Auctions, Carpet Cleaning and Chicken Carving

It was an interesting weekend.

On Friday evening I took some pictures of our friends Trent and Amy (the same ones we did Let's Dish for last weekend). Amy's pregnant and due October 10th, so we wanted to get some fun pregnancy pictures done before little Nadia graces us with her presence. I've never done pictures of people before, but I had fun trying. Some of them turned out pretty cool. I didn't try to pose them too much, just took pictures of whatever happened as we all hung out down by the river. It was a beautiful evening with great lighting and the Washington Monument in the background. After pictures, we went to our place and played with our new Nintendo Wii and ate Five Guys burgers (yum!). We had a lot of fun looking at the pictures with the Wii, because it puts them in this really cheesy slideshow with music and special effects. We thought all the laughing might have put Amy into labor! It was especially fun once we realized there was this "paint" type program built in for you to edit your pictures (or give the people rainbow hair with dreads, in our case).

On Saturday Joel and I finished our deep clean of the apartment. Whew- that was a job! But it's SO nice now. Joel even Rug Doctored the carpets (lots of nasty black water came out!). We cleaned the blinds, under the bed, cleaned out shelves, etc. Not to mention the 3 hours we spent scrubbing the bathroom!

On Saturday night as Joel was finishing the carpets I went to a friend's house with some girls from work (already committed to before we decided to do the apartment, but Joel was very sweet about encouraging me to go). It was a clothes auction. Basically, we all brought new or barely used items from our closets and auctioned them off to each other. It was actually a lot of fun, not to mention that I made $85 off of some stuff that I haven't worn in over a year! One black tank top that I'd never worn (just never seemed to work for me) went for $17 (I paid $7!). I bought a purse and cute little black jacket and still came home with close to $60. Whoo-hoo! I came home and we finished the house around 2 am.

Sunday morning we slept in and spent the morning being lazy, enjoying the clean house. We were sore but happy to not clean anymore! We went running, then felt justified going to the candy store and Taco Bell for lunch. We ate at the park by our house and enjoyed the beautiful day (75 degrees and sunny!). We came home in time to return the rug doctor and I was supposed to put a chicken in the Crock Pot for dinner. Unfortunately, the chicken had not finished thawing yet, and in an attempt to pull out the nasty bag of giblets I ripped it (yuck!). It was not good. Joel came to the rescue, and basically wound up cutting the partially frozen chicken in half so that we could remove the giblets. This was about a 20 minute operation! We finally got the chicken in the pot to cook and headed out to church. The irony is that we forgot to eat it when we came home! Still full from the tacos, I guess... Oh well, it made a good sandwich (that I'm eating as I write this).

That was our weekend. Kind of a strange one, but fun. I'm so excited about the weather cooling down and the leaves changing. More on that to come... As well as more about our church.

Right now I better get back to work.

PS: An update: I didn't post this on Monday because I had forgotten to bring the pictures I took of Trent and Amy to work (where I usually write the blog). So here it is Tuesday, I've added the pictures, and am ready to post. Last night Amy was induced because she was having high blood pressure and some other symptoms that weren't good for Nadia. It's a good thing we did these pictures last weekend! Hopefully I'll have some baby pictures to post tomorrow!