please bear with me, my favorite subject to photograph may or may not be beans...i apologize. Also - all my days are getting confused and blurring together, so I'm not quite sure all of these are accurate. Consider this week a fail. I'll be better, I promise!!

january 26: Another snow morning!! We had a three hour delay at Gordon...so what I should really have a picture of is the massive amounts of snow piled everywhere. I'll get to that some day. We're supposed to get more on Tuesday, so maybe I'll snap something then. For now enjoy this cute little muffin head:

january 27: So we do a BJ's run once a month to fill the house up with things for lunches and tasty treats so we don't get bored of the same old same old. This week we might have stumbled upon some toaster strudels. Whoops...the coupons always seem to lead us astray. Anyways, after dinner we both had one and I told Ry the only way I was eating one was if he participated in a frosting decorating contest with me. Clearly he won as he created a snowboarder jumping off a jump in honor of the x games. All I could muster was a heart with his initials in it. Point, Ry:

january 28: So this past may Ry and I had the privilege of going to Guatemala for eight days (well it was supposed to be eight, but it turned into ten. That's a story I'll save for another day, though.) Anways, while we were there we stopped in Antigua for four days and one of the things we did was go to a coffee farm!! That was definitely one our favorite parts of the trip. The coffee there was DELICIOUS and we said we'd buy some when we got back. Fast forward...oooooooh seven months...and still no coffee from Finca Filadelfia. So since it's tax season and Ry lives on coffee, we decided to order some and it finally came in! YAY!

january 29: Another tax season Saturday. I was quite busy all day as I got to enjoy a coffee date with one of my players, take Beans for a nice long walk and catch some of the Gordon Mens Basketball game. I had to make sure I was home in time to make Ry dinner - Chicken and Biscuits, one of our ALL time fav comfort foods. I'm still looking for the winning recipe, but this one didn't turn out all that bad:

january 30: Woohoo! SUNDAY!! Time to spend time with Ry (except that he's currently sleeping on the couch with a terrible headache, which always seem to accompany tax season). We woke up early (thanks, Beans), made coffee, tidied up the apartment and then snuggled in for some Bible reading (we're in Exodus and only five days behind schedule for reading through the Bible in a year). Afterwards Ry was looking for tables to buy (AND FOUND ONE - I pick it up Friday, so you'll see it then!) when Beans decided to sit down and share his coffee with him. I couldn't resist snapping a pic:

d3100. and a lonely bone.

january 25 - YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!!!!! YESTERDAY RYAN CAME HOME WITH A NIKON D3100!!!! I can actually take REAL pictures again using a lens suitable for every day pictures!!!!!! YAYAYAYAY!!!!!! I am SO excited.

So I called this one "lonely bone". You can see Beans walking away in the background. I actually hate the composition of this picture because I think the bone should be a little less centered...but what can ya do!? Bean is not really done with his bone, he's just completely and utterly sick of me snapping pictures of him with the new camera! silly boy:

i've been slacker.

I must apologize (especially to you, Lisa!) to my faithful picture of the day checkers, but I have been slacking. I was reminded by Lisa today, whom I saw at the gym (yay!) that I hadn't posted in over a week. Yipes! It was NOT a good week for pictures. In fact, I neglected to take a picture on Monday (a sort of day off) AND Thursday. Work was SO busy last week, all I could do was eat, sleep and think about everything that needed to get done at the office. Anyways...here's the lot of not so great pictures...

january 18: Remember that shopping spree and the banana republic trip we took?! Well it was time to break out all the great new clothes and I started with this warm and cozy gem (the picture isn't great, but the sweater sure is!):

january 19: Tuesday night greeted us with a brown out after the day full of icy, slushy snow. This means that the power goes out, but only half goes out. This is apparently the worst kind of power outage to have because of everything that goes, the heat and hot water unexpectedly don't work and you don't find out until you wake up the next morning to 56 degrees and no hot water. Ugh not a great way to start the work day. I had such a hard work out the night before and not showering was not an option...so I heated up water on the stove and bathed out of this (tmi, sorry):

january 21: Skipping over Thursday (so sorry, my faithful followers!) and we find ourselves with a three hour delay. This was slightly stressful to my day because I was planning on going in an hour early as I had all week since I was in training and had to accomplish eight hours of work from 7-10. The good news about this, though, was I had time to sit, sip coffee, snuggle with Beans and watch Sportscenter. FABULOUS. It also meant that most everyone worked from home, so I wore my most comfy jeans, a big comfy sweater and my slippers because I was hidden away in my online training all day. Here's a look at the insane amount of snow we have right now (AND THERE IS TEN MORE INCHES COMING ON WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY!!):

