Enter the Household of Doom!

Not really - I just thought it might be an interesting title for the first installment of random information on us, starting with stuff we display around our house/house tour. Today I will show you some of the stuff we have on our shelves, mainly our Invader Zim collection of toys that you don't play with, weird concept, eh? Anyhew, when you come into our house you see this shelf-
It has lots of pretty things on it :) The story behind it all is that we were first moving into our new home about the same time that we discovered the joys of Invader Zim. I tend to get a little obsessive at times, so I decided that we needed some of these Invader Zim figurines as "decorations" for our new house. It was a great excuse to have Michael let me spend way too much money on toys, but they rock! The bottom shelf in our front room has a part of our collection - which I will tell you more about with these pictures:

We have a set with Ms. Bitters, the lovely school teacher, that includes things like her desk, a lovely neck-ring Hall Pass, and some destiny-determining blotch tests (one of which has Human Slave written next to each one). I put the mutant rats with her because they seemed more fitting. We also have Gaz, and she's holding a pink version of the C-S2, and she has things like a piece of pizza, a can of Poop soda, and her in a beaver suit.

In this picture you can see Dib, with his lovely computer desk full of gadgets, and one of our favorite figures - Dib changing into Bologna. We also have their crazy dad, Dr. Membrane, floating next to him.

One of my other favorites is our set with Gir. We have lots of different Gir figures, but the one here is just regular Gir in his living room set with his squeaky moose on the couch, some Krazy Tacos, a lovely Suck soda, and a cupcake. He's also in his dog suit riding a piggy. We have both of Zim's robot parents, but only the Mom is out on display.

On this end we have some interesting figures of Zim. One is Zim in the Old Man disguise, which is used in one of Mike's favorite episodes. We also have the crazy dog, Mini Moose, a robot bee, and Zim in his Human suit. I love Almighty Tallest Red and Almighty Tallest Purple, but unfortunately Red likes to tip over a lot so I have to glue one of his antennae back on.
Also in our front room we have an Invader Zim clock that I payed too much for also (don't buy them off of eBay- it was just an Ikea clock with a custom paper put in it - not too much fun), but I must admit the guy who made it was very creative, as it has a different Invader for each number on the clock.Other than the shelf in our front room, we also have a few things on our dresser in our bedroom - mostly Zim with the front of his house, another Dib, the giant piggy from the "Attack of the Saucer Morons" episode, and some more Girs. Can you see the box of Poop Candy?

Anyhew, if you can't tell by now, we really like Invader Zim. I love the figurines as they are such great quality and the company that made them was really brilliant with all of the little extras that come with each set. It was really sad that the company went out of business, it makes finding these really hard! The one set I really really really want still but is hard to find and expensive is a figure with Pustulio Zim, complete with a clear-ish Pustulio on the side of his head! Maybe someday.... Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the things we have around our home, until next time!

What a day

Wow, it has been an eventful week. The day before I held a baby shower for my sister's soon-to-be baby boy, our step-sister from my mother's second marriage called. We hadn't talked to/seen her since the divorce almost 10 years ago, and it was such an amazing experience. We were raised together as siblings, and we'll always be siblings regardless of legalities. It was wonderful to hear that my three sisters are all married and happy, one is going to have a baby boy in a couple of months, and the younger brother is serving an LDS mission in the Dominican Republic. I got to be friends with them on Facebook today, and it was such an awesome experience to re-connect with them and realize that family is so much more than biology or legal papers. It's been a strange life growing up with siblings and then losing them, but now we can put our parents' issues behind us and still care about eachother. What an awsome thing to have happen. I am so grateful for this wonderful experience, it has taught me so much about love and the nature of families, I hope that we can all keep in touch and care about eachother without reservations. Family and love are the two most important things in this life, and I'm so happy to be able to have both right now, it's been a long road, but this new beginning is sweet!
:) Risa

Lots of good food And Lots of Pictures!

Whew! I just finished about 4+ hours looking through yummy recipes at Vegweb.com and my awesome friend, Tammie's website (simplehealthytasty.blogspot.com in my list of links/blogs). Our printer decided to run out of ink finally, and after finding that there are new printers with extra ink for less $ than a new ink cartridge, we will be waiting a while to print again. And so, the writing of the recipes began. But now I've got about 11 new albums in my online Picasa account, and a week's worth of breakfast and dinner recipes. Surprisingly, my fingers aren't that tired! It must have been all of the note-taking in school coming back to me. In the end, you should all go and look at all my new pictures (that took quite a while to download) and you can see all the pics from our Amazing 2008 Adventure with Mike's parents (we went to Virginia, Washington DC, New York City, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and we drove through other places probably but I can't remember), our trip to Moab, and our family photo out-takes. We will get more stuff on in the future, I promise. I saw some of my family's blogs and other blogs and they're so awesome that we are (or I am) going to work harder to make this one awesome. Some possible future features will be highlights of different things we enjoy, and of course any big events, and don't forget more pictures! I may go on about different things, like our new vegan/whole foods lifestyle, because that is huge for me, but bear with us and we will work more to make things interesting. Now go and look at those pictures :)