dinner and a mattress

Exciting things happened today! I had the missionaries over for dinner and made a delicious Spinach Chicken Pasta Salad and for dessert, my favorite!, Chocolate Zucchini Cake! The recipe is as follows:

1/2 c. margarine
1/2 c. oil
1 3/4 c. sugar
2 eggs
2 c. peeled, seeded, & grated zucchini (1 large, or 2 small zucchinis)
2 1/2 c. flour
2 t. vanilla
1/2 buttermilk/sour milk/yogurt
4 T. cocoa
1 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1 t. baking powder

Mix um all together, pour into ungreased rectangular baking pan and bake at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes. Let cool, ice with chocolate frosting (or flavor of your choice) and enjoy!

So I have a dining room table that I got for 8 buckaroos at Stuff Etc when I was here in July, and I loff it but don't have any chairs to go with it. Yes. So I improvised. It turned out pretty well. Here's the table:

Looks pretty good, huh? Don't worry, the chair you can't see at the far left side? It was the piano bench.

I also cut some leaves and flowers from the jungle back yard to make the center piece, inspired by the one and only Martha Stewart.

It's pretty green, but I think it turned out alright. The missionaries were impressed with the size of the leaves. Haha. Oh boys. They're just little guys.

Additionally! I got a mattress today! A real one! With box springs and everything! (Insert arm swing, here.) On Saturday Jared had to leave the film festival thing early to help someone move, and that someone just happened to be getting rid of their mattress and box springs, so Jared scooped them up for me since he knew I was in search of a real mattress (I've been sleeping on a blow up one since I moved in). Since he came over with the missionaries for dinner tonight (they have to bring someone with them since I'm a single girl living alone) all three of them helped move it in. PLUS they got rid of the couch I was just going to take to the dump and instead are going to bring it over to a family that just moved here from Peru and doesn't have any furniture. Win win win.

It actually looks like a real room now! (PS Can you see the striped pillows behind the polka dot ones? Does that pattern look familiar? It should! I used the flat sheet from that same set for the table cloth at dinner. No big deal.)

I even like that I don't have a bed frame, since that's how my bed was at home before I left for college: I like being close to the floor, and it keeps me from hiding things under there that should really be put away.

So basically it was an amazing day today. My plan for tomorrow? Yard work. Yay! Be excited. My neighbor Aaron so helpfully did some intense weed-wacking for me the other day, totally under his own volition (ok, so maybe his mom asked him to do it...) and that uncovered all kinds of things, like stepping stones and even stairs that I didn't even know were back there! Who knows what other treasures lay hidden amongst the foliage?

Oh! And PS, my dear freshman year roommate Whitney called me today and it was a lovely surprise and made my night even better that it already was (which is pretty impressive seeing as it was clearly going incredibly well).