Finally

Finally the date has been set, Al and I are going to be sealed for time and all eternity. We are getting sealed March 26. I'm so excited, but a little overwhelmed at the same time. I really wish my mom and dad were able to help me and answer questions. So you have to forgive me if I ask you dumb questions because I'm not really sure what I am doing.

Living Social

Do you ever use groupon or those coupon websites? I've bought a few things, but today's deal is great. For $10 you can get a $20 Amazon gift card. If you get three people to buy one under you your deal is free. Awesome. So here is my link if you would like to use it and then you can send out your new link to your friends. http://livingsocial.com/deals/21336?ref=personalized-link-box-3976211&rpi=3976211

I Made This

last night and I don't even like chocolate. It was too delicious not to share....

Microwaved Hot Fudge Pudding Cake

(serves 2)

Combine:

1/4 c. flour

1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 tbsp. cocoa powder

1/4 tsp. baking powder

small pinch salt

1/4 tsp. vanilla

1 tbsp. melted butter

2 tbsp. milk

optional: chopped pecans or walnut in desired amount

Mix together above ingredients and split evenly between 2 large ramekins or wide coffee mugs.

In another bowl mix together

1/4 c. sugar

1 tbsp. cocoa powder

Sprinkle half of the mixture over each ramekin.

Pour 1/4 c. boiling water over each ramekin.

Place one ramekin on a small plate (in case it overflows) and microwave for 1 min - 1:30 min.

Serve with icecream.

It was so yummy and could be made during a commercial break.

source: www.remodelaholic.com

Ooops.

I messed with my neglected blog thinking that if it looked nice them maybe I would update it every once in awhile, but all I did is manage to make it look worse. I don't have the patience to fix it. Oh well.

I've Never....

I have never entered to win giveaway I've read about, but I really want to win the binder from mylitterofsix.com I've recently started couponing and I am SO disorganized. I think the organization part is holding me back a little from couponing more. I've tried a few "systems," without success so I really want to win this binder and get organized!

Garden 2010

Well, it's that time again for our annual garden. I love getting my garden ready, I love even more watching my plants grow, and then eventually producing vegetables. I have a slight problem when it comes to eating them though. I love veggies, but when they come from my garden I feel really bad eating them. I don't know why. This year I have a goal to eat everything my garden produces. I only grow stuff I like, so this shouldn't be a problem.
This year Al made me a larger garden box and we decided to let it go into the ground. Our old garden box had a ground cover so things couldn't take root in the ground. I planted 2 tomato plants, one bell pepper plant, 2 onions left over from last year. I am also going to try growing things from seeds this year, so I planted corn, green beans, peas, and carrots.
Hunter has taken it upon himself to "water" the garden for me and Curly has decided to "help with the weeding." Now, I have to stand out by the garden whenever they are outside so they can learn to leave the garden alone since it is no longer growing just weeds. Wish me luck. I'll post pics later.

Date Night

One of our goals this year is to get out of debt or at least work on it. So we have decided to start living like there is a recession (just a little late). It is killing me. I used to be perfectly content to sit at home on the weekends and relax, but now I feel like I am being tortured in some fashion.
At work I have A LOT of free time to explore on web and I recently came across a really cute blog http://loveactually-blog.blogspot.com I've been using my spare time to find cute, creative ideas for cheap date nights. Most of them are too cutsie for Al, but I found a few that will work for us.
So this weekend was our first "at home" date. I got home from work, did a quick clean of the downstairs, started dinner, and moved our king-size mattress from our room out to the family room. After I moved the mattress I was exhausted, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Al came home on time for once, so I wasn't completely finished with dinner. I was hoping to have everything done by the time he got home, oh well. We ate a delicious dinner and then we watched romantic movies in the front room on our bed. I set up a little movie theater concession stand for our treats. Overall, it was a great evening and it cost less than $10. Hopefully, we can make this a monthly thing and my recession will be a little more bearable.

Want To Adopt A Puppy?

Well I guess the need to "mother" something has been getting to me lately, so I started volunteering with a local animal rescue. Animals have always been a passion for me and I love having them around. As I have gotten to know people in the rescue community I have learned the awful truth about people breeding thier animals and what happens to a lot of innocent aniamls, so I have decided to help out in a small way.

