Update

Well, my car broke down on the way to work today. At least, the Civic I have been driving because we were worried that my Elantra would break down on the way to work, broke down. Oh, the irony! The good news is I was home by 11 AM and now have lots of free time to blog that I would otherwise be wasting doing something silly like working or driving to the grocery store. I also got to practice being independent today. When Robert and I were dating we talked about how I would have to learn to do a lot of things on my own when he got deployed. We did not talk about the fact that I would have to do this even when he's not deployed! Apparently they can't use cell phones in the helicopter, yeesh. So I called USAA, got towed, and called a friend to come pick me up, all by myself! It was a definite improvement over the last car crisis I had right before the wedding, where I just started crying until Husband and/or Dad could be reached and tell me what to do. This time I got through with minimal crying, yay me!

Anywho, obviously lots has happened since the last blog post. I'm not even going to try to touch on the wedding yet, partly because I would never shut up about it and partly because I don't have any pictures that are uploadable. So basically I just uploaded whatever I had on my camera and that's what we'll talk about today!

We've been trying to take some trips to the beach, since we're really close to Panama City and Destin.

Restaurant on the beach

They like to pretend like they're in the movie Top Gun

Rob and I have really gotten in to cooking. There's not much good food to eat here and it saves money, and it's fun! Also, I love wearing my aprons. Since we had a long weekend for Memorial Day, I tried out Aunt Peggy's sugar cookie recipe.

Using Nana's rolling pin!

I made stars since I only had star and snowman cookie cutters. I'm not sure where I even got cookie cutters from. But we'll pretend I used stars to be patriotic for Memorial Day. The cookies were really good but I need some practice on getting the dough right.

Since I love to post recipes and talk about cooking on the blog, I don't want people getting the impression that we are master chefs over here. So to that end, I am posting a picture of a fail that I had. This was a slow cooker recipe for ribs with rice and broccoli. The recipe called for long grain converted rice, and they don't sell anything fancy like that here in Alabama, and I just used regular rice. Second, I made this the night before and put it in the fridge, then got up and put it in the crock pot the next morning. So, broccoli and rice were sitting in water all night, AND got cooked in water for 8 hours the next day. I'm sure you can imagine how that turned out. If you don't have imagination, it was something like this:

The rice and broccoli were total mush. We just rinsed off the ribs and ate those anyway!

A few weeks later, my parents drove up to visit and hauled all our presents from the wedding. It was a fun visit. We took them to the neighboring town of Headland, where an annual Blueberry Festival was going on. It gave them a good taste of the Alabama life.

Not pictured: anything with blueberries in it

The next weekend, we took our gift cards and bought up a few extras to complete our kitchen. We now have a bunch of great kitchen gadgets (all of which have been used multiple times already!) Our kitchen counter was getting crowded, so we set out to get a little hutch/island that we could store our Keurig and related items on. We ended up finding a perfect thing which had great storage for all our coffee cups and mugs. My husband was excited until he saw that assembly was required. Apparently, he is a total man stereotype and hates following directions. Lucky for him he married a girl that 1) is an accountant at heart and LOVES following step-by-step instructions and 2) used to follow her dad around doing everything he did, including assembling furniture. So we got home and I got out my trusty power screwdriver, all excited to put it together.

All excited

Of course I wanted to do it all myself so Rob was banished to the couch to play videogames. I think he was ok with this arrangement.

Tada!!