latest blog-stalking find

so, I must confess something scandalous right now... I am addicted to blog-stalking. I have stumbled upon numerous fun and fantastic blogs and, subscribed to their feeds and now have all these unwitting pseudo-friends that I love. Occasionally I might comment on their blogs, but usually I just find comfort in the fact that we are all basically the same, no matter how far apart or how differently we live. But, tonight I have to share with you one of my favorites: Tartlette. A french transplant pastry chef who does amazing things with food and a camera. She's adorable. And so are these.... So if you get a hankering for feeling really inadequate in your baking skills, hit up her blog.

ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh!

I just had the funnest weekend at a Digital Scrapbooking retreat with my favorite friend Kirsten! Friday night she & I headed up to Park City after dumping our kids off with our husbands at work. At first we kinda thought it would be a bit of a waste of time because the first little class that night was kinda basic, but soon the mind-blowing tips and tricks started and we are the biggest nerds. Just check us out with all our laptops and whatnot...

Classes on Friday were done by 10:30, but Kirsten & I hadn't eaten dinner yet, so we ventured to Albertsons and found lovely junk food and delicious ciabatta roll sandwiches with pesto sauce. Then we hooked up with her sweet cousin, Brooke who was there to teach a class. She is such a doll and had the CUTEST 3 week old baby. I could not wrap my brain around being that well put together after having a baby only 3 weeks before. She is soooo creative, too! Anyway, we all went down to the lobby & found a whole bunch of our fellow scrap-nerds and talked shop and ate delicious cookies from here, one of a very few reasons I've found to stop in Utah Valley. Well, that went on till I decided I was tired at midnight, but when Kirsten & I went to bed, we experienced a strange combination of not being able to shut our pieholes and being too tired to sleep and suddenly not being very tired. At any rate I don't think we were asleep before 3:30 am; which didn't actually really suck until about 3pm, when we both wanted to poke our eyeballs out. But we learned SOOOOO STINKIN' MUCH COOL STUFF!!!! We kept looking over at each other & going, ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh, and when Kirsten said it she would do one of my favorite things she does, the famous Kirsten "hand flap". Flip your hands back and forth in front of your face like a spazz. That's how it is done, and it makes me smile everytime. I {heart} Kirsten.

cupcakes on the brain...

I'll be doing cupcakes for our 10 year reunion on July 11th as well as a wedding at the end of July, and so I've spent the majority of my time tonight trying to find amazing recipes and fun ideas. Cupcakes are seriously the funnest little bundles of confection, I know it's such the trendy thing right now, but I am SO on that bandwagon! I just wanted to share these funny little pictures, they make me smile. (They are, btw, part of an adorable book Hello, Cupcake by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson.) If you know of any cute cupcake ideas or recipes, I am going to be doing some serious experimentation in the next few months, so feel free to pass them on!

these are for grandma & grandpa

Babysat my sister Carrie's kids for a minute yesterday and they are so freaking cute! She doesn't have the internet and I guess my parents are dying for pictures of the Pinkleman kids. So here are a few.

it's a thin line between love & hate...

Hi, my name is Celeste and I am a Targa-holic. Yes, I know, it's shameful. I suppose it's a step up from being addicted to Wal-Mart, but I literally go there nearly everyday. Does that make me a shallow person? I don't know, I'll let God judge, but my thinking on the subject is currently this:

Due to the extremely convenient proximity of my neighborhood SuperTarget store, I have lost the ability to get everything I need for the next few days in one shopping trip. My brain knows that it would not be a big deal to have to run back to the store, so I never seem to be able to think of everything I need when list-writing time comes.

Take today for example. Panties. Princess panties. Somehow they became a priority high enough on my list to risk a diaper-free trip to the store. (It was a complete potty-training success, by the way!) Either that or the past two days of potty-training have made me a bit cabin-feverish and I HAD TO GET OUT OF THE FREAKING HOUSE!!! So, yeah, princess panties were good enough reason to run to Target.

If I weren't so lazy I would go scan this receipt in and show you evidence of what happens to me when I go to Target.

Today it was this:

What would have, for any sane person, been a ten dollar maximum trip to Target for a pack of princess panties, became a TWO-HUNDRED-AND-FORTY-EIGHT-DOLLARS-AND-SEVENTY-EIGHT-CENTS random crap purchase-a-thon. Am I alone in this problem with Target? Am I honestly the only person who absolutely must have a forty dollar palm sander when I had never thought of owning one before? And you know the worst part? I'm not taking it back. I have decided that, yes, I really do need that palm sander and I have spent the evening making sure that I didn't get totally ripped off without first researching prices for said palm sander. And I actually seem to have gotten a fairly good price. huh, who'd have thought?

So, yeah, let's see, here is a summary of my line of thinking that eventually accumulated to $248.78:

Toddler Panties (at least I didn't forget what I even came in for, like I often do) $8.54

Divided Toddler Dining Tray (useful for newly enforced toddler food apartheid laws) $2.99

Matching Monkey Cup (Sawyer will have to learn to use cups without lids at some point) $1.99

OXO dish brush (this product is God's gift to me; no touching gross dishes) $2.99

Hoover filter replacement (cannot decide if this is worth the price, spring cleaning???) $39.99

Twin box spring cover (for nasty, free ksl.com classified box spring for Sawyer's bed) $12.99

Twin waterproof mattress cover (for no doubt soon to be pee-d on mattress) $19.99

Layette Set (baby shower gift for cute little Becky friend) $19.99

Palm Sander (already addressed this one) $39.99

14Volt Drill (we actually do need this, ours recently passed away.) $54.99

2 muffin tins (cupcake wedding cakes are all the rage; business expense.) $9.38

So yeah, please tell me I'm not the only one who gets lost in a consumer driven frenzy in places like this.

two questions....

#1: Is it really, really, REALLY done?

Crap like this, I mean. I don't want to get my hopes up any more, only to have them dashed to peices by thousands upon thousands of snowflakes. You should see the poor little seedlings on my dining table; growing toward the sunlight.... stretching out to the spring, and sick of their confined little plastic sprouting container. That is much how I feel.

and now question #2: do you LOVE my new bedding or what? That last duvet cover has increasingly started to remind me of a circus tent, and that is not a romantic theme for my marital bed. (not for me at least, there may be some who would argue.) Anyway, it had to go and when I saw the lovebird pillow at Target, I was sold on a trendy yet highly soothing blue/brown color scheme. Matt & I have decided that the soothy-ness cancels out the the trendy-ness.

(oh, also, an added bonus of new bedding & darker draperies- increased napping opportunities when and if I become a tired pregnant person. Jury's still out on that one though.)