Updates

Since I was a disaster in the kitchen today (I'm not exaggerating. I have a burn on my face, I cooked dinner completely wrong - lucky for me it still tastes good haha -  and my new Christmas sweater was saved from butter/grease stains by dish soap.), I decided it would be best to stay away from my food blog for now.

How about a Christmas update? Sounds good to me.

We were able to spend Christmas with my family and lucky for us we were able to be down with them for almost 5 whole days. It was so good to see them all again and spend time with them. It was especially fun because the whole family was there this year.

Ameya loved hanging out with my families cat, Oreo. He wasn't very fond of her though. About once an hour he would hiss and spit at her and she would stick her butt in the air and wag her tail like it was the best thing ever. It was pretty hilarious to watch.

We had a girls day out and got Starbuck's (Peppermint Hot Chocolate....best thing ever) and got pedicures. All of our toes match with little snowflakes :)

I was definitely spoiled this year - not only by my husband but my family and Hunter's family as well. Here are a couple pictures of the spoils:

Hopefully, cooking is going to get a lot better around here and there won't be many more days like today. haha. 

Other things included sweatshirts for both of us, a pair of nice camping backpacks, and some wardrobe revamping. 

We definitely enjoyed spending time with my family this year, as we did Hunter's last year. We are grateful for both of our families and everything they do for us. We are a lucky couple, that's for sure. 

Temple Square at Night

Tiffany + Hunter + yummy dinner + touring the lights at Temple Square = perfect date night

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Here are some various reasons why:

1. When I left for work this morning it was snowing - big, pretty snowflakes. My favorite kind.

2.  Our Christmas tree is up! Just look how pretty it is :) We seriously scoured the whole lot looking for the perfect tree. Lucky for us, we found it!

3.  We have lights! The icicles were Hunter's idea. Genius.

4.  Ameya...oh wait, she's here all the time. She's just cute though so I had to share the love.

5.  Yes, we put our extra ornaments on our plants. We didn't want them to feel left out. 

6. Yes, we bought our dog a stocking. Yes, we loved the idea. And yes, she will thoroughly enjoy all that rawhide.

7.  We have wrapped presents! Not that they are under our tree out of fear of them being shredded, but they are wrapped nonetheless. haha.

8. We recently became the owners of a shmancy new vacuum cleaner. It was inspired by all the fallen pine needles. And it picks up a looooot more than just pine needles. 

9. We also have stockings hung over the fireplace with care. I just couldn't get a good picture of them. 

10. We get to go hang out with my family in a week!

the little dog

I can't believe I forgot to include this picture in yesterday's blog. I guess better late than never, right?

Ameya is not a big fan of the car.  She runs back and forth from passenger to driver to back seat and back for quite some time before she settles down. Eventually she burrows somewhere - normally in the blanket or coat pile in the back seat. On our ride out to Denver, I had a pillow and my jacket by my feet and she burrowed there for a while. This was taken in a moment of her checking on us before burrowing back down. 

Man do we love that dog!

Giving Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Ours was joyfully spent in Denver with Hunter's parents this year. It was full of family, food, friends, and don't forget the food poisoning. haha. We started out our trip with lunch at Cherry Cricket with the Marican's. We have heard raving reviews about this place and it was also featured on Man vs. Food, one of Hunter's favorite shows. The food was delightful. However, this is where the food poisoning comes in. It wasn't severe, but one of the girls that went with us got sick and so did I. Luckily it was short lived and I was ready to feast the next day. 

Here is a picture of the smorgusboard we got to feast on:

Yummy, yes?

That was basically all we did Thursday. We woke up, ate breakfast, watched some Community, then ate some more. That night we met up with the Marican's at Wal Mart for some pre-Black Friday shopping. I will confess that this is the first time I have really black friday shopped. While I was beginning to regret our decision as we were being swarmed by people, the goods we left with more than made up for it and might have even convinced me that it's okay to go again. They had $1.96 DVDs and $5 and $10 Blu rays and TV series. We left with 4 seasons of 24, 8 blu rays, and 1 DVD. We easily saved at least $100.

Friday was filled with more shopping (much less crowded than it was the night before) and dinner at Texas De Brazil. It was a delightful restaurant very similar to Tucanos. Hunter's goal was to gain 10 pounds between the Thanksgiving day feast and the Brazillian Churrascaria. Unfortunately, he didn't quite make it. He did get close though. 

Ameya spent the week playing with Hunter's parent's dogs. She has a tendency to pick fights, truth be told. She likes to have things her way and will let you know when she thinks anything is inappropriate, as previously discussed. She did quite enjoy herself and wrestled around with one of them the whole time. They both wore themselves out sufficiently, in fact, Ameya has been sleeping all day to make up for all her playing.

