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 :)

New Blog Design

What should I be doing today? I should be finishing up labeling all my classroom library books (I'm sort of running out of time very quickly!).  

What have I actually been doing today? Giving my blog a complete design overhaul.  

If you are reading through google reader you should click on over to see it. It's super cute if I do say so myself!  The header isn't finished by any means (it will be much cuter when I am done with it) but I wanted to get something posted so this is the bare bones version.

What do you think?

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. :)

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.