busy little bees...

I have been pretty busy lately. Obviously. Since I haven't written in quite a while.

I will give you a good overview of the last three weeks. Ready? It's long...

oct 25-30
One of my oldest and best friends came to visit for the whole week! Anneliese and I met in 2nd grade at a friend's birthday party and in 4th grade she transferred to my elementary school. We have had a trillion sleepovers together with barbies, crafts, Fish Food ice cream, and movies. We have partied, traveled, cried and laughed together. We went totally separate ways after high school, but have kept in touch all these years. Even if its a year between our chats we can catch up just like it was yesterday.

She arrived on Sunday and left on Friday night. We had a very eventful week, minus the huge blizzardy storm that made us house bound for a full day.

We shopped at Cherry Creek Mall, Nordstrom's Rack, Target, Park Meadows Mall, Joanne Fabrics, and Halloween stores. We went to Lookout Mountain and Golden, CO. We cooked a few meals, did some crafts, cleaned house, decorated for the party.

The big Halloween party we had been planning for months on Wednesday the 28th, was of course ruined by the crippling 2.5 foot snow storm that started the night before and ended Thursday night. Luckily we had cooked and cleaned all day. We had 5 people at the house already; Tony, Matt, Carly, Anneliese, and me. Our neighbors stopped by with carmel popcorn and the one other guest is our friend Adam. A total of six people partied in the snow and in the garage with the keg for hours and hours!

We had sooooo much food for the 6 of us. We made...
72 mini cupcakes
chex mix
peanut butter cup cookies
sausage rolls
Rotel and Velvetta cheese dip
9 layer dip
cranberry bread
little smokies with bbq sauce
and we got a keg!

Ultimately we had a blast and I fully understood why people didn't make it out for the party. When it snows 2+ feet there aren't too many people that wanna drive to go drinking at a party! Shocking!

oct 31
Work. Blah. Cruddy Halloween.

nov 1-5
Work done by Wednesday morn. Because of the storm last week we threw together an impromptu Post Halloween party to attempt to finish the keg.

I cleaned the house all day to perfection because I knew people were actually coming this time. I asked people to dress-up in hopes of recreating Halloween.

The first couple of guests showed at 6. Then 6:30 Carly showed up. Soon after that, more and more people were appearing at the party. There were some really great costumes; M&M, Russian mail-order bride, Mario (from Mario Bros.), sexy cop, zebra, catholic priest, and more. I think there were about 20 folks in our little house/awesome garage.

We not only had pitchers and pitchers of keg beer, but some girls brought wine, champagne, and vodka. All in all there was a lot of drinking going on. The party went on until midnight. Seriously a fun time and I drank A LOT!

Thursday I probably did something important, but now I don't remember. Oh packing for our weekend vacation!

Later that night, I had a friend's birthday party to attend downtown. I got all dressed up and told myself I wouldn't spend any money or drink. I spent 25 cents on parking and of course there were free drinks.

Someone made me a drink and we danced to the music. We requested some Cyndi Lauper and the DJ said "who?" I then asked for 80's music and he said "what does it start with?" OK. Great!

nov 6-10
Friday morning, Tony and I got up super early to head to the airport. We were headed to Portland for the weekend to visit my dad. Elizabeth flew into Denver earlier that morning to meet our flight out.

Amazing rainy events in Portland...
friday
*Ikea. good shopping, good food and now Tony is in love with the store too!
*Bonneville fish hatchery to watch the spawning salmon in action jumping up the fish ladders
*Multnomah Falls. basically a double waterfall nestled into a lush green forest.
*Kell's Irish Restaurant and Pub. Tony and I love the Seattle location and we had been telling dad about it for years. It didn't disappoint. Corned beef and cabbage with good Irish beer and soda bread ::drool::
*VooDoo Doughnuts. If you go to Portland you have to have VooDoo. The old dirty bastard is AMAZING!!
*POWELL'S BOOKS. That's all I have to say. The best bookstore I have ever been to. When you need an obscure book like Red Dragon first edition or Angels and Demons Illustrated Edition... it's there.

saturday
*pouring rain, actual flooding
*Saturday market. It is a weekly outdoor craft show which might be great except for the cold wet rain.
*back to Kell's for a warm-up drink.
*a beautiful vintage store with Chanel suits and a Karl Lagerfield jacket and much much more. I almost died until I looked at the prices and we left :(
*powell's books again. I just can't get enough.
*Bridgeport Brew pub. Seriously what other kinds of sight seeing are you supposed to do in the pouring rain?
*more vintage stores but in our price range. new patent leather lace up shoes!
*chili for dinner at Dad's house. Nice dry warm evening with family.

sunday
*Elizabeth was supposed to leave, but got really sick in the night so we got one more day with her!
*basically football all day. hmph.
*downtown Vancouver, WA. Thrift stores, antiquing, and more vintage stores.
*Blind Onion Pizza. delicious.

monday
*Tony and Elizabeth left today to go back to work.
*Pittock Mansion. A beautiful house built in the early 1900's. So much history and a fantastic view of the rivers, the mountains, and downtown.
*Powell's one last time :(
*McMenamins on the river for dinner.

tuesday
*home.