On Saturday we let the little dog run. Hunter's parents hadn't seen her since she was a little puppy and watching her run is pretty incredible. She is fast, fast, fast. These are some action shots. 

We ended the evening watching Contagion with Hunter's parents. We both really like that movie, and Bill and Lark gave it good reviews as well. We finished the trip up on Sunday with Sacrament meeting and a quick lunch before the drive home. 

Thank you, Paddocks, for a great week!

The Ultimate Weekend

Yes, that is a picture of me on the ultimate frisbee field. Yes, I actually played in the tournament in Grand Junction this last weekend. Be proud people, really proud. haha. Please take note of my awesome hot pink cleats.

It was actually more by chance that I ended up playing. They didn't have enough girls to play on the second team (not the team that Hunter was playing on) that came from Salt Lake and because I played fall league, they all knew I was capable and called on my mad frisbee skills (or something like that...). I had a lot more fun than I expected and the odds of me playing in another tournament are greater than before. 

Because I was playing and not on the same team as Hunter, we didn't actually get any pictures of him playing this weekend. In the spirit of the post though, I thought I would include this one. It is from the Halloween tournament from a couple weeks ago. 

In case any one was wondering, a day and a half straight of Ultimate Frisbee = really sore abs and legs. 

My Obsession: Food

I have an obsession with food. I've always rather enjoyed food, but recently it has come far more to the forefront of my life. I'm sure this has to with my recent spike in cooking/baking. It's a love hate relationship that I have with food though. We are currently in a hate cycle, allow me to explain why.

I wish I could subsist entirely off of baked goods and ice cream. I don't only have a sweet tooth, I'm pretty sure I have a whole mouth full of sweet teeth. I would far prefer a cookie, brownie, some sort of pumpkin/banana bread, cake, or cupcake over any sort of savory food. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good meal to be certain, but dessert is always the best part. I'm sure that this is why I prefer baking to cooking.

This is also where the hate part of my relationship with food stems from. I strongly dislike choosing things to make for dinner. Whenever I look through food blogs or cookbooks, I always stray to the desserts - mainly because they are what sound good to me. Choosing food that will satisfy both me and Hunter? Way to big of a chore to enjoy. Not all the time, only when food and I are on the outs. It would be a wonderful thing if there was a button we could push that would make us full - giving us all the nutrients that we get from not dessert foods - so we could skip the dinner and move straight to the dessert....every meal. I'm pretty sure Hunter wouldn't complain all that much. I'd even still eat breakfast - cereal, oatmeal, waffles, french toast - all yummy sweet foods.

If only this could become my reality. Life would be so much easier and tastier, not to mention sweeter.

Giveaway!

A few weeks ago I was emailed about an opportunity to host a giveaway on this blog. Needless to say, I was quite surprised but also curious and excited. After doing my research and learning all that I could about it I decided it was a go. So, here is the schpeal...

The product is digital scrapbooking software. It is in my nature to be a bit of a skeptic. But as it turns out, this is a pretty incredible product. I am not a big scrapbooker, lets be honest here. The extent of my scrapbooking is this blog. It provides me a way to record things that happen and include pictures. I have a feeling that will be changing in the near future though. After looking through and using this software, it is pretty simple and very effective. I can record our memories in a way that is easy, quick, and cutely designed. It is a win win situation.

To further drive my point home, the following is a copy of one of the pages I made. Allow me to give you a little context for the page: when we first got married, I made a little photo album (I guess you could even call it scrapbook!) of our story. It is a fun little keepsake and I decided to do one every year and give it to Hunter on our anniversary (or close to). Our book total is now 2. haha. I think my method of preparing the book may be changing this year, thanks to MyMemories. This is a page out of the book that will be completed next September (even a little sneak peak for Hunter!). So, if you click on it to make it bigger and read it, that is why it is written like I am talking to Hunter, or telling a story to someone.

If you win this giveaway, a copy of the scrapbooking software can be all yours FOR FREE! Are you excited yet? You probably should be. All you need to do is go to the website, http://www.mymemories.com/, find you favorite digital scrapbooking kit and leave the name of it in a comment on this post. The deadline for this is next Wednesday, November 9 so be sure to leave my your comment soon!

For those of you that don't win, don't worry, you aren't completely out of luck. If you look on the right side of my blog there is now a link for $10 off the software. You just have to copy and paste the code right above the link and put it in when you place your order.

Happy scrapbooking everyone!

Happy Halloween!

Tonight's Creation

I've never been a big fan of Halloween. I don't like dressing up and I would choose baked goods over candy any day. I stopped trick or treating as soon as I was old enough to be the one helping at the carnivals and fairs. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it when I was younger I think I just outgrew it quicker than others. 

