Feels like going home ...

This week is what summer is all about! What better way to enjoy summer than taking random road trips and staying up half the night talking to friends?!?

On Tuesday I drove up to College Station to visit Kate.  She moved back there a little over a month ago and I've been saying I would come visit, so I finally just did. To be honest, I'm not even sure I can put into words how I feel about that place, or how much I miss it.  I have SO many fond memories attached to so many things there. This is probably weird, I'm probably the only one in the world who does this, and I'm probably not going to explain it very well but I'll try.  Sometimes, when I go somewhere that has some sort of nostalgic memory attached, I get these vivid flashbacks to that time.  Almost like in a movie, where you are looking at an empty table or whatever, but seeing yourself sitting there and the memory unfolding before your eyes.  Does that make sense? Is that super strange? haha I don't care. Anyway, that's what every moment in College Station is like for me.  

• Driving past Olsen I don't just see the baseball field and stands, I see Tony and I sitting on the 4th row back, in the second section of bleachers, between home plate and first base, at my first Aggie baseball game. I hear myself asking Tony, "how do you know they've hit a home run", him looking at me like I'm crazy, and then both of us laughing hysterically when we realized what I was actually trying to ask, and how stupid it sounded.

• Driving down Rock Prarie I don't just see a bunch of houses and buildings.  I hear Missy's voice (through my tears because of all the drama) inviting me over for our first Wednesday night sleepover.  I see myself driving to Missy's every single Wednesday night my whole first semester.  I see the two of us laying in bed talking until well after 2am.  I remember the distinct feeling I had that life outside of high school (which I was so reluctant to leave) was going to be okay, if not great, because I had already made myself an amazing friend.

• I drive down Texas Ave, across from campus, and I see all of us jumping out of the car in the middle of the road and making our way across the muddy field cracking up the whole time trying to get to the Bonfire Memorial dedication.

• Sitting at a table on the back porch of Mad Hatters I see all my friends standing against the fence between 315 and Mad Hatters the night of graduation laughing and taking a million and one pictures.

• Looking at the duplex that Missy and I shared with the boys I see Missy and I sitting on the third step of the stairs having the most important of conversations (all important conversations seem to happen on the stairs haha).

I've got more, but I'll spare you.  It's hard to explain, you just have to feel it to understand. I bought this shirt and I think it sort of explains what I'm trying to say:

"From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. And from the inside looking out, you can't explain it"

I haven't lived there in two years, but it still feels like home.  I know a lot of my friends agree. It's just like going home ...

But, I digress (this entry might drag a little, can you tell?!?)

I drove up on Tuesday to spent the night with Kate.  It was so wonderful to see her (it had been too long) and we had a lot of fun going to some of my favorite places in town. I was just soaking up every minute of it!  We walked around campus and I marveled at how much has already changed in just 2 years. How strange will it be to go back in 10 or so years when so much will be different. That whole "life goes on without you" concept made me sort of sad.  

As I was driving back on Wednesday I was talking to Missy and we were reminiscing about college. We decided we wanted to take a trip up there together, and looking at our schedules the only time we could make it work before school started was to go yesterday.  So, I drove back in from College Station, packed up my bag for the next day, then headed to Missy's to stay the night so we could leave in the morning (it was a Wednesday night sleepover, for old times sake! hehe  What a great guy Tony is that he lets that happen).  Dad got us a free hotel room (thanks dad!) so we were set! 

It was SUCH a good Missy and Kerri trip!  It was perfect because we wanted to go to all the same places, and since we have so many shared memories we could be all nostalgic about it together.  We made a list of all the places we had to go to eat, see, or take pictures and we worked our way down it.  How fun! We went to McAlisters (where Tony says Missy and I would go on our dates if the two of us were dating haha), Shivers, Shakes, Fazolis, Cheddars, King Dollar, Campus View, the duplex, the little girl with the ducks (she needs to go home before it gets dark! hehe), everywhere on campus, the Mitchell Mansion ("this is where we first met!"haha), the schools we student taught at, and of course Northgate.

We got to meet up with Danny for dinner, Aaron came out and had a drink with us at ng for awhile, we saw Matt at a couple different bars, and randomly we ran into Elliot and Jordan while we were out.  It turned out to be a lot of fun seeing a bunch of people we know.

