Author Archives: Elisabeth

About Elisabeth

The joyous and sometimes odd adventures of a former English teacher and her trusty sidekicks, Jared the Hottie Husband and her two Italian Greyhounds, Stinky Stevie and Bonnie Boo. Recently the adorable baby, Princess Evelyn, has joined the clan to shake things up!
Oct8

There’s an app for that…

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There’s an app for that…

Jared has this habit of looking at apps for my phone. (He got me the good phone first, and so he’s constantly suffering from phone envy. Here’s hoping that he gets his own awesome smart phone soon…) So, he’s been looking at all sorts of things that I can download for my phone that he wishes that he could have on his own.

The other day, he came across this app called “Paper Camera” that was Amazon’s app of the day recently. Meaning that you can download the app for free when it normally costs money. He told me that I should check it out and see if I wanted to download it to my phone. I didn’t really have time to “check it out” but it sounded intriguing, so I went ahead and downloaded it (after all, it was free, right?).

What it does is takes pictures, but instantly converts them to different styles. Case in point: My classroom.

This is Comic Book style.

Neon Cola style- takes the colors and turns it into neon-light sign style.

Going simplistic- Con Tours style.

You just select the method, and it immediately shows in real-time what the image would look like BEFORE you even take the picture. Sweet, no?

Still not sold? Just check THIS out!

Jared and the pups in Con Tours mode.

Jared in the family room- Sketch Up style

And if that doesn’t melt your heart, what normally looks like this:

 

Turn into this:

Okay, now you’ve got to admit it- that’s pretty dang awesome. And the subject matter therein is pretty much the dictionary definition of adorable.

Oct4

It’s been a week…

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It’s been a week…

You know that there’s something wrong with you when you look at your blog and go, “Wait! Why is that the top post?! Did it not save my latest few posts?!” and then realize: “Nope. I had a lot going on it my head, but was too busy to do anything with it.” Yes, I really did have that train of thought run through my mind.

Anyways, this past week has been insane. It was the end of the first grading period, and it almost did me in. The whole past week, I have had 7th grade papers as my constant companions. When I wasn’t grading, the thoughts of what I needed to grade haunted me. Poems, book reviews, and miscellaneous late work fluttered around me… and it was horrible. Even with these two hanging out with me as I tried to work hard:

Thanks for your patience with papers being all over the house (and pets), Jared. I know that was rough.

On the flip side, to balance out the misery and chaos created in my life by grading, this weekend was General Conference weekend for Church. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I was triple booked this weekend (between grading, my CTWP conference, and an amazing book festival going on within a hour of here) along with General Conference. And they were all important and/or meaningful things for me to be involved with. I had to make a conscious choice to choose Conference.

I always seem to enjoy the Saturday sessions more. And this year I was not disappointed. Within the first two hours of Saturday morning, I had several talks that felt like specific parts were addressed directly to the struggles and discouragement I have been facing. This year has had so many things go wrong, and I have never felt so hopeless or discouraged, even when I have tried so hard to focus on the good around me.

General Conference touched me and reminded me that all these things will pass. These issues and doubts that have plagued me are temporary, and that I can rise above it. I feel so lucky to have such easy access to inspiring and good people sharing simple truths about how to live our lives.

That, and the fact that grades have been officially submitted, make life a much happier place to be.

Sep25

A needed escape…

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A needed escape…

As per my last post, I’ve been really down. For a lot of reasons.

So, Jared decided that we could get away from the weekend. And since his work rented out Six Flags Fiesta Texas for today, he thought that might play in perfectly to my need to separate work from the rest of my life.

So I wasn’t able to get any work done, and I needed to be away from anything remotely school related SO badly.

Saturday morning we dropped the dogs off at the boarding place, and then drove to San Antonio, where we stayed in a B&B. We stayed with this particular place before a year ago, and they remembered us, which was cool.

We went out to dinner at Azuca, a rather expensive Caribbean restaurant, but the food was REALLY good. We got a rather wimpy appetizer (you’d think that if you ordered an $8.50 coconut shrimp appetizer, and there are two people, you’d get more than THREE medium sized shrimp!) and so we were worried about the rest of the meal. But out came dinner’s MAIN course:

It looked better in real life, but believe you me, lots of food, and lots of GOOD, very tasty food. I couldn’t finish it!

We then went swimming in the B&B’s lap pool, which was amazing. I loved to swim when I was younger, but just haven’t really been able to do that in a long time. It felt so good just to swim and be in a pool and do the different strokes (and know that I could still do them).

Then after showing so I didn’t smell like chlorine, I went to bed soon afterwards. Jared had to do some church-related work until pretty late, but I couldn’t handle the masks that were visible in the main room/kitchen area:

I mean, what’s not romantic about THIS wall?

Anyways, I was feeling pretty sick for various reasons, so I didn’t sleep very well. So even AFTER Jared came to bed, I was up a lot during the night, which left me a lot of time to ponder about what the heck this might be:

I think it looks kinda like a washed out chili pepper, but Jared said it reminded him of a snail. So I don’t know.

Anyways, this morning after breakfast, we spent the morning at Six Flags. It was awesome because our average wait was like 5 minutes or less, even for the BIG rides like Superman or Poltergiest. But between the 100+ temperature (because Texas still doesn’t realize it’s fall, yet), my headaches getting bad, and the fact that we got all the big rides and some of the small ones too, by 1:00 we were ready to come home.

Which we did.

And even though I have to go back to the real world tomorrow, which I am hating, I know that I have a wonderful husband who goes out of his way to make me happy and will always be there to catch me when I am down, like he did this weekend. Thanks, babe.