My 30th Birthday Party

I can't believe I'm 30!!! For my birthday, Nigel arranged a party for me and invited all my friends to the Macaroni Grill in Dublin, CA. Italian is my favorite! He wouldn't tell me anything about it though - just that he was doing something for me the night after my birthday with my friends and his family. We all enjoyed some wonderful Italian food, and at the end a man brought out this fudgy cake with a candle on it. He then sang "Happy Birthday" to me in Italian with his beautiful voice. After dinner, we went to Bob and Merrie's house for cake. Nigel had ordered a birthday cake from Fatema, who made our wedding cake. This one, however, was a 4 layer almond cake with chocolate ganache filling. What a sweet husband I have!!!

I should also tell the story of my birthday itself. Nigel couldn't wait until morning for me to open my gifts, so as soon as midnight hit and it was May 11th, he handed me the gifts. I chose, however, to only open one. It was a beautiful black and white pearl necklace. The next morning I opened another gift, and it was a matching black pearl necklace and bracelet. How sweet! The most unique gift, and appropriate for a 30th birthday for sure, was from my friend Brittany. She gave me the new Tickle Me Elmo Extreme. It is hilarious!!! If you haven't seen it, get one!!

I left work at noon on my birthday to spend the rest of the day with Nigel. We met up at his mom's house. She couldn't resist and cooked us a wonderful lunch. She is such a GREAT cook!! That night, Nigel told me we had dinner plans but again wouldn't tell me where we were going. It turns out he had made reservations at this cute little Italian restaurant in Alamo called Ristorante Forli. They had live music as well, so we danced to some of the old standards after a wonderful dinner.

I am blessed. I have wonderful friends, a husband who treats me almost too well, a great family (who is too far away), and a wonderful family of in-laws. What more could I ask for in the people that surround me? God is good.

A visit from friends (new friends for me)

The last week in April we hosted Nigel's good friends from Pakistan, Haseeb, and his wife Itti (pronounced It-thee). It is very hard for a Pakistani to get a visitor's visa to the US right now. So we thought the first time I would ever get to meet them was if we went to Pakistan.

However, Haseeb works for Motorola, and won a sales award, WNNR, for which the company flew him to Hawaii and gave him and his wife (along with all the other WNNRs and their spouses) tons of praise, recognition, free gifts including a gold-plated cell phone, and the whole vacation which included their stay at a fancy resort. I want to work for Motorola! No wonder their phones are so expensive.

Anyway, since the company wanted them to travel to Hawaii for business, it was easy to get visas for them. Then Haseeb requested to fly through San Francisco with a stopover on the way back for 4 days. They agreed, and so they stayed with us and we traveled all over the Bay area. It was a blast!!

Here is a link to my public Picasa gallery, which includes an album from their visit with a few of my faves:

Itti and Haseeb's Visit April 07

Their visit also meant a week of cleaning and finally completely putting together our house. So now I have a functional office/spare bedroom/studio!! I'll take some pictures of our place now and post them soon, since everything's finally in order.

Scrapbook Page Flowers 1

This is one of the pages I've been working on for our wedding album. I think this one's done (expect maybe some copy changes). It's stretching my Photoshop skills in a whole new way, and I am excited to learn more!

New furniture, new ideas, and a new job

I can't believe it's already March!!! On Thursday Nigel and I will have been married for 5 months already. I can't believe it. And changes abound, yet again, in my life. I guess that's the way it goes when you never really picked/stuck to a career path to begin with...

We received a huge gift from a family at the church - bedroom furniture! Mine is at my dad's place in South Dakota, and we have no clue when we will be able to get it out here. So, in the meantime, we got some from a family who is majorly downsizing. The daughter, Sunee, is an 8th grader in my small group. We got a beautiful dresser and nightstand for our bedroom, white in a French style, and a matching desk/hutch which I am going to use in my "studio."

