Baking Gals

I saw that two of the lady bloggers that I follow (Beantown Baker and Heather Drive) were heading up a team for this round so I read up to see what was involved and signed up.

Baking gals was started as a way to help give soldiers overseas a little taste of home that they can share with their buddies and hopefully it lets them know that there are people over here thinking about them. I'll be baking as much as I can to fill up a large flat rate box and I'll be shipping it over to Afghanistan between Oct 1st and Oct 12th. If you're interested in joining a team or you just want information, take a look at the Baking Gals website and check it out.

I actually did a little baking today and tried out Bakerella's recipe for pumpkin pecan chocolate chunk cookies. The batter tasted amazing! I'm a firm believer in firm dough and this was definitely a softer dough so I'm going to let the batter rest overnight and try the cookies again tomorrow. My first batch was definitely cakey (which is normal when you use pumpkin in a cookie recipe) but they were still too crumbly for my liking so I'm hoping if I firm them up and let them bake a little longer that it'll iron my problems out. I also made a batch of crockpot chili today too. I just threw Fall into our faces today in the form of chili and pumpkin. The weather was perfect and we were able to get some yardwork done that we've been putting off because of rain.

We didn't do a whole lot on Friday or Saturday. The weather was kind of blah so we used Saturday to do some shopping and I *finally* found a pair of red flats. You would think that it would be a simple request but I could never find exactly what I was looking for. They have a cute point to the toe and I know you can't tell from the picture but the red is kind of splotchy which gives them a different look. I'm totally a ballet flats person. I can swoon over heels all day long but if we're honest I don't really wear them that often. I only wear them when I go out which is a small portion of mylife. The time I spend going out to dinner, working, or running errands on the weekend far outweighs the time that I would actually wear pumps, so flats it is! Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Puppy Love

This is what I see when I'm laying in the floor and I look up onto the couch above me. This makes me smile.

I really love this dog.

I'm so sorry if you're tired of pictures of my dog, but this is what I do on the weekends. I blog about what I do. I apologize I'm not more interesting.

On another note we did decide to redo the wall behind our couch. We've had these shelves up since we moved in, but I wanted to do something a little more updated.

I framed one of my FIL's photographs and ordered some sconces from Etsy to frame the outside. I love the way this turned out and I love the mix of the modern against the colonial look of the sconces. What do you guys think? My only worry is that the picture is too small for the wall. We'll have color on the wall when we get a home so I'm hoping that it won't make everything feel so blank and wide open.

I hope you're all having a good weekend. I took off on Monday, which gives me a nice 3 day weekend w/ Case =) I think as long as we're saving for a home we probably won't be able to go on a vacation this summer, so I think we'll have a lot of long weekends or weekend trips in our future this summer. In a way it'll be nice to take some time off here and there instead of using it all up at once. Vacations can be stressful when you're trying to finish everything up before you leave and the days coming back are not pleasant. Thinking about checking my e-mail after 2.5 weeks off for my wedding makes me break it out hives. Not FUN.

Hope you're all having a good weekend =)

Spring Forward

Why didn't anyone tell me that the time changed this weekend? I woke up this morning (and obviously missed church) and could not figure out why my computer and cell phone had a different time than everything else. It was ironic that the weekend we spring forward, we have the most beautiful weather. It's more like Spring trickery, b/c I think it's calling for freezing rain next weekend. I have snow boots beside my flip flops at the front door. I'm so confused!

Either way I thoroughly enjoyed the warm weather while it was around. My old college roommate, Maggie, came down Friday night and it was really good to see her. I think it's been since last Fall that we've seen each other. We actually didn't meet in college, in fact I think we've known each other for about 10 years.

We met Kara at the park on Saturday and we took the dogs out to let them run, but I think they were in shock from the warm weather. It was actually really hot weather and they were both panting and not being very active so we didn't stay long. We went downtown for dinner and Maggie left after dinner to head back home. Casey and I just watched movies and I let myself fall asleep entirely too early.

In case you didn't know haha, a nickname for our town is "The Star City" and someone erected a ginormous star up on one of the mountains in the area in 1949. It's actually the world's largest freestanding man-made illuminated star. That's an interesting claim to fame right there. It's cool to see at night, but there's an outlook that makes it worth viewing during the day. It overviews our downtown area and we drove up there today with Tuck.