Wow. The last couple weeks have been crazy, and now there is just work. Darn. I dont think the next couple weeks will be exciting at all, even though Thanksgiving is right around the corner!!

Here's to the next posts and lets hope they are shorter!

new books (continuation)...

Just to let you know, after writing the last post about the book, The Hunger Games, I finished the book because I couldn't put it down and immediatly bought Catching Fire. I found out there will be one more book to round out the trilogy. Love it!!

new books...

On the airplane, I get really bored. I am constantly scouring the plane for good magazines (Time, Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair), bad magazines (people, in touch, us weekly), and any kind of books.

I read a great article in Time magazine recently about a new young adult book series, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins...

I used to tell my daughter stories about a family of mer-cats--kitties with fish tails--who lived in the East River and how they were persecuted by a mean purple octopus. I spent considerable time and effort coming up with nonviolent ways for the mer-cats to defeat the octopus at the end of each story. Finally one night I asked my daughter Lily, who was 4 at the time, how she thought the mer-cats should handle the problem. She chirpily replied that the mer-cats should find a sharp rock and then stab the octopus till it died. Ha, ha, ha! Kids.

If the time ever comes, Lily might do pretty well in the Hunger Games. As described by Suzanne Collins in her young-adult novel of the same name, the Hunger Games are an annual spectacle in which a group of children are forced by the government to fight one another to the death on TV. A sequel, Catching Fire (Scholastic; 400 pages), will be out on Sept. 1. The Hunger Games is a chilling, bloody and thoroughly horrifying book, a killer cocktail of Logan's Run, Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, reality TV and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But it inspires in readers a kind of zeal I haven't seen since the early days of Twilight. Stephen King is a major fan. So is Stephenie Meyer.

The Hunger Games is set in an unspecified future time when things have gone pretty spectacularly badly for humanity. The world, or the bit of it we can see, is dominated by a ruling caste who live in luxury in a city called the Capitol. The rest of us live like peasants in 12 districts that are strictly cordoned off from the Capitol and one another. Life in the districts sucks: it's mostly hard labor--mining coal and farming and working in factories--in dismal conditions.

To make things even dismaler, once a year each district is required to give up two of its children, chosen by lottery, and enter them in the Hunger Games. The kids are dropped into an enormous arena strewn with traps and hazards, with a heap of weapons and supplies in the middle. The last child alive wins a lifetime of luxury and celebrity. The action is filmed and broadcast to the entire world.

We experience this ordeal through the eyes of Katniss, a resident of District 12, a harsh, cold region mostly given over to coal-mining. She is a passionate 16-year-old who hates the Capitol and is devoted to her family; she volunteers for the Games to take the place of her sister, whose name came up in the lottery. Katniss is a skilled hunter and sheer death with a bow and arrow. She doesn't like to kill. But she doesn't want to die either.

Whereas Katniss kills with finesse, Collins writes with raw power. After a life spent in freezing poverty, Katniss experiences pleasure--warmth, food, pretty clothes--with almost unbearable intensity, and that's where Collins' writing comes alive. (Not sex, though. The Hunger Games isn't just chaste, like Twilight; it's oddly non-erotic.)

Likewise, Collins brings a cold, furious clarity to her accounts of physical violence. You might not think it would be possible, or desirable, for a young-adult writer to describe, slowly and in full focus, a teenage girl getting stung to death by a swarm of mutant hornets. It wasn't, until Collins did it. But rather than being repellent, the violence is strangely hypnotic. It's fairy-tale violence, Brothers Grimm violence--not a cheap thrill but a symbol of something deeper. (One of the paradoxes of the book is that it condemns the action in the arena while also inviting us to enjoy it, sting by sting. Despite ourselves, we do.)

Katniss survives the first novel, and the second finds her back in the arena, where she will try, in her words, to "show them that I'm more than just a piece in their Games."
The Hunger Games and Catching Fire expose children to exactly the kind of violence we usually shield them from. But that just goes to show how much adults forget about what it's like to be a child. Kids are physical creatures, and they're not stupid. They know all about violence and power and raw emotions. What's really scary is when adults pretend that such things don't exist.