Speaking of my studio. We have a 2nd bedroom with no other purpose, yet, though it will hopefully be a nursery eventually. So for now it is "my space." I've been working on a lot of neat new projects. I started getting inspired for all kinds of projects while I was working on planning our wedding. So I started collecting "stuff" - canvases (the traditional kind plus wooden boxes, old cigar boxes, bags, clipboards, composition notebooks, photo albums), fabric swatches, wallpaper, paper of all kinds, ribbon, flowers, and all kinds of other things.

I also started working on a digital scrapbook. Basically, you layer text, photos, graphics, ribbons, etc. just like you would on paper, only in Photoshop. I'll post one of my latest soon.

So, I am also switching jobs. This Friday, in a very bitersweet way, is my last day at the antique shop. On Monday, I'm starting at Network Architects, and will be doing web design and maintenance. No, I have no experience in that exactly, but it's something I've always wanted to learn. And now someone wants to give me the tools I need and teach me how to do it. It's 3 days a week, and I'll make as much as 5 at the store. So I'll have time to work on photography stuff for Nicole, the photographer I'm working with (her husband is the one who's hired me), and to do all these projects I'm dreaming of.

Life's crazy. But it's a wild ride that I'm enjoying immensely, especially with Nigel by my side!

4 Things About Me - Jackie Clemonds

My Friend Holly posted this and I liked it. So here's mine!

A) Four jobs I have had in my life: ( I think I've had around 20 different ones!)
1. Dishwasher at Ike's Chicken Shack (my very first job at age 14)
2. Hostess at TGIFriday's in Fargo in college
3. Piano teacher (have been teaching since my junior year of high school and still do)
4. Sales at an antique shop/part-time nanny for the owner (another current job)

B) Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Beauty and the Beast
2. The Wedding Planner (a dream job for me)
3. First Knight
4. Pride and Prejudice (the newest version)

C) Four places I have lived:
1. South Dakota (I was born in Sioux Falls and grew up on a farm near Sisseton)
2. Scottsdale, Arizona (for 4 months after college)
3. Various parts of the Minneapolis area for 7 years
4. Lafayette, CA (where I live now since I got married in October 2006)

D) Four TV shows I love to watch:
1.American Idol
2. Reba
3. 7th Heaven
4.Almost anything on TLC or HGTV

E) Four places I have been on vacation
1. The Bahamas in High School
2. Europe for a month in college (Germany, Itlay, Czech Republic, Vienna, Amsterdam - was in Florence on my 21st birthday)
3.Ghana, Africa (not vaction though - for a mission trip
4. Kauai, Hawaii for my honeymoon in October 2006

G) Four of my favorite foods:
1. Almost anything Italian (my favorite pasta dish is Spaghetti Carbonara)
2. Nigel's chicken fried rice
3. Thai pumpkin curry
4. Chicken Tikka Masala

H) Four places I would like to be right now:
1. Italy
2. Home with Nigel
3. Sleeping with Nigel in a hammock in Kauai like we got to do on our honeymoon
4. Catalina Island

Our home - and the piano saga

With a title like that you're probably expecting pictures. Well, I haven't quite gotten that far. But I will soon! And I will post some when I do.

Our apartment is finally starting to feel like a home. That's partly due to the fact I've now had some time to work on it, and get almost daily ideas from my boss who's an interior designer. I get inspiration from the store I work at, too. When I first moved in, it felt totally like Nigel's place. Granted, all of my furniture is being stored at my dad's farm.

But Nigel's style of decorating is not mine. He likes dark cherry finished woods with an Asian (Indian/Pakistani) influence- I like pastel white, green, and country blue French style furniture. Luckily for me, pale green is his favorite color and the French country blue is mine, and they go very well together. But the woods - I wasn't thinking it was going to work very well together. I was wrong! We're slowly blending the two styles.

So that's our bedroom - white furniture with white, green, and blue decor. We do, however have some dark wood nightstands in there and some dark wood frames framing some honeymoon momentos on the wall. Our bathroom is completely done - all in white and pale greens.

