Ninja Surprise

This morning I went to breakfast with my friend Michelle. She is home for Christmas break from grad school in Syracuse - art history and museum studies. We went to one of my favorite breakfast places - Nova Cafe. It is this great local cafe that uses local ingredients, organic goods and makes a lot of its food gluten free, for those of you allergic to gluten. I had the huckleberry cream cheese filled french toast with a side of fruit. It was delicious.

Why am I talking about breakfast when the title of this post clearly led you to believe it was going to be a story about me being attacked by ninjas? Keep reading.

Nova has a bamboo plant on every table. I was staring at the one at our booth, and through my very sleepy haze, realized there was something not quite right about ours. See photo:

There was a ninja in our bamboo plant! It pretty much made my day. How often does this happen? I will tell you! Once! And that is all! Sorry the picture is a little blurry - I took this with my phone. Let me tell you, that restaurant is lucky all I did was take a picture and didn't just grab the whole thing and go running out of there. A house is not a home without a bamboo dwelling ninja.

I urge all of you to keep an eye out for small ninjas hiding places - and if any of you know how to keep a bamboo plant alive in Montana, let me know - we killed ours. And if you ever come to Bozeman, go to Nova - the food is great and so is the decor. :)

Wii would like to play...

Last night, Henry and I had several of our friends over to experience the joy of the Wii. We got our Wii as a wedding present and have been having a blast with it. Henry got Rockband for Christmas and we figured this was a great opportunity to watch our friends turn into Rockstars.

The evening started with a healthy dose of Rockband.

I love the look of extreme concentration on Allie's face.

We then moved on to the always exciting Mario Kart. It was great watching the different styles of driving. Some people moved their whole bodies with the wheels (Allie), while others went with the "less is more" approach and barely turned the wheels at all (Jim).

Tennis followed, and at this point it got a little dangerous. Four people standing in a row and swinging rackets...let's just say we didn't bring out the good crystal.

We ended the night with some boxing, which was hilarious.

I think we will have a real life rematch in the backyard.

All in all, Henry and I had a great time and loved having our friends over to play. It brought out the little kid in everyone and it was great to see inhibitions being lowered. I was pleasantly surprised with how many people were willing to sing with Rockband!

We are definitely going to do it again but I think next time we will carry the theme further. We'll have Nintendo inspired food (Stuffed mushrooms, chocolate coins, Princess Peach Cobbler) and costumes will be encouraged. Perhaps a Halloween party next year.....

This blogging situation is harder than it looks...

So after becoming a certified blog stalker, I decided it was about time I started one myself - and what better time than the start of a new year! It is a great way to keep up with what is going on in people's lives and an easy way to update many people about our day to day life. I struggled for awhile because I wasn't sure our day to day life is really that interesting so this might be the most boring blog ever. However, starting a blog is much easier said than done. I never realized how much went in to setting up even simple pages. I have no idea how some people get theirs so fancy (Sara McG). Please bear with me as I go through the growing pains of figuring this all out.

Henry and I just had our first holiday season as newlyweds and it was wonderful. We had a very simple and quiet Christmas, just the two of us.

This is a picture of our very small tree with a very large strand of lights.

We had a great long Christmas weekend and played a lot of Rockband (Henry's Christmas present) and just relaxed and rejuvenated. This is a very busy time of year in my industry (Health Insurance) and work can be really intense and stressful. It was great to have that time to ourselves and make some great memories of our first Christmas together.

We then worked a strenuous three day week and now we have another four day weekend for New Year. For New Year's Eve, we went to our friends Dave and Sara's house and had a really great time playing games and staying up late.

We are looking forward to the rest of our long weekend - it will involve lots of housecleaning, some friends coming over, and our first moving/packing project.

Moving you say? Yes, we are planning on moving sometime in the first half of this year. We are planning on buying a house (Hooray!) and we hope to being doing it in the next 3-5 months. So, why are we packing already? Well, for those of you who know me well, this isn't exactly a surprising answer. I tend to get a little stressed/overwhelmed/bitchy when it comes to big projects like moving. We have somehow managed to accumulate rooms full of stuff and I have no idea where it all came from (actually, our wedding created most of it and there are boxes we still haven't unpacked from our last move in 2007). For those of you who know my husband, he tends to be pretty relaxed and easy going. Doing huge house projects is not exactly his cup of tea. So, in the interest of both our sanities, we have divided our house and yard into several zones to tackle one at a time. We will go through our house and do one zone each weekend (clean, organize, get rid of most of it) in the hopes that when it is actually time to move, I will not turn into a crazy woman. (I HATE moving.) So we are starting this weekend with the linen closet. Our thought is to start small and work our way up to the big projects (dirty, scary, smelly basement and guest room/everything from our wedding room).

Look forward to more updates on our cleaning and packing! (I warned you this might not be an interesting blog!)

That's all for now - thanks for reading this and if you have any tips on how to make the blog page cool, I welcome comments. Or you can come to my house and just do it for me. :)