Spring Break

It's been a good week so far. Dad got this great place in Copper Village so we don't even have to drive to the slopes. We go down the elevator, walk about 100 yards, and get on the lift. It's wonderful!

It's been really great because we've had perfect boarding weather yesterday and today. It's been sunny and warm. The perfect kind of warm though where when you are on the mountain you feel fine, when you stop at the bottom it's a little hot, but then you cool off on the lift. I'm excited that tomorrow it is going to snow all day though, because boy do I love to see it snow. We probably won't board tomorrow, unless I just really want to, and that's fine by me. I got in two good long days, which is about all my legs can take anyway. Tomorrow will probably consist of some outlet mall shopping before I head back to Texas.

At one point today as I was barreling down the mountain at some ridiculous speed I thought to myself "what the heck am I doing?!?". Seriously, sometimes I wonder who came up with this sport. I mean, who was sitting around one day and though, "oh I know, I'll just go up to the top of a snow covered mountain, wax up a piece of fiber glass, strap both my feet into it so I couldn't pop out if I tried, and up and slide down the mountain". It really is sort of an odd idea, but oh so fun.

I love spring break! I don't know what I would do without it.

"Wimberley .. that's like Kimberley!" - Missy

I had the most wonderful relaxing three day weekend ever! Seriously, it's sort of hard to put into words just how great (and completely necessary) it was!

Friday after school Missy and I got on the road right away for Wimberley. For a 3 1/2 hour drive, it seemed to go by fairly quickly. Good company I guess :) When we got to San Marcos we needed to stop for dinner so we started to search for what was around on one of our iphones. We had almost decided to go to Texas Roadhouse because we used to love eating there in college but there isn't one close by in Houston, when we saw a Fazolis up the road. We most def chose Fazoli's over Roadhouse. That may seem ridiculous, but man we LOVE that place!! After a delicious meal there, we finished the drive to my mom's river house.

The GPS on my phone led us down this incredibly scary back road and for awhile there I was pretty certain we were going to die there. Missy later told me she was all but about to jump into my lap lol. BUT, we made it. By the time we got to the house it was nearly 9pm. There were NO lights on anywhere, and it was pitch black outside! Walking up to a house out in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, and having to search for a key is scary. My mom had told me where the key was hidden and in my rush to grab it quickly I totally knocked one of two keys onto the ground. Luckily, it was the mail key, not the house key, because it was nowhere to be found in the dark. Missy and I had a pretty good laugh over that. We would have been screwed if it had been the other way around. yikes! Once we got the key, we let ourselves in the house and started to unload the car. 10 trips later, we were in. Seriously, we had SO much stuff! You would have thought we were moving in! The walk from the car to the house is not exactly a short distance and like I said it was pretty dark and scary so we were moving fairly quickly. At one point we got back to the car to get more things (I had left the car running so my headlights would give us some light on the path) and Let the Bodies Hit the Floor was blaring from the radio. Ummmmm not good music when you are already freaking out afraid of the dark! haha The rest of Friday night was spent hanging out in the living room, drinking many mimosas, listening to the water feature outside the window, and chatting. Quite a relaxing end to the day!

Saturday morning we got up and spent some more time just lounging around. At some point I decided I needed a shower and when I turned on the water it was the most overwhelming sulfur smell ever! I seriously wanted to throw up it was so bad. Plus, the water never got hot! It was the stinkiest, coldest, shower ever! I literally stuck my head in, washed my hair, and that was it. I called my mom later and we figured out that the sulfur smell was from the water not being used in awhile (it went away after that first shower), and the reason it was cold was that the previous renter had turned off the hot water when he left (we got that fixed for the next day, no worries!). My mom was trying to walk me through flipping the breakers to try and fix the hot water problem when out of nowhere this huge male deer runs up to about 5 feet away from me. He totally had an arrow stuck in his side and I all but had a panic attack right there. He was SO close to me, all the house doors were open (trying to air out that gross smell), he was looking right at me, and he was clearly very agitated because of the giant arrow he had been shot with. I was too scared to cry. Seriously. Missy had seen this thing dark across the yard from the bedroom window so she came out to see what it was. As she came out, it got scared and ran away. Thank goodness!