But our home was lacking something. Something crucial for me to feel at home - a piano. I have cried countless times since the wedding over being sad at not having one to play and having no idea how to get my piano here - or when that might possibly happen. To make it worse, we found out it is worth about $800 and would cost more than that to move. So we're holding out on the decision, but will probably try to sell it. That makes me a bit sad, because it is the piano my parents bought for me at 6 years old to learn on, and has been with me through my life of learning, and teaching, piano. But at the same time, I've learned the hard way that I'm very sentimental and can't keep everything just for the memories. After all, the material things themselves aren't the memories or the people connected to them anyway. (Thanks Becky, for helping me get to that point with my first major purge!)

One Sunday just into 2007 and just after a Lorie Line concert (Nigel's first and my 15th) inspired him to want to SOMEHOW get me a piano, we went to Walnut Creek to dream. In reality, I still figured we would keep looking on Craig's List and someday find a "good enough" one that we could afford. But I can dream, right? So we wandered into The Music Exchange, which sells Yamaha pianos - my personal favorite to play in touch and sound. They are so far out of our price range. But I asked the saleswoman for a brochure anyway, because I wanted to continue to dream. We assured her we could not afford a brand new piano right now, but on the way out she said to Nigel, "You know, Valentine's Day is coming up." To which I responded, "He WISHES he could buy me a piano for Valentine's Day!"

I soon ate my words. About an hour later we wandered into Sherman Clay, another piano dealer in WC. They mainly sell Steinways and the Steinway brands like Boston and Essex, but why not dream some more, right? We wandered through all the beautiful Steinways, the stately Bostons, and the cheaper, yet wonderfully ornate Essex pianos. We wandered all the way into the back corner of the shop, where I spotted a sign that read "We rent pianos." Hmmm. Rent? I bet we could afford that! And they even had Yamahas to rent. So we found a salesman, Bernardo, who is from Brazil originally, and started firing questions at him. How much do they rent for? What kinds do you have? How do they get to our place? Do you tune for free?

After he answered all of our questions, and we were eagerly nodding our heads and ready to sign the papers, he said, "I feel like I should also mention to you that we have a rent-to-own program." Intrigued, I asked him to explain the details. Payments are around $50 a month, we have a year and a half to change our minds, we can put a down payment on it to bring the price down, we could make higher payments and pay it off early to avoid some of the interest, and they were having a huge end-of-the-year sale that knocked $1000 off the price. After all the explanations, he left Nigel and I to talk.

Nigel said sure, why not? I actually cried with joy. Not kidding. So I started playing. Every piano in the store. I wanted to find one that had a great touch, a bright rich sound, and was on the taller end of uprights (more height = bigger soundboard = bigger sound). I found the perfect one - a Henry F. Miller, mahogany finish (which would nicely complement Nigel's decorating style), responsive action on the keys, and a BEAUTIFUL sound. Nigel said a down payment, which would make it affordable in the long run, was my Valentine's gift - a bit early. And my two new piano students would pay for the piano!

So, we signed the paperwork, and within a week it was delivered to our door!! Nigel's mom was the only one there when it arrived. She was teaching me to cook that day and had sent me to the store for some unsweetened coconut, which proved difficult to find. When I got back, she said "Go see what arrived while you were gone." And I cried again! It's now been a couple weeks, and the piano has brought Nigel and I so much joy already. He cries when I play, and I am happier and less stressed than I have been in a long time!

I love my husband. And I love how he supports my dreams, and does what he can to help me achieve them. Now, I'm working on a flyer to advertise for more students. By the time we have our first child, my goal is to have enough students to stay home. With a piano in our home, that now just might happen!

New Year's Eve, 2006

Nigel and I at our friends Ron and Nicole Gee's house on New Year's Eve. Yes, I actually cut my hair! I had been letting it get as long as possible for the wedding, and kept it that way through the second reception on December 23. Then it was time to chop it off for a while. Nigel LOVES it, which was a bonus!

Our first Christmas together!

Here we are at Dad's on Christmas.

Hometown Wedding Reception

The reception in Browns Valley on December 23 was a lot of fun. Nigel was very surprised to see this sign as we rolled into town the day before. It was still up when we left on the 26th (it's not like there was anything else going on in town). It was great to be able to celebrate with so many more family and friends.