We packed a TON of places and activities into a 24 hour trip, but it was a blast!

Originally I was going to do a walkthrough of our trip in pictures, but we took hundreds, so I'll spare you.  Here are a few of my favorites:

My favorite place on Northgate! Looks like it came right out of an old western film

Need some good luck before an exam? A penny at the feet of Sul Ross should do the trick!

Century Tree - if you and the one you love walk beneath the branches you are destined to be married

I love my best friend!

Darren's 23rd Birthday Bash

Last night was Darren's 23rd birthday party.  For those of you that don't know, there were WEEKS of planning that went into this! Seriously, He and I have been discussing details for this party daily, for the past 2-3 weeks.  Somewhere along the line I became Darren's official "party planner" because I was organizing everything and making sure we got everything covered. There were many emails, many lists, and many trips to the store, but it was all worth it because the party turned out amazingly great!

Funny enough, it hasn't rained in Houston but maybe one time all summer, and the day of Darren's party there was a massive monsoon type storm right when the party was supposed to begin.  Once the rain let up a little people started coming and the party picked up from there.  At one point Darren counted about 80 people there. That's awesome!

Darren had rented out The Clubhouse at The Calais at Courtlandt Square. The location was BEAUTIFUL! Perfect for this type of evening cocktail party.

One of the biggest hits of the party was the candy bar. We had gone back and forth on whether or not to do this because of the expense, but in the end Darren decided he wanted to.  He had this great idea to have a candy bar with cellophane bags so people could snack on candy and take a bag home as a party favor. This was a HUGE hit! Everyone loved it! I seriously went to almost 10 different stores looking for bowls that would be suitable, but not to expensive, for this purpose and finally I found the perfect ones.  Here you can see the candy bar that was at the entrance to the party room.

For 3 hours people had cocktails, visited with friends, listened to music, and snacked on finger foods.  Darren looked like he was just soaking up every minute of it. I'm so glad he had so much fun! There was definitely a lot of hard work put into it, but it was obviously totally worth it.

What was really wonderful was how many people drove in from out of town for this party. There were guests from Austin, Dallas, San Antonio etc.  Some of my favorite people came into town for the party, so that made it all the better for me!

At 10:30 I had Darren make the announcement that people needed to start heading out and that we would all meet up in a bit at one of the bars in midtown.  At this point I started to get everything packed up.  It took 3 solid hours to decorate and get this party put together, and it took 30 fast paced minutes to get it packed up and cleaned. Many thanks to Kristen and Missy who helped me load all the stuff into cars and get everything taken care of while Darren was entertaining his guests.  Their help sure made the work go by much faster.  After we got everything cleaned up we headed over to Red Door and met up with a lot of the party people on the roof, where we spent the rest of the evening.  What a fun night!

As a totally unnecessary thank you for being his "party planner", Darren bought me the CUTEST new wristlet from Coach! I am absolutely in LOVE with this thing! Look how cute it is:

So, overall the party was a huge success! Everything went smoothly (despite the rain at first), and everyone, including Darren, seemed to have a wonderful time! I've been so busy doing all this party planning I'm not entirely sure what I will do with my time now. It's been a lot of fun!  For all your party planning needs you can now call me, the "party planner extraordinaire" haha :)

Side note: I completely forgot to bring my good camera and didn't remember until we were almost there, so it wasn't worth going back to get it. These were all taken with my point and shoot, so the quality is not nearly as good.  Oh well.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

At the beginning of the summer I decided that my new hobby (how many new hobbies does one person need? apparently I need a lot!) was going to be baking. Or, more specifically, baking and decorating. I like baking (and I definitely like eating), but I also wanted to start to bake new things and practice decorating them. The problem with this new hobby is that I can bake all I want, but what do I do with all these bake goods once I'm done. I certainly can't sit around and eat an entire cake by myself, or an entire batch of cupcakes! So, my hobby got put on hold because I didn't have anyone to bake for. I did plenty of research though. I got a lot of recipes to try and decorating books etc., I just never made anything. I kept telling myself that when I go back to school it will be great because I can bake as much as I want, eat a little, then take the rest to school, so I was getting prepared.

But, I digress. I woke up this morning and wanted to bake today, so I did. This turned into quite an expensive ordeal seeing as how I decided I needed a new muffin pan, a cupcake carrier to hold my cupcakes in, piping bags, and piping tips (plus all the ingredients of course haha). So I ended up spending my morning running around collecting the things I needed.