After spending a bit more time lounging around on the porch enjoying the beautiful weather, Missy and I decided to head over to San Marcos for some outlet shopping. I cannot believe how long we were there! We walked the entire prime outlet side and didn't leave until it was already dark. Of course we didn't think to leave a porch light on, thinking we'd be back much earlier, so it was dark and scary when we came home again. Shopping was a lot of fun though. We both got a few cute things, and honestly just had a nice time wandering about leisurely not caring about the time or anything. We grabbed dinner at Outback since it was right there in the parking lot, then headed back home for more mimosas and an old mix tape.

Sunday we were both so glad that we didn't have to get up and drive back yet. We spent the morning just laying around relaxing, got some cutting done for our quilting projects, and had lunch in town. After lunch we ran a few errands to try and find things we needed for our quilting setup, then headed home to start quilting. We both got our entire top piece done for our quilts! SO fun!! Plus, they are both super cute! Sunday night consisted of even more relaxing, and even more mimosas (7 bottles worth of champagne at this point lol).

I really didn't take many pictures this weekend, and I the only pictures I even took of our completed top pieces were on my phone so these will have to do. This is when we had the blocks all sewn together and laid out, but had not yet sewed them all together. You get the idea at least.

My quilt

Missy's quilt

Monday we got up, did some more cutting for our next quilting project, then packed up to leave. We stopped in San Marcos for lunch at none other than Fazoli's again haha. yum! On our way back into town we stopped at ikea and picked up some fun new chairs for the kids to use in the classroom when doing read to self, and then finally made it back to my house. Missy did some lesson planning, and I went to yoga, then we picked up dinner, came back here, watched Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill, and had a Monday night sleepover.

This weekend was SO incredibly relaxing I just can't even explain it. I think we both really needed it, but we sure were sad to come back to reality. We should really make it a point to take weekends like that more often. Love you bunches Missy! :)

Weekend in Salt Lake City

Can I just say what a wonderful time I had in Salt Lake City this weekend? Seriously, it was SUCH a good mental health break! I hadn't seen my dad since the first week in June, which I think is the longest period of time in my life that I have gone without seeing him ... craziness! Plus, Lauren and Aunt Mary Beth were there, and I got to see a lot of family I haven't seen in a long time. Dad and I were trying to figure it out, but we think the last time I saw Aunt Mary was possibly almost 15 years ago! That's an insanely long time, so it was really good to see her again. Plus I got to see Molly, Uncle Bruce, Grandma and Dick. Such a fun time!

Friday morning I flew up to Salt Lake city and met my dad at the airport. We checked into our hotel and relaxed/napped for about an hour upon checking in. Then we headed over to the park to meet up with everyone for the barbeque. I got to meet Molly's husband Adam, and I have to say he definitely got two thumbs up from the McCormack's. This guy is great, and so much like Molly! They are adorable together. So, in the park Adam did some grilling

and everyone did lots of eating. Whole foods must have thought we were crazy about kale because they sent over a MASSIVE platter. Seriously, Molly and Adam are going to be eating this kale for months to come! It was ridiculous and proportionally so much larger than any of the other platters of food. Lauren and I laughed so hard about it!

I have turned into quite the Texas girl over the years, because once the sun went down I was FREEZING! Seriously, SO cold! However, it was lots of fun hanging out with dad and catching up with Lauren. (this picture was actually taken the next night, but it's the only one I have of the two of us this trip)

The next day Lauren and I went to Adam's yoga class. He owns this neat studio there, so he had invited us to come to his class. It was a good class, but man 2 hours of yoga almost killed me! I am used to only an hour, so this was twice as long as any class I had been in! It was lots of fun though! After yoga I spent some time showering and getting ready for the day then dad and I went to lunch and drove around the city so I could see it. Having the mountains as a backdrop makes everything so much prettier! I really miss the mountains!

