It never lies...

Sorry Chad. The wheel has spoken.

I know the future thanks to this...

My sister gave me this Pottery Barn wheel a couple of years ago, mind you that she bought it with a Pottery Barn gift card I gave her, but that's neither here nor there. It's like a Magic 8 ball with the sayings like "YES. NO. ASK AGAIN LATER. SPIN AGAIN. SOON. SLEEP ON IT. NOW." and etc.. Dean and I have turned to our all knowing wheel on several occasions to seek guidance. We have tired it with many a question and as you will see, it is never wrong...

~

Is Dean going to be a Dr.? : YES

Is he going to be a very successful Dr? : COULD BE

Is global warming really a threat? :GET OVER IT

Was I meant to become a massage therapist? : SPIN AGAIN

I said, was I meant to become a massage therapist? : LATER

But I'm in school now. Should I quit? : YES

Are you a lying inanimate object who tries to demoralize your users? : SPIN AGAIN

Will we be able to pay off our student loans quickly? : FLIP A COIN

Does that answer mean we should gamble everything we have to double it and then pay off our student loans with our winnings? : YES

Are Dean and I going to have kids in the next couple of years? : YES

Am I pregnant now? : UNLIKELY

Is Dean pregnant now? : YES

Is he having twins? : MAYBE

~

See? I told you it's never wrong.

Just a glimpse...

It's a variable Where's Waldo in the library, but instead of Waldo, try to find my depressed husband who can only read books to drown his sorrow over his beloved deceased wife. This is the image you would probably in the Davenport Public Library should I die....

~

*A couple of days ago Dean randomly blurts...

Dean: "Honey, if you die I am going to become a homeless man, and I will live in the public library and sleep in the bathrooms at night."

chelle: "Really? How are you going to sleep in the bathrooms since they have people clean them? Don't you think they'll notice a homeless man on the floor in a stall?"

Dean: "I will hide in a back room and wait until they clean them and once they're out for the night, I'll sneak in"

chelle: "Wouldn't you rather sleep in a cot in the back room than sleep on a urine soaked floor?"

Dean: "It'll be clean by then."

chelle: "Okay honey. You do what you need to do."

~~~~

I have no worries for my homeless husband. I have already planted sticks of Old Spice deodorant carefully behind War and Peace, the shampoo is behind The Cat in the Hat, a razor and shaving gel is behind 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and a clean pair of socks is behind the French For Dummies book. He knows where it all is so he should be just fine.

~~~

(30 points to you if you found Waldo)

~~

P.S. I will not stop biting gobstoppers. It's what I do and I cannot change. And I am not willing to break down and pay $25 for 10 seconds in a dentist chair to file it down. I'll figure out a way to do it myself. Or have it knocked out with a gobstopper and sue. I'll think about it.

Fang molar...

If you are an avid reader of this blog (which you should be or else you can just keep moving), you know that I am no stranger to dental work as of this past year due to my years of paralyzing fear of the dentist. I had a billion cavities filled, a root canal, and a crown put on, and I even give myself injections in my gums just for funsies now because I enjoy the pinching/pricking sensation. So my teeth are all patched up and I don't have to deal with the annoying dull ache that my root canal tooth loved to sporadically ignite, however, my second love, Willy Wonka and his manna from heaven, a.k.a. Gobstoppers, have decided that they would like to undo all of the drilling, filling, spraying, and polishing that my cute little molars have had to undergo. Ok, I exaggerate a little. My fillings are still in tact but my fine looking #14 molar took a beating from a hard-as-rock Gobstopper sometime this past week. The lateral posterior part of my toofie has this jagged spur that is driving me absolutely crazy, courtesy of Mr. Wonka himself. It's kind of like when you lose a tooth, how your tongue can't help but gravitate over to the gaping hole and play with it for hours and hours. It's the same with the jagged unconquerable K-2 in my mouth, I am always slicing away at my tongue with it and I can even manage to knick the inside of my cheek pretty well if I concentrate hard while biting down. I'm sure I look just lovely in class when I have a concentrated look on my face, and everyone can only see the side of my tongue as I am determined to slowly file down my tooth with my squishy tongue. If the filing it down with my glossus muscles fails, then I am going to stick a fingernail file in my mouth and see if I can't get results from that approach. If that fails and I manage to impale myself with the file and die, look for Dean in the Davenport Public Library System. He's informed me that he'll be living there rent free and sleeping in the bathrooms if I should pass on from this life. Make sure he has a shower at least once a week, and that he finishes his education at Palmer. Then he can go anywhere in the world and live in any library he chooses.

