We Made It!!!

Well after a long day of travelling and time zone changes and loooooooong customs lines, we finally made it to our hotel here in Vancouver at about 4:30 pm (our time 6:30 your time). The flights themselves were not too bad and were all on time just all the other stuff in between took a while. We went to bed last night about midnight ish and got up about 5:oo am. I took this picture of our pretty irises that bloomed last night. It looks like they are most going to bloom while we are gone and start wilting when we get back :(

Brennon got us to the airport at about 6:45 am which was as it turned out SUPER DUPER early but at least we had plenty of time and didnt have to rush like some people did. That left me with plenty of time to work on my newest knitting project!!

The first flight was pretty choppy for Matt (who was in the back of the plane). He almost got super sick but made it to Denver and immediately took some dramamine and pepto. Then he did well the rest of the trip. We rolled into Vancouver at about 1:30 our time but waited in a ridiculously long customs line. It took about an hour and a half to get through!! Finally we did, hopped on the skytrain to our hotel area, checked in, unpacked and headed to the tourest information center right here where we are standing in these pics. As you can see in the picture of Matt, we have a lot of planning to do tonight!

We then went to a local grill/pub, stuffed our faces and are now relaxing at our cute little hotel. I hope you all have a great week, I know we will :)

*If I have time, I might make another blog update but I am not making any promises...you know how bad I can be at time!

Decadent Valentines Events

This year, Matt and I really lived it up around Valentines Day with all of our outings. The week before Valentines Day we went to Chocolate Decadence, an annual fund-raising event for historic Automobile Alley. This was our second year to go and I enjoyed it even more than last year! If you dont know how it works, here is a brief overview: There are 20-30 restaurants across the city that have a table with their chocolate goodies and everyone gets to eat as much of it as they want and vote on the best table at the end of the night. There are silent auctions and live auctions going on too but we never get into that :)

Since I am not quite the chocolate lover that Matt is, I tried harder to pace myself this year. We found The Mantle's booth which was serving lamb chops with a chocolate balsamic glaze (super delicious by the way) and La Luna's booth that served chicken mole as their "chocolate" dishes so I basically went back and forth between those booths and tried chocolate desserts of all kinds in between. I definately ate more than last year and felt like I needed to be rolled out to the car afterward.

I brought my camera but its always hard to take good pictures this way...we have never really mastered it. This old photographer man was making fun of me and took a real picture of us, we will see if it ends up in one of those OKC magazines.

At the beginning, there is usually a jazz trio and they were really good, then my least favorite part of the evening is when Jack and Ron make their appearance as the MC's. It would be so much better if they werent there but I guess a lot of people like them. I dont get it.

And lastly, they added a free photo booth to take silly pics, so we did. I dont think I have ever taken pictures in one of those things, they are really small. This is poor quality in more than one way :) but I had to take a picture of the picture since our scanner isnt cooperating!! But anyway, it was such a fun night and I am glad we went again. All you chocolate fans should look it up next year. It is usually the week before Valentines Day.


And on to our other Valentines celebration...

Matt and I celebrated the day before due to lots of stuff going on that week. I went to a knitting class all day and came back to some lovely roses and a sweet poem (classic Matthew style)!!

I always love his silly poems and cards that he makes. They always put me in a good mood and remind me of when we first started dating!!

And for dinner, we got to finally go to The Melting Pot and use our gift card. Luckily we made reservations weeks in advance because the time slots were slim pickings already. We got lobster tails, steak, chicken, ravioli, veggies and that was just the main course. There were 3 other courses including desert. We got the spinich artichoke dip for the app and the smores fondue for dessert. Delicious and incredibly filling. Again, I had to be rolled out of there.

After eating here, I realized that we could make stuff like this with our own fondue pot. I have never really thought about making the different fondues they make, we have only ever made plain chocolate fondue and not very often at that. So we definately have plans to use it in the near future.
And like a dummie, I brought my camera but it was missing the ever vital memory card so we couldnt take any pics. Fortunately, we had a super nice/sneaker server and she snuck the restaurant camera, took a picture of us and told her boss it was my bday so they would print it and put it in this frame. So here is my picture of the picture again.

I am so blessed to have my wonderful husband by my side forever and am reminded of how much he loves me even more this time of year when we get to do fun things like this. I love you Matty and happy Valentines Day!

Winter Wonderland Part 1

Let's back up to Christmas Eve...where the updating begins. We had been planning to leave about 1:00 pm to go to Tulsa for a long weekend, but as we all know, everyone's plans changed rapidly. Luckily Matt didnt have to go to work so he took me to work which wasnt that bad yet but was awful on the way back home. It took him 45 minutes to get to my work (4 miles) and 30 minutes back!! Since we weren't going to travel, we immediately began our snow adventures!! We thought it would be fun to go walking in the blizzard to the church with Lucy. Well it wasn't really that fun in the blizzarding sideways snow but at least we got to play some at the church.