That evening we got dressed up and headed over to this beautiful restaurant, Tuscany, for the ceremony and reception.

It was a small group of maybe 30 or so people so it was very intimate. One of their good friends was the officiant and the whole ceremony was very Molly (and as I came to find out, also very like Adam). It was simple and very sweet. I cannot even tell you how much we all loved Adam, he is perfect for Molly and they are so cute together!

After the outdoor ceremony we moved inside for the dinner. Dinner was supposed to be outside, but the whole day had been very overcast and chilly, so it was moved inside. Thank goodness! Seriously, I would have frozen! I knew I needed a coat, but when I was packing I found that the only dressy coat I have is a peacoat, and I knew I would look ridiculous if I wore a peacoat the first weekend in October. That being said, I had no coat. No coat, and a dress that only comes to my knees. Dinner outside would have been miserable, but inside it was quite fun. Lots of yummy food and chatting with family.

Sunday morning my flight was at 8:30 so I had to get up and leave pretty early. It was such a nice weekend and a nice break from work that I was really sad to come back home. I'm thankful I got to go though, it was really a great time! Thanks Dad, love you!

Quilt Retreat 2009

This past weekend was been a nice relaxing break from the reality of my life.  I probably didn't have time to take a break from my life (actually, I KNOW I didn't have time to take a break), but oh well.  

Just like last summer, I drove up to Milford, Texas (North of Waco about half way to Dallas/Ft Worth) with a bunch of ladies for a quilting retreat. We stayed at this bed and breakfast that is made for groups of quilters or scrapbookers.  It's really nice, because apart from the rooms where you stay, they have this large craft room set up so that each person staying has their own large workstation. They have cutting tables set up, ironing boards, and craft walls, so it's very convenient for you to work.  Plus, they fix these amazing meals so you pretty much get to just stuff yourself silly and quilt for a whole weekend.

I wasn't really on my game this year (perhaps that's because I feel so lethargic about life in general) but I did manage to get one project completely pieced together (no picture because it may end up being a gift), 

help with a baby quilt for Molly, 

and make some very good progress on my scrap quilt I started working on last summer.

 But mostly, it was nice to just sit around and chat.

Year two of our quilt retreat was a success ... and year three is already booked for next summer.

Unfortunately, now it's back to real life; and real life is not so good right now ...

Color and a blurry background

As I've started to get into this photography thing I have found that I love any picture that has two specific elements: bright colors, and a blurry background.  If you hadn't already figured it out by looking at my pictures, I'm a HUGE fan of the blurry background. It's my most favorite simple camera trick, and I use it all the time!  It takes what would be an everyday normal picture and turns it into something a little more fun and special.  I love the way it draws your eye directly into the part of the picture I want the focus on. And as for color, have you noticed how many things I photograph with a bright blue sky? Did you notice how I always enhance the color in my photos before posting them to make it really pop? I LOVE color!

In The Bellagio they have this atrium room that is FULL of color! Everything in there is incredibly bright (and also incredibly random).  Seriously, this room is a dream to photograph in, and I took quite a few pictures there haha!  Good thing Kristen was enjoying photographing it as well, otherwise she might have been annoyed at me for needing to take pictures of every single random thing in the room.  One of my favorite things about this room though, was the flowers. I love how the colors pop, and of course I had to use my blurry background trick haha

In this last one I set my focus to the pink flower on the side. I love how it normally would not be the point of focus in this image, but because of the blur, your eyes are drawn straight to it. I love how I can actually choose the point of focus with my new camera! Actually, I just love my camera! I'm about ready to buy my next lens; maybe I'll put my Vegas winnings toward the purchase :)

Vegas Slideshow

I am clearly my father's daughter, so when I go on trips I like to make slideshows. My dad has always made a slideshow of our family vacations, so now I have taken to doing it as well.  So, I made a slideshow of our Vegas trip. I tried for a VERY long time to get this to post here but it was unsuccessful! No matter what I tried all the pictures posted, but only the first song would post with it, leaving the second half of the video without music.  So, I finally had to break it up into two different videos with music.  Combined they are about 7 minutes. Enjoy!