Honeymoon pic 2

The last day of our honeymoon, at Poipu beach. We found another couple, also on their honeymoon, and took turns taking pictures of each other.

Honeymoon pic 1

This is a picture on the tour of the Smith Family Tropical Paradise on Kauai, the luau we went to on our honeymoon. It was SOOOO fun!!

A better pic of the cake

This is a great shot of the cake, as well as the awesome bridesmaids' bouquets my talented friends made the day before the wedding. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon at Krista's house assembling flowers. My grandma actually did all the corsages and boutonnieres, and Deana, Amanda, Krista, Kerri, Jill, Misty, Claudia, and others put together the rest. I have to say, they did a fabulously beautiful job. And we saved a TON of money! All the flowers came from Costco. They were beautiful.

Me and my dad

Our first kiss ever

The photographer was in on my little plan to kiss Nigel in the vineyard (instead of our first kiss being at the altar). He was ready with the camera and got some pics of it. I will love this picture forever - it's so special to have a picture of our first kiss.

A pic of me from my wedding day

Married life...

I LOVE being married. It helps when you have an absolutely wonderful husband, but marriage really does suit me. It's been two and a half weeks, and we're working on setting the house and getting into a routine. Our schedules are really nice right now - I start work later than Nigel and get home before him, so that's nice because I love making him breakfast in the morning (I'm a morning person) and I can get a start on dinner before he gets home to help. Usually anyway.

I really love the fact that I don't have to drive home late at night anymore. And waking up next to him is so sweet. I also love sharing a home with him, knowing we probably won't be moving anytime soon. Imagine that: me, living in the same place for longer than a few months!

Anyway, more on all that later. I wanted to post the link to our professional photos from the wedding. It's: http://www.joelflory.com/nigelandjackie. As he gets the rest of them edited, he will be posting them (it will be around 2000 total). But for now there's a good sample out there. There are also many pics from friends who were at the wedding on our website: http://www.nigelandjackie.com .

I can't believe how fast the wedding went. I loved it, every minute of it, and it still feels like a dream!

My Amazing Fiance (almost husband!)

Ok, so I need to say this for everyone to hear, because Nigel really is amazing. After a rough week last week for me with some wedding stress and fires to put out, Nigel has been so supportive. He cooks every night while I work away on the last-minute details, and has even helped assemble programs, clean hard wax out of all the votives I'm borrowing, and run errands. I love this man. I am so blessed. God's love really is that amazing, that He would bring me someone like Nigel.

Yeah, yeah, of course I'm biased, because I AM marrying him after all. This Sunday even (weird, in less than 6 days I will be Mrs. Nigel Clemonds!!!). But Nigel really is a gift from God to me. I love him. And Him.

I am so excited to get married! Check out our website in a couple weeks for posting of pics from the wedding. It's http://www.nigelandjackie.com.

Only 8 days to go!

I am so excited! Only 8 days until my wedding! I have to admit, the whole process has gone REALLY smoothly. Only yesterday did I start to really feel stress at all. And God has provided in BIG ways to help with this wedding, and surporised us around every corner, too. Here are a few:

1. We found someone to make the cake I designed myself for only $300! (Here's a pic I added from the wedding day) For those of you who know wedding cakes, you know that's a great deal. Especially in California. And Fatema, the woman making the cake, is from Pakistan! Nigel was super excited to find that out.

2. We found a great Christian couple to do our photography. And they have common friends with Nigel from a church they attend that Nigel used to. Check out his website at http://www.joelflory.com . It will be fun to work with them! And they were about half the price of some others that do the photojournalistic style in this area.

3. The site we are getting married at, Garre Winery. It is beautiful, in the country, and used to be a horse ranch so it has a rustic feel about it. Being from South Dakota, that's awesome. And Nigel and I fell in love with the place from the moment we saw it.