Pals for Pooches is a rescue agency in Houston. They usually get their animals that are on "death row" in the animal shelters. 90% of animals in shelters in Houston and the surrounding areas are put to sleep. Houston area has the highest rate of animal euthanasia in the country. Anyways, I am now fostering an adorable puppy named Curly. She is available for adoption, fully vetted, spayed, and microchipped. She is fully grown at 35lbs, the perfect size. She is a lab mix, but she is really short and they think she may have some hound in her. There were 4 pups in the litter and they all look like a different breed of dog. One of the rescuers found them after listeing to the owners complain about the price of $50 per dog to put them down, so they were going to take them to the shelter. The rescuer saw how sick they were and took them in (two had to have blood transfusions). Curly is a really calm puppy. She can be shy, but she is really friendly too. She loves other dogs, cats, and kids. She is potty trained and crate trained. She is also learning her basic commands. She is just a great puppy and we've enjoyed having her. I am not keeping her because I would like to keep fostering and helping other dogs and unfortuantely Al doesn't want to move to a farm and keep 100 animals (I'm not sure why). If you are interested in adopting her or know someone looking for a puppy let me know and I can give more information. Remember 1/2 of all shelter dogs are full breed dogs, so look to a shelter for your next animal and save a life.

Someday I'll get around to updating my blog with some of our events.

Weird Story

So I am an office assistant at a small commercial construction company. I really like my job and most of the people I work with. I do have some interesting encounters with people, but none like the one I had today.
We are getting a new security company and today they stopped by to finish up some paper work so they can install it on Monday. It was a husband wife team that came by. They seemed friendly and were up in the waiting area with me while they were waiting on my boss. I am pretty bad about entertaining people. I usually have them sit while I continue on with my work. Well today this did not happen....
I was filing some paperwork and the man comes up to me, inches from my body, (definitely an invasion of personal space) while I am standing (luckily) at the filing cabinet and he says to me, "I have a weird question.....then he proceeds to put his hand in front of his crotch wave it around like he is peeing and makes a "PPIIISSSSSSSSSSSS" sound. He is practically touching me and I am speechless. Am I really watching this? He says nothing else and I make some sort of sound and point down the hall. I felt so violated, it was the weirdest thing. He never asked for the restroom. My friend was standing up there watching this whole thing and asked me did he just do what it looked like. I nodded silently and she left me to go laugh outside. It has been a big joke all day here in the office. Seriously who does stuff like that?

NOLA

Well I finally made my first trip to New Orleans. It was a really, really quick trip. Our friend was meeting his mom there to pick up his dog. So he invited us to ride along with him. We left early Saturday morning and we had terrible rainy weather the way there. It took about 6 hours to finally reach the city. We got all checked into our hotel and made our way down to ACME Oysters. Everyone raved about the chargrilled oysters and poboys. I ate 3 oysters and that was plenty for me. They weren't as bad as I had envisioned, but they definitely won't become a staple in my diet. While we were at ACME our friends from Houston happened to be in town so they met us for lunch. After lunch we had plans to visit the aquarium (I can never pass up an aquarium, something about them I love), but it closed at 5:00pm and the last ticket was sold at 4:30pm so we would have never been able to make it. So instead we took a much needed nap at the hotel.
We decided we needed a nice dinner out so we made plans at Emeril's New Orleans. It was delicious. The cheesy grits were to die for and I don't even like grits. After dinner we hit up Harrah's so I could get my gambling fix. I was doing pretty well for awhile and instead of cashing out while I was ahead I ended up loosing all my money. I tracked Al down and he was up about $15 so he let me take over for him. I ended up loosing all his money too. Good thing we set limits or I would have gone crazy and lost a lot more than $40. We ventured down the street to Hard Rock to get Al a shirt and a hat. We saw some drunk guy get arrested, so that was interesting.
The next morning we headed to the world famous Cafe du Monde for beingets (french donuts). They were delicious. We wandered around the Mississippi River and back into town and met up with Ron and his cousins and took the street cars up and down St. Charles street. The old homes were absolutely gorgeous. I could have looked at them all day. After that we had to leave good 'ole NOLA. I definitely want to go back there seems like a lot more to do to see. Also, we managed to escape with out being mugged. We probably had 30 people tell us to take taxis everywhere and watch everyone around us. Overall it was a really fun trip. I'll post pics when I get home.

Happy Anniversary to Us

September 4, 2009 brought our 5th anniversary. I can't believe we've been married for 5 years. It seems the older we get the more time flies by. The night of our anniversary we went out to dinner at Carino's. It wasn't very exciting, but we brought our friends Marianne and Blake with us. We did a small dinner because we were leaving early, early the next morning for our cruise. I LOVE you tons and tons and millions, Allen. Here's to many more years together.

