In Other News...

I feel like all I have posted about recently is running! And although that's been pretty all consuming, there have been a few other things going on in my life in the past few weeks.

For starters, we've been sprucing up the house a bit since we have a string of visitors coming in March. I started by painting the guest room a nice, boring tan color to go with the rest of the house. The big change is painting the trim a nice crisp white - before both the walls and the trim were the same off white color (which you can still see on the door.... I swear all those doors are getting painted this week!)

I am working on a couple of projects for the walls, since as you can see they are quite empty. First up was the frame collage that I have been 'planning' for about 2 years now. Those frames are getting a nice coat of paint, and at some point I just have to find time to hang them.

Sam says I always talk about spray painting but never do - proof!

I'm also hoping to work on a pinboard map, but we'll see if that happens - don't want to get too optimistic since we also have a lot of yard work to get to this weekend!

We also decided to finally replace the fans in both the guest room and the master bedroom. I don't know why I didn't think to take any before pictures, since the fan in the master was especially atrocious, but oh well. Replacing the fans was definitely a two person job and took a lot longer than we expected (at least 1.5 hours each) - although I'm sure we were not the most efficient since we really didn't know what we were doing!

New master bedroom fan - the guest room fan is similar.

Other than the housework, we went out for sushi on Valentine's Day, which after 2 years in a row I suppose is officially a tradition! We started off taking a few normal pictures, which quickly digressed when they brought out long stemmed roses to all the women in the restaurant. I was laughing so hard at all of Sam's faces:

I was also too hungry by the time the food got there to take any pictures before eating apparently!

We had a nice night, ate too much sushi and mostly bought each other candy. We are serious candy lovers around here! Sam also got me an entire box of Madagascar 3 valentine's rather than just a normal card and scattered them around the house with silly things written on them like "To: Will Smith, From: Aliens" and "To: Tootsie, From: Roll" - it made me laugh a lot and kept me entertained as I kept finding them!

Other than that, I did make this lasagna this week that was really good and only 350 calories for a fairly large serving. I increased the recipe to make 8 servings and we have been eating on it for several days.

Recipe from Cooking Light March 2013, you can find the recipe online here. I realized I haven't been posting many recipes lately, and since we typically try 3-4 new recipes each week around here, I definitely have a lot to pull from! So I'll try to start including that more often.

Hope you guys are having a good weekend! Are you watching the Oscar's tonight? We developing a voting ballot and scoring system to make it a little competition, and Sam is making mushroom risotto so dinner so that sounds fancy and Oscar-like right?