My Trip to Chattanooga

That post title sounds a lot like a paper you'd turn in on the first day back to school about your summer vacation. "Here Mrs. Teacher, this is my paper on my summer vacation. It's called 'My Trip to Chattanooga.'"

Anyway, a few weekends ago I took a trip to Tennessee to visit two of my very dear friends. One is my BFF from high school and the other is her husband. My BFF, Kelly, is a pharmacist and after college she moved to TN so when we want to see each other we have to travel. I was excited to spend a weekend away!

My two sweet friends.

Their sweet puppy Stella.

We ate dinner the first night at a wonderful Tapas restaurant. I ate blue cheese puffs, spinach artichoke dip and what they call papas bravas. Yum!! We all shared and they gave me some of their pear and walnut quesadilla. It was so good!

Selfie in the car on the way to lunch.

I was so happy to see they had this Daft Punk table!!

I've loved Daft Punk since Discovery.

We ate lunch at the best pizza place. Basically you pick the pizza size and that's a base price and then you pick all your toppings including type of cheese. We got spinach, artichokes, mushrooms, tomatoes, feta cheese, garlic and mozzarella. It was so tasty! I loved that there were so many toppings options and that we could pick whatever we wanted.

After lunch we headed to the Aquarium. It was so nice!!

 

 

 

We really enjoyed the penguin exhibit. We even made new friends.

Look at this penguin on the left standing on another penguin!

We even got trapped in this cage with a shark right behind us!!

I bought a souvenir before we left. I got this cute, little owl mug because of course when you think of the aquarium, you think owl....

Bobby and Kelly cooked the most amazing dinner for me. The made their own ravioli from scratch.... It was pumpkin ravioli with a sage cream sauce. Yum!!! They also made honey ricotta bruschetta and we enjoyed a tasty salad. These two have been taking cooking classes and they are quite the chefs! Dinner was soooo good. I wish I lived closer so I could drop by for dinner more often. :)

I had such a fun weekend. It's always great to catch up with Kelly. :)

Easter

Woah! It's been a month since I last posted. Time is just slipping by me... It seems like I'm never home these days due to work, church and hobbies. However, today I am home sick with (what I think is) strep throat so what better to do than blog? :)
I realize it's pretty late to be posting about Easter, but I am enjoying reminiscing about days when it wasn't painful to eat something besides soup.

I made my family take a lot of pictures after church. It was a coincidence that they all wore pink.

My grandfather joined us for lunch. He is a huge Bama fan so that's why he always wears this houndstooth hat.

I love my baby sister. :)

I love how my mom will do pretty much anything that I ask her to. She's the best. For real.

It looks like this photo was photoshopped to death, but I didn't even touch it. It truly was just a beautiful day.

 

Trying to look sophisticated.

Our friend London:

For lunch we enjoyed lemon pasta, parmesan green beans, spinach salad and my mom made chicken for the meat eaters.



It wasn't a traditional Easter meal, but we wanted to do something different and a little simpler. :)

We also played some Just Dance 2014 and Scattegories. I am a beast at that game, but one of my sisters still beat me... All in all, a great Easter with the family!

Kirby Cake

My sister's birthday party was the weekend before last and I wanted to share the cake I made for her with you guys. :) My sister loves the Kirby games on the Wii and I'm pretty sure Kirby is her favorite video game character in general. She has little Kirby trinkets in her room and a Kirby shirt so I thought why not make her a Kirby cake? I've made her a rainbow cake the past 2 years and I wanted to do something different this year.

Here's Kirby:

Picture from here.

And here is the cake:

We made tacos and veggie tacos with all sorts of toppings. I made queso dip and we had guacamole and of course, salsa. There were lots and lots of tortilla chips too. We also made black beans and rice.

Here's a picture of the table before we added the rest of the taco stuff.

It's not that exciting looking, haha. Honestly, my mom and I decided to make this years party more low-key. Usually I go crazy and try to make too much food/decor/whatever and burn myself (and my mom) out trying to get everything done at the last minute. So it was nice to just relax this year!

I thought it was sweet that one of my sister's friends bought her a Kirby figure since I had made her a Kirby cake.

As you can see someone bought McKenna the Trouble board game so I acted out the old commercial from when I was a kid where they all go "Gettin' into trouble!!" at the end and they had no clue what I was doing....

Here's McKenna with her cake! :)

I didn't actually get a picture of the 2 of us that day.... So here's one from the day we had a family dinner to celebrate her birthday.

