Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! We celebrated the holiday with some friends from the law school on Saturday. Dave was a leprechaun and I was a skeleton (both costumes were reprises from past Halloweens). The party was so fun that today actually feels a little anti-climatic--the only festive thing I've done today is allowed myself to snitch a few more pieces out of the candy dish at work than I usually do. Isn't it funny how holidays kind of get that way when you are older?

Not that they still aren't fun or silly of course. Just maybe a little less...magical.
Still Halloween has made me realize that the Holiday season has officially started. They always say that the Holiday season makes you a little more homesick and it came as a surprise to me that even Halloween made me a little nostalgic for some of our friends and family.

 Pictures from Halloweens Past

Anyways, I thought I'd include a picture of the appetizer I made for the party.

All you need to do is add some parsley, sliced up pimento stuffed olives, and paprika to your favorite deviled egg recipe and you have bloody alien eyeballs!

First Foray into DIY--Complete!

The table and chairs are done! (And have been done for awhile, but it took me much longer to remember to buy new batteries for the camera so that I could show off the finished product).

I am so pleased with how it's turned out, and slightly torn on what to do next--sand, paint, and get new hardware for our dressers, paint our bookshelves so that they aren't all different colors anymore, or reclaim the old seat cushions for our chairs by sewing a cover for them and turning them into a doggy bed (not that we have a dog yet, but that would bring us one step closer, right?). I've also considered doing a variation on this: Possible Next Project.

A Somewhat Lazy and Sickly Saturday and Sunday

Lately it seems like there is a bug going around all of Gainesville. Me, Dave, all of the lawyers at work, half of the little kids in nursery, and various other friends and acquaintances have all gotten sick in the past few weeks. Hopefully we're all just passing the same thing around and once we get better that will be the end of it. With all the people getting sick it's been hard to pinpoint who exactly gave it to me, but Dave's been sick since Monday or so and I've been sick since Wednesday. We both bravely slugged it out until the weekends, since neither of us could really spare time away from work or school.
Dave is already halfway through his first semester and finals are steadily approaching (gasp!). He is buckling down and working on his outlines in addition to all of his other homework. Yesterday he had to drag himself out of bed to go to 8AM mock jury duty on a murder trial (I wonder which is worse--real jury duty or mock jury duty. I bet if it was real jury duty they would have let him off for being sick).
I've been pretty busy with work myself. Just in the last few weeks, I've helped to launch a smart phone App, write, edit and shoot new commercials, and handle a bunch of new criminal clients. I like that it's busy though, since it makes time go by quickly, I get to learn lots of new things, and it means that the firm is doing well. This past week the Office Manager and the paralegal in the criminal department started a very long vacation, which has left me and the secretary (who is also a recent hire) to take care of things while she is gone. So far things are going well, and even if it is a little stressful, I like the variety and dealing with all of our interesting clients.
Still, with work and school and being sick I definitely wasn't super motivated to do much this weekend besides drink lots of OJ and take advantage of the fact the Netflix now has the series Wonder Years on instant play. I won't embarrass myself by saying how far into the 2nd season I already am, but suffice it to say, it's just as good as I remember it being as a kid.

Wild Life

One of the things I really like about living in Florida is all the nature. I know I've mentioned a little bit before about the different creatures we have living around our apartment complex, but I am still consistently surprised at how many crawling, creeping things I run across when ever we've outdoors--not literally of course, although the amount of dead armadillos I've seen out here have shattered my apparent (mis)conception that they only live in Texas. A few weekends ago we participated in a small service project with our church at a woman's shelter that was kind of off the beaten path. After splitting up into groups, our group was assigned to clean out and organize and bunch of outdoor sheds. Opening the doors of the first one revealed a practice menagerie of insects and reptiles. I saw tiny frogs, huge carpenter ants, a six-inch lizard, and lots of little half-inch lizards. The floor was covered in dirt and white ant eggs, which understandably grossed everyone out, but I bravely volunteered to sweep it out. It gave me that feeling that something was crawling on my skin, but I sucked it up for charity's sake. While I was in there the large lizard attacked and slowly ate one of the small ones. It was like the Discovery Channel, except inside of a shed. I wish I had a camera with me so I could gross you all out. I do have some awesome turtle shots, which I don't mind sharing. Not quite as scary but still neat.

P.S. when I first took these photos I thought it was cool that such animals lived in the pond next to our apartment. We've since met a couple from our ward that has two baby alligators that live in the pond by their apartment complex. They feed them bread, and I am excited to see them. Even though my Dad likes to lecture me about staying away from ponds because he thinks I will fall in and get eaten. Not like I ever fell into ponds or anything similarly clumsy as a child....