After that we rode over to PetSmart and let Tuck pick out a toy and I made him an appointment to get his haircut on Friday. We also drove by another house on the way home. I mentioned in a previous post about a home that we really liked and we listed the drive to and from work as a negative factor. We never put an offer in, but technically we still could if the bank is still holding the previous offer that was made by another couple. Let me list some pros and cons of the homes to give you an idea of what our concerns are.

First Home:

Pros: Good area and school system, low taxes, open floor plan, nice backyard, private area, big basement, big garage, nice parking area, low price (went into foreclosure)

Cons: Further from work, would use interstate A LOT to get to most places, would need a ton of cosmetic work (bathrooms, kitchen, appliances, floors, walls torn down)

Current Home (that we're going to see tomorrow):

Pros: Open floor plan, good area and school system, nice parking area, close to work and convenient area in general, very private wooded lot at the end of a cul-de-sac, nice deck, nice rec room on lower level, work needed would be minimal (flooring and bathrooms need updating), lower price (not as low as the first, but still a foreclosure)

Cons: On a steep hill, wooded lot doesn't allow for much yard even though there is over an acre of land, higher taxes than first home, smaller than the first home, kitchen and all bedrooms are on the upper-level

I know most of you don't care about our housing concerns, but it helps me to lay everything out. It doesn't really help to say this house has more pros than the other b/c some of those pros/cons are very important. We're not going to make an offer on the first home, but I compared the two b/c of all of the homes we've looked at, we've liked that one the most. We're really interested in foreclosures, nice areas, and homes that we can do some type of work to b/c I want good resale value. I don't know that we'll be in this home for 5-7 years, so I would prefer to be able to build some value into it so that if we did have to sell sooner, we would be in a good position.

So that's our situation right now. We're seriously looking, but being pretty picky. Work needing to be done to a home doesn't scare me at all (in fact I can't wait to make things the way I would want them), but we are picky about things related to the resale. I guess I think that's financially a smart way to be picky though. The reason there aren't tons of houses that we like is b/c we've narrowed down where we want to live to 2 or 3 really good areas so things don't pop up extremely often, but I know we'll find the home we're meant to.

Sorry about the house rambling, but it is a big part of our time and concentration right now so you'll probably be seeing a lot of it in my posts =

On another note, earlier today I was making pico de gallo, and listening to music with the deck door open and I could hear birds just singing their hearts out on the porch. It seems like everyone, even the birds, were just absolutely loving this weather today. Now I'm going to have a ridiculously hard time going to bed tonight with this time change and all of the sweet tea I've consumed. Ah well, it's worth it.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Interesting

I was reading Pioneer Woman's blog and I was looking at her cooking section earlier today. She actually had Southern Living over to the lodge at her ranch to feature some of her food and to photograph it for an article. You should really check out this post if you like food, photography, or have an interest in the way magazines operate.

I'm completely fascinated by the work of the 'food stylist'. Pioneer Woman says that would be her dream job and I just think I found mine too. You would get to go to different locations and style food and make it look pretty. I love making things look pretty. Also the food can't talk back to you when you style it, unlike other models.

I don't feel like I made any blogworthy meals last week (that haven't already been posted). I made another attempt at homemade pasta sauce with meatballs. Last time the meatballs were pretty good, but the sauce was not and this time the sauce was great but the meatballs were bland. I think if I just tweak the first meatball recipe a little bit and use the second sauce then I'll have a winner. Tonight I'm making this roast for dinner. In fact I turned the crockpot on when I left the house and all I have to do when I get home is add some vegetables. If you haven't made this roast I suggest you make it soon b/c it's goooood.

Our weekend was pretty standard. We had pizza night Friday, hung out with some friends and played games Saturday, and had a lazy day on Sunday. We actually looked at two houses on Friday night, but I forgot to post about that. We really really really love the first house that we looked at. It would need a lot of work, but we're looking past that at the potential. The only issue is location. It's actually in an awesome location, the re-sale would be great. It's just a bit further away from work than I would like and it would make going home at lunch really hard. Tuck is ok some days left alone, but I don't know that I would be willing to say that I would be ok with me never being able to go home at lunch 5 days a week, all year round. If the location was a little closer, we would hands down put down an offer and it actually just got foreclosed on so the price is dropping even lower, making it even more tempting...