I came home this afternoon and whipped up some chocolate cupcake batter from scratch:

who doesn't like chocolate?!?

Of course I had to taste it to make sure it was good:

it was! yum!! :)

Then I found a great recipe for a peanut butter icing made with cream cheese. I love it because it's really light in texture, but it's super rich in taste! It's not an overpowering peanut butter flavor, it's just enough mixed with the rich cream cheese to give the cupcake a little excitement. Before I iced the cupcakes I got out my piping bag. I had way more icing than necessary so I decided to test out my piping skills and made some stars.

That was easy! I see how this could be very very fun!

Then I got serious and started to pipe the icing on my cupcakes. Of course this would be about the time I had to merge my two new hobbies and take about 50 pictures of the cupcakes. Seriously, I took a TON of pictures!

Aren't they pretty? I think they turned out beautifully!

Now, if I must be honest, the cake is a little dry, but I attribute that to the fact that this was the first time I've baked in my oven (sad, I know!) and it cooks quicker than I was expecting. Now I know for the future that I need to take things out a few minutes before the time is up. However, they are still yummy :)

Indian Wedding

Yesterday I got to attend my first Indian wedding.  It was very interesting; I've just never been to anything like it before.  I didn't really take a lot of pictures since I didn't know most of the people there I didn't want to be the weird one up taking pictures of everything. I took a few with my cell phone in the morning (sorry for the bad quality) and then just a few of the decorations and such in the evening.

It started at 10am when the groom arrived. Everyone moved outside to greet him, they played music as he got out of the car, and everyone clustered around him and had a mini dance party. How fun!  He then walked inside and stopped in front of this arch that was set up. The bride's family was on the other side of the arch and they had a mini ceremony to welcome him into their family (complete with some joke about trying to take his shoes, which I wasn't really sure about, but was a lot of fun to watch. He later had to buy them back or something like that?).

Once that was complete, everyone made their way into the room set up for the ceremony.  The entire ceremony lasted about 2 1/2 hours.  That might have been a very long time (seeing as how it was hard to be actively engaged when you don't understand the language), but apparently it is okay to move around and talk to people during this time. At first I thought the people around me were being rude by talking so loudly, but I quickly realized that just about everyone around the room was chatting with their neighbors while the ceremony went on up on the stage.  In the back of the room they even had a table set up with coffee, tea, water, and cookies for you to go and snack on. 

After about the first hour, someone came around and passed out mini ice cream cups to all the guests. Ice cream! I was sitting with something like 20 people from my school, and we were all pretty excited about that. hehe

The room looked incredibly beautiful! The decorations really made it stand out. I had a great time admiring all the women's sarees as well. I LOVE all colors and how different they all are.  Sure wish I had an excuse to buy and wear one hehe. And, of course, the bride looked absolutely stunning! She really looked so beautiful, and I loved how sparkly her outfit was! After the ceremony was complete, everyone filed out into the foyer area where they had set up a buffet for lunch.  I skipped out on lunch and came home though, because to be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of Indian food (as some of my family member readers may know haha).

One thing I really appreciated was the wedding program. In it they had described each part of the ceremony, telling guests what would be happening, and what the meaning behind it was.  Not being able to understand the language, this was incredibly helpful in keeping up with what was going on.

I spent my afternoon lounging around the house for awhile and then I headed back for the reception at 7pm. During the ceremony, a lady near us was giving us information about what was going on in the ceremony, and what the reception would be like later. She told us everyone goes home and changes into their "party clothes". We asked what "party clothes" meant and she said, "you have to put your bling on!".  Not so sure I have a whole lot of "bling" haha I think the dress I had was "party clothes" enough.

The reception was a lot of fun!  It was very similar to a western wedding reception like all the other ones I've been too. It started with drinks and appetizers in the foyer, then we were led into the ballroom so they could announce the family and bride and groom. 

They cut the cake, and then the groom's 3 nieces did some dances for the couple. Those kids have rhythm!  After that the some of the bride's friends did sort of a recap of her life through music. It was cute! They would read a statement, such as "she has an incredibly big hear and has always been there to help out her friends" and then music would play to match what they said (in that case it was the friends theme song). Then they had something called the bride's dance, which was a number of her friends and family members who had prepared these choreographed dances.  Very fun! I loved how the groom's tie was a perfect match for the brides outfit, and the cake was in the same color scheme! Obviously well thought out.

