We're Back!

This is where I'd love to be right now! This is actually part of a castle in England (photo courtesy of my boyfriend, who's currently stationed there), and it looks so much prettier than this Michigan winter that surrounds us right now! Sorry for the long absence, but this boring white winter just hasn't been inspiring me to do much writing (or much anything else for that matter!). What I have been inspired to do however, is to start looking for a house to buy! I'm still in the very early stages of the whole process, but it's one I'm excited about! I hope to be able to find something in my price range that's in a good neighborhood and close to work and family. I'm starting to get nervous about this whole process, but if this is what God wants for me, it will happen! Perhaps before I officially start my search I should consider taking down my Christmas decorations... :) I'm a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to that. I promise to try to blog more now and to keep ya'll updated on my home search, but right now I have to get ready for work!

Gettin' crafty with my momma...

A couple of weeks ago, my mom and I spent the afternoon creating a small wreath. We had gotten the idea from another blog and decided to adapt it a little bit. The final result looked something like this...

We made the wreath using a small wooden dollar store picture frame, some pages from an old book, and some ribbons and pine cones. It took us a couple of hours, but it was a lot of fun to just hang out and create together. We cut circles out of the book pages and used the end of a pencil to crinkle and curl the pages up to get the effect you see above. We then used hot glue to attach the pieces of paper to the frame, and when we were all done, I took a walk down to the corner of our road with dad and picked up some pine cones to add the finishing touches. Mom just happened to have a small key hanging around and we thought it would be a nice addition to the pine cones. The wreath is currently hanging on our apartment door, safe from the elements. It'll be a nice wreath for the fall, until it's time to put up a Christmas wreath! I don't think it will be too long before that happens though, since I'm already starting to think about purchasing a Christmas tree. It's never too early to start decorating for Christmas as long as it's cold outside! :)

Signs You're Officially A Grown-Up...

It turns out that as much as I thought I was "all grown up," I wasn't. At least, not until I learned the most basic of "grown-up" things yesterday - how to change a tire. If you know me at all, you understand that as much as I love my car, I have never liked taking care of it myself. I will gladly pay other people to change my oil, check the fluids, and do pretty much everything except check my tire pressure (I can handle that on my own, thank-you-very-much). Yes, my father taught me how to do most of these things on my own, but I have no interest in doing it on my own, and I certainly don't trust myself enough with most of these tasks to be sure that I didn't forget one little step, thereby making my car unsafe to drive. The thing I really didn't want to learn to do myself however, was changing a tire. Unfortunately, I was forced to learn yesterday when I went to pull out of my parking space at home and head to work, only to discover that my front passenger tire was FLAT. When I say flat, I mean...

not drivable.  But I had no choice. I was either going to have to change it myself or call a tow-truck. And in this case, it was worth it for me to learn something new in the name of saving a few dollars!

 So since I didn't really know what I was doing, I asked my boyfriend to walk me through it over the phone from England. I would ask him what the next step was, hang up, complete that step, and then call him again. Overall, it took me about an hour to complete the job, but I felt so proud of myself once it was done! But of course, it couldn't be as simple as just changing a tire.

Once the spare was on, and the jack was in the trunk again, I discovered that the spare was flat as well. I love my life. At this point I pretty much just quit caring and drove to the gas station to fill up the spare enough to get me to the tire store where they fixed my tire for free! I do love me some Discount Tire :)

Once I was finished getting my tires fixed, I decided to go get an oil change (ya know, since I was like 2,000 miles overdue and my car now almost has 150,000 miles on it. Did I mention I have a small oil leak? Yeah, I'm not sure how my car is still running either). While sitting there waiting for this fun task to be completed, I was informed that I had burnt out lights on the back of my car, oh and by the way, did you know you need a new serpentine belt? I'm telling you. This car. It's on it's way out.

Ok, ok....you've guilted us into posting!

Sorry about the long absence. I'm glad to see my sister was able to tide you all over, even if it was a sneaky trick on her part! The Apartment Girls have been busy lately! Kayla is still doing full time school and pretty much full time work like she has been, and I've joined her crazy schedule. I've also been trying to change my sleep patterns, which seems to be a full time job of its own. My body seems to think I need approximately 11-12 hours of sleep per night, which really isn't helpful when you've got school and work going on at the same time. It also leaves you no time for fun things, or even just everyday tasks in general. While trying to change my sleep schedule, I seem to be making it through my days as a zombie. Maybe that's what I should be for Halloween. I have managed to start cooking a little more often though, which is a plus! Last week I made Chinese Chicken Soup (a family favorite!) and I also made my own marinade to soak the rest of my organic chicken in (can you believe that the organic chicken was the cheapest package of chicken breasts I could find at our local Meijer store last week?!?)  When I cooked the marinated chicken, I also made some rice, and this is what it ended up looking like:

It turned out pretty delicious. I made the marinade out of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger and a small bit of brown sugar. YUM!