- Time Magazine

I was so excited to find out about a great new series, as they are my favorites (Harry Potter, the Hannibal Lector series, Chronicles of Narnia, Twilight, the Dexter series). I immediately put it on hold at the library and apparently everyone else had the same idea. I was number 120 on the hold list and there were only 40 copies of the book. I was sure it would take forever, but it only took a couple weeks. I just got it a couple days ago and am already halfway through. I am loving it. I love Katniss and Prim and Gale. The entire world of Panem is very creative and someplace I hope never to live in. I cannot wait to see what will happen to Katniss, so I better get to reading! Oh, and I really can't wait to read Catching Fire!


I am also in the middle of another book, which I found on the plane. It is so completely opposite from The Hunger Games. It is about Queen Elizabeth I. It's called I, Elizabeth by Rosalind Miles, a novel told from Elizabeth's perspective. I read The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory, last year and just love all the drama surrounding Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, and Mary Boleyn. I, Elizabeth is basically a continuation of this story, but by a different author. It is a really great story of a girl born a princess, considered the daughter of a whore, and sent off to live outside the castle. She was hated by the public because of her mother, but when she could actually speak her own mind, then the public finally loved her. It's a great book. I enjoy reading books based on real life events and history and especially in different time periods. The language is so romantic even though the events of their lives are very hard.



I recommend both of these books. Happy Reading!!!

HAPPY FIRST ANNIVERSARY!

In honor of Tony and I celebrating our one year anniversary of marriage, I thought I would put together a photo montage of our 7 years as a couple!

We met in August 2002 in our photography class at the Community College of Denver. He said "I like your shoes" (pink suede pumas) and I told him "I like your watch" (a beautiful silver watch with 2 faces). We were obviously made for each other right from the very start.

We began dating officially on September 9 and have been inseparable ever since. We have been through wonderful times and very difficult times in the last 7 years, but it has only made us stronger. We have lived in 5 different locations, added 3 pets to our family (RIP Hampy), gotten tattoos and piercings together. We have lost loved ones and celebrated new additions. We bought our first house and a car last year. We have survived car break-ins and a burglary. We both have had every haircut and color possible between us. We love art, crappy comedies, good food, drinking, spending time together and with our animals. We both hate driving and our jobs. He puts up with my crazies and I put up with his fancy-pants cravings. We both love the Broncos, Rockies, and the Avs but especially attending games. We enjoy rain, fall, Halloween,

We have traveled to many places (but plan on tons more); Alaska, Seattle, Oklahoma, New York, South Dakota, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone and Grand Tetons, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming... and someday we will actually take a real live honeymoon.
































Obviously these are in reverse order. They begin with our first road trip together. Tony drove me to Oklahoma the day before Thanksgiving to surprise my mom. She was so excited and impressed that all her friends heard about my wonderful new boyfriend! And little did she know he would be her future son-in-law.

We have been through so much together and we have wonderful memories and tons and TONS of photos to prove it all!

I am so very very lucky to have my husband and my best friend all rolled into one. He is such a kind compassionate and caring person. I love you Tony and can't wait for many many many more years to come!!

Bacon Corn Chowder with Crab...

Oh you know you want it!!! I have been craving this recipe all year and now that fall is finally upon us... its soup time. I love making soup. Maybe because they are easy and delicious, but they are good for what ails you!

This one is particularly good. The corn and milk make is sweet. Bacon and crab make it salty and hearty. All the veggies make it very well rounded. I think I will have to finish off the soup with some beer bread or even Irish soda bread for dipping. YUMMY!!!


BACON CORN CHOWDER w/ CRAB from Rachel Ray
serves 5-6

Ingredients:
-8 ears of corn, kernels removed (reserve 4 of the cobs)
-1/2 cup celery leaves, chopped
-2 cups water
-1 cup chicken stock
-1 tablespoon EVOO - Extra Virgin Olive Oil
-1/2 pound (about 8 slices) bacon, coarsely chopped
-3 medium Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
-1 medium onion, chopped
-2 cloves garlic, grated
-3 stalks celery, chopped
-1 small red bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped (about 1/4 cup)
-2 small bay leaves
-4 sprigs fresh thyme
-1 quart milk
-1 teaspoon (or more) hot sauce, divided
-1 cup crab meat, picked clean (optional)
-2 tablespoons Old Bay seasoning (optional)
-3 scallions, sliced on the bias

Preparation:
Place a large pot over medium-high heat with the four reserved corn cobs, celery leaves, water and chicken stock. Bring liquid up to a bubble and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer and reduce broth until about 1 1/2 cups remain, about 10 minutes. Keep warm until use.

While broth is simmering, place a heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat with 1 turn of the pan of EVOO, about 1 tablespoon. Cook the bacon until crisp and brown, 4-5 minutes. Remove bacon from pot with a slotted spoon and drain on a paper towel-lined plate.

Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the drippings from the pot and add the potato, onion, garlic, celery, red pepper, bay leaves, thyme sprigs and corn kernels to the pot. Sauté over medium-high heat until vegetables begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add milk, hot sauce and corn broth and bring to a bubble. Reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer chowder until potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.

If using crab, place into a small bowl and toss with Old Bay seasoning. Serve chowder garnished with crab, a pinch of scallions and some of the crispy bacon.


Give this recipe a try this weekend!! Bon appetit!!

road trip, wedding, birthday, national parks and family time...

All in one week!!

Starting Wednesday, September 23rd at 5:00am we are heading to the great north. To Eau Claire, Wisconsin for the Strozinsky-LaFollette Wedding. Our great friends, Phillip and Alicia are getting married and my husband is a groomsman. Matt and Carly are flying out to WI while we are driving and they are road trippin back with us.

This morning we were planning on running errands when the car wouldn't start. Yes. The very car we are taking TOMORROW for a 15 hour road trip! JEEZ! But, thank goodness for AAA and their roadside assistance for jumping our car and getting us back up and running (literally) for the big day!!!!

Today, I stocked up on great road trip snacks: trail mix, beef jerky, fruit, water, and other sundries. We already got The Lost Symbol (the new Dan Brown book), Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Utopia, and The Great Gatsby all as books-on-CD. We are gonna be getting our read on, or listen to, while we drive.


9.23.9
We are starting in Denver (obviously)
EAST through ALL of Nebraska
NORTH through Iowa
to Bay City, WI (really Red Wing, WI) to visit Matt's (Carly's husband) parents.

9.24.9 - 9.27.9
NORTHEAST to Eau Claire, WI for the wedding and all that entails. Dinners, wedding celebrations, breakfasts and Phil's b-day!

9.27.9 - 9.28.9
WEST to Minneapolis, MN for some IKEA time!!!
Then WEST to Brookings, SD to see my mom for the night. Pork tenderloins, Geoffrey, and homemade sugar donuts!!!

9.28.9
WEST to Rapid City, SD to visit the Black Hills, the Badlands, and Mt. Rushmore. I have been to all 3 places but Tony, Carly and Matt have not!

9.29.9
WEST to Wyoming
SOUTH to DENVER!!!

WOW! Its gonna be a really long week with too much car time, but it will be so great! I must say that I truly love road trips. ANYTHING to get me off a plane every once in a while!!

More than anything I am soooo excited to spend the entire week with my husband. Sadly it has been a while since we have had a week together and it will be fabulous.

Here's to wedded bliss, great friends, family, and a safe car ride. CHEERS!!!

what i want...

I am in a very strange place in life. I have this wonderful husband, house, dog, cat, car and yet I am never home to enjoy any of it! I am terribly unhappy with my job and currently looking for something to do instead.

Also, I have finally decided what I actually want to do with my life and I am having a hard time figuring out how to start. I have applied to Emily Griffith Opportunity School to study Fashion Design and Sewing with plans to start come spring. This all depends, of course, where I am working. I have to work full time and would like to school full time, but somehow I think this is impossible.

I really do have plans for my life, even if I am rediculously boring right now and I haven't done much in the last few years to show for it.



These are my goals for the future, near and far. I plan on working hard to get them all done...
*I want a new job. I need to be home everynight bc right now its killing me. I could absolutely cook several dinners a week then get to wake up next to my husband every morning. It has been almost 4 years since I have done either!
*Go to school, soak up every bit of information, do well, and graduate before I am an old lady
*Start my own label. I am not asking for fame and riches, but just to be able to make and sell clothing that I love while making a living at it.
*The true dream would be to open my own store or at least have my clothes in boutiques around Denver.
*Continue reading great books and watching wonderful movies. I love to be entertained.
*Add-on to our house. We have such a small house that we need to add a dining room, master bedroom and bath, and double the size of the garage.
*Begin a real live career by working for myself. I want to be busy and stressed and happy with my job!
*Help Tony with his school and let him help me with mine. We both dropped out together and now we want another go.
*Visit my grandparents, parents, and sister more. I want to have more family memories every year.
*Save money!!! Life always happens as we learned the hard way this year, and I want a nice cushion to fall back on
*Save money for a huge European trip!!!
*Be a better friend, daughter, cousin, sister, granddaughter, wife by doing more little things to show people I care. I currently blame my job for not being able to keep up with b-days and special events since I can't keep track of the date. I always know the day of the week though!
*Start working out on a regular basis, no matter what it is. I feel so blah lately.


I know I can accomplish all of these if I work hard and stay at them.