Lucy loves pictures, cant you tell? If ever we get a good one of her, its because we tricked her or got lucky.

This is in front of the church on our way back home. It was a long walk to and from with the snow hitting our faces.

Christmas Eve night we pretty much just hung out and caught up on house stuff that I hadn't taken care of since I had some time. Also, we did Christmas with each other on Wednesday night since we thought we were going to be gone. Also, we watched my all time favorite Christmas movie and Matt's not-so-favorite movie, "White Christmas." He came up with a crazy rule this year that he is limited to one viewing per Christmas movie a year!! Sometimes Matt can be a bah-humbug about Christmas stuff :)

And also, we did a Christmas craft with our animals/kids. Last year, Deanna got me an ornament that you make in my stocking and I made it this year. See below:

After I molded the plaster stuff in the circle shape, Matt helped Lucy make her paw print.

Then I helped Jackie make his paw print. Then you just let it dry for a couple of days. I forgot to take a final picture but you get the idea. I might even decorate it more, I dont know. Anyway, I am sure they all loved it and will treasure the experience forever.

And the final fun activity of the night, we let Lucy play with her laser friend, Dottie, outside in the snow. Here is a video of all the fun:

Last weekend

This year, I have been a little bah-humbug about my Christmas decorating this year. We have been beyond busy and tired this last 6 months or so and it was already well into December before we had time to do any kind of decorating. But you know that I cant just do nothing at all.

Matt and I usually use our fake tree but since we didnt want to get a whole bunch or stuff down, we thought it would be fun to get a real tree this year. Last weekend we did just that. We went to Horn Seed Co. and got a pretty Noble Fir tree and a beautiful Christmas cactus. We only got down the bubble lights, the ornaments, the stockings, the tree skirt and had a decoration that Monica gave me at Thanksgiving. Which might sound like a regular amount of Christmas decor to most people but as my sister puts it, our house looks like "Christmas threw up in it" usually so this is pretty toned down! But I am glad we did some and I like our tree alot and it kind of feels like Christmas is actually here now even though it has been rather warm this year.

Our pretty Christmas tree

My Christmas cactus. It will have magenta flowers on it in a few weeks. Some are even close to blooming now.

And on Sunday Matt had a very impromptu performance at Penn Square Mall. Our band director from OC came to Mayfair on Sunday morning and asked Matt if he wanted to play in a trombone choir with him and the UCO trombone choir. So he did and I went to watch them. They did a great job! It have never heard so many trombones play together at once but it is really pretty. They even invited Matt to join them on Friday afternoons if he ever gets a chance to go!!

They played about 30 classic Christmas tunes including: "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" and "Feliz Navidad" as well :) I thought I got several videos to choose from to post but apparently I deleted them because I can only find one. This is "Carol of the Bells." It wasnt the best one they played together but it is the only one I had on the camera still...enjoy!

* A disclaimer of the video after I watched it just now is that Blogger.com sucks and it always screws up my video editing but it wont upload the spliced version so this is kind of in the middle of the song but oh well. I am tired of messing with their video upload system. It makes me mad everytime I try to put a video on here. You would think that with so many people that use this website that they would make it more user friendly...one can only hope I guess :)

Dr. Matt in the making

It's a rare occasion these days when I get to go to work with Matt and check out the awesomeness of his lab. But a couple of weeks ago we went up there on Saturday afternoon so I took some pictures to share. I dont know how he gets things done but I guess he does because he is almost finished. Everytime I go there, I just want to clean up his mess but I never do!

Every good doctoral candidate needs a good workspace...clean and organized to get proper brain juices flowing! You cant tell it by this picture but the shelf looks like it is about to fall on your head when you sit at the desk because it is overloaded with heavy books and what not. (Not pictured: dirty dishes and shoes and other random junk all around).

And of course, plenty of hazardous chemicals that not only can kill you, but kill trees and fish according to the above label!

I sat on the sidelines and knitted while waiting for Matt to finish up his work.

Matt made some crazy chemical a few days before and let it dry in the bottle. This is what it looked like after he took a close up picture of it through the glass bottle. It looks like Mars or something to me. And if you are really interested, Matt drew the chemical diagram at the bottom of what this is that he made. I'm sure all of you will open up a new tab and look it up straight away wont you!!

In all seriousness, I am super proud of my husband and cant believe he is almost Dr. Matt. How weird is that! He will be finished officially in May but maybe earlier than that. Please keep us in your prayers as we are actively searching out jobs for him and if you hear of a chemist opening, please let him know.

Matt's long lost buddy has returned.

His yellow hat! I am not really sure how long it has been missing but I think over a year now and I have been receiving the blame for it too. This was Matt's trademark clothing at OC. He wore this thing everyday even in the summer just to bug people. When I first met Katie and told her that Matt was my husband, she said, "I didnt know his name in college, just that he wore a yellow hat every day."