You want me to massage WHO?!?!?...

I started clinic 2 weeks ago at school which just means I can massage the general public a.k.a. people who schedule appointments with me. I've had some pretty interesting clients already, but today it was the silent fella who weirded me out the most and I'm pretty sure will forever take the cake...

~

I go out into the waiting room and greet my client who was a very nice man, do a health history, ask and answer questions, and then I take him back to the room when I am going to do his massage. Tell him the usual spiel about dressing down to his comfort level, get under the sheets before I come in (yup, I've had a guy who was laying on top of the sheets when I came in), and put his clothes over here, ask him what kind of pressure he prefers, blah blah blah and etc. I step out of the room and putz around for a couple of minutes to make sure he has enough time to get undressed and situated, and then come back just outside of the room and ask him if he's ready. He is. I come in and he's laying there on his back on the massage table watching me while I get everything ready, and I make sure he is comfortable.

~

Then the most awkward/uncomfortable/funny/reminiscent hour of my life starts.

~

I start doing the massage, and just like 99% of the population, he closes his eyes to enjoy the tranquility and the human touch. ONLY WHEN HE CLOSES HIS EYES, HE LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE MY DECEASED GRANDPA DAVIS! And I'm not talking about my Grandpa Davis out in the garden or sitting on the couch because that would have been fine, I'm talking exactly like my Grandpa Davis in his coffin. For some strange reason my mom took a picture of my Grandpa Davis in his coffin at the funeral, and I have it somewhere in my picture box plus I remember what he looked like laying there, and this gentleman I was massaging was my grandpa in the flesh. I felt like I was massaging a corpse because everything told me that this was my grandpa and I know my grandpa has been gone for 18 years but here he was right in front of me exactly how he looked in his coffin. Now don't tell me that wouldn't be one awkward massage. It was like a trainwreck, I wanted to look away but I couldn't. Of course I love my Grandpa Davis and have nothing but admiration for him and it's great to be reminded of him, just don't do it during a massage.

~

But hey, at least he left me a tip. Keep 'em comin gramps.

Don't waste your money...

Wow. All I can say is 'Wow."

~

No, I can actually say more than that and I will. I can earnestly say that In The Name Of The King has hands down won a spot in my top 5 worst movies of all time list, and it should be on all of yours too. Dean and I went out on a date last night, and he had suggested we go see P.S. I Love You, but I knew he had been really wanting to see this so I insisted we go see this and of course he was elated. I should have picked the chick flick. I literally only made it 2 minutes into the movie when my trademark raised eyebrows in disbelief came into play and uncontrollable snickering kicked in and pretty much didn't stop until the ridiculous ending. There is something wrong with a medieval movie that has Cirque du Soleil performers in the forest, ninjas doing quadruple back flips while decapitating an orc-like creature, and Ray Liotta. It's just wrong. It was like a drunk kindergartner saw Lord of the Rings and tried to make a spin off of it with his daddy's HandyCam, and somehow managed to bribe the head honchos at Brightlight Pictures with Gerber food and snacktime goldfish, and that duped them into releasing it. That drunk kindergartner should never be allowed near a camera again, ever.

~

I will be going to a hypnotist to see if we can't purge that waste of space out of my grey matter.

Ahhhhh, siblings...

I don't really have anything particularly witty or philosophical to write at the moment, but I have been having an overwhelming feeling of love for my family today. I love each and every family member of mine, and I have been reflecting back on the craziness of our youth and all the dumb and silly things I used to do with each of them, and even better, the admirable qualities they each possess that I try to adapt into my own life. My sisters and brother are all remarkable people, and I love them with all my heart.

My whole family minus my dad, and 5 grandkids.

Wow...

...I think Dean is about to break the world record for longest shower. I should go make sure he hasn't passed out and drowned... I'll let you know how it turns out...

Geniuses at Mediacom...

1 Coaxial cable + Dean and Jeff tromping through our over-insulated attic to track down where wiring is routed + 1 $25 5 minute house call from Medicacom = internet service. Pretty simple, eh?