Hunter Turns 2

It's no SECRET we Love our dog, Hunter. So last year I decided that if I didn't have a baby or was preggo by the time Hunter turned 2 we would throw him a party. Well August came and I was having no luck in the baby department so Hunter got a birthday party. Every year we have an end of the summer bbq, so this year if tied in to Hunt's birthday (we don't really know when his birthday is since he's a rescue pup). Al preferred to call the event out Summer BBQ, he thought it was dumb to have a dog party. We sent out evites and invited our friends to bring all their dogs. I thought it would be fun to fill up our little pool and have dog toys all over. The toys were a great idea, but the pool was a really bad one. The dogs kept tracking water all over the floor. I finally decided all dogs had to stay outside and the pool had to be emptied. We got Hunter the cutest baseball birthday cake (he was named after Hunter Pence who plays baseball for the Astros). It was adorable. We also got carob dipped milk bones and a little goody box of treats and toys for all his puppy guests.

Trey was the only one who got into wearing the birthday hats. We had hotdogs and some other dog friendly food. I think Hunter enjoyed having all the dogs over to play. By the end of the night we was worn out. Overall it was a great day with friends.

Where to start?

I often do things and think oh I need to blog about this, then I never end up blogging and then I forget all the fun things we have done. So thinking back on the last couple of months I feel like I've had something every weekend to do, but now none of it seems to exciting or blog worthy. So this will be a short blog update.

Happy Birthday to Me

Well I turned the big 28 this past weekend. I don't really know how I feel about 28 yet. I thought I'd be further along with my life, but what can you do. For my birthday we met up with some friends and headed over to New Braunfels, TX (outside of San Antonio). We floated down the Comal River. This year it was so, so crowded. We had to wait almost 2 hours just to get a tube. It hasn't rained in over 30 days, I know that's not too long for you west coasters, but here it is a really big deal. The river was pretty low and I think we all got our bums scratched by the big rocks, but it was really fun. It was a really long, hot day. Then Al and I and our very best Houston friends went up to San Antonio to celebrate a little more. Al and I celebrated my birthday and Jeff and Cindy celebrated their first real break from their kids. We met up at Boudros (my most favorite restaurant in San Antonio) for dinner and it was absolutely delicious. Then we wandered the Riverwalk for a little while, but we were all exhausted from the day, so we headed back to our hotels and we crashed. Then Sunday, Al and I went to the Quarry, it's a really nice outside shopping area that we like to visit. We had some lunch, caught a movie, and headed back to Houston. It was a great weekend. I'll post pictures of the river later, but here we are at dinner.

Sandcastle Competition 2009

A few weeks ago we went to Galveston Island's Sandcastle competition. We weren't too sure if they were going to actually hold the competition this year because a lot of sand was washed away after the hurricane and the beaches were left pretty barren. But, they had one this year and we were really excited. We got a really late start, so we decided to go hang out at the beach and then we would head over to the other end of the island and check out the competition. We had a great time relaxing and swimming. We then went down to the competition and had to wait in line for nearly an hour to get in, eventhough the competition was already over. This year, "green" was the theme and they didn't get to use generators to pump the water. They were a lot smaller than usual, but still most of them were cool. They have a couple different catagories such as: traditional castle, world events, entertainment, etc. Here's some pictures of our favorites.

Our Favorite Sunday Activity

Is napping....

Not Meant to Be...

