpis”, be he says it all the time).

There isn’t any swearing in the movie, but instead they use the actual word “cuss” to replace all cuss words (so a character might say “What the cuss is that?” or you might see “CUSS” spray painted on a building in the background etc…). That is as bad as it gets, and in my opinion is actually kind of funny, but I could see some parents not being crazy about it.

The animation is great, the voice acting is great, and the story is really fun (not just for kids, both Mel and I really enjoy it too). I sort of remember it coming out, but don’t remember hearing much about it, so it seems it has kind of flown under the radar, but it’s well worth watching if you get a chance. Below is a little featurette on the movie from youtube:

1020 W 200 N, Logan

When Mark took me for my first wrap at LW’s I was a little apprehensive about eating a meal at a truck stop. I was expecting chips slathered in nacho cheese sauce (absolutely nothing wrong with that), a variety of nameless and not too good looking hot dogs rolling around on a warmer. Now LW’s may have nachos and hot dogs and they might be wonderful, I’m not sure, the only thing I’ve had there is their wraps and this is what my review is about.

The wraps at LW’s stop are kind of like the poor man version of Pita Pit. It’s set up the same way as pita pit (or subway too), where you pick your tortilla wrap flavor (sun dried tomato is very nice) pick the main meat (we usually get turkey bacon, mmmmmmm it’s good) and then you go down the line telling them what fixings you want on it (lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, mayo, mustard, etc…). The wraps themselves were large and very tasty. I’ve only ever gotten turkey/bacon on mine. All the toppings (veggies, sauces, cheese) were all very good and seemed to be a good quality (what you would expect to find at Pita Pit or a Subway).

Besides wraps it looks like they have other hot deli type foods similar to like a grocery store deli (fried foods, chicken, potato wedges, corn dogs, etc.)

LW’s is a little out of the way. But for me, so is Pita Pit. Pita Pit is on the north end of town, while I’m on the South. LW’s is closer, but more West. But if you like Pita Pit’s wraps, but would like to spend a little less money (actually a lot less) and would maybe like to fill up your car too, I’d suggest trying LW’s truck stop.

P.S. Thanks goes to Gary for showing the wraps to Mark so he could share them with me .

Melarky has gone mobile. Installed last night, a great wordpress mobile plugin. We tried a few different mobile plugins with varying results, but ended up going with WPtouch, one catering more to our iphone and ipod touch friends (okay, it was installed for selfish reasons but hopefully others can enjoy it too) but it should run pretty well on the Android or Blackberry phones as well.

It runs super sleek on the iphone and has some pretty great features, some of which you don’t even get on the main site. You can easily scroll through posts, see right away how many comments on each post, you can leave comments, even twitter the post your reading. You can browse through categories, pages, search, and send a message to me that will instantly show up on my phone.

You might have noticed we also added a new feature on Melarky. If you look underneath each post there is a box with some links that say; “Similar Posts you may be interested in”. These links will take you to previous posts on Melarky that share common subjects with the post you are reading. This is also a wordpress plugin, that I had Marky slightly modify (he put a box around it and added the “similar posts” bit). It usually does a good job at finding a post that has a similar subject, but sometimes it can be a stretch.