Dean and I moved our computer desk into our basement on Tuesday because we decided I needed to put my massage table in that room instead of doing them in our freezing basement and me having to massage the icicles off off people's extremeties because it's so frickin' cold down there. So we disassemble the desk and haul everything downstairs only to find out that we don't get internet down there. The geniuses at Mediacom only hooked up our top floor to be internet ready when we first had it installed 2 years ago but apparently they only hook up 1 room and then it's $15 per room on top of that which we didn't know until today. Anyways, we called Mediacom all ticked off on Tuesday night, and the technician we talked to on the phone was very kind and explained to us every possible thing it could be that we could do but to no avail. We scheduled for a service technician to come out only after Dean and Jeff explored our attic to see if there was any way they could reroute our wiring but it would have been a little bit too tricky and they didn't want to accidentally mess up anybody elses service. So today good old Bob came out, walked around to the side of the house, unlocked a box, connected our basement cable to a splitter, closed said box, yelled through our house to Dean to see if the internet was working, had us sign a paper saying we will pay $25 for his strenuous work, and then left with his muddy boot prints still fresh on our kitchen floor.

~

At least our 4 days of internet fasting are over. Time to partake.

What do these have in common?

What do these have in common, you ask? Oh I'll tell you.
~
Two nights ago Dean and I were just chatting with eachother like we always do, and the subject somehow turned to me saying that I would never ever live out in the middle of the wilderness. It's not that I don't love mother nature, because I do, I just hate the creepy homeless killers that live out in mother nature. Maybe I have just seen too many scary movies where people get killed in their homes that have no neighbors around for miles, but personally, I prefer to be relatively close to other homes so that when the creepy killer comes into my house and I shoot him with our shotgun, my neighbor will hear it and call the police too. We have friends that grew up out in the boonies, and they said that they never ever locked their doors on their car or in their house while growing up and I'm thinking, "Are you guys freaking crazy!??!" Locking doors is an unconscious thing for me. I've actually locked Dean out of the house on more than one occasion when I've closed the door behind him when he was going to the mailbox or running back out to the car to get the rest of the groceries.
~
Anyways, I was saying he couldn't pay me enough money to live in the middle of nowhere-ville like Alaska or Montana, and Dean suddenly says, "Okay honey. Would you consider moving into the wilderness if we bought a HUGE mansion, and we had a minefield surrounding the house with dogs carrying AK-47's patrolling through it?"
~
I about started crying I was laughing so hard because the mental picture was so perfect. Once I calmed down, I told him I would move ONLY if all those things were included. My husband cracks me up.

Clichè "what we learned in 2007" post...

• We have gained a deeper and more profound respect for eachother.
• It's expensive to travel. But worth it.
• We will do anything for family. They mean that much to us.
• As hard as school is, it's possible to get through it.
• It's possible to decide what you want to become and become it even when you're 26. Hence, chelle and her deciding to become a massage therapist.
• It's possible to wake up at 7AM and still be in a good mood (most days).
• There is never enough money. Never.
• Dean learned how to fix the motor on our windshield wipers. For real this time.
• We love our friends both here and far away. But we already knew that one, silly.
• chelle needed to take better care of her teeth growing up as shown by her 13 trips to the dentist over 5 months to fill numerous cavities, do a root canal, and put on a crown. At least she doesn't have a fear of needles in her mouth anymore!
• Dean looks best with a goatee.
• You don't have to stay working somewhere where you are miserable.
• 99.99% of tv is garbage.
• When you get the chance to do something you want to do, DO IT.
• Listen to people. REALLY listen. They want to share their stories too.
• Sam's Club will take back anything, no matter how long you've had it or what kind of condition it's in, and you don't even have to have a receipt.
• Chiropractic boards are as scary as people make them out to be, but not as hard as they try to make you think they are.
• We can drive straight from Seattle to Iowa in 40 hours with little pit stops to sleep.
• We will never fly standby again.
• The Grand Canyon is freezing in March.
• 4 AM wake up calls to Dean to say good morning are ok.
• We will never live in a house with stairs again.
• Verizon charges way too much for their family plans.
• Put blankets up over the bedroom windows to block the sun and sleep in once in a while.
• Dean can only do sideways flips on the trampoline. It's freakin' hilarious.
• It takes a lot to make either of us cry.
• We are chronically late to sacrament meeting.

