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!

Thanksgiving

So I realize it's pretty late to be posting about Thanksgiving, but I'm going to anyway because 2013 was the first year that I hosted Thanksgiving at my place and I was pretty excited about it. My family usually plans these kinds of things at the last minute so I wasn't stepping on anybody's toes by offering to host this year. Also, my family is pretty small (at least those of us who get together for Thanksgiving) so it wasn't a huge ordeal.

It was pretty fun getting together a menu and planning everything! So first of all, the decorations.

Ever since my BFF's wedding shower, I always have some sort of bunting hanging in my dining room. I think it's just cause I having some extra color in there since the only other ways I do that are with the art and various table runners. I created this one with some extra papers I had.

I went shopping with my mom and we found this fabric that features all the traditional Thanksgiving colors (well, to us anyway) and so I got some to create 2 runners out of. I made one for the food table and one for the dining table. I don't have a sewing machine so I just used hem tape and it held up really well.

When I was picking up some of the food at Publix (my favorite grocery store....) I spotted these red-orange flowers and picked some up to arrange on the table. I'm definitely no florist, but I thought they were a nice touch.

For place settings, I just put out my everyday plates and silverware. I don't have china or another set of dishes, so this is it. :)

I made my grandmother's red velvet cake like I enjoy doing for most holidays. There was an incident though where before the meal was served, my diabetic grandfather cut into it and ate a piece. That was an interesting moment. :) Don't worry, he was fine.

Here I am with the finished food table! I was really pleased with how everything turned out. My mom and sisters arrived early and helped me with the cooking so it wasn't too overwhelming. They also brought the meat so my vegetarian self wouldn't have to make it.

We had mashed potatoes, spinach salad, squash/zucchini casserole, roasted broccoli, veggie casserole, my grandma's biscuits, ham and green bean casserole. My mom also brought a cheesecake for us.

I planned my menu out a few weeks early so that gave me time to get stuff on sale for the meal. I am a coupon-er still and so if I can save money on something I was going to get anyway, that just makes my day. I'm really glad I did it that way or I would have spent a lot of money on food at the last minute.

The other thing is, a lot of this was foods that I tend to have on hand anyway so that helped too.

We had a really great time eating, playing board games and just hanging out together. I love my family. :)

The main thing I learned from this experience was timing. I have a hard time with big meals like these getting everything finished at around the same time. Do any of you have tips for that?

Happy New Year!

So what have I done since November? Well, not much really and it's been pretty nice. I've been spending a lot of time with my family and friends. I did manage to get together a few friends for a New Year's Eve get-together and I gotta say, there were some pretty special people there. Check it out!

Don't be jealous

We had some potato soup for dinner. I put out some toppings so we could make the soup "loaded" - sour cream, cheese...

I also made tomato basil pizza

We had lots of cookies too. I have a great chocolate chip cookie recipe that I'll share next week. I brought some of the leftovers to work and they were gone before I could blink.

My friend Sharon made us two kinds of punch. I sure do love punch. :)

It was a really fun night and no one's yard caught on fire this year.

Happy new year to all of my friends in blog land! :) Hope you all had a great time bringing in the new year!

Halloween

On Halloween at work every year there is a costume contest. Not very many people dress up unfortunately. I think most of the people at my work are too self-conscious to dress up (i.e. afraid of looking silly). I am not at all afraid to look silly so of course I dressed up (as I have done in years past).

I even found a co-worker willing to join me!

For those of you that weren't children of the 90s, there was a magnificent kid's TV show on Nickelodeon called Legends of the Hidden Temple. It was an awesome game show that my sister and I used to watch. My co-worker loved the show just as much as me so we dressed up as 2 contestants. It was great fun, but unfortunately there weren't a lot of people that knew who we were.

After work I visited my family and got to hang out with London! :)

 She was wearing her pumpkin outfit for Halloween, but kept moving so I couldn't get a good picture.

On October 20, my friends Bobby and Kelly got married. :) It was a really fun day and I was so happy to be a part of it. The reception was one big party and it's always fun to see old friends.

Love my BFF! :)

Hope you all had a fun and safe Halloween!

Murder and Mayhem Part II

Yesterday I shared part I of our NYE murder mystery party re-cap and now I'm back for part II. When I left off yesterday, we had experienced 2 murders at our party and a little greediness from our guests (stealing money off 'dead' bodies).

With 2 murders so far, we continued asking questions and trying to figure out information to solve the crimes.

And then, another murder!

And *gasp!* another one!

So many crimes to solve!

We wrapped things up eventually and were shocked when we figured out who committed each murder and all the things that were going on right under our noses that we didn't know about. Everyone had secrets and people were blackmailing each other like crazy!

We gave out awards for best costume, best performer, guest with the most money and for each guest who solved the main murder.

After we finished the game, we had to take some group pictures (some people had already left, but we got some with the people who were still there).

Then we headed down to the end of the street to shoot off roman candles that a friend brought to the party.

After we finished with the fireworks, we walked back to the house and on the way we noticed my neighbor's yard was on fire. Yes, you read that right - on fire. That had been lighting some small fireworks in their driveway and one went off into the grass.

Of course I had to get a picture with the fire and my two friends who were trying to stomp it out since my neighbors didn't have a water hose.

And that was how we welcomed 2012 - with mystery, roman candles and fire. Happy New Year to all of you!