As Victoria mentioned in her post, we had a pumpkin carving party with a bunch of Kayla's friends last Sunday. We watched movies, had pizza, talked, and of course, carved pumpkins. Here are a few of the highlights from the party....

 This is apparently the only "action" shot we got of the night :)

 Kayla's very first carved pumpkin! I'm so proud of her for doing such an awesome job! :)

 This beautiful pumpkin was carved by Kayla's friend Charlotte. So pretty!

I decided to do a polka dot pumpkin. Victoria made me an awesome "swirly art" template to use, but I didn't have time to go to Kinko's to get the template enlarged enough for a pumpkin. I'm hoping to use that template this weekend on my pumpkin for work!

That's about all of the news right now! It's time to go do some more textbook reading for my online class! We'll try to update the blog more often! :)

Girls, you have neglected your blog!

Hi there, this is Victoria, Lauren's younger sister, asking all of you out there to please join me in shouting: LAME!!!! at Lauren and Kayla for not posting in almost three weeks. 

Girls, now that I am at school, HOW do you expect me to creep/spy on you without posting?!?!  It's ridiculous.  Also, thank you for sending me an email with your login info a few months ago.  I never clear out my inbox.  whoops :)

So how about an update for everyone out there who's been missing their favorite pair of cousins?  Well ok.... since you begged....

1.  Apparently last night there was an AMAZING pumpkin carving party, hosted by none other than the infamous Apartment Girls themselves... I have no idea who attended this illustrious event, but please, give a shout out to my homegirls if you want a post with sweet pictures from this amazing evening!  For now, I can only offer up this meager snapshot of a pumpkin in my parent's garden in order to appease your appetites.  I hope this holds you over for a while.

2.  Last weekend (as in 8 days ago, not 2 days ago) Lauren and I (Victoria) attended the beautiful wedding of two of her co-workers.  It was lovely, I forced Lauren to dance, and even though I KNOW she enjoyed it, there is no way in heck she'll ever admit that, or stop hounding me about my ridiculous behavior - wherein I am the cause of her actually having fun for a change.  Shame on me.  She looked gorgeous, and she helped pick out my dress, so I wasn't too shabby either :)  I won't post pictures though, because me creating this post is a little teensy surprise, and I don't want her to become so overcome by a giant photo of her face that she up and dies, thereby making Kayla change the title on the blog to "Apartment Girl:  One cousin being lame all by herself."  That just doesn't have the same ring.   (BREAKING NEWS THAT I JUST REMEMBERED... If anyone who reads this is a fan of the Bed Intruder Song, you wish you were at this wedding where an AMAZING string quartet played it.  And the Beatles.  That is, the quartet played the Beatles.  Not that the Beatles turned into a string quartet which played the Bed Intruder Song.  Because that would be expensive.  And impossible.  Anyway...it was awesome.  Just saying)

3.  On the subject of Kayla...  Well, who really knows?  Today she was working a ridiculously long shift, and while I was home for the weekend I only got to see her for a grand total of like, 20 minutes.  But she did let me use her tinted lotion in an effort to keep my legs from looking like I cut them out of the bride's skirt.  They were white.  That's what I'm trying to say here.  Anyway, she saved my bacon... or whatever.  You get the picture.

WHO'S UP FOR A FUN GAME?!?!?!

I'm going to need everyone's participation on this one!  Ok, here it goes....


We need everyone to give SUGGESTIONS for HALLOWEEN COSTUMES!!!!  YAYYYY!!!!  I would like to hear your creative and amazing ideas for awesome, budget-friendly costumes you think the cousins would look ah-mazing in!  Please remember:  While just plain old costumes are good, costumes they can wear to make them a PAIR are even better!!!!
Hoping this is the most amusing thing ever,
~Victoria ;)

Time For Change...

It's official! I (Lauren) will be starting school again on October 12th! I was planning on going back sometime in January, but it turns out I don't have to wait! I'll be finishing my degree through Ashford University. It's traditional campus is located in Iowa but they have a great online program, which I'm really excited about. They will accept all of the 83 credits I've already earned at Oakland University, and the part I'm most excited about is how they schedule their classes. You only take once class at a time and each class lasts 5 weeks. I think this will work great with my schedule and I'm excited to be able to work on my schoolwork at my own pace and at whatever time of day I choose! It looks like it was a good thing I went back to school shopping with Kayla after all!

