the real texas post

okay, sorry to anyone who got tricked into reading my howdy y'all post. i accidentally posted it before it was done...and i'm staying at mom and dad's house right now, so my internet connection is pretty much non-existent. this post should include some photos (jenny & cristy) and answer kristina's questions about cats...NO! I STRONGLY DISLIKE CATS! but i can see where you'd get that idea.

to celebrate the completion of my college classes (which conveniently coincided with my birthday and Christmas) matt and todd generously offered to take me on a vacation. i decided i wanted to go to:



texas, because i have never been outside of an airport in texas, and to narrow it down a bit i chose san antonio, because it offers a lot of things i am interested in...namely sea world, a river walk, and lots of steak.

here i am waiting for our flight to board. it was a couple days before my birthday, but i figured i would get a jump start on being old...so i passed the time by crocheting. (and cristy, they DO allow knitting needles & crochet hooks through airport security...i was shocked.) i may as well dye my hair blue and put a down payment on some dentures.



i was a bit sad to be separated from matt and todd, but when there was only one first-class seat available, i took the bullet for the team and volunteered to sit up there all by myself. i know, i'm a giver. matt and todd were so lucky to be able to stay together.



and while matt and todd were happily enjoying their crisp cookies OR peanuts, i got to eat all of this, i mean, come on...the flight does take a little over 2 hours, so of course those of us in first class get famished:



we landed sort of late, because we had to wait for me to finish all of my finals before we left...so we didn't see a lot of san antonio our first night, but our taxi driver (who really liked using his horn) was nice enough to advise us of which direction to go and NOT go when we were out and about. however, we saw LOTS of san antonio over the next few days. i was rather shocked. it was NOT at all how i had pictured it. who knew there was a venice-like river that ran through downtown SA? not me?

here are just a bunch of photos of things we saw on our riverwalk adventures:









and i am going to post for now, with more to come...i have to go to my other sister's house to get ready to rock and roll new year's eve style. thanks to mitchel for letting me use her internet while i am in town. not only do i not have internet at mom & dad's house, but i was snowed in for 2 days. seriously, i was considering changing my name to laura ingalls.

howdy y'all

to celebrate the completion of my college classes (which conveniently coincided with my birthday and Christmas) matt and todd generously offered to take me on a vacation. i decided i wanted to go to san antonio, texas, because i have never been outside of an airport in texas, and san antonio offers a lot of things i am interested in...namely sea world, a river walk, and lots of steak.

here i am waiting for our flight to board. it was a couple days before my birthday, but i figured i would get a jump start on being old...so i passed the time by crocheting. i may as well dye my hair blue and put a down payment on some dentures.

i was a bit sad to be separated from matt and todd, but when there was only one first-class seat available, i took the bullet for the team and volunteered to sit up there all by myself. i know, i'm a giver. matt and todd were so lucky to be able to stay together.

how am i doing?

i decided to take a look back at my new year's resolutions and see how well i completed them throughout the year. in case you are like me and you also forgot what they were, here's a little reminder:

5: get my snuggie photo posted on pulsipher predilections. (might have to submit a few, to increase my odds.) SO DONE WITH THIS ONE!!! WOOHOO!!!

4: make my limited budget last for 5 months, then get a summer job. (might have to actually finish the coloring book i started 2 years ago or sell some stuff on e-bay...like my body. hey, if it sells by the pound, i'll be set.) DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO GET A SUMMER JOB!! MAJOR BUDGET MASTER!!! THANK GOODNESS FOR AWESOME RENTERS AND WONDERFUL FRIENDS!!

3: make a healthy meal at home at least twice a week that didn't start out in a box. (the disposability of microwavable meal containers is soooooo appealing to me.) NOT SO MUCH. I COOKED ABOUT ONCE A WEEK.

2: exercise for at least an hour 5 days a week. (wii fit DOES count.) NOT EVEN CLOSE. I DIDN'T EVEN GET 5 DAYS A MONTH. I SUCK.

1: try something new at least once a month. (food, activity, or social event.) YES, I DID THIS. ONCE AGAIN, THANKS TO WONDERFUL FRIENDS!

so, i did about half of them. that's not too bad...or too good. i'm going to post this right now, but perhaps i'll throw together a few of my photos from 2010 and have a photo post in the next couple of days. this year has been so much fun!

change of scenery

one day it looked like this:



my lawn ornaments were SO happy. loving the crisp autumn air:



but soon, it looked more like this:



and after some digging, it looked like this:



good thing i have such great friends, who keep me highly entertained, so snowy cabin fever never has a chance to set in. here we are at easy a. this was my second movie of the day, i went to a matinee of burlesque. man, i wish i could sing and dance well.



i hope you are all enjoying the wonderful holiday season. i do not love driving in the snow, but it is SO beautiful.

