It's time for the Oscars!

Oh my gosh, you guys! Tonight is the Academy Awards!  I'm quite excited.  I'm watching all of the Red Carpet stuff right now (poor Kevin...), and the Awards will be starting in about 30 minutes. We ended up getting to see all but one of the Best Picture nominees this year!!  So I thought I'd give a very quick summary of my thoughts on each of the movies.

Arrival -  This is the one starring Amy Adams about aliens coming to Earth. I thought this movie was pretty good.  I didn't love it. 

Fences - Starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. This is the one we didn't get to see!  The acting in the trailers looks AMAZING though, and I'll see this one once it's available via Redbox. 

Hacksaw Ridge - This is the WWII one directed by Mel Gibson. I liked the story, and I thought some of the acting was really great, but I'm sad to say I didn't love the  movie.  I loved parts of it though. 

Hell or High Water - This one was great!  I had known nothing about this one before I saw it (except that it looked like a cowboy movie and it starred Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges), and I really enjoyed it.  It doesn't have my vote for Best Picture, but I'm really glad I saw it. 

Hidden Figures - AMAZING!!!  Loved it, loved it, loved it.  The acting was amazing, the story was amazing... just everything.  I hope this one brings home some awards!  Loved it.  Go see this one!!  It's sooo good. 

La La Land - This one was super fun and amazing, and I think it's going to take home Best Picture.  It doesn't get MY vote for Best Picture, but I think it will win because Holly wood loves movies about Holly wood. I absolutely did love this movie though, and I'm rooting for Emma Stone to win Best Actress.
 
Lion - This one has my vote for Best Picture!!  I LOOOOOOOVED this movie.  Seriously, go see this one.  Just see it.  You won't regret it.  I'm totally rooting for Dev Patel to win Best Supporting Actor, and I hope this one takes home Best Picture (even though I think La La Land will take it....). 

Manchester by the Sea - Casey Affleck was AWESOME in this, and I hope he takes home Best Actor.  Such an incredibly heartbreaking movie though... Don't see it unless you want to be sad. We had to watch some Parks and Rec after this to cheer up, because it is super upsetting. But, the acting was amazing. 

Moonlight - This movie was absolutely awesome, and super powerful.  This is my 2nd choice for Best Picture (behind Lion, even though I think La La Land will take it...).  The acting was amazing, the story was amazing... it was really great. 

So, that will be our evening!  We spent the weekend doing a LOT of house projects... Yesterday I painted our guest room (my gosh I'm sore today...), and today we pulled up the carpet in the guest room!!  We aren't done with pulling up the staples, etc in the floors, but we think the hardwoods will look good once we get the staples out and clean them up a bit.  They seem to be in pretty good shape (unlike the hardwood floors in my office that took us MONTHS to clean up)!!  I'll give you a little sneak-peek of the floors, and some pictures of the guest room "before".  The "after" pictures will have to wait until we finish up next weekend!! 

Here's a "before" picture!  White walls and VERY green carpet!! This room has been driving us nuts since we moved in... 

Here's Kevin cutting the super green carpet to rip it up! And it's a bit of a sneak-peek of the painted walls... It's kind of a grey-beige color. The lighting isn't great in this picture... 

A little peak at our floors that were hiding under the carpet!! 

Oh, and apparently it's Spring?  We have flowers blooming in our yard!  Weird... It was 70 degrees yesterday and the day before, but then this morning it was 30 degrees and only got to the 40s.  So... I do not know what is going on.  Poor Mother Nature is having a breakdown. 

Pretty purple flowers!! 

I hope you've all had a great weekend!!

Our Valentine's Day

Last weekend was pretty good!  On Saturday morning Kevin drove me to the Red Cross because I had an appointment to donate platelets. It was my first time donating platelets, and I was pretty nervous and I wasn't sure how I'd be feeling after (if I'd be ok to drive or not), so Kevin very graciously offered to drop me off and pick me up even though my appointment was early in the morning! The experience itself wasn't too bad... It was definitely uncomfortable, but the worst part of it is just that you can't use your arms for like 3 hours (because they have blood coming out of one arm and going back in the other one after they remove the platelets).  But, they do let you pick a movie to watch, so I picked The Lord of The Rings: Return of the King, because I knew it was SUPER long so it'd last the whole time I was there! I was very grateful for that movie. I think I'll donate again sometime next month, but for now my arms are healing up because they bruised the crap out of me. After Kevin picked me up, I definitely napped for a bit on the couch with Guinness. And then during the evening we went to McGee's family's house for dinner!  It was so nice to see all of them, and we had a great evening hanging out.

Guinness loooooved our nap time. We were snuggled on the couch. 