In other news, we just had a match burning experiment and it turns out the only time I can light a match, hold it completely horizontal and not have it burn out within 1 second is when Kayla is also lighting a match at the same time. I'm really not sure what this means, scientifically speaking, but I just lit 8 matches trying to make them not burn out so fast, but it didn't work. I'm really not sure what's going on with my match-lighting skills.

Also, we went to Pei-Wei tonight for dinner and had an awesome roomie date. Kayla will probably want to kill me for phrasing it like that when she reads this post, but it's ok. We're cousins and we're just awesome enough to have roomie dates.Be jealous. You know you wish you were us.  I had some honey glazed crispy chicken, and Kayla got sweet and sour vegetables. DELICIOUS. If you haven't been to Pei-Wei (or P.F. Chang's for that matter), you should totally go. Make it your next dinner out.

So right now you're probably thinking that we've been purposely withholding our adventurous lives from you for two weeks. It's not true. We've pretty much just been living a boring life (Kayla is now an old lady apparently. I came home at 10 last night and she was already in bed. I think I've mentioned this before, but it totally takes the fun out of having a roomie if when you come home from work, you discover that said roomie is already sleeping and therefore cannot hear your crazy work stories from the day, nor can she share her crazy work stories.) But we did accomplish a couple of somewhat exciting things recently. For starters, we re-arranged our monstrous couch as my mom had been advising us to do, and we really love it! My mom also made some covers for our throw pillows. You wouldn't believe it- they actually match our ugly couch but they look really pretty! I know, it's a miracle. But what can I say? My mom is just awesome like that. We were so inspired by our couch moving success that Kayla bought some posters at a concert she went to recently and today we framed two of them! We discovered that we need some nails in order to hang them on the wall, but we'll probably end up getting some this weekend so we can do that. So far, this is what the posters look like in the frames (doesn't our nice clean carpet make such a great background for them?? lol)

Wow! Two Posts In One Day!

I know, I know. It's a miracle. We've gone eight days without posting, and now you get two fantabulous posts within mere hours of each other? No, the world isn't coming to an end, we were both just feeling guilty about not posting. It's been a crazy week for me- I got back from house-sitting on Tuesday night. I was SO happy to be able to sleep in my own bed in my own little cozy apartment! House-sitting is great, until you realize that you miss your roomie terribly and you miss your own bedroom, even if it is torn apart due to a few maintenance mishaps.

I thought I'd fill ya'll in on everything that's been going on around here lately! First of all, can I just say that I was extremely disappointed to come home from work at 10 p.m. today only to find out that Kayla was already asleep? Here I was all excited to hang out with my favorite roomie, and she was already in bed! I'm assuming she must have to work early tomorrow. Oh well. Perhaps tomorrow... :( As for the accusations that I've been "vaulting" fodder for Things My Cousin Says, trust me - you would too if you said as many embarrassing things as I say in a day. I think the only thing I didn't vault with Kayla yet was when I asked her "Wait. Serbia and Montenegro are just one country? Why is it Serbia and Montenegro? Why can't it just be one or the other, or split up into two separate nations??" In my defense, I've really never paid that much attention to the geography of any area (you all know I've actually gotten lost on the first floor of the airport parking structure, right?) so I can't really be blamed for not knowing about Serbia and Montenegro. On the bright side, while we were googling this "two names/one country" business, I also learned that Bosnia and Herzegovina are (is?) also one country. Oh, the things you learn when you Google random information...

In other news, I think I may have caused Kayla to gag this morning in class when I texted her to inform her that I was having a steak for breakfast and that I was washing it down with a nice glass of milk. Oh, and did I mention that I had some double chocolate gelato for dessert after that? (Maybe this sort of eating habit is why I've decided to finally get a gym membership? Hahaha) I'm really not sure how we're roommates. She's a vegan who's allergic to soy, and I'm the girl who will pretty much only eat what she won't! I do enjoy freaking her out with my eating habits though :) And I must say, I've gotten pretty good at making a delicious steak! You know it's good when you dip it in A1 and decide it's better without the sauce! And mom, just to prove to you that I'm not joking, here is a picture of my delicious steak. :) (And the gelato I had afterward. Turns out you can get some pretty good gelato at Meijer for a pretty decent price!)

My favorite way to prepare the steak: mix together some season salt, paprika, cumin, and a little garlic salt and rub it all over the steak before you cook it. In this case, I let it sit like that overnight, and it turned out delicious!

Well, that's about it for this post. I need to actually go to bed at a decent time (for the first time all week) so that I can actually get up and get things done tomorrow before work! I think I'll go have a couple spoonfuls of gelato first though. ;)