i finally did it! i am FAMOUS!

hey everyone, i can finally cross off one of my new year's resolutions and an item from my bucket list.

if you wanna check out the big accomplishment...click HERE! check out the photo on the sidebar...heck ya, that's ME!



earlier this year, i sent in a different photo, but it was a little bit too naughty...it may have involved some nudity...so i decided to try one from santa's "nice girls" list. hooray! thanks for the excitement, kristina!

random dress-up day

about a month ago, i helped my friend, ashlie, out with a project at her daughter's school. ashlie was in charge of the reflections contest, which is a contest for students in 8 different art catagories. this year, the theme is "together we can..." and i made a bit of a fool out of myself in front of the entire school by acting out how they can dance, sing, write, or draw their way into prize-winning territory.

anyway, one of my favorite parts of the 2-day event was wearing a little tutu ashlie had sewn for me. it was just a simple, little thing, but it was my very first tutu...as far as i can remember. so, as a thank you present, ashlie made me a bigger, poofier, awesomer tutu to go along with the gourmet doughnuts and gift card to kneaders. really, i would have been satisfied with just the tutu, but i do appreciate some good food, so i didn't turn the other gifts away. thanks again, ashlie!

as soon as ashlie left my house, i ran downstairs to build my new favorite outfit. i got it on just in time, so when matt got home i was sitting on the couch in THIS, with my box of donuts on my lap. just an ordinary day in the house of danelle:



i think i might get along well with lady gaga.

do you smell burning hair?

due to a wonderful combination of genes/medication/hormones, i have been blessed with rather rapidly growing hair. even my eyebrows grow long at an alarmingly fast rate. i can wax one day and they will be back a week later. WAX! i say. WAX! i am sick to death of waxing, so i decided to try laser hair removal, now that the lasers are supposedly better.

all has been going well, until today, when andrea-the-new-girl tried to take out my entire eyebrow, instead of just the stray hairs above and below it! seriously, she zapped an entire section of my brow! she twitched a bit, then said in an all-apologetic voice, "Oh, sorry...I sort of knicked the edge, but it won't leave a hole or anything."

once i got out to my car and saw it in the mirror, i realized it was WAY more than "the edge" and i'm really hoping it didn't actually penetrate the thickness of my peter gallagher brow to kill the roots. it is all singed and poking in about 27 different directions. yay for me and my attempts to not look like a caveman. ugh.

okay, this is awful photo quality, but i had to take it with my computer because my camera battery is dead. you can actually see a hole among all the scattered/singed hairs.



i'm pretty sure andrea probably about peed her pants. i know i almost did. can i get a refund?

***okay, my camera battery is charged now, so here is a better photo, with a comparison of a "what it should look like" photo...see all the singed hairs, and they are torched into that position...I've tried to smooth them out. hopefully it won't last long and they won't just fall out. ignore all the other flaws on my face and brow, please.

what it should be, before shot:



what it is, after the laser slip, for reals, it's stuck like this. jealous?:

super nel...not to be confused with superdell

last saturday i went with matt and karen to help matt's mom and dad with some yard work. i know, me? believe me, when matt first asked me to do it, i told him "nope." but, being the kind, loving, generous, hard-working person that i am, it only took about 5 days for the guilt to start eating away at me. i don't know the first thing about yard work. well, that's a lie, i do know the first thing...the first thing is that it's HOT and SWEATY and WORK! i won't lie, i secretly prayed that i would fall down the stairs and sprain my ankle before saturday morning arrived, but i didn't. so, we headed up there bright and early (we didn't get there until around 10 am, but for ME on a SATURDAY morning, that is bright and early.)

luckily, matt's dad had some gloves for me. even more luckily, matt's mom had some mountain dew for me. so once i took a potty break (hey, a girl can't work with a full bladder) got my iPod hooked up to my portable iHome (nor can she work without the proper mood music...eye of the tiger usually works. thanks for that, crystal), i was ready to get to work.

here i am, hard at work SUPERvising matt and karen digging a trench for some giant beams to divide the garden from the grass:



and now i am SUPERvising them as they place the beam into the trench:



and here i am, SUPERvising matt pound in a stake while karen holds another piece of border wood in place:



good thing i was there to SUPERvise matt while he used the wood splitter:



HEY! where did he go? oh no!



they FINALLY let me play with the awesome toys:



and then i was on a roll, check out that stack of wood behind me. yes, i split that!:



look at me go! i am an animal! take that, yard work!



once the wood was all split, i SUPERvised matt and karen as they loaded some into the blazer to take home. hey, i can't do EVERYTHING!