2008!?!?!? Fuhgeddaboutit...

After Dean and I barely made it home alive through the snow storm on our way back from St. Louis, we showered, threw on some pj's, and booked it over to our friends Amy and Brett's to ring in the new year with them. We felt bad because we thought we were going to be there an hour before we actually got there but the storm proved otherwise. Anyways, we went over to their place (which is adorable, by the way), and chatted it up, I about peed my pants laughing, and then we played Battle of the Sexes. Amy and I were rocking the casbah from the beginning and were a sure bet to win but some punk husbands had to kick our piece off the board and send us back to start. Long story short, we lost. But it was still fun and I really want to play again. Then before we knew it, the ball in Time's Square was making its descent and we all did the customary "HAPPY NEW YEAR" yell and gave our spouses kisses, and then as quickly as it started, we moved on back to our game and eating appetizers. We stayed there until 1:30AM, and when I finally started to almost hallucinate from sleep deprivation (we'd been up since 5:45AM, well, I had a little nap but it wasn't enough), I tugged at Dean's shirt and said we needed to go. Dean and I were so sleepy that we barely remember coming home and getting into bed. What a way to end 2007! Bring it on 2008!

Amy messing with her uber nice camera. It's by far the nicest one I've ever seen.

Awwwww, first kiss of 2008.

Smiley girls!

Awwwww, look how cute they are.


Crazy fun times.

Everyone needs to see it...

Dean and I drug our sorry butts out of bed New Year's Eve day at 5:45AM and I slithered to the car to go back to sleep while Dean undertook captaining the 4 and a half hour drive to...

ST. LOUIS!!!!!

That arch is crazy tall. It's actually 25 feet taller than the Space Needle. Write that tidbit in your journal tonight.

Dean's so strong that he bent that big old piece of metal in half. Check out those guns.

I can hold up 5199 tons of steel with my index finger. Can you?

St. Louis lovin'.

I love how he just has this casual "I do this everyday" look on his face.

YAY!! WE'RE AT THE ARCH!!!!...

...SO I WILL DO A BALLERINA LEAP!!!!...

...AND FINISH IT OFF BY INTERCEPTING A PASS AND SCORING A TOUCHDOWN!!!!

Classic dean and chelle self portrait right next the the shiny arch.

Spider-Dean, Spider-Dean, doing whatever a Spider-Dean does...

Must.....climb.....to....top. Too......cheap....to...pay.....for.....observation.....deck......tickets....

Adam, you have a hotel and you never told me? I'll forgive you this once but I want to know who this 'Mark' fella is.

And now the main reason we went to St. Louis. Dr. Gunther von Hagen's Body World exhibit. If you have never heard of it, go to bodyworlds.com and check to see where the nearest exhibit is to you, and then immediately go buy tickets and go. I'm not kidding, everyone needs to see this exhibit. It's an eye opener. Our bodies are fascinating, and this gives you a much better perspective on how intricate the body is. The exhibits are actual dead people and they have each gone through a 1500 man hour process of dissection, and plastination (the process of injecting them with a reactive polymer the preserves the tissues in their ideal state). It's nothing disgusting and the exhibits have no identifiable features that give them character or personality. Dean and I were both amazed at how well the bodies were preserved and how you could identify every single muscle, artery, nerve, vein, bone, etc. It gives you such an appreciation for how Heavenly Father created our bodies, and how we are just at the jumping off point of starting to understand our own species. Point being, you need to go see this.

This is an example of one of the plastinates that you might see. They don't let you take pictures in the exhibit so I Bogarted this picture from the internet. Those are actual bones, tendons, and muscles you are seeing. They look just like how they do under your skin while you're alive. It's amazing. We spent 2 and a half hours in the exhibit when it should have only taken us an hour and a half max. Dean had fun playing tour guide to me through the exhibit and he loved being able to answer any of the questions I had. It was also a good review for me because I had just learned all the muscles in the body in school so it was such a help to actually see them in person. We are going to be going to the Body World 1 exhibit in Milwaukee sometime this month or next month. There are 3 exhibits that tour in the US and we went to the Body World 3 exhibit.

