Stacie's Place

I have so many things going through my head tonight so I thought I would write them down. Here goes!  It's less than 40 days until Christmas and I have barely done any Christmas shopping. This is the first year in a very long time that this has happened. I tend to shop throughout the year. This year, not so much. I do not want to be a crabby and stressed person in December but I have a feeling that's going to happen whether I like it or not. I am already thinking of the Christmas themed Pinterest party but I have to make it through Thanksgiving first before I can commit fully to it.  I have a couple crafts I need to put together to make in Idaho with family and that combined with food we need to bring and planning a strategy for Black Friday shopping...it's just too much to think about all at once.  I guess I have Christmas on my mind. How ready are you for Christmas? I refuse to decorate or have anything much to do with Christmas until Thanksgiving is over

How many of you feel like it was a whirlwind of a summer? Inbetween working full time, 2 classes at LDSBC, homework, roadtrips and my husband's summer internship, I can't believe the long warm days of summer are over. Tear. I heart summer.  Here are some links to what's been going on so you can catch up! I got to go to the Mystery Escape Room at the Gateway mall in SLC. Does your city have one of these? It was a pretty fun experience! There was a hot air balloon event every weekend in June, so crazy fun! I loved all the roadtrips and visiting some of my favorite small towns in Utah. We volunteered at an event in Springville which we had never gone to before. There were not a whole lot of blogger events this summer but I did go to one at The Roll Up in Orem which has crepes - one of my favorite foods! Tony & I had a fun little trip to Idaho for his nephew who got baptized plus we got to see family and hang out for a few days. That's always nice!

Times are changing, the world is crazy. Things will change in my life, dramatically or not, maybe even less than a month from now. What I do know is that I never want to forget these days. Mainly in my own personal life. I never want to forget the times when Tony is in school or working his internship and we dont get to do as much together because he is busy with all that. His working on a website for BYU or endless hours of studying with his headphones in or falling asleep with his laptop. I do not want to forget when I decided to go back to school to get a degree in Social Media Marketing after not being in college since 2007 and the fun times, things I learned and the friends/connections I made and continue to make. Winning the selfie contest on the LDSBC Facebook page, that was fun. I do not want to forget living where I live. It may not be my dream home but it's what I've known for the past 4 years since living in Utah. The crazy neighbors. The cool neighbors.

WHY do I feel the need in my life to have so many choices! I am starting to realize that it just makes things harder instead of easier. Take for example, clothes. Those who know me well, know I have a lot.  I say I wear at least 90% of what I own, depending on the season. I like to have options because I have a lot of colorful shoes that I need to coordinate with my outfits, right? But having so many options gets overwhelming and makes me late for work.  3 pairs of gray pants, 3 pairs of black pants and brown pants, skinny jeans, athletic pants, leggings...I wish I could decide what I liked best and just stick with that, but I cant seem to do that. For awhile I was in to the colored or patterned jeans but lately I just dont want to wear pants. Haha, just kidding. I just want to wear soft , comfortable pants. Not pants that are tight on my legs. It just feels so restrictive. Maybe I need to lose some weight? Or get a little less skinner type of jeans? No! I have too many pants

Tony and I celebrated our 4 year wedding anniversary last weekend by going to southern CA to do some fun things such as Medival Times dinner, Universal Studios and the beach. We stayed the night in Vegas and my Macbook started making a crunchy sound. Tony told me to shut it down and don't turn it on the for the rest of the weekend because my hard drive was crashing. Scary and sad! Luckily we were able to save everything plus most everything was backed up. Friday morning when we woke up, my iPod touch restarted for no reason and did not want to get off the reboot screen no matter how much we tried. There went my camera for the weekend, or so I thought. Once we arrived in L.A. , Tony, who is not a fan of Apple at all, esp iTunes, installed iTunes on his laptop and set to work to fix my iPod. I had already gotten on Craigslist to see about buying another one but by the time we went to Universal Studios on Saturday, he had the iPod up and working again! So amazing he was able to fix i

My social media marketing strategy class put together this video to help drive donations for Operation Underground Railroad. It was quite the process to put this all together. I was there the day most of this was filmed and my sister brought her boys to be in it. My nephew Riley made it into the scene with the kids at the playground. It's been really neat to watch this all come together.  Check it out and share it on your social media accounts. Plus consider donating $5/month to help rescue a child from slavery. You can visit Operation Underground Railroad on Facebook too to check out a competition going on where you can win some O.U.R swag.

Here are some new blog posts to check out! One of our favorite places to eat, The Habit Free Ice Cream night at Dairy Queen Celebrating Pi day with food and fun As you can tell by the links, they all revolve around food. Oh well, sometimes its like that!