january 22: Ugh. This is not a celebrated day in the Dumas household. It was Ryan's first Saturday of tax season. While we are extremely grateful that he has a great job, this is not one of our favorite parts. Beans must have known something just wasn't right and watched sadly as Ryan headed off to work at 8am on Saturday morning:

january 24: We'll skip over Sunday because I didn't take a picture...and that brings us to 7 am this morning when it was a BALMY -2 degrees. It didn't FEEL that cold until my handy dandy thermometer in my fabulous subaru told me it was that cold. Knowing it's negative degrees outside made it feel THAT much colder. So thankful that the temperature will crawl back up into the high 20s/low 30s before we get hit with a massive snowstorm Wednesday night:

a pats party and a cup of joe.

january 16: It was finally here. The big game. Patriots vs. Jets. And the Patriots were supposed to win and advance. Of course it wouldn't be easy, play-offs never are, but they're the Patriots for goodness sake. So to celebrate, we had a few friends over for a little gather with food and fun and watching the Patriots. Well, everything certainly did not go as planned. In fact the Patriots self-destructed and BLEW it. Ugh. To the Jets. The most classless team in all of the NFL. The picture of Rex Ryan giggling after the botched fake punt with forever be etched in my mind. I can't wait til next year. Sigh...at least we had some good food. We provided some snacks and the others provided some as well. Two of the most delicious things we made were skewered chipotle meatballs and a maple layer cake made with real vermont maple syrup. Here are the recipes:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Chipotle-Meatballs-350594

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Maple-Cake-with-Maple-Syrup-Frosting-358216

And here's a pic of the cake (I would have posted pictures of us celebrating the patriots win...however, we were all too dejected to take a group pic:

january 17: a day off. well kind of. I had to go into the office for about two hours, but besides that, I had the day off. I got to go to the gym and then come back and cleaned up the piles of dishes from yesterday's extravaganza. Then I started to not feel so hot so I took a bit of a nap and I woke up with a headache still. I could NOT figure it out. And then it dawned on me...I hadn't had my daily dose of caffeine! Ahh...Sweet relief:

ice, a new life and a fabulous trip.

january 13: after the big snow day everyone was still trying to recover from the massive amount of snow we got. The snow piles were bigger than the cars!! I secretly had hoped for another snow day, despite how far behind that would have put me at work, but to no avail. Everything was still snow and ice covered. Our porch had some cool ice forming on it and I tried getting a few shots, but I was too much of a bumkin to get the tripod out...but I did get this one (not my fav ever, but it'll do):

january 14: Friday was a fun day as the development office got to enjoy lunch at Bertucci's in celebration of the calendar year-end!! We have the most wonderful team - so many people who love serving God through their work at Gordon...and it's all very cool to be a part of. The highlight of lunch was definitely seeing Jen and meeting baby Drew!! Jen is off on maternity leave and we definitely miss having her at the office ... and look at baby Drew...WAY TOO PRECIOUS!

january 15: today was such a fun day! Ry and I left the house at 9 to head off to Wrentham and the 150 outlets there. Our first stop was to Banana Republic...and we were there for TWO HOURS. whoops. We both managed to find so many things that we LOVED. I have so many new sweaters, which is great because I own maybe two that I actually wear. One would think that after 7 years in New England, I'd actually own some suitable clothes, but nope. Not until today could we call my wardrobe winter appropriate. My favorite item, though, was a great new coat with really cool toggle buttons! YAY! Look at the bags...and the coat (toggle buttons not showing, whoops!):

the snow day.

january 12: yesterday at 4 pm Gordon announced that it would be closed today due to the weather reports predicting up to 18 inches of snow for today. Well, those weather reports certainly did not disappoint. The amount of snow that fell and is still falling is crazy! I haven't seen a storm like this in quite some time!! The snow day was great. Ry had off, too. We slept in, drank coffee, read, started our quest to read the bible in a year (yes, we know we're starting 11 days late...but we just found the plan we wanted to follow), played with Beans outside and relaxed. Fabulous. Nothing was on the to-do list due to the unplanned-ness of this day. Here are a few shots of the day...couldn't pick just one:

#1: This was at approximately 4pm today. It had been snowing for about 12 hours and it was still continue to fall as we went out to brush off the cars.