He thought I threw his beloved yellow hat away along with his super nasty duct tape sandals. BUT GUESS WHAT? I didnt dispose of either item (no matter how much I would have liked to (and almost did) throw away his sick sandals)!! While looking for some other stuff in the garage, he found his sandals and apparently his yellow buddy has been lost in the black hole of his trunk. But alas, all is right in the world now....yellow hat is back!

randomness of sorts

Since i am still behind on all the updating, here is a compilation of our lives the last couple of weeks that would make for very short blog posts individually:

On our way home from Waltonia, we stopped at a great outlet mall in Roundrock, TX. We spent a couple of hours there and didnt even see half the mall. Matt really hit the goldmine at the Adidas store though. He bought a plethora of normally very expensive Houston Rockets and other brightly orange colored gear at a steal of a price.

As you know, orange is Matt's second favorite color...only to yellow:

The best part of the whole outfit is that Matt got this awesome jacket that says Space City (one of Houston's nicknames) on the front, with a Rockets logo on the back and besides that it is yellow, the inside lining is "the space". Its pretty cheesy but awesome too!

Then, 2 weeks ago, I surprise Matt with a secret date when he got back from DC to go see Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago. We had talked about going before I got laid off then decided not to spend extra money until I got another job. And to my surprise, they still had tickets a few days before. It was a funktastic concert, as Matt called it but also interesting because it was at the Zoo Ampitheatre which we have never been to before. It is like the fair, it brings out a lot of crazies wearing lots of crazy clothes with lots of crazy haircuts!!

Unfortunately, we couldnt take our camera in so these are the only 2 pics we got. I made Matt wear a blindfold and everything but I think he kind of knew.

And then, last weekend was our 7th Annual Fantasy Football draft into the Leaugue of Ultimate Destruction! Shay got the good end of the deal but our team is not too shabby. It was a good time had by all and I finally got to try and make this guacomole football field. I thought I was going to have all this room to make every yard line, hash marks, logos, etc. But as it turns out, there wasnt even enough room to use the correct amout of football players (tomatoes) on the field. But it turned out pretty well anyway...and yes the white piping is sour cream. It kind of grossed me out to pipe sour cream instead of icing!

The destruction has already begun!!


And then this last weekend, Matt's parents came down to visit us and we had a grand ol' time just hanging out and relaxing. We didnt do a whole lot but play with the animals, go for walks, cook, and eat at Sophabella's.

Lucy being really weird. She never lays like this long than about 15 seconds.

And Oreo and Lucy never get this close but never say never I guess.

And by Matt's special request, I made him a chocolate cheesecake. It was supposed to be the Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory but it wasnt quite that. It was more like a Ghiradelli Chocolate Stumpy cheesecake that was really confusing and slightly difficult to make. But he liked it a lot so that is all that matters. And in the end, it looked pretty!

Finally, here is a shot of Matt, Derek, and I dressed up as bible characters from the book of Genesis as a celebration to the last day of our 1.5 year long study in Genesis. Can you guess who we are:

Funny Lucy video

The other day I decided to do a little vacuuming because it was just too dirty to go on. Normally, Lucy doesnt care one bit about the vacuum but today she did not want it to clean the ottomans as seen in the video. And Charlie was helping Lucy combat the traitor as well with her fierce bark.

And here is a pic of Lucy cuddling with Matt. Too cute to pass up a picture opportunity!

This week three years ago....

Matt and I were in beautiful Belize on our honeymoon.

We just celebrated our 3 year anniversary on July 15th! "I cant Belize" we have been married that long already! (thats what it said on our car that night when we drove off)

(Three really pretty roses for three years!)

(Matt wanted to hold the beans up for some weird reason that I forgot)

We have had such a great marriage so far and feel that God has blessed us in so many ways. Matt is almost finished with his school, I just got a great job quickly after being laid off a couple of weeks ago, we have a great family and church family, and the list goes on. Matt definately has joined the super elite "best husband ever club." Anyway, since I didnt have a blog back in the day when we got married, here are some pics from that wondrous occasion:The proposal

These were the shirts that Matt made for us to wear rehearsal night. Hence the meaning of the blog name in case you ever wondered where that came from.


The bridesmaids bouquets. I made all of them, including mine and the boutonnieres. I love flower arranging!!
Matt's first look at me in my dress. We had a private "first look" so we could see each other before the ceremony and take pictures of everyone as much as possible too.They had to wait outside the auditorium and look in at first. Then they came inside to take pics.The wedding crew, minus me and Matt I guess :)I think this was taken during a prayer by Matt's dad in the ceremony.Matt's THREE grooms cakes! They were pretty awesome!

Rob and the chocolate fountain get in a duel.

Cutting the cake.

Brennon made us official...I was so glad he did the ceremony but sad because this is like 1 of about 3 pics we have of him from that night :(

Leaving for an awesome honeymoon.


It was the best day EVER!! I love you Matt!!