 

Then there were speeches, and thank yous, and then they opened up the buffet. I pretty much passed on the food again (not such a fan, and it's really spicy, remember?), but I actually tried a few things. So, we ate dinner and wedding cake, the bride and groom had their first dance, the bride and her father danced, and then they opened up the dance floor to everyone. Let's just say this, the people there knew how to party! It was like a crazy dance party up there. Literally, in a room with what we estimated was 350-400 guests, there were only like 20 people still sitting at their tables! It was crazy!  I decided I sort of like Indian music, it has a really fun beat to it! So, we took to the dance floor for awhile until we were totally worn out, and then called it a night around 11:40.

I imagine the bride must have been exhausted! What an incredibly long day! Her mother told us she had gotten up at 6am, and the wedding stuff was nonstop until after midnight! I would have been dead tired by that point haha. It was really a lot of fun though, and a really cool cultural experience.  I'm really glad I got to go :) 

This turned out MUCH longer than I intended; props to you if you actually read all this!

Worry

I went up to school today to get an update on the numbers.  It's still not looking very good. The numbers are low in 4 of the 6 grades.  Definitely not encouraging. Apparently though, if parents called up to administration to find out when they would be able to register they had been told not until August because a number of campuses have closed registration.  That could mean that there are a number of families holding out until August to register their children. We have had a few more registration packets come in, they are just coming in MUCH slower than we would like.  

After all the years I've spent worrying about things though, I've finally figured out that it does me absolutely no good.  Worrying and stressing about it doesn't change the situation, it only keeps me from enjoying the present. This verse has sort of become my mantra lately:

Luke 12:26 

If then you're not able to do even a little thing, why worry about the rest?

So, I'm doing my best not to worry about it (although some days are easier than others) and just enjoy every minute of my break.  

A large part of enjoying my summer break has consisted of laying on the couch reading, watching movies, and snacking on these:

YUM! Definitely my favorite summer snack!

Happy Birthday America

It's been a few days since I have posted, I just haven't been home much.  I cannot even explain how much I am loving having the summer off! I had forgotten what this was like after having taken class or worked through the past 7 summers. People ask if I get bored, and honestly I haven't at all.  I've managed to fill my time and enjoy every minute of it.  I cannot believe it is already July though, where in the world did the month of June go?!?  I'm going to be very sad to go back to work in the fall.  I need a job that pays me to be on vacation all the time; that would be fantastic haha.  Maybe my new career aspiration should be to become a traveling photographer.  Travel the world, take pictures, and get paid.  That sounds pretty awesome to me! haha

I spent the 4th down at the beach with some friends and had a fabulous time! We spent the entire day just relaxing on the beach and then got to watch some a great fireworks show (that lasted FOREVER) right from the rocking chairs of the porch.  Between the food, fireworks, and the strong breeze, I could have sat in that rocking chair forever haha

I took a bunch of pictures, but this one is my favorite.  I LOVE the colors! (have you noticed I'm all about color in my photos?) This one has a gorgeous bright blue sky, a faint purple tint to the clouds, dark blue ocean water, and I love the way the sand has a sparkling golden look to it. That, along with the contrast of our dark shadows stretching towards the water makes this one really eye catching to me.

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

At one point in the day the boys walked across the street to the convenience store to buy something.  One of them must have said, "happy birthday America" in front of the cashier, because she responded by saying, "so, does that mean it's everybody's birthday today?".  Happy birthday America means it's everybody's birthday then became the joke of the day.

"Happy Birthday America!"

In all seriousness though, how blessed are we to be able to live in such a great country. And how blessed are we to have people willing to fight for us so our freedom is not taken away. We had a great tribute to the armed forces at church yesterday.  I for one, feel extremely blessed, and am extremely thankful.

sweltering heat

According to weather.com, in the past 15 days we have had record breaking temperatures for 9 of those days. 9 days out of 15 we had hotter temperatures than had ever been recorded on that day!  That is not a good sign of things to come this summer.  The heat has gotten out of control! We have had more days with temperatures over 100 degrees already, than we did all of last summer combined. ugh

Tropical island?  I wish ...