#2: I can't resist taking pictures of this puppy:

#3: I repeat, I can't resist taking pictures of this puppy:

#4: Warm and cozy on the inside - cold and snowy on the outside:

not the shot i wanted...but we'll take it.

january 11: 1.11.11 means it is our one and a half year anniversary. this fact has absolutely nothing to do with the picture of the day, but I enjoy this fact, so I'm sharing it.

Anyways - my goal today was to capture the little amount of snow there is on the ground right now. It's not that little, there's probably a good base of five or so inches from the last storm over Christmas. However, I wanted to capture this because tomorrow we are supposed to get slammed with another nor'easter. It's supposed to be so bad during the morning commute that everything is already being closed for tomorrow (Gordon is closed - announced at 4pm today and Ryan's work is closed if it snows...but if that's the case, then they're open on MLK jr. day...another story for another day). Anyways - I was failing at getting my stupid autofocus to work, which meant I should have turned it on manual and just taken my shot. However, I turned around to find Beans peering out at me and I've been trying to catch that on camera for WEEKS, so I had to snap (please ignore the no smoking sticker - that's been here since we moved in...makes us giggle). I just love this "little guy." This is exactly what he does when I leave for work in the morning. Too stinkin' cute:

To Baltimore and back!

january 7: We finally made t to the end of the week...and it was time to hit the airport!! We were off to Baltimore to finally visit my mom and mike in their new city!! Our flight was at 7:15 and everything was on time and we landed at 8:45!!! I love that it's a short 1.5 hour flight down there. Here's Ry in the airport waiting to fly...playing Battleship to pass the time :)

january 8: We woke up and had a lazy-ish morning munching on granola and yogurt and watching the news. Delightful. Oh I should mention the snow plows woke us up...it had snowed about a half inch and the snow plows were out in full force, along with the snow blowers...too funny. Anyways - we all bundled up to brave the cold and headed off to Lexington Market. It's a cool place with tons of places to eat and buy food - not your typical public market. We wandered around a bit, Ry got some delish donuts, while Mike got oysters on the 1/2 shell. It was then off to the Harbor to stroll around. It's cool down there, but when it's freezing out there's not too much going on - we can't wait to go back during the summer!! We then headed to a section of town called Canton...cute row houses and tons of shops/restaurants. Definitely a cool place to explore!! Then it was back to the apartment and off to a nice dinner! It was a great day full of exploring. Here's a pic of the four of us:

january 9: We had another lovely lazy morning and got up the courage to bundle up and head to Annapolis after packing up all our things. WHAT A CUTE TOWN!!! I love it there. So so so many cool stores and shops and so many people wandering around even with 30 degree temperatures!! We tried to wander onto the Naval Academy property...but we went to the wrong gate and they wouldn't let us in, so we spent the day wandering in and out of shops and had a lunch at a sports bar during the Ravens game (did i mention everyone is CRAZY about the Ravens?!) Anyways - it was a great last day for our quick trip. Can't wait to go back in the summer!! Here's a pic of main st. in Annapolis:

january 10: So my wonderful friend Lindsay was over not too long ago and noticed that was severely neglecting my cactus that my former boss gave me when I left Vinfen, so she watered it and I swear she has a magic touch. It started to bloom in no time! I was upset, though, because I thought I was going to miss it's beautiful flower while we were gone over the weekend...but check it out! It's still there:

what a deal.

january 6: I went to target after work tonight for a couple of things. I was getting ready for work this morning, using the hair straightener, when I noticed my hair was not getting straight. I figured that I accidently bumped it off, so I hit the button to turn it back on. Fail. It was dead. So off to target I went. I was greatly discouraged in the aisle as the one that I had for five years was $15 more expensive than I wanted to spend. I decided on it anyways. So then I went off in search of a calendar for our wall. I finally found them and was disappointed to see them listed for $9. I was bummed that it was so expensive, but it was definitely meant to be hanging on the Dumas' wall. So off to check out I went...and then came the fun part. The straightener was $10 cheaper than what was listed...and the calendar. That was only $1!! FABULOUS. And check out the calendar...does it get any better?!?!

a big day for beans!!

