Thankfulness!

Last week was full of thankfulness. There was lots of time spent with friends, family and resting. I had the whole week off and enjoyed every minute of it. Lots of things got done during those days off... lots of Christmas shopping, Christmas decorating, gathering addresses for Christmas cards, cleaning the house. It was great to be productive.

On Friday before Thanksgiving, our friends, Mark and Shevawn, hosted a "Wii are Thankful" party. It was so much fun to have couple's tournaments on the Wii, we ended up playing for 5 hours. Craziness, but the winner of the night, took the Wii for Thanksgiving week. Sadly that wasn't us, but congrats are in order to the Libby's. Hopefully there will be pictures of the event soon.

The next few days were spent shopping... Zach and I have marked off almost everyone on our list. It's a good feeling to have that done. Now I just have to get Zach's presents and I think he's still working on me as well. ;-)

Wednesday, Zach had to work from 10am-7pm. We were hoping that he would have the early shift, but it ended up being smack in the middle of the day, so we decided to leave for Memphis on Wednesday night when he got home from work. The car was packed by the time he got home and we headed out the door and were on our way by 7:30pm. It made for a long drive, but we arrived in Marion, AR at 2:45am at the same time that his brothers drove up. All four of us piled into the house with all of our dogs and crashed. The weekend was spent with lots of food, family and 7 dogs. (Mind you 3 of those dogs were puppies that were only 4 days old.) It was a good Thanksgiving spent with Zach's family and we were glad to be able to make the trip. We also got to see Zach's best friend, Curtis, who is newly engaged to his wonderful girlfriend, Jessica. What a blessing they are to each other. Very exciting! Too bad there are no pictures to show for the weekend. Saturday morning, after a full two days spent with Zach's family, we got up at the crack of dawn and were out on the road by 6:30am. Zach again had to be at work at 2pm. We made it home by 1:15pm and were exhausted. We were just thankful to be home safe and sound. God provided for us along every point in the trip and made it a wonderful time.

I'll leave you with the pictures of our Christmas decorations around the house for the first time...


Zach and I will celebrate 2 years in about 3 weeks. Time flies when you're having fun!


Our tree fits so much better in the house, than in the apartment. I love it!


My favorite star lights from IKEA... if I could I would buy every star that I could get my hands on.


I've never had a banister to decorate. It's kinda cool!

Penguins from Target... one of my favorite places!

Hope that everyone else had a great time decorating. It's going to be a great holiday season!

Storage Solution

Alright, this is long overdue. These are finally some pictures of the office. There are two corners of this room that I will not publish yet because they are just not up to par yet. But this is the latest addition to the Shirley household.

We had storage problems with cds and dvds. We also had disagreements on how they should be stored... SOOO... last weekend we went shopping at one of my all time favorite stores, IKEA! They had everything that would could imagine as far as storage goes, but that had one very obvious choice for us because it was just so stinkin' cost effective... so we got eight shelves to hold cds and dvds and now they no longer take up space in the closet. What a wonderful solution. Take a look....


I will say that hanging the shelves on a diagonal was not my idea, but I went with it. The shelves are Kermit the frog green and gray. We are very thankful for the designers at IKEA for providing such wonderful storage solutions. Stay tuned for an update on the office once it's finished!

Halloween 2007

A week later and we have a post about Halloween. Halloween was fun this year... Dave & Buster's accounting dept. had a dress up contest, so I thought that I would give it a try. Tuesday night before the big day, Zach and I rounded up some of his clothes and I made myself the perfect mechanic outfit complete with grease and a grease rag. It was great... below are some of the contestants... Tropical Depression, Harry Potter, D&B Baseball Player, Number Cruncher, and Calendar Girl. I'd say we're a pretty creative bunch in accounting. Anyway... I won the contest with my mechanic's outfit and Harry rounded up 2nd place.

On Halloween night, we dressed Bailey up for all of two seconds in order to take her picture. You can tell that she just really loves her outfit especially the little helmet. This was actually last year's fire hydrant costume. We decided not to get a new costume because we weren't going to be home for the evening to show her to trick or treaters. So what did we do you may ask...
We were the kitchen helpers at The Branch Fall Festival on Halloween night... we made hot dogs and nachos all night long. When we got to the church building all our friends asked if I was dressed up as "zach". Nobody at work asked that, but they just don't know him. My entire outfit though was Zach, no doubt!
The boys: Tyson, Josh, Mark and Zach.
The girls: Jessica, Sarah, me, and Shevawn.
And last but not least... we got Bailey a new toy this week at IKEA. You may think..... hmmm strange place to shop for dog toys. I will say though that this toy cost just as much as it would as a pet store and she loves it!!! The snake swallows her whole. The only stinky thing is that she has already put several holes in it. She also ripped the tongue out of it in the first two minutes of playing with it. It sure does keep her entertained though!