I'll keep you updated. It probably didn't help to go get a bunch of kitchen design and home improvement magazines and look through them yesterday and decide how we wanted to re-do it :-\ It may just not be meant for us, but it's something we're definitely thinking about. This isn't unusual though, we've fallen in love with homes before but there's always been 'something' that holds us back. I don't know if we're being to picky or if we just haven't found the right home yet. A home is a big decision and we're not taking it lightly and that would probably explain why we've worked with our realtor for a year now (and 2 months). She's patient with us though and she never pressures us. I don't know how I went from college and having to make decisions about a class schedule to getting married and making huge choices like buying a home. Time has gone by rather quickly.

I hope everyone is havin a good Monday!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Valentine's Day continued...

Lilies are such a nice Valentine's Day gift but from now on I will be cutting the stamen/pollen whatever it's called out of the middle of it. I turned around to find Tuck's face completely dusted on Saturday.

::sigh::

I tried using a wet cloth to wipe it off, but making it wet just seemed to turn it into a homemade dye. We ended up breaking down and giving him a bath. Our Valentine's Day was off to a good start.

We had Lillian here with us for part of the morning.

She tried to make Tuck feel better about his yellow face and spent some time with him in his crate.

The bath seemed to make it better. Here's a picture of him sitting at my feet while I blog. You can barely see the yellow on his nose now. He just looks like he got some lovely yellow highlights

Aside from the stamen incident we had a really good Valentine's Day. After we gave him a bath we got ready and went to dinner. I got a steak with a demi glace sauce and Casey got a bleu cheese steak over top of garlic smashed potatoes. We grabbed some coffee and then came back to the house and watched some movies. I also made some mascarpone cheese brownies (YUM and I'm going to post the recipe after this post).

All in all it was a good Valentine's Day. We don't normally do anything over the top. We just usually go grab some dinner. I gave Casey a giftcard to Dick's and he gave me some bath stuff along with my lilies. We both had the day off today and we went to a movie and relaxed for most of the day. We went and looked at a house that we really really like that is a foreclosure (I'm pretty sure). We've been looking at it for the past week and we sent an e-mail to our realtor requesting that we see it. I hope that we end up liking the inside and I'll keep you posted if we decide to make an offer.

There's one more thing I have to add... I placed an order for one of these last night in bronze =)

My computer lasted me well through college but a couple of incidents have made it kind of a pain to use lately, mainly that it won't run off of battery at all. They shipped a free printer with it too and I think that ships out tomorrow. I ordered the laptop off of the HP site to save some money, but that means that it won't ship out until the 24th since they have to build it to my specifications. I still can't wait to have a new computer!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Valentine's Day!

Most people hate this holiday and think that you don't need one special day to show someone that you love them. I'm a big goob and I see absolutely nothing wrong with sitting a day aside for this, b/c unfortunately we get so caught up in life and rushing around that we may not always make the time for each other that we should. If this is one day that people decide to go out or sit at home and have dinner together and just enjoy each others company then I'm all for it =)

My parents intended to go out to dinner for their Valentine's Day dinner last night, but somehow Lillian came along for the ride so we went with them to help with her so that they could enjoy dinner. It was nice to see my parents and it was interesting to try to occupy a baby in a restaurant. At one point mom was laughing at Casey trying to hold her while I tried to get lasagna in her mouth without losing the lasagna and stabbing her with the fork. We have a long way to go with figuring out babies :-\



I also had a little surprise at work yesterday. Every year I tell Casey not to get flowers and every year he sends them anyway and I always enjoy them =) This year I tried to point out that we would be at home together all day so sending flowers would be pointless and to save his money. He took it upon himself to send them to work on Friday and it definitely caught me off guard but it was a really nice gesture. Sorry for the crappy cell phone pick but here they are on my desk at work.