Well, don't get your hopes up just yet. That's what I did, then I had to be horribly disappointed. As most of you know Al and I have been trying to have a baby FOREVER. Not really, but 4 years feels like forever when practically every person you know is popping out a kid. We had worked with my OBGYN for a while and finally it got to the point where she wasn't able to treat us anymore, so off we went to a Fertility Specialist. Our doctor has been rated one of America's top 100 doctors a few times, so I knew we were in good hands. I find him to be a great doctor, easy to talk to (I always ask a lot of dumb questions), and very supportive. I've been seeing him off and on for the last 2 years. When we found out we were going to have to do the shots we took some time to save up (they cost A LOT of money). Well we recently started the shots. I didn't feel like telling anyone because I didn't want someone asking me every other week if I was pregnant. Well we did one round of shots and an IUI (insemination) and everything looked good, but no luck. So we did another month of shots and I developed so many follicles that they decided not to do an IUI because the risk of multiples was too great. So they told us to go home and try the "old fashioned" way. Al was upset because he felt like we wasted our money on the shots. Well 2 weeks later I took a test and it came back negative. Surprise, surprise. I decided not to go to my doctor for a blood test. I wanted to rest my arms. I was averaging 4 blood tests a week and I looked like a druggie. Plus my doctor is a good 30 miles away, so I decided to save on gas. Well a few weeks later I went back to my doctor to get a prescription to start shots again and he said since I hadn't started my period I had to get a blood test. Ugh. So I gave some of my blood and my nurse told me she'd call me in the morning.
Well we were having a work lunch-in and one of the guys answers the phone and proceeds to tell me and everyone else that my OBGYN was on the phone...Thanks. So she says, "well the test came back positive." I reply, "oh ok." It didn't sink in. I have gotten 48 months of negatives. So then she says, "You're pregnant." I immediately start crying and shaking. Everyone in my office knew right then. I couldn't wait to tell Al. I even went and bought an Astro's onesie, wrapped it up and gave it to him when I got home. I set up a profile on babyzone. I was ready to go. I only told 3 people (besides my work group), but I wanted to shout it from the rooftop. I'm pregnant. The infertile one is pregnant! Well a few days later I went back into the doctor, more blood work and the nurse called with the results. My HCG levels and rose, but not doubled like they were supposed to. I immediately got on the Internet (bad decision) and tried to find out all I could. Everything was leaning towards a miscarriage. I was devastated, but tried to remain hopeful. I went back a few days later for more blood work and my HCG levels plummeted. My doctor told me I was beginning to miscarry. I got the news at work and had to sit there all day while my heart was breaking. I lost the one thing I've always wanted. I had such a bad headache while I was at work from trying not to ball my eyes out. Some of the guys started making cracks like "Oh you'll never make it 9 months, I feel bad for your husband, etc, etc." I wanted to kill all of them. I hadn't told them yet, so it wasn't their fault, but still it was like pouring salt into an open wound. I felt like it happened so fast I didn't get to enjoy it. Part of me wishes I had never known at all. Then again I was ecstatic because I actually got pregnant. It's been a week now and I haven't started miscarrying yet. I go back for blood work on Thursday to decide what the next step is. I am praying I don't have to have a D & C, but it wouldn't surprise me if I did. I also heard about these pills that make your body contract and force a miscarriage. I don't know what's worse, they both seem awful. I've been so sad about this miscarriage, but I am holding onto the hope that we can get pregnant. There is always the next round of shots and it may work again. Keep us in your prayers and we'll keep you updated.

Garden Try #2

Well I really like gardening for some reason. I think it was because I was never aloud to have a garden growing up. My dad thought it would ruin his yard. He used to be really picky about his yard. I believe this is how my love of gardening truly began because I was denied as a child. Well, off to college I went and I befriended a girl named Randee. The summer of our freshman/sophomore year her family so graciously took me in while we were waiting to begin work at the Reid Ranch. I guess I had to earn my keep, so one day we ended up in her family's huge garden. I was in heaven. We had to weed, plant, play in the mud, shell peas, all the "normal" garden stuff I was deprived of in my childhood. So now that we have a yard Al let me put in a garden. It is a small box garden, but a garden none the less. I love it. Last year it did pretty well. My only problem is once is produces food I don't want to eat it because I feel like I am ruining my garden in some way. So a lot of food went to waste last year. This year though I am really going to use it. I planted things we would actually eat. We cleaned out the garden's soil from last year and found it to be home to a ton of worms. Question: Can one have too many worms in a garden? I wouldn't let Al throw any out, but now I am wondering if too many will ruin my garden. So all you gardeners out there let me know. We also came across 3 cocoon type things. They were about 2 inches long, red, and mostly disgusting, so if you know what this is: let me know. I threw them away because they were just too ugly to have in the garden. So hopefully it is not some super garden bug. But, here are a few pictures of my garden. The cabbage plant is leftover from last year. It took a long time to mature.

Our Austin Easter

This year for Easter we went to Horseshoe Bay, TX. It is about an hour west of Austin. We went with my parents and had a really nice trip. We got in late Friday night because Al's boss wouldn't let him leave early...lame I know. Then Saturday we explored the hotel and their grounds. It was really crappy weather. We did find this amazing hot tub at the Yacht Club and we spent a while in there. Kids took over so we left the hot tub. The rest of Saturday was spent relaxing and hanging out with my parents. That night the hotel had a s'mores bar set up, so we ate lots of marshmallows. Sunday Al and I got a nice hot stone massage ate lunch and headed home. We didn't really focus on Easter Sunday sadly. When we got to Brennan we ran into the most beautiful field of bluebonnets. Hundreds of people were pulled off the freeway taking pictures in the field. Overall, we had an easy, relaxing weekend that we desperately needed.

BlaH

Do you ever just feel blah? I have been feeling this way for awhile. I need to get out of this funk. Maybe I'll plant my garden this weekend.