january 5: Today was a first for Beans. He spent the entire day in the kitchen instead of in his crate!! What a good little pup he is. We put up a barricade so that if he has an accident it's on the tile instead of the couch...but Beans is SO beyond having accidents. He's too old for such things. I still came home at lunch to feed him. I must say it was quite a surprise to walk in and have Beans in the kitchen since Ry conveniently forgot to mention he was in there - he knew I'd be nervous all morning! But Beans did FABULOUS and there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Good job, Beans :)

this is harder than I thought.

january 4: wow. this picture thing every day is rather difficult. I mean, we lead a very exciting life (I write as we sit here watching Dance for your Life....) So my picture today is a picture of the Christmas cards I will be taking down today. I LOVE CHRISTMAS CARDS!! I love the weeks leading up to Christmas anticipating getting the mail every day, hoping for a good Christmas card. This year certainly did not disappoint. Look at this collection:

I wish I could leave them up all year round...but the strings that all those clothes hangers are on are starting to fall down, so down they must come! This is also a constant reminder of how we did NOT send a Christmas card. I was so set on sending one with a picture of me, ry AND beans...but we did not have a good picture of the three of us for a card...so they never got made. I, however did get a great shot while in VT! So if we were to send a card now, it would have this picture wishing you a Merry Christmas from Ryan, Nicole & Beans:

the third picture.

January 3: Today was the first day back to work after ten days off...and what a doozy. I knew it was going to be one of those days where my head was in ten different places at once. I was coming back to a to-do list that I had before break...I now think that is not a good idea. That makes coming back to work not so enticing. Anways, we had a fabulous new Director of Alumni start and had a lovely reception for her. She is going to be a fabulous part of the team. I then spent the last half of my day learning more about the tasks I'll be doing for my new job. I'm not sure I posted about that...I'll be the Assistant Director of Development Operations. I've known for a while now, but it was finally official today. I'd explain what this change means, but I'm still learning - basically I'll be doing a lot of reports for fundraisers so they can do their jobs. Anyways - the day was finally over and I got to wander off to the Bennett Center - one of my favorite places at Gordon College. I never fail to see at least five wonderful people I know...and today was no different. I was first greeted by the wonderful smile of Lisa Logan! WHAT a treat! I lived with Lisa for a year before she ran off and married Jerry (another wonderful person I saw at the gym today). Lisa is just one of those people who always makes you smile...thoughtful, happy, wonderful...she's just cool. AND she mentioned reading my blog about my picture postings...she's the first one! So CLEARLY I had to document such an occasion. Also ... I must make a plug for her blog. It's simply fabulous. Check it out at: thecastingdock.com Anyways...here's the always smiling Lisa (she was going SO fast on the elliptical that the picture is blurry ...):

Thanks for agreeing to being on thoughtsfromadumas, Lisa!

a year in pictures.

Happy New Year!!! I had full intentions of blogging about Christmas...but my week of vacation went WAY too quickly and it's already back to work time. How did ten days of vacation go SO quickly!? I am not a fan.

Anyways - I noticed that one of my friends from high school had joined a website that allows you to post a picture a day...project365...or something like that. So I figured that would be a fun project to tackle in order to document this year...and with the camera built in to my phone that makes it easy to upload pictures, I figured this would be a slightly feasible idea. So here we go:

January 1: Okay, this picture isn't technically from January 1, but it was how part of how we rang in the new year. We had a low key evening with just two friends, Warren and Lindsay. Very different than the 30 person party my father throws for his birthday every year (which I missed for the first time in my life), but wonderful none-the-less!! Ry and I decided to make a nicer-ish meal and therefore I decided to actually set the table...I also wanted to make use of the cute napkin holders my mother had sent us. It was a fun night of relaxing and chatting and we even got to break out the siphon!! Anyways here is the table:

January 2: Another one of my goals for this year is to find a REALLY good chili recipe. We always used to throw things in a pot and add spices until we thought it was good, which was good, but not fabulous. It certainly would not have won the Pigeon Cove Chapel annual chili contest (which we can never enter because we're gone Christmas Eve). Anyways, the first try of the year came from Bon Appetit:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Beef-and-Bean-Chili-107079

It was a beef and bean chili. Ry's first word was, "spicy." He then thought that it was missing something, as did I, but we couldn't put our finger on it. Ry thought more chili powder. I'm undecided. Needless to say, it wasn't the winner. Good, but not the winner. Here's it cooking on the stove: