Random

Hello my bloggy friends. I have been MIA for almost a year! My goodness, I didn't think it would be that long before I would blog again. There wasn't any crazy reason for me stopping, I just got busy with work and church and my improv troupe that I'm a part of. It seemed like I had something going on every night of the week and when I'd get home at 10 or later, I would just go straight to bed.

I always thought, well.... next week I will blog and catch up, but obviously weeks turned into months and here we are. I sure do miss all my blogging friends though! I feel so out of the loop and I feel sad for not sharing what's been going on in my world too. I have a lot of fun house changes to share with you guys and I hope I'll be able to get some posts up next week about them.

For now though I am going to be catching up on your blogs and seeing what you all have been doing!! :)

P.S. - This is totally random, but I accidentally ran over my porch light on the way to work this morning. Now, you might be asking yourself how that is possible and I will tell you. A month ago when I changed my porch light bulbs I dropped the screw that holds that cover on for one of them. So I searched for about 5 minutes, couldn't find the screw and what did I do? Did I go to the store and by another one? Nope, I put the cover on the ground and left it thinking I would just search on another day. Well, it's been there ever since and this morning was crushed under the tire of my car.

What am I going to do about it? I have no idea yet. Maybe in another month I'll figure it out.

Still Here

Well, I am still around though it doesn't seem like it. I have been taking lots of time to hang out with my family and friends and enjoy the holiday season. :) I have had a really wonderful last few weeks and hope that all of you are getting to spend a lot of time with your loved ones too!

I'll be back in blog land soon!

Random

Soooo.... my birthday was back in June and somehow I never got around to sharing this AWESOME birthday cake that my friends Bobby and Kelly made for me.

Check it out!

We love Mystery Science Theater 3000 so they decorated the cake with Mike, Crow and Tom Servo.

They also gave me a new party game called Bubble Talk!

Here's the inside of the cake:

In the background is a Matryoshka doll I brought back from Russia. :)

And one last thing... Dollar Tree sells Ribeye steaks? Interesting...

Where have I been?

Well, for 2 weeks I attended a training camp for work. It was fun, but we didn't have computers while we were there all day and upon getting home each day I was exhausted and pretty much went straight to sleep.

Meanwhile, I learned how to survive a plane crash in the desert from the camp. Pretty cool!

In other news, last Friday my mom and sister got a new puppy! My family has never had pets before (besides the occasional fish and the bunny rabbit I had for a few months when I was 8) so we were pretty stoked. She is totally adorable and so sweet!

Meet London!

The woman who owned her before needed to get rid of her because she travels often for work and was working long hours during the week so she couldn't spend time with London.

She is a toy maltese/poodle mix and she's 12 weeks old. She's so little! London loves to play, but is cool just chillin' too.

She loves people and gets so excited when anyone comes over. Every time I go to my mom's house she runs up to me as soon as I get in the door and she'll put her paws up for me to pick her up! It melts my heart.

My sister Mallory came over the first day and we all got to hang out.

This sweet puppy is perfect for our family. I'm so happy God decided for her to come bless us. I love this little girl!

Oh Yeah, I went to Russia

Back in June I went to Russia for 2 whole weeks for work. It was my first trip out of the country and quite an experience!! :) I have never been on a flight that long. It was nine and a half hours to get across the pond and when we arrived I was so ready to get off that plane!

We were picked up at the airport (yeah, we were not driving over there...) and I snapped this picture as we drove away. I thought the airport looked really cool and modern.

Look to the left of this picture - yep! That's Ikea! In Moscow, Russia. :)

These kinds of apartment buildings were everywhere. They were all this big and so colorful.

This was my room at the hotel we stayed at.

Yep, I had a kitchen too. It was pretty awesome.

The view from my room.

St. Basil's Cathedral! Pretty cool, huh? :)

This building is a mall! Crazy, huh?

My dinner one night. Just kidding, but isn't that the fanciest way to bring a customer ice ever?

Yummy, yummy pizza.

One of our colleagues made us macarons!! :) They were the most delicious things ever.

One of the restaraunts we went to had the napkins in these containers and I thought they looked really cool.

One day when I was coming back to my room, I saw this sign on the door next to mine. It says, "Bankrupts Anonymous." I thought that was very strange. Okay, so I'm in Russia and there's a group of English-speaking Americans gathered in a room in this hotel to have a meeting about bankruptcy. Hmmm.... Ok.

I have more pics that I haven't even gone through yet so I have more to share later, but I wanted to give a glimpse into my trip! :)

99 Red Balloons

They are not floating in the summer sky, but still.

I don't know why I felt compelled to share this - probably just because I am weird, but a few years ago my friends and I had a 99 Red Balloons party at my mom's house (I still lived there then and all the get-togethers took place there). Why? I don't remember. We probably didn't even have a reason anyway. Who needs a reason to throw a party?

So anyway, here's how we took that theme to a whole 'nother level.

Red everything was the basic rule. And you KNOW we had 99 Red Balloons jammin' in the background - in English, in German and even the remix.

We baked a cake and iced it with red icing and even drew 99 red balloons on the top.

Yep, there were 99 red balloons in the house. We were all in band in high school so it wasn't that horrible to blow them all up since we had band-level lungs.

For dinner we served tomato soup (duh, it's red) with veggies and we had plenty of red-colored snacks.

Can you spot the person in this picture?

*Sigh* I love parties! Even if this one is a few years past.

2011 Recap

Everybody else is doing it! So in the spirit of conformity, I'm going to make like a high school girl and copy my peers. Here is my recap of some of what got accomplished in 2011.

I made a rainbow cake for my sister's 14th birthday.

I shared the guest room makeover.

For Father's Day I made homemade oreos.

We hosted a Fourth of July celebration at our house.

I made herb stuffed bell peppers.

After finding my grandmother's recipe in a cookbook, I tried my hand at baking a red velvet cake.

Pinterest inspired me to make mozzarella sticks.

We threw a party for Halloween.

A command central was created in the pantry/laundry room.

I painted the half bath downstairs.

Eric built me a desk.

My friend Sharon and I baked an ombre cake for our friend Kelly's birthday.

It was fun looking back on what I've done this year! Here's to more fun in 2012. =)