crafts in school

i bet you all think i spend my days in school looking at cadavers and learning about bones and muscles, huh? nope...this semester we have an entire class period dedicated to learning about CRAFTS. that's right. there really is a good theory behind it all, though. apparently, if we can get our patients to whittle away on a piece of wood or paint a figurine, they won't even realize they're receiving therapy until we've practically cured them of whatever ails them. they will gain strength, fine motor skills, activity tolerance, cognitive rehabilitation, and even practice some social skills. i have had a very fun time learning the crafts, my class is full of very non-crafty people, so it has been a huge learning experience and experiment for us all. NONE of us even knew how to thread a sewing machine...at least the ones the school has.

oh, and each day, we are each assigned a different diagnosis and we have to complete the crafts as if we have the use of only one arm, visual impairment, memory loss, etc...it gets pretty chaotic, but we're supposed to figure out how the craft can be adapted for different degrees of difficulty. anyway, here are the first crafts i made:

the day we made the baby quilts, i had to call my mama and tell her i finally made a quilt. she has made about 5 gazillion, the kind you cut and piece together, and this is MY very first, and it is simply tied. my quilting partner (mean deb, who's not really mean) and i were the first students to ever finish within the time limit of one class period. we rocked. i mean, come on people...those are HAND-SEWN edges! so i guess i'll start with those photos...ta-duh! my quilt (which really isn't mine, because we donate most of our finished crafts to local charities):







here is my hand-carved wooden car...i didn't have to carve the wheels, thank heavens, and i really, really wanted to paint it, but they wouldn't let us:



here are the cards i made (i was not in a creative mood this day, i finished in about 10 minutes, we had over 2 hours to work on them...oops, sorry charity):



here is my tile coaster...one of the only projects i get to keep:



here is the baby hat i made on a loom:



and here are my embroidered Christmas ornaments (i really had fun with this craft):



we still have leather working, crocheting, knitting, and a few others to master. so, i may not know which bone the thigh bone is connected to, but i can glitter and glue with the best of them. woohoo!

triple threat

when i was about 13 years old, i began to develop a strange, superstitious paranoia. there were a LOT of things that lead up to the creation of this insanity, and still to this day, the fear plagues me. it follows me. it plants seeds of suspicion and terror in my brain. i am pretty sure today may be the culmination of this fear. because the thing that riddles my mind with paralyzing anxiety is.....the number 10. but not all by itself. no, it has to be a double ten. like, when the clock reads 10:10, or when a bridge clearance is 10' 10", or when the total bill comes to $10.10. i'm getting shivery goosebumps just typing it so many times. i'm certain i'm inviting some sort of bad luck into my presence.

so imagine how my heart pulsed when i woke up this morning and realized it was the day of triple threat! 10-10-10! ugh! i will have to be on high alert all day long. it's going to be exhausting. i hope you all successfully dodge the course of the 10-10 curse.

did you know that if you place the number 1 inside the number 0, it forms a cat eye? i think i'm gonna faint.

happy birthday to my baby girl!

today is maggie's birthday. she is 3 years old in human years...i think for a dog her size, that means she is about 18 in dog years. i love and miss her very much and i hope she had a fantastic birthday. she better watch the mail, there is a little something special coming her way!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAGNADOODLE MARMALAIDEE MILLER! Mama loves you!

bird dog

what she usually looks like:



what she looks like when kentucky-louisiana disguises her as an egg-laying bird dog:



and believe it or not, this IS what she looks like right now. maggie recently went to the groomer for her very first time. thank goodness hair grows back...she may be a poodle, but she's not THAT kind of poodle:



i'm thinking that in the future i'll just stick to taking her to the groomer for her manicures. i HATE clipping her nails. mitchel said maggie was a little embarrassed about her new haircut, so they tried to only laugh at her behind her back. poor little lamb.

sorry for the confusion

a few people have inquired about why my blog keeps having ghost updates. well, the explanation is simple...i tried to be organized, but i am a procrastinator at heart, so those preparations backfired. i post-dated a few blog entries, with only their titles, thinking i'd give myself adequate time to finish the post. then i never even worked on the posts and i forgot i had planned ahead. so, they published themselves, as per my initial instructions, so then i had to delete the empty posts from my blog. sorry. i am still working on them. so maybe the explanation isn't as simple as i thought. i just made a short story long.

smiling next to oprah and the queen

i wanna be a billionaire, so frickin' bad, but i am pretty sure this collection is not going to be my ticket to the fast train going in that direction. nonetheless, i began collecting squished pennies many years ago.



i started the collection as a way to gather souvenirs from my travels, which were easy to transport, simple to store, didn't take up a lot of space, and were very inexpensive, but which also gave a good indication of where i'd been or where they'd come from.