I'm not much of a roses girl, but I absolutely love lilies =) Casey is still asleep, but I'm going to make breakfast whenever he gets up and then we're just going to hang out until dinner tonight. He made reservations earlier this week (he's really on the ball this year!) and we'll head out to dinner and possibly go see a movie. He told me we could see the Shopaholic movie if I wanted to, but I don't know if I'll submit him to that or not haha.

I'm actually going to make mascarpone brownies with ganache today too and I'll post the recipe later. I really wanted a more 'gourmet' recipe for today and I've never worked with mascarpone cheese before so we'll see how it goes! I'll post pictures later.

Everyone enjoy their day and just enjoy being married/in love/engaged/dating/smitten with someone for today =)

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Lillian's First Birthday

I'll admit I went through a brief period this past week where I thought about stopping the whole blog thing. I was afraid I was going to run out of ideas, recipes, etc. and that people would just get bored with it. Casey encouraged me to keep up with it and I realized I could always post what we do that week/weekend even if it's not that exciting and it'll still be a document of our life. I'm always trying new recipes as well. I just need to get better about taking pictures before we devour it. You don't have to have an extraordinary exciting life to have a blog, because I certainly don't!

This past Saturday Casey, Kara, and I went home for my niece's first birthday. She's growing into such a little person. Sometimes I look at her and think that she's actually growing into a person that I'll be able to sit and have a conversation with one day. I'm blessed to have her in my life and I hope she's had a great first year of life. I hope that she knows that she'll always have her aunt and uncle to lean on for support and that if she gets mad at mom and dad, she can come stay with us =)

Casey, me and my mom waiting for people to arrive



The birthday girl with her mom and dad. My grandma made her #1 onesie.



Kara and Lillian



Little man keeping an eye on the scene

Opening her glow doll

More presents!

Her bath toys that my mom got her

and more...

Opening her Sophie the Giraffe from me and Casey

About to devour her piece of chocolate cake. I made her the cake from the Hershey website with their icing. She didn't really get any in her mouth, but she had fun playing in it. I enjoyed it at least! Casey also got a video of her playing in it that I'll have to post sometime this week.


We love you Lillian, Happy Birthday!

Friday, January 9, 2009

Clean Cut

This is the after picture of Tuck's haircut, he looks all cleaned up and they scooped out his eyes so that he can actually see what's going on in life.

I will address something else in this picture. We had a great idea last Wednesday during the beginning of our four day weekend to pull the mattress off of the bed in the spare bedroom and put it in the living room floor for the night to watch movies. This 'temporary' arrangement is currently where I'm blogging from right now. This bed has officially been in the living room for over a week. I like to pretend that Casey is the reason it's in the floor, but I am a fan. It's comfortable to watch tv on, I can bring my laptop down here, eat down here etc. Tuck loves it b/c he can hop on and off of it with ease and lay on my legs as evidenced belows. You can also see in the upper right hand corner where our tree was. We pushed our coffee table back there in order to keep things organized. We really have no excuse for our actions, we're just weird and we don't have many guests obviously.

Just in case you don't believe me, here's another picture of it. It rests right up against our couch almost like an extension of the couch. What grown people put a bed in their living room? My sister and her husband have a bed in their laundry room (and the sleep there every night) so maybe it runs in the family.

Here's another quick picture of us all dressed up before going to a wedding last weekend. We obviously spend so much of our time on a mattress in the floor that I have to show you pictures of us showered and all dressed up to prove that we're somewhat active members of society.

As far as other stuff going on in our life, we just signed another 6 month lease at our apartment. I'm actually a big fan of our complex. We know the people so well, we've had no problems here, it's well kept and fairly new, and it's convenient to our work. We've been getting e-mails from our realtor of extremely low interest rates being offered by a couple of local banks so we may start looking again. We planned to look in the Spring and our current lender said that she feels that rates will stay low through the first quarter of this year so I hope that she's right. We're keeping our eyes open now, but we definitely want to be a little more financially cushioned before we take that kind of leap. Our plans from last Fall were to hopefully be in a home by this Summer but if we see an awesome deal we might jump on it before then. I'll post any updates, but you can expect us to probably be here for the full remainder of our lease.