4. My hair appointment. My goodness, after the first two people fell through, I panicked last week. Then I called a cute little day spa in Danville called Chateau de Sable, decorated like a French chateau, and their prices were $30-40 below all the other salons. So I met with Chris, and she's doing my makeup, too, and giving me a deal!

5. Friends, and their able hands and eagerness to help. I've only lived here for a year and a half, but I have AMAZING friends. They have jumped in to help with everything from coordinating the ceremony, making programs and favors, gluing paper cones, and stamping a TON of stuff, to helping me design the reception and shop for and assemble all the flowers. And giving me a place to call "home" until the wedding.

6. Our rings. Nigel and I wanted to get our wedding bands at Simayof in San Francisco, where he bought my engagement ring. I of course was really hoping to get the matching diamond band for my ring, but knew it was out of the budget. The day we chose to go they happened to be having a big sale. Not only was his ring 30% off, mine was 50% off and put the diamond band under the budget Nigel had set for a plain one! So that was an easy choice!

I have a million more stories I could tell, and maybe I will at some point. For now, I am looking forward to becoming Mrs. Nigel Clemonds on October 8th, and then relaxing in Hawaii for a week. Yippee!

Long Time No Blog

Well, it's been a VERY long time indeed. So, head on over to http://www.nigelandjackie.com to see what I've been up to. And while you're there, leave us a note in the guestbook!

God's Amazing Love, part 2

Back in September I wrote about God's amazing love. He had shown it to me tangibly many times at the National Youth Workers' convention in Sacramento. Well, He's been showing it to me lately in similar and even bigger ways.

Last night, I went to a Shane & Shane concert in San Jose with Nigel and about ten friends. It was an awesome time, as their performances/worship times always are. And at the very end of the night (get ready for the deja-vu) they started singing "How Great is Our God." And yup, right after it, they sang "It Is Well With My Soul." I thanked God for thinking of me in that way, once again, and reminding me of all He's done in my life (see God's Amazing Love, the original post in September).

But even bigger than that, God has brought me Nigel. He's already heard most of this from me, but I wanted to put it here for you all, my friends, to read as well. I ahve prayed for years for God to bring me a special man, one who I would spend my life with. One who would love me as I am, the good and bad, and care about/for me by living God's love. I had no idea God would bring me more than I asked for.

I'm a pretty simple woman, from a simple upbringing, with simple yet strong and unwavering faith and an "old-fashioned" kind of love to give. But I am also messy, stubborn, picky about certain things, and love a good intellectual debate (though debates aren't necessarily bad).

Nigel has been so constant since I met him. Even though I've had many fears, doubts, and lack of trust due to being hurt and deceived so many times in the past, he has always, from day one, said he will not give up on me and that he loves me, ALL of me, just as I am. He has shown me more grace and love in just over two months than anyone other than God ever has, and he just keeps on going. I keep thinking he's going to all of a sudden "wise up" and run, like men always have in my life. But he doesn't. He just loves me more.

I keep wondering how it is that God could love me enough to send me someone like Nigel. It doesn't make sense at all. I'm far from good, and made so many mistakes, how could I deserve this kind of blessing? Yet God assures me I do deserve it, and much more, because He loves me that much.

I know that we will face challenges, especially once we get married, and I know we will not always see eye to eye (and we don't, even know, all the time). Yet, with God as our focus and guide and the center of all we say and do, the rest of it will work out. I know it will.

My favorite tradition that we have started is going up San Damiano every Wednesday night after I'm done with Wildside to pray together and talk about our relationship. San Damiano is a Benedictine retreat center straight up the mountain from here. They allow people to come there to pray and have quiet time with God. There are no cars, no streets other than the one leading to it, and there is a view of the entire valley. I can see my church, my house, and a lot more from there. It's amazing, and since I moved here has been my favorite place.

I am very excited, and yes a little scared too, for this next season in my life. It's hard for me to entrust my heart to someone besides God. God will never, ever let me down, but people always will at times. Yet I am so very glad to have found someone to share my life with - to walk side by side through the hills valleys, and meadows, and to love. God is so good!