Vegas Vacation - Food Edition

One thing I love to photograph is food, and one thing Kristen and I love to do together is eat.  See how well those two go together?!? For that reason, this Vegas entry will be the food edition so you can see some of the yummy things we had to eat (and some we just thought looked so yummy we had to take pictures haha).

As I mentioned in my Vegas Vacation entry, the first night we were there we went to dinner here:

If you follow me on twitter you already know that I basically had a secret love affair with this martini!  It was peach flavored, and one of the best martinis I have ever had!! YUM! Definitely rivals Maggiano's pineapple martini (my other favorite).

Of course the meal wasn't all about drinking.  I had a delicious tomato mozzarella salad (one of my favorite meals on any menu!).  It definitely didn't hurt that it was presented beautifully!

Honestly, I don't remember what all was in the salad Kristen had, but it looked pretty and it was delicious as well.

The next day, on our tour of the strip, we came across these gourmet caramel apples. They were $13 each, so we passed because that is a ridiculous amount of money for an apple, but they were so pretty we took pictures through the case. Unfortunately, since we were taking pictures through a glass case, the flash could not be used so you really can't get the full effect of how marvelous these were, but you'll get the idea.

Do those not look absolutely to die for? I'm thinking I could totally recreate these at home for much less cost.  That may be one of my upcoming baking ventures :)

It was literally SO HOT in Vegas while walking around the strip that I felt like the soles of my shoes had to be melting into the ground, with my feet right along with them. The heat was so incredibly bad that Kristen and I were THRILLED to stumble across this place:

We stopped off to cool down and had a very yummy snack! Onion rings - always a favorite! I loved the presentation; they came stacked up like this on a small metal stand. They also tasted pretty darn good!

And of course how can you go to Serendipity and not have the frozen hot chocolate?!? When I was in New York with Darren a few years back I had this for the first time and fell in love, so of course that is what Kristen and I had to get!

This would also be the part of the trip where Kristen and I discovered that we do not know how to take attractive pictures while sipping on a straw.  I'm going to save us the embarrassment and skip posting those pictures haha!

That night we went to eat at a little Italian place in New York New York:

I had a penne pasta in vodka creme sauce with parmesan sprinkled on top! YUM! I am not even kidding, this sauce was fabulous!  I love a good vodka creme sauce, but rarely find it on the menu. Of course I jumped all over this entree.

I didn't forget about Kristen's food, we just didn't get a picture of it. She had a margherita pizza, so you can pretty much just picture it in your head.

For dessert we decided to leave the restaurant and instead eat at a little corner cafe in the hotel. We stood at the counter looking at all the choices for a good long while; they were ALL so beautiful it was hard to choose!! We ended up deciding that since we couldn't have them all, we could at least have pictures of them, which is how I came to spend the next 10 minutes photographing desserts through a glass case. haha

I loved this one! It was tiramisu, which I don't really like to eat, but it came in a tiny coffee cup made out of chocolate! How awesome is that?!?

This one was a cheesecake with fruit on top. I love the way they used the fruit as decorations!

I don't remember what this was, but something chocolate clearly that looked so incredibly good!

Pretty sure this one was the one that was a mix of chocolates. It had dark chocolate, milk chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, and white chocolate.  Pretty, isnt it?

Finally we just had to make a decision (and the lady at the counter seemed to be getting annoyed at my incessant picture taking, so I decided on this little dessert.  It's a chocolate mousse with peanut butter! One of the best desserts I've ever had!!

And Kristen decided to go with this fruit tart.  It had a pie crust shell filled with something like a vanilla creme filling and was topped off and decorated with all this beautiful fruit! I particularly loved the detail of the stars painted on to each of those chocolate points sticking out of the top.