Just wanted to say Hello! to anyone new who might be reading my blog since snagging my card at Build Your Blog conference over this past weekend. I got home Saturday evening and my head was spinning with all the awesome things I learned, people I met and fun experiences. I cant wait to write out everything in the next day or two. In the meantime, I have a big'ish project due for one of my classes on Saturday but I want to turn it in earlier since I may be going down to southern UT this weekend - all depending on the weather. Not sure what happened to the early spring Utah was getting but winter seems to be back. It may look nice outside but it's a trick because it is icy cold! Every time I look at the weather for Kanab, its a mix of snow and rain. Bad bad bad. Hot air balloons can't go up in that kind of weather! Hoping and praying for a miracle. I have wanderlust so much right now. What's new with you? Let me know and link me to your blog too so I can come say

Many of you reading this are most likely aware that after my job at WGU ended in early November, I've been looking for a job and working with temp agencies. I've had interviews here and there but nothing happened from them. Until last Friday I got a call asking me if I was still looking for a job and would I like to come in for an interview on Monday. Stupidly I said I could, forgetting that Monday was a holiday. Oops. I had badly wanted to go to Capitol Reef National Park to see a friend, hike and do fun things but I was unable to find anyone who could come with so I decided not to change the interview and just stick around town for weekend.  I went in at 10am for the interview...well I got a little lost but luckily was only delayed by a few minutes.  I started filling out paperwork and by the time everything was said and done , about an hour and a half later! they were offering me the job. I was stunned because I never had anyone offer me a job so quickly before, at least, no

Last Wednesday I got to go to Dev Mountain in Provo to hear YouTuber Stuart Edge speak. If you have not heard of him, definitely go check out his channel . He is pretty funny! He spoke about "How To Be Funny & Make Money" which caught my attention although I did not know that was the topic before I went. What drew me in was who he is (I have seen him before and watched some of his videos) and there was free food afterwards. Spoiler alert - it turned out to be just cookies. All I wanted was real food! However, Sodalicious has fantastic cookies, esp their sugar cookies.  Alright! Here are my notes, enjoy. Figure out what you do. Figure out who you are. Don't paint yourself in a corner We paint ourselves as something. Facebooker. YouTuber. Don't paint yourself in a corner.  What/who does the real world say I am? Give yourself more room to grow. Vlogger? Ok a  reality tv show. How are my ratings. How can I grow? Expand your brand. Figure out how we

I've been upping my blogging lately and working on redoing what I do, as in, I have too many blogs and I am trying to think of what I can do to get rid of 1 or maybe 2 of them. In the meantime, while I figure that out, you may have noticed that Stacie's Place is now a .com! So excited to finally just DO that. I think it looks great and will be easier to tell people as well. Check out the Valentine's Pinterest Party I hosted last week I also took a quick trip to Idaho over the weekend with my sister and her boys Tony & I got to go to Midway to see the ice castles for our first time ever. School is going awesome!   I blogged about some moving tips for moms (or anyone!) and have you heard of the Great Inflatable Race ? What fun things have you been up to lately? Link me in a comment below and I will come check it out or comment back!

I super love that the daylight is lasting longer. It's happening slowly but each day is a little better. The longer it stays the light, the more I feel like I can get done. Especially things outside. These past few days I have gotten a lot better somehow about getting rid of stuff. Or at least, committing to get rid of it and organizing clothing , shoes, craft supplies and other items into a donate and sell pile.  Unfortunately the pile to sell grows bigger and I am not really getting much sold. I did sell one item from the Facebook yardsale pages. I sold another couple items on eBay. Made less than $30 but something is better than nothing! More things are posted so fingers crossed I can make a few more sales. Eventually though I  will have to decide what to just let go because I just keep re posting, it doesn’t sell and it takes up way too much space. The other day my friend came over and helped me go through my closet full of jackets and sweatshirts. She offered and

My first week (er, day) at LDSBC seemed to go well. I only had 1 fail where I had a smear of chocolate on my jacket. Maybe it blended in and nobody noticed (hopefully). Tony wasnt home to check me before I wrecked myself.  Sigh. Luckily in my classes I dont feel like the oldest one. It feels like mostly a good mix. It will be interesting to go to class tonight and see who has still stuck around. Tony and I are sharing a car at the moment. My poor HHR. Tony's poor truck. I feel like I dont have good luck with cars and I have not even had the HHR a year yet! Both of our vehicles are drivable but need work so its best to avoid driving them. My HHR died last week waiting for my sister in the Smith's parking lot. A kind teenager used his truck to help me jump my car. I got it home and it promptly died in front of my house. I started driving my Mazda again. I heart that car so much, despite its problems. Since Tony had Monday off of work, we went to Sweet Tomatoes for lunc

Am I going back to school? Yes. Hopefully. I sure hope so. Here's what is going on. Late last year I heard a commercial on the radio I believe it was, for a degree being offered at LDS Business College in Social Media Marketing. It's an AA degree which I have already but that's okay. They offer a certificate starting in summer of 2015. I love being online, I love my social media and that degree sounded really fun to me. So I got the crazy idea in my head to apply. I put it off for a bit but with the encouragement of a friend or two, I thought, what the heck. So I filled out the FASFA and waited. Then Tony told me one day when we were talking about it, that I need to apply to the college I want to go to to find out if I will get accepted or not. WHAT?! I have only ever gone to Woodland Community College in California and everyone gets in, there is no 'applying'. So this is all new to me! I scrambled to start applying. This was in late December. Apparently LDSBC is