i soon discovered that not very many of my vacation spots value the fine qualities of the good ol' pressed penny. that's where my fantastic friends stepped in. not only did matt and emmy discover this amazing squished penny storage book, in a shop in estes park, colorado, but they have also donated to my collection over the years. and last night i finally filled the final slot in my first book. matt just returned from alaska, and my only souvenir request was a squished penny. i really didn't think he would find a place to make one, but as usual, matt came through for me. that anchorage, alaska penny was the final piece of this collection...well, until i get a new book.



here are my pennies and below is a list of the locations from whence they came, and i have tried to remember if the penny is actually from a place i've been to, or whether it was donated. i might be wrong on some of them, but here's the list according to danelle:



1. estes park, colorado (YES)
2. oregon trail, columbia gorge (? I DON'T REMEMBER MAKING THIS, BUT I THINK I DID)
3. cabela's, lehi, utah (YES)
4. skycoaster @ lagoon, farmington, utah (YES)
5. buffalo bill historical center, cody, wyoming (YES)
6. million dollar cowboy bar, jackson hole, wyoming (YES)
7. the old mill, pigeon forge (NO? NOT EVEN SURE WHERE IT IS, MATT?)
8. hole n" the rock, moab-ish, utah (YES)
9. motsumosto shave ice, haleiwa, hawaii (YES)
10. edinburgh castle, scotland (YES)
11. hanauma bay, hawaii (YES)
12. trolley square, slc, utah (YES)
13. music city usa, nashville tennessee (NO, MATT)
14. balloon fest, albuquerque, new mexico (NO, MATT)
15. atlantis submarines, honolulu, hawaii (YES)
16. zion national park, utah (NO, MATT?)
17. dole plantation, hawaii (YES)
18. san fransisco, california (ONLY THE AIRPORT, SO NO, MATT?)
19. honolulu zoo, hawaii (YES)
20. utah olympic park (I THINK SO? BUT I DID NOT MAKE THIS, I THINK MATT DID)
21. gatlinburg, tennessee (NO, MATT)
22. motor city muscle, detroit, michigan (NO, MATT?)
23. muir woods, national monument (DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE IT IS, SO NO. MATT?)
24. ellis island, new york (NO, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? SAD. MATT)
25. multnomah falls, oregon (YES, BUT MATT MADE THIS ONE)
26. maui, hawaii (NO, MATT)
27. tillamook cheese (NO, EMMY)
28. humpback whales, maui, hawaii (NO, MATT)
29. rockaway beach, oregon (I DON'T THINK SO, I DIDN'T MAKE THIS, MATT?)
30. rainforest cafe, phoenix, arizona (NO, CRYSTAL)
31. eeyore, disneyland (YES, BUT NOT MINE, I THINK EMMY?)
32. the big island, hawaii (YES)
33. tillamook cheese, tillamook, oregon (NOPE, MATT)
34. shedd aquarium, chicago, illinois (NO, EMMY)
35. mount st. helens, washington (NO, MATT)
36. land of the midnight sun, anchorage, alaska (NO, MATT)

so, now i need to get a new book and this time i am going to keep better track of when and from whom i get them. i also need to keep better track of the pennies, in general, because i am certain i have misplaced a few i made for myself. i still have tons of fun collecting them. my heart does a little happy flip whenever i see a machine, sadly, some of the machines don't work, like the one at the midvale mining company restaurant, or the stupid one at the dinosaur museum in vernal, utah...it looked like a squished penny machine, but it spit out a stupid token instead. let the hunt continue!

so tell me, what types of things do YOU collect?

more facebook profile pictures

i am working on a few new posts, but until they are ready, here is another collage of some of my more recent facebook profile photos. i know this seems strange, but i don't know how long i will be part of the facebook world, and i just want to have these memories captured here for when/if i ever make a blog book. so sorry to bore you all. at least my mama will be happy to see my face...she doesn't do the facebook. :)



and i promise, i have 3 posts on the work bench, they just need a few more tweaks and a bit more time.

don't forget to stop by the quote blog! there is a link for it on my sidebar, it is called "daily quotes and challenges" and i am having a very fun time putting it all together. this week's focus is the dreaded four-letter word...exercise!

change of plans

i had big plans for the day, while matt was at his family reunion, i was just going to sit around my house being lazy, reading a good book, and relaxing...but i kept seeing the apple tree swaying in the breeze in the back yard and it got me to thinking, "hmmm...i bet an apple pie would taste good today, and since matty loves apple pie, i should surprise him with a yummy homemade treat." so i traded my reading glasses (which i don't really wear) for my baker's hat (which i don't really own) and i got to work. todd helped pick, peel, and shred the apples, but the rest was all me.

here are the apples:



here i am with the finished product (the pan is really hot...i'm sort of dumb):



and here's a close-up of my masterpiece:



i bet you wish you were here right now, huh? the house smells delicious, and even without ice cream, the pie tastes pretty dang good. i was right...it was the perfect day for an apple pie.