And this concludes the food edition post from our Vegas trip. :)

Vegas Vacation

Kristen and I had a BLAST in Vegas the past 4 days!  So much so that I am incredibly sad to be home. I think the worst part is knowing that my summer vacation is almost over, that trip was sort of the end of it.  School starts in 26 days, and I should be starting soon to get my stuff together. I'm going to hold out on that as long as possible though.

Anyway, back to Vegas.  I've decided that there are WAY too many pictures and details to tell, so this entry will be an overview of the trip and then once I get pictures edited I'll post some more Vegas themed entries with more pictures.

Kristen and I flew into Vegas Saturday afternoon.  We took a cab to MGM where we were staying, got checked in, and spent a little time laying around, making plans, and just resting after our day of travel. We then freshened up and headed downstairs for dinner at Wolfgang Puck.  We had a peach martini that I basically fell in love with, and the food was delicious! After dinner we went back up to the room to get ready to go out, and then took the monorail over to The Venetian to go to Tao.  Let me just tell you how INSANE this club was! I'm not even sure the word insane is a strong enough adjective, but I can't think of another better one that fits. This place was PACKED and had this insanely high energy level the whole time.  We had some drinks, did some dancing, met some EXTREME creepers, bailed on them, met some more ridiculous creepers, bailed on them, and then continued in the same pattern most of the night.  I'm not even kidding, these boys were ridiculous! We wanted NOTHING to do with them and spent quite a bit of time trying to find a place to dance where they would not follow us. haha it was actually quite amusing!

Once we tired out from all the dancing and our feet were in some sort of extreme pain from the heels, we moved up to the rooftop level of the club that was a little more laid back.  We took a seat on this ledge and did some people watching, then decided to call it a night.  Back at our hotel we stopped by the Studio Cafe for some late night food. There were these two people in the table across from us that were cracking us up. They were obviously very drunk (that would be the majority of people in Vegas all the time haha), were just about to fall asleep in their booth, and were not speaking to each other at all! After our late night snack, we passed out until the next morning.

Sunday we got up and headed down to the pool.  MGM has this 21 and up pool called Wet Republic, and we had randomly gotten our name put on the guest list the day before, so we headed that way. We ended up playing volleyball with a group of boys and thoroughly embarrassed ourselves.  We are not cut out for pool volleyball! It was a lot of fun though! After a decent amount of sun, we picked up some lunch and went back to the room to eat and shower off. We then took the monorail back over to The Venetian to pick up our tickets for the Blue Man Group show that night. Back at the hotel we played a few slot machines (Kris won, I lost but then got my money back) and got ready for the show.  Blue Man Group was fantastic! I really loved it! We had pretty good seats too, so that definitely helped.  Wish you were allowed to take pictures inside, but you can't. So sadly, no pictures of that.  After the show we had dinner at Grand Lux (even in Vegas it's still my favorite restaurant haha) and then made our way back to our hotel. 

We had been planning on going to Tabu that night in MGM so we were all dressed for that but had a little time to kill before going in.  We decided to try and find this horse race game that Audrey had told Kristen about.  We found it, got some quarters, sat down to play a bit, and never ended up leaving. Is it sad that we skipped out on clubbing to play an old horse race game?  Maybe, but I sure don't care, it was a blast! We made friends with the people around the table (who had already been there for 3+ hours) so it was a fun social game to play. The idea of this game is you put in a quarter and bet on which two horses you think will come in first and second place. The game tells you the odds of that combo winning and you bet accordingly. If you win, you get as many quarters as the odds said (for example if it tells you that the odds of horses 1 and 2 coming in first is 2, then you get two quarters back if they win). Well, the guys at this table who had been there all day had figured out that the 200 odds was hitting about once every 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Within 30 minutes of us getting there, the 200 hit and Kris and I both won $50. We were so excited we decided we HAD to stay until the next time it hit.  We spent the next 2 hours betting on horses and chatting with the men at this table.  It was so fun!  After about an hour and a half we started to watch for the 200. Each time it came up we would bet a little more. Finally it hit and all 7 people at the table had bet 5 quarters (that's $250!). There was cheering, screaming, high fives, etc we drew in quite a crowd!! It was so crazy that the machine pretty much broke. All the horses kept going round and round in circles without stopping and no one could bet after that. We were cracking up!  Security had to be called over to use a key to get our quarters to come out because we had won so much at once.  We got 500 quarters and then they paid us the rest in cash. We were THRILLED to cash in all those quarters! Basically, we put in $3 and walked away with almost $300, how awesome!!  Kristen and I were on such a high after winning (the whole experience of winning with a group of people you'd made friends with really added to the excitement) that we accidently got off on the wrong floor, walked ALL the way down the hall to our room (which was the second to last one on the hall), I put the key up to the door, and then we realized it wasn't our room. We just about died laughing!

