Sunday, April 3, 2011

New Friends and Social Endeavors


I started attending a new congregation back in July. These are some of my new associates I have met there. Peter taught us how to make pot stickers. You may recognize him from his Debut with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Karina, Levi, Julie, and Patrice are hanging out in the back and there was another group in the living room at the time.

Celebration





St. Patrick's Day Parade 2011.
If you ever need a balloon arch for any occasion...I'm your girl.

Each month at work we have a 'spirit day'. March was Decade Day.

Heidi organized this enormous group to go see our friend Mandi perform in a play at the Desert Star.

Cornucopia!

A couple of posts ago I included a picture of our first Bountiful Basket. Here are the pictures of more of the yummy produce we have enjoyed as a result.

Week 2
Week 3


A forgotten Holiday

I forgot to include pictures from our Valentine's celebration!

It was a night for the Roomies and my faithful friend April, who's husband was away training for his new pilot job.

My roommate Karina has chosen to not eat sweets except on holidays. Weeks prior to Valentines day she requested "moist chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, caramel topping, hot fudge, whip cream, and cherries".

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Fine Dining

Have you ever eaten the food at 7-11? Neither had I until Friday. Robert and I had it a 3 course dining adventure all from 7-11. It is also worth noting that this was my first chili dog experience.




Good news! I don't think either of us ended up sick from.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

To Finally Be Caught Up!

Ringing in the new year. I don't know most of the people in this picture, but at least you can see me down in the right corner. I don't know exactly why I was making this face.

On to the sledding extravaganza!
Jacob and I.
Some of my favorite people. Starting in back: Heidi, Luke(I don't really know him, but he is roommates with some of my favorite people), TJ (I really like that kid). In the Middle: Me and Robert. In the front: Karina, and Jacob.

One adventure in tubing. Robert lasted till the bottom of the hill...almost.

I believe the quote repeated over and over as they went down the hill, "We're gonna die!".

This was not as thrilling as we had hoped, but at least we tried.

Yeah. I'm cool when I carry a tube.

We celebrated King's Day belatedly with a Latin night. Heidi, Karina, and I made this piñata. Karina and Heidi are the creative genius behind the exterior appearance. I was sleeping:(.

Just a funny picture.

Heidi taking her turn with it while is was still hanging. It didn't stay up long, so...

We resorted to the baseball approach. It was pretty much the best piñata ever! Heidi and I filled it with what ever we could find around the house. Dental flossers, old nail polish, flat marbles, life savers, alcohol swabs, random tubes of chap-stick and lip gloss, tootsie rolls...

I have serious questions about Costco's chicken! Can you even imagine the chicken this breast came off of?! That can't be natural. Please note the size of the banana next to it...and that is not a small banana!
Heidi and I signed up for our first "bountiful basket". It is a food co-op that you buy into and get your produce at wholesale price. We paid $15.00 and got all this! We were most excited about the strawberries b/c right now you have to pay a small fortune for them at the store...ok, maybe only $5-$6, but still.

Snowshoeing...
The guy taking this picture told us to act like we knew each other...apparently Robert doesn't know me as well as I thought.

A hole!!
Robert explored the hole too:).


We hiked to Donut Falls. I had never been up inside the cave where the donut name comes from. So Fantastic!!!

I love holes!

Post Script

This picture is evidence that I am perfectly capable of wasting time.

Oh the holidays are joyous

Technically this one should have been amid the November pictures, but it was taken a holiday weekend, so it fits in here. Hayden and Jennifer came to visit for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Pretty self explanatory here...the Christmas tree of choice.

Karina passed the light decorating portion of the tree. I actually let her take over for the bottom part.
Garrett and I headed outside to hang the lights on the outside of the house.


The Amish bread experience. I was given an Amish friendship bread starter this year. I decided that people would much prefer a finished loaf of bread, rather then a starter. So I did the math and figured out how much I had to increase the measurements to cook up all the starter. It turned out to be such a funny adventure.

When I measured out the wet and dry ingredients and they filled both of my largest bowels, it was time to get creative. I finally came up with the idea to mix everything in a large bin I was given for my birthday.
That turned out to be a good arm work out.

Then there was dividing the dough into just about every cooking pan I had.

I ended up with about 8 pans in the oven which I had to be careful to rotate frequently. In the end, most turned out all right. The ugly ones still tasted good. Note, this is not a project to undertake at a late hour. The last picture was taken at 11:40pm and they still had to bake after that.

We had an ugly sweater party to attend this year and so we headed to the local thrift store and picked up supplies. This is me, Karina, and Patrice trying our handiwork. Its amazing what ugliness can be created with a little hot glue.

The whole crowd. I was fortunate enough to take first prize for the ugliest sweater.

We decided to leave a note with some treats on the mailbox for the mail man.

Here they are hanging for him to enjoy. He left us a thank you post card the next day. I am sure we are now his favorite house on his delivery route.

We celebrated Christmas Adam with the roomies and a couple other cool cats. For those who are unfamiliar with Christmas Adam, it is the night before Christmas Eve. Thanks to our friend Ashley J. for introducing us to holiday.

I was able to spend Christmas Eve and part of Christmas day with Jennifer. Apparently one picture was all we could muster.

I drove down to Cedar City on Christmas day to spend the rest of the Holiday weekend with Cambree. We spent some time exploring boutiques on main street. These glasses were just so perfect!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

November: A quiet month

So apparently the only photo worthy moment in November was my roommate Karina's birthday. We took her out to Layla Mediterranean Grill and Mezze. The owners are from Lebanon and Egypt. We tasted some delightful new thing and some not so delightful new things. I would highly recommend everything we had there, except for the lamb shank. The atmosphere was very enjoyable and the staff was very personable.

As always...left to right: Erica, Heidi, Karina

We tried to be thoughtful in our gifts. The squeegee was for her car that the defrost didn't work on...the car died the week before we gave the gift. The headlamp was for our late night jogging adventures. The clock was a fulfillment of a home design dream, thank you DI for having the perfect clock for the right price.

We finished out the night by bringing home a chocolate lava cake from Chili's.


Happy Birthday Karina!!!