 We started celebrating Valentine's Day last Sunday by going bowling (it's been our tradition the last few years). We wanted to go to a cool bowling alley in the city that has a super retro vibe and also serves AMAZING tater tots, but unfortunately that place was booked for a private event.  But, we discovered that the little bowling alley near us (that'd we'd never been to!) had SUPER cheap prices, and they're also BYOB!  We went there and bowled 3 games, and drank a few beers that we'd brought with us, and had a really fun time (and the whole thing cost us $10 total)! By the 3rd game my arm was super dead, and Kevin SLAUGHTERED me!  The first two games were pretty close, but the 3rd game was a blowout...

After bowling, we went home for a bit, and then we went to see Lego Batman!  It was HILARIOUS. Seriously hilarious movie.  After the movie was over, we wandered across the street to the mall and walked around for a few minutes (I'd never been to that mall!). 

It's the Joker from Lego Batman! 

I'm poking Lego Batman in his 9-pack abs!  (It's a joke in the movie)

And our Valentine's Day was AWESOME, except for having to work (I prefer a weekend Valentine's Day!). We made some homemade pasta and homemade alfredo for dinner (AMAZING), and then we watched a horror movie!  That has been a Valentine's Day tradition for me since my days of being single, and Kevin and I have shared that tradition the whole time we've been together too. Our movie this year was The Visit (by M. Night Shyamalan), because we'd both heard it was good and we saw it was on HBO On Demand.  It was definitely a creepy movie!  The twist was pretty good... I don't think I'd call it a "good" movie, but the twist was good.  And it creeped us out, so that's what we were looking for really :)  Oh, and we ended the evening by watching Michael Bolton's Valentine's Day Special on Netflix!  It was SOOOO hilarious!!  We were cracking up.

We have made a bit of progress on our Oscar Best Picture nominees list!  This week we saw Hidden Figures (SOOOOO good!!!), and we saw Arrival (pretty good). So, we've now seen 5 of the 9 nominees!  Not too shabby.

Happy Friday everybody!!  I hope everyone has a great weekend! Kevin should be home any minute, and then we're going to make some enchiladas, and have a nice relaxing evening!

Guinness is 4 years old!

Guinness turned 4 years old yesterday (on Groundhog Day!). So, we celebrated by playing LOTS of frisbee outside (it's his favorite thing ever I think), and then we gave him a little bit of boiled chicken and rice with his dinner. He's had chicken and rice before when the vet has told us to give him that to help an upset stomach, and he loooooves chicken and rice. So, we decided that could be his birthday treat! And we also watched Groundhog Day, because we HAD to since it's Groundhog Day! We both love that movie so much.

Working on his training ("stay"), and that's Groundhog Day on the TV! 

Last weekend was FUN!! On Saturday we started off our morning by driving into the city to see our friend Michael (aka Big Mike aka the opera singer) at his apartment, because he's getting ready to move into a really awesome apartment!  I think his move-in day is today, actually.  So there were a few last minute things he needed some help with (taking his TV off the wall, etc). It was great to see him, as always. And I'm so excited for him that he's going to be moving into a great new apartment. After helping Michael, we drove to Sly Fox Brewery for some snowshoeing fun!!  REI was there demo-ing some snowshoes. We went into the brewery first and had a few beers, and then we were totally ready to try out the snowshoeing!  It was FUN, and we both totally want to find some cheap (used?) snowshoes now. REI had to bring in some snow for the demo, because there is no snow anywhere right now!  It's such a weird winter. We both took a few photos of the whole experience!

This is when we decided to head into the brewery and have a few beers before we started snowshoeing. That wasn't as much snow as we were thinking would be brought in! 

Here's when we came back out! It was a bit busier. But everyone was having fun! 

The hardest part is getting the snowshoes on!  And they have these sharp metal blade-like teeth on the bottom of them (I had no idea!)

Here's Kevin waiting at the bottom of the hill for me to walk on down in my snowshoes! 

I had no idea he took this picture... but I was putting on my gloves. It was chilly! 

After our fun snowshoeing adventure, we went back into the brewery and had some more beer and then also went on a brewery tour!!  We have been on a LOT of brewery tours, and this was the first time ever that I was the only girl!!  It was really weird. 

In the brewery! 

This was our tour! All men!  So strange. 

Last weekend we also watched a few of the Oscar Best Picture nominees!  We checked two more off of our list, so now we have 6 left! We went to the movie theater to see Lion, and oh my gosh you guys... SUCH a beautiful movie!! We both really loved it. "Beautiful" is the best word I can think of to describe it. Just incredibly beautiful and touching. Go see Lion!  You won't regret it.  We also saw that Hell or High Water (the one with Chris Pine) was available at a RedBox at our grocery store, so we rented that for a night and watched it too.  It was good!  Definitely a bit violent though, so keep that in mind if you're not a fan of violent movies. So far (and I know I'm very early in the Best Picture Nominees viewing list...), I'm rooting for Lion to win, for sure.  But I also think that La La Land will win, because Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood (and it was awesome, but I loved Lion way more). 

I'm SO happy that today is Friday!!  I hope you all have a great weekend!!