More Memorial Day recap

I'm back! I'm in a meeting but blogging my face off! We did a grand tour of furniture shopping this weekend. We picked out 2 recliners that were a great compromise: they are slim and modern but still are comfy when you lay down in them. We also got this AWESOME sofa that beats all the other sofas in the world:

It's so comfy!!! It's some space age magic material that we can clean really easily. Dogs and dirty feet are A-Ok! The 2 end seats are recliners and the middle seat folds down and is a tray with 2 cupholders. The big wonderful selling point for me was that the reclining pieces MASSAGE. So you can sit on our sofa and get a nice, relaxing massage. OH YEAH. If all goes well John and crew will be picking the new furniture up today. I can't wait!

Memorial Day weekend fun!

This weekend was SO WONDERFUL! There were 2 holidays rolled into 1 since Friday was John's birthday. We did SO MUCH this weekend! It really felt like I had a 2 week vacation but in a good way. Friday night we had a wonderful birthday dinner at one of John's favorite restaurants. It's the sushi restaurant where we had our wedding reception. John HATES people making a big deal out of his birthday. Before John and I got there his parents told our waitress that it was John's birthday. At the end of the meal our adorable waitress comes out with a little rice ice cream scoop with a candle in it. We start singing, the waitress starts singing, and by the 2nd verse of "Happy Birthday" almost the entire restaurant is singing. Here is John's priceless face:

PRICE.LESS. I love it! After that yummy birthday dinner we had to leave and go get a good night's sleep for a weekend full of furniture shopping! Not exactly excited? Well, I HEART saving money. I think of it as a game that I have to win. Earlier this month John, Mrs. Davis and I drove to the IKEA in Charlotte to look for furniture. John and I have decided that the best way to use our wedding war chest is to buy furniture for our 2 living rooms. We've done alot of footwork and internet searching and thought we found the perfect set at IKEA. We were planning to pick it up on Memorial Day weekend but then we started getting waves of Memorial Day sales flyers from furniture places, so we stayed around Columbia to have a look. One of the furniture places (where we didn't end up buying furniture) was about 30 minutes outside of Lexington in the same town as a semi-famous restaurant, Shealy's. It's a huge and adorable barbeque buffet. It's cafeteria style so you grab a seat and chit chat with your neighbors. It's also where I ate my first fatback:

UUUGHHH. This is obviously taken before I ate any piece of this disgustingness. I should have had Mike videotape me. UGHHHH. Have you ever eaten a fatback? They're the fat and skin of a pig and I used to think they were fried, but I think they're just heavily salted. So one layer (shuddershudder) is the pig's skin and has the consistency of a damp pork rind and the other layer is just fat. The consistency is HORRIBLE and there is no taste aside from salt. It was like the Morton's salt girl was pouring her little blue container straight onto my tongue. I think this is what they serve to the people in Gitmo when they really want to punish them. Aside from that, however, the meal was FANTASTIC. As John likes to say, I didn't stop eating when I was full. I stopped eating when I hated myself. :)

Off to a meeting! More Memorial Day fun coming up soon!

You get what you pay for

As I've mentioned before on here, one of the easiest places to trim fat from my budget was on my girlie pampering and primping. I don't tan anymore, I dye my hair at home, I don't get bikini waxes, I don't get manicures or pedicures, and I get my hair cut with coupons. Well, with scissors, but I only get my hair cut when the local branch of a big hair cut-o-matic has a coupon in the paper. The last time I went to get my hair cut there, about 3 weeks ago, my hairdresser wore a wig. That's not a good sign. It had purple tips on the end and I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't want permanent purple tipped hair. However, when your job is to cut people's hair, a wig of any type is not a good way to impress clients. One of my co-workers went to the same salon (?) last night and the woman cutting my coworker's hair CUT. HER. FINGER. The hairdresser cut her own finger with the scissors. Seriously. For real. She apparently had to stop the haircut to get something to stent the bleeding. Yikes. Maybe it's time to stop paying for haircuts with coupons.

I'm a walking advertisement for Princeton Review

I can see that my GRE classes and studying are really paying off! I have so much homework now I basically have no life during the week. However, my GRE score has gone up by 240 points! THAT IS SO MUCH!