I also finished wedding photobooks! It only took 7 months! I'm quick, what can I say. We ordered two photobooks from MyPublisher and we'll give them both to each of our parents. We're going to make our own at some point. We have absolutely no proof of a wedding in this house. It's kind of sad. My FIL did give us a beautiful wedding picture of us printed out on canvas that I love, so there's one picture!

It's Friday night and I'm blogging, what a dork =) Friday has kind of established itself as our break night. Sometimes we order pizza or some other kind of food and rent movies and just hang out (on the mattress). It's something I look forward to by the end of the week. Having to be at work at 6:45 *really* takes a toll on you by Friday. I'm going to post a recipe I made earlier this week and then I'm going to relax for the night, have a good weekend!

Sunday, November 9, 2008

My Dog Has More Friends Than I Do

I was looking at pictures from this weekend and I realized as I was going through them that on Friday Tuck went to go see his buddies Sox and CatDog and then he had a date with Mason at the park on Saturday and we just brought him back from seeing Coal a couple of hours ago. Dude, how does he have more of a social life than I do? Well, since I apparently didn't do as much as he did this weekend, I'll post some pictures of his exciting weekend.

This is from his trip to visit CatDog and Sox on Friday evening. He was still sniffing out the parameters at this point.

It didn't take him long before he started sprinting around the yard with Sox. Sox would be the black blur in front of him. My dog is a sprinter, definitely not an endurance runner. Sox has somehow nailed down sprinting and endurance.

The ears! They shoot up in the air when he runs and it makes him look like Mickey Mouse.

CatDog didn't get in on the fun very much, but she kept an eye on her little brother. That would be Adrienne, my co-worker, holding her.

They played until it got dark and then they just hung out like old homies.

Switching over to Saturday... this is from our day at the park with Mase-diggy and Kara

Tuck doesn't really know a lot about tennis balls, but he knows to run after Mason when he chases them until he's tired. It works for him.

The Mickey Mouse ears kills me

Mason with his pointer tail being kind of crooked =)

Both of them checking out this man in the background

This is Kara. I kind of love her. She keeps me sane and she loves me back, what more could I ask for?

I feel like I've managed to photograph my whole weekend. I also realize that people might think I'm a big loser once they realize what I do on the weekends but that's ok with me. Friday we actually did go to dinner with a couple of friends after my dog's playdate, and we did go see a movie and do some shopping on Saturday. We went to see The Changeling and I would recommend it to you if you were thinking about going to see it. It's different. I think it's different in a good way though. The movie does a good job of placing you in the time period that exists in the movie and Angelina Jolie does an amazing job as Christine Collins, a woman who rebels against the LAPD when they try to return a child to her that isn't her son when he goes missing (holy run on sentence). It's a true story and an interesting one. It's also a little liberating to see what one woman accomplished by refusing to by quiet. So women, just remember that ;)

Today we had my family over for some of Pioneer Woman's lasagna. We have a few slices left over so hopefully I can get some pictures of that to blog about. I was supposed to blog about my last TWD recipe which was rugelach but I deleted the picture of the cookies and gave the cookies away. Dumb.

This morning at church we also made the decision to become a member at the church we've been going to off and on since January. It just felt right this morning and we're really happy with our decision and have really enjoyed our time there. So that's a step in the right direction!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Lazy Saturday Morning

This is what happens when my boys don't want to wake up in the morning. I crawl back in bed and blind them with the camera until they wake up or until Tuck starts to bark insanely at the red light on my camera which then wakes up Casey and achieves the desired effect. Before you think I'm a harsh wife waking up her husband, it was noon. Come on people, I can only entertain myself so much in the morning. Well actually, I did entertain myself at least for an hour doing this.

My puppy is lazy and that's my arm he likes to sleep on in the morning, and that's my ratty VMI t-shirt that I'll never get rid of.

"Seriously mom? Is it hurting anyone for us to be sleeping in a little later?"

"Seeeeeeeeeeeeriously?"

I then opened the blinds in hopes of brightening the room even more and I received just a pure look of scorn.

Then he thought about it and came over to my side. Waking dad up won't be too bad of an idea.

"Dad, are you up?"

"Dad?"

"Oh well.. I'll just sleep on your face for a little bit until you wake up."

I lost him back to the dark side of the late sleeper inners.

::sigh:: I guess a few more minutes won't hurt...

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)