Kitty Deschanel | Food, Wine, and Travel Adventures Across the USA

I stumbled upon these cute placemats from burkedecor.com and am optimistic that I can make something similar using bamboo placemats and rubber stamps. We'll see.

Over the past few weeks, Sexy Nerd has made some major updates to our dining room. He repainted the chairs, refinished the table, switched out the light fixture, and, of course, put up the gigantic tulip wallpaper mural that has been sitting in the closet since March (finally!) There is still a lot to do (like recovering the chairs, adding 2 more chairs, and building a window seat,)(oh, and replacing that ugly white tile around the fireplace!) but we think the changes look pretty good so far. Somehow, that green dolly always finds its way back into our dining room!

Sweet cuppin' cakes! Sexy Nerd and I spent our New Year's Eve decorating cupcakes. Cupcake Decorating Ideas We're quite the party animals. (Just in case you don't know us at all, this is a joke.) Apparently, these 4 looked so goofy that Blogger felt it necessary to rotate my photo. The one on the lower left is a Pica dog. Though, I'm sure that's clear without any clarification! Cupcake decorating is a messy job, but someone's got to do it! Ta da - the top 12, which include a mug of beer, Santa, and flames. Sneaking a cupcake when no one's looking. The perfect crime?

I can't believe our cruise ended in October and I still haven't finished posting all of the photos! I haven't even posted all of our stops. Rather than take even more time sorting through everything, here are the photos from the rest of our trip. It's quite possible that additional captions, sorting, and daily breakdowns are coming one day in the future (hey, anything's possible!) No other vacation beats cruising! There's a funny story about this watch and this dinner invitation (you know, in the way that irritating, horrible events where everything went wrong are funny when you look back at them), but it will have to wait for another time. Alright. I suppose that now is as good a time as any to explain the watch/dinner invitation connection. I had read online about a special dinner featured on some Holland America cruises called the "Chef's Special". It involved all of the waitstaff serving dinner while SINGING & DANCING. Ridiculous? Abso...