The next day we woke up talking about the night before and how fun it was! We were on such a high!  We spent Monday walking the strip for 6+ hours. It was HOT as heck, but we got to see everything we wanted to see. We randomly came across Serendipity (I had no idea they had one in Vegas!) so we stopped there in the middle of our venture to cool off with some frozen hot chocolate, YUM!

We took a TON of pictures and by the end of the day we were exhausted. For dinner we walked over to New York New York and ate at this great little Italian place. The food was yummy! Then for dessert we walked to this little cafe bakery thing there and had the best desserts EVER! There was a whole case of some of the most beautiful desserts I have ever seen, so of course I took pictures of them all haha. More close up pictures to come later! :)

We wandered back to MGM and used our free $25 slot play we got when we booked the hotel.  I let Kristen do the playing since she has better luck than me and we split the winnings.  We made $17 each so we wandered down to the horse game and used that money to play. All our friends were back!  Everyone that came up to the table was talking about how we had won big last night. Apparently we are known as the "table veterans" hahaha! I honestly think that after us winning big last night they went in the games computer and changed up the odds of winning because on Sunday night the same groups of numbers would come up each round, and on Monday they were all totally random! Plus, EVERY time that the 200 came up in the 2 hours we were there it was either for horses 2 and 5 or 1 and 4.  That was suspicious to us, and in the 3+ hours of combined time our friends spent at the table, it never hit.  We played for a bit and then decided to walk away before we spent any money other than that free money we had just won.

When we got up to leave 2 of our casino friends decided to leave as well. The 4 of us went over to an open bar in New York New York and had a drink and chatted. It was a lot of fun! Is it weird that we have "casino friends"?!?  After we had been there for awhile this EXTREMELY drunk couple came up to the bar. They were probably 2 of the most drunk people I had ever seen! They were falling all over each other, and quite honestly the guy was so out of it he couldn't focus, hold his eyes open, or keep his head up. The bartender told us they had gotten married that night.  Great way to spend your wedding night right?!? yikes! We could not stop laughing at how ridiculous they were! Seriously, it was like a comedy show and we were not the only ones at this bar watching and laughing.  After awhile security was called and they were wheeled away one at a time in a wheelchair. My goodness! It was definitely entertaining!

Tuesday we woke up and had to head to the airport. I was SO sad to leave, it had been such a fun 4 days!  We had enough time to do everything we wanted though, and were walking away with $300 so I definitely can't complain about that!  My flight home took me to San Antonio, where I had to switch planes.  The first leg of the trip I was so exhausted I passed out. I NEVER sleep on planes, they terrify me! I was vaguely aware of a lot of turbulence on our descent as my head kept getting smacked against the window, but I was so tired I couldn't even keep my eyes open and just kept going back to sleep!  In San Antonio I had just enough time to talk to Missy for a few minutes and then we were boarding. I got on the plane, sat down, looked up, and saw Shaun's sister walking toward me So random! I waved her down and we ended up sitting together on the flight from San Antonio to Houston. Seriously, what are the odds?!? It was nice to have someone to chat with though :) Last night after I got home I passed out and slept in very late today! What an incredibly fun vacation!!

Like I said earlier, I am working on editing some pictures right now and then I'll post some more entries with those later so be on the lookout. :)