After we were done at Body World, we went around the rest of the science center and they had a whole area on the human genome. Hence, the double helix.

Now the GIANT double helix. Anyone ever seen the movie GATTACA?

Can't talk. Studying to find cure for cancer.

Umm, honig!? You know there are no strings on that harp, right?

And of course we had to get Jack in the Box tacos on the way home since the geniuses here don't think it's necessary to have one within 100 miles of Davenport.

~

It was a wonderful, exciting, and educational trip. We would do it again in a heartbeat even with the 5 and a half hour crazy icy and snowy drive home. Oh well, Happy New Year!!!

chelle the drunk...

I prefer to meet my preferred presidential candidates while drunk. Don't you? I was 3 sheets to the wind and actually had a bottle of vodka in my hand while taking this picture, and it sure looks like I was having a good ol' time, doesn't it? Oh Mitt, you so crazy.

Okay, okay, so I've never had a drop of alcohol in my entire life, but the aide to presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, that took our picture managed to make me look like I was on the road to Hangoverville. We were the last people to meet him after the rally before he had to be escorted out to a forum that he was already late for, so the aide was in a rush to get him out of there and didn't wait for me to stop laughing and actually smile AT the camera. When Mitt becomes president, he'd better fire that aide for taking a crappy picture of me or else the White House is going to be receiving a nasty letter from one Iowan girl. Buy hey, at least Dean looks great in it. He can his Photoshop his drunk wife out of the picture and put this picture in his office one day.

Anyways, the rally was a lot of fun, and Governor Romney definitely has our support. The Iowa caucuses are tomorrow and we plan on going to caucus for him. Now if I can just get a decent picture with him...

Pass me another pint, Mitt!!!!

I tried to redeem myself by taking a picture with him in the background. My ear could be touching his face if I wasn't 10 feet in front of him.

I would seriously be claustrophobic if I were him. People swarmed around him the second he ended his speech and he only had 3 inches of wiggle room on any given side of him at all times. So why not take a picture to add to the claustrophobicness?

Dean's brain is all over our driveway...

...or at least it almost was. When we were outside playing on Eutopian Day (see posting below this), Dean and I were running around the back of our townhouse to go turn off our car (it had been warming up and we decided we wanted to take some more pictures outside before we headed off to Mexican food splendor so we needed to go turn it off) and while running down the driveway, Dean slipped and fell flat on his back and whacked the back of his noggin on the cement. I was a couple of feet in front of him so I didn't actually get to see it happen. Next thing I know, I hear a moaning behind me and Dean is sprawled on the driveway writhing in pain. Now, I know I have something majorly wrong with me because I think it is absolutely hilarious when people get hurt. Something is wired wrong in my brain because I can't help but laugh when people trip or fall down (good thing I never became a nurse, huh!?). So my sweet husband is lying there grabbing his head and I think, "Hmmm, what a good photo op!" Hence, the picture below this. I tried to contain my laughing while attempting to console him, which just annoyed him because he thought that I shouldn't be laughing but he knew that I had this problem before he married me. He finally got up and we went inside so that he could sit down. After a little while he realized that his neck muscles were starting to tighten up really badly and he was getting sporadic headaches. It turns out that he gave himself some whiplash and a minor concussion. It took 3 days for the neck pain to go away and everything seems fine now, thank goodness. Next time he falls he needs to make sure I can see it firsthand so I can enjoy the show.

~

I need some therapy. I know.

I know it shouldn't be funny, BUT IT IS!!!

Sad man.

Owie head.

Best Snow Day EVER!!! Part 1...

The 28th of December was my Eutopian Day. The heavens opened and dumped out 6+ inches of snow within a couple of hours, and it was marvelous. I love winter and I love snow even more. Nothing is as peaceful and serene as watching or being out in a heavy snowfall with my husband. The world looks perfect and white and magically becomes quiet.

~

I posted a bunch of pictures from our snow in 7 different blogs because I didn't want to make the worlds longest blog with 30 pictures back to back and plus you can't enlarge pictures if there are that many in a posting for some reason. Anyways, enjoy. I know we sure did.

SNOW SNOW SNOW!!! LET IT SNOW!!!

We do love eachother somethin' awful.

Umm, where are your gloves honig?

It was wicked awesome snow.