I love my sister!

A Little About Me

I find that when I read a blog I enjoy it more when I feel like I 'know' the person so I thought it would be fun to share a little bit more about myself. And in a video, no less! I have never done a vlog before and got a wild hair to try it. So here a few facts abut myself:

trim.X0iJeM from Morgan on Vimeo.

I realized afterward, that I mentioned improv and then gave no explanation of what it was, but perhaps it's more well-known in your neck of the woods anyway.... Basically, we play improv games similar to the show Whose Line is it Anyway and we get all our suggestions from our audience. The difference between us and the show is we are family friendly. :)

If you didn't watch the video, I think it's basically me admitting that I am a nerd. And I didn't even get in to how much I love Star Wars/Star Trek.

A Day in the Life

I see these kinds of posts on all different types of blogs and it's always interesting to me to read about how people spend their days. I have always thought that no one would care what my DITL looks like cause to me it's usually pretty boring. :) However for the past 2 months at work I have been working rotating, weird hour shifts and I kind of want to document it so that when I look back years from now I can remember this weird time in my life. I say weird because I have days go by (or whole weeks) where I'm like, "What the heck have I done these past few days besides sleep and work? Oh, nothing, that's right."

And who knows, maybe one of you will find this interesting?? I decided I would document one of my days working midnight shift because that is the weirdest transition for me and the hardest to get anything done (outside of work) during. I am on midnights this week so I picked Monday to share with you all.

4:30 pm - Wake up. My first thought, "Ughhhhh..... I feel like I've been hit by a truck...." I am really good at falling asleep and sleeping during the day, but when I wake up I feel horrible.
4:35 pm - Meander downstairs to eat dinner. I make some of my favorite pasta and pack some leftovers for work later. I also have some strawberries and spinach salad.
5:00 pm - Clean kitchen and pack the rest of my food and fill my water bottles for work.
5:15 pm - Walk back and forth between the living room and kitchen 5 times because I am too disoriented to remember what I was going in the living room for.
5:20 pm - Oh yeah, I wanted to check my cell phone. Grab it and zombie upstairs to get ready for work.
5:50 pm - Make my bed, clear off my nightstands (trying to create a good (daily) habit), pack my purse

6:00 pm - Head out to run some errands
6:30 pm - Off to improv rehearsal before work
9:30 pm - Improv rehearsal is over, time for second dinner! I grab a Greek salad and sandwich from my favorite Greek restaurant and head on to work. I get hungry a lot more often when I am on mids for some reason.
10:00 pm - Get settled at work and take over for the person before me.
12:00 am - Wow! Those first 2 hours of work flew by!! Time to eat some snacks. I have a granny smith apple and some cheez-its. Yumm.

1:30  am - I am hungry and my co-workers are getting tired so they aren't telling jokes and entertaining me anymore.
3:00 am - Time to go heat up my leftover pasta. Yay! 3rd dinner!

3:30 am - Pasta was delicious and eating killed some time. :)
5:00 am - Someone sneezes over our intercom system. I find it hilarious, but no one else laughs. I am an awkward person.

6:45 am - My relief is here! It's almost time to go home!
7:00 am - I am on the way to freedom.
7:15 am - The person behind me honks their horn at me because I am not moving and the light is green. I didn't see the light was green because I was so engrossed in eating my egg and cheese biscuit from McDonald's. :( Sorry dude. I proceed forward with biscuit hanging out of my mouth.
7:30 am - Home sweet home.
7:35 am - After rinsing out my water bottles and cleaning my food containers, it's time for a quick shower.
7:50 am - I am knocked out for the next 8+ hours.

People always feel bad for me when I tell them I am working the midnight shift but really it's not that bad. You gotta make a living somehow! Anyway, I usually have fun while I am working - it's a unique and fun job. It is stressful at times, but I like it. Yes, it is strange hours, but I don't have too hard a time getting used to it. My problem is adjusting back to day shift after midnights. Yikes! That is a nightmare.

I also find that I am more tired and hungry the weeks I work mids. I'm not really sure why that is...

But like I said, a job is a job and I am very fortunate to have one at all, especially to have one I really like. :)

In case you are wondering why there are no pictures of me in my DITL post it's because I didn't want to ask my co-workers to take any of me. That would have been weird, but here's a picture from my work trip to Houston in November. This is what I sometimes look like at work, except my console is never that clean (there would be lots of snacks surrounding me) and I have to wear a headset.

This was completely posed by the way. I wasn't actually working here.