Tuesday, October 13, 2009

When friends come to town..

You grind bean in rocks....


and play with butterflies...





and make pies....
and sew up cute things...
see told you cute!
And then you eat at In and Out cause your friend has never been there...

Yep that pretty much sums it up! OK, well except the part where we also HAD to have Mafa Chicken (aka cold chicken... um most of you probably have no clue so moving on).... and we HAD to eat at Rosas (sensing a food theme here?) ... Oh and HAD to go to a girly move - Julie and Julia (again with the food theme, what the heck? Is that all we do!... Come to think of it, even the picture Adam made us take at the Botanical gardens was of us grinding beans.... good grief!) At least we managed to get a run in Saturday morning. Thanks for a fun "food filled" weekend Mary!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Oregon Coast

Last week Adam and I spent the week on the Oregon Coast with my parents. It was a WONDERFUL getaway, and much needed! It was very relaxing and we had a great time. Here are some highlights:

We flew into Eugene and stayed the night there and had my parents pick us up on the way in the morning. Our room was of course very nice. Adam still has Diamond, or Platinum or whatever status with Hilton, so we almost always get upgraded. That night was no exception. They put us in a Suite on one of the floors that you have to use your key to get access to. I had no idea that these "special" floors have complimentary snacks at night and breakfast in the morning! Here's the view from the Hotel where you can see University of Oregon Stadium in the background. Adam had never been to Eugene, so in the morning we took a walk to the campus while we waited for my parents.

One of our activities was going to the Aquarium in Eugene. It was raining that morning so I didn't even try to get any pictures outside and most of the inside is too dark for pictures. However, Adam did find his way into the divers helmet! Scary!


We rented a beach house that was less than a quarter mile from the beach. We had a view from our house to the beach (I don't know why I never took a picture! Maybe it was because the view was partially blocked by the Casino! HAHA!). If you ever want to take a trip to the Oregon Coast, I highly recommend the beach houses. The price was great and we actually could have had several more people staying there. Ours was two stories, three bedrooms, hot tub, full kitchen and it also had a foosball table and air hockey in the garage. One of the great things was right out our back doors there were tons of blackberry bushes so one morning we picked a bunch and had blackberry pancakes with blackberry syrup. YUM!!!!


One of my favorite things (besides the beach of course) to do on the Oregon Coast is to go to the Tillamoock Cheese Factory! LOVE IT! You get samples of all sorts of cheeses, I think we had cheese curds, mozzarella, pepperjack, some jalapeno spread, horseradish something or other and my favorite, extra sharp white Cheddar. YUMM! And you can't go to the cheese factory without getting ice cream! Each of us got a sampler so we tried lots of flavors, I think my favorite of all time is Chocolate Peanut Butter, its soooo tasty! Here Adam and I play the farmer and the Cow.. I had to be the Cow since he is tall...




I love how the Oregon Coast is so different from the typical beaches people think of. Its so neat to be able to be on the beach on minute and in the forest the next. Our beach house attracted several woodland creatures. We came home from a walk on the beach one night and found these guys waiting for us:


But perhaps the most fun were these guys we found on our back porch one night. My mom kept saying how she wanted to see a raccoon, and sure enough they showed up!

It started with just one that my dad fed a bag of popcorn, he even tried to open the door and come in! He momentarily left but brought back 4 of his friends! We fed them our leftovers since we were leaving the next day... I am pretty sure we probably shouldn't have done that!
Hopefully the next guests at the house will enjoy them too.

On our way back from Tillamoock, Adam saw a sign for some waterfalls, so we followed the sign down a road, not knowing how far we would have to go or what we would see when we got there. Turns out it was worth it! We found these pretty falls, they weren't particularly large, but they were pretty and it was nice to get in a little hike.

My mom and I in the woods by the falls, turns out its the only good picture I have of my mom from the whole trip! And sadly all the ones of my dad are super blurry.

Do you think Adam would actually follow the directions of this sign?


NOPE

And of course we spend plenty of time doing this:


Enjoying the beach. This was the first night we arrived. It had rained on our drive up but stopped when we got there. I was so excited to have blue skies and nice weather. If you have ever been to the Oregon Coast, you know your lucky to get clear skies! But it didn't stop that night. The ENTIRE next day was clear. No clouds at all and highs in the 70's! There wasn't even any wind! I was able to go for a run on the beach in the morning which was awesome and we even had fun playing in the water.


This is a picture of my parents and Adam seeing if they could make it out to a rock before the tide came in... I think they eventually got there!
See that NO CLOUDS!!!! AMAZING!!!!



Thanks for a great trip Mom and Papa! We had a wonderful time!

Cardinals Game

Somewhere in all the fun over the last month, Adam and I went to a Cardinals Pre-season game. We have a friend that works for the Cardinals who gave us some free tickets. They were pretty sweet tickets, upper deck but front row and on 50 yard line. The game itself was kinda lame in that the Cardinals were playing awful, but its always fun to go to a pro game, especially for free












Wednesday, September 23, 2009

One of the scariest things I have every done!

And it involved food! No I didn't eat something crazy, I agreed to make my sister in law Rachel's wedding cake! Talk about scary! I was pretty confident I could do it, but at the same time you never know what to expect. It was a crazy few hours making it, and I definitely had some freaking out moments, but once I got everything figured out it was all good! I don't have any professional photos, but hope that Rachel will share some with me. But for now here it is!


This cake used pretty much all the skills I had learned in my cake classes so far, and then some I had to pick up from the internet. It was actually a lot of fun (once I got the fondant on, dang it my teacher was right about using cake dummies!).


I think my favorite part was the Anenome on top. I made that a few weeks in advance and was so excited I got it to turn out.

I am thankful Rachel let me make my first wedding cake for her, I can't imagine if I would have done this for a non family member.... YIKES!


Happy Birthday!

We also celebrated Adam's Mom's birthday in the last month. We had dinner at our house, we had a fun baked potato bar with lots of crazy toppings (including bacon, chorizo, peppers and onions in addition to all the normal stuff). And for dessert I made this super rich cake:

We had a big group (13 if you count Sadie and Brycen), our table is almost not big enough, and we don't even have kids yet!

The cake was chocolate with peanut butter cream cheese filling and chocolate ganache on the outside. Then it was covered in Peanut Butter M&Ms. Very tasty, but very rich!




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