Fun (of the costume, furniture, and photoshop variety)

I have to say, it's been a pretty fun and relaxing weekend. Have I gotten anything on my "to do" list done? Well, no. Have I done a lot of Pinterest pinning and other fun but unnecessary tasks? Of course!

On Friday, the hubby and I had lots of fun at my school's Trunk or Treat event. It was fun to dress up and decorate the trunk (and you know I love decorating!) and the kids really had a blast. They pranced around in their cute little costumes, little princesses and spongebobs and pumpkins and bloody zombies with skin dripping off their faces(....okay,so  not every costume was cute. But hey, way to be creative!) and got tons of candy. There were a lot of kids -- we gave one piece of candy to each kid and went through five (!!) bags of candy. A good time was had by all, and I have to say, I believe Mario and Luigi were a huge hit!

Yesterday, my husband shocked me when he suggested we spend our day looking at furniture. (Who are you and what have you done with my husband?) I happily took him up on this offer. We checked out a few local furniture stores and went out to lunch. It was fun! Since we're moving into a much bigger place and it's our first "grown up" house, we have a lot of furniture to buy. We took a ton of pictures and enjoyed dreaming about where everything will fit in our beautiful new home. We can't wait until it is finished!

Testing out all the furniture...please ignore my crazy face.
At this point, I had become a little silly.

Today, I'm supposed to be doing my lesson plans...clearly I'm still occupied with other things. Oh well, everything will get done eventually! I'm much more interested in playing with my new toy, Photoshop. I've been trying to learn how to use it...I want my pictures to have that professionally edited look. There are so many different types of edits in photoshop, it is kind of overwhelming. I discovered that you can use "actions" as shortcuts but I haven't quite figured those out yet and plus, most of them cost a lot of money (like, 130 bucks!). Buying photoshop itself was enough of an expenditure for now. 

I watched a few tutorials on how to improve your photographs, particularly of people. I practiced with a photograph of my sister I took a few years ago. I was pretty happy with how the edited version turned out!

Before (left) and After (right)

I guess now that I've had a little playtime, I should probably get to work. Gotta make sure I'm ready for the upcoming week with my fun fifth-graders!

Our First Place

Our life has been full of so many changes the past few months. It has been an interesting combination of totally exhilarating and completely exhausting. The emotional roller coaster has been running overtime!

One of the more exciting changes in our life is that we are going to become homeowners! After renting for four years we were getting pretty sick and tired of throwing our money away every month. Once we left our apartment in Blacksburg to head up back to good ol' northern Virginia, we knew we wanted to look for something more permanent and, well, ours!

After searching high and low for our perfect place, we made the choice to build a new single family home. The upside to this (and a really fun part, too!) is that we get to choose everything - our floors, cabinets, countertops, upgrades, location of outlets, basically anything that is within our budget to change. And, when we move in, it will be clean and pretty and brand new! The downside is that it takes a lot of time to build a house from scratch...and that is how we've wound up crammed into one of the upstairs rooms (my brother's old room, to be exact) at my parent's house. Don't get me wrong, I am super grateful to my parents for allowing us to live here rent free. However, it is a little tough to go from living on your own in a two bedroom townhouse (albeit a rental) to packing all your stuff into one room and being around your parents all.the.time.

We can't wait until December, when our house will hopefully be finished. For now, here are some progress pictures!

Start of construction, early October...digging the hole where our house will go!

House progress Oct. 15th...foundation walls are in!

View of the neighborhood

Photo Walk

A beautiful fall day inspired me to take a photo walk around the neighborhood. My newly purchased Adobe Photoshop CS6 helped motivate me, too. I just love the way my photos turned out! (Turns out teachers get a huge discount on photoshop and other adobe software...who knew!?)