This last week at church I volunteered to make 2 dozen cupcakes for the trunk or treat the ward is sponsoring. I figured it would be a good way to get involved in the ward and we all know that I am not likely to pass up an opportunity to bake. After looking at a bunch of different Halloween cupcakes, I settled on these Wicked Witch ones.

Aren't they cute?

Today was the practice run to see if I could pull them off well enough to display them to a bunch of people and I think I was successful. 

What better way to learn to love Halloween than by baking? 

Much Overdue

Wow, it has been a while since I last updated and there is a lot of updating to do!

First off, Hunter has an interview for PA School at the University of Washington! BIG deal! We couldn't be more excited! Well, I'm sure we would be more excited if we knew he was accepted, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. His interview is on November 1st. Everything happened so quickly. Last Friday he got a letter from Oregon saying they weren't going to pursue his application any further. It seemed we were in for disappointment. Then on Tuesday, he got an email from Washington congratulating him and inviting him to interview on the 1st (exactly 2 weeks)! That day was exciting as he tried to get work off (of course the interview would fall on a work week) and book both flight and hotel. Don't worry, he was successful on all fronts. For now, we are anxiously awaiting his interview and hoping for the best!

Secondly, after much thought and discussion, we have decided that I am going to apply for grad school this year too. We both know that we want to get more schooling and this way even if Hunter doesn't get in we will be moving forward and getting one of us started. This comes in large part because I finally decided what I want to do...Epidemiology. It was something I had considered before but had kind of been pushed to the back burner a couple years ago and left there. The idea came to the forefront this last couple weeks and has really stuck. I've been looking into schools that offer the program and studying for the GRE - which I will be taking sometime in mid November if all goes according to plan. Of course, if Hunter gets accepted, this will all be a mute point for another year or two, but at least we will be prepared.

In other, not such life changing, but funny and should be shared news...

Our little dog is getting more and more curious. Mostly this has resulted in her being locked in her crate when we aren't home so we don't come back to find something else shredded. At one point, I was completely out of wearable flip flops because of her love to chew them. No worries, Old Navy was having a blow out on flip flops and I was able to get 3 pairs for $5.31 that will hopefully last me through the winter. Slightly ridiculous, right? Anyway, back to the point of my story. Yesterday she was exploring the window seal in our dining room. We have had a candle warmer with a 14.5 ounce candle (that burns VERRRRY slowly - I'm talking maybe it has burned half an ounce in the 3 months we have had it burning straight) that has sat in that window from the day we moved into this new apartment. Ameya has never even approached it before. Apparently she thought it would be a good idea to pull it off the window seal. Needless to say, she got showered in melted wax (it doesn't get hot, just warm enough to melt it, thankfully) and the floor looks like someone spilled a can of light pink paint. After her wax shower, Hunter was lucky enough to bathe her and get all of the now solidified wax out of her fur. Doesn't that sound like so much fun? Unfortunately (not so much for me...), I was at work and unable to help at all. He said there was wax all over her - even in her eye. After much scrubbing and flushing of her eye, he was able to mostly de-waxify her. There are still little spots of wax embedded, but I'm sure they will come out with time. As for our carpet, well, we are pretty sure it will take a steam cleaner to fix it.

A couple days ago as we were on our way home from getting a suit for Hunter's big interview, his car ran out of gas - like engine died, we had to push it out of gas. Luckily for us, we were almost to pull into the parking lot of the Sinclair station as the engine died so it was minimal pushing. I was quite impressed at how far the car went after it ran out. The engine started limiting our speed to around 30 about 2 miles away from the Sinclair. I would have gone to the closest gas station (we would have definitely made it to two, also I tend to freak out and fix things asap) but Hunter wanted to make it to the Sinclair so he could get his $0.10 discount. He clearly has more experience running out of gas than I do because he had no doubts as to whether we would make it to Sinclair. It was quite exciting to push the car the last 50 yards to the pump. haha. Something everyone should experience at least once ;)

And finally, we have SOOOO many fish! I'm not even exaggerating. We haven't counted them in a very long time because a)we don't think we could see them all at the same time to count them and b)they keep multiplying. We easily have over 20 maybe even 30 guppies. We started with one male and maybe 2 females (one has since passed) in March. Lets just say that they get along really well. We have guppies in all phases of life. The weird part though is that when they get big enough to tell what sex they are they all end up being female. So we have the one male and a bajillion females. We have decided that he likes it that way and eliminates any competition before they even have a chance. As all these babies continue to grow (and more continue to be born) our tank will be seriously overcrowded and that means bad things for all fish involved and we just don't know what to do with them. Moral of the story: if you want guppies for FREE please, please let us know! We will give you as many as you want.

Long Live

Last night we went to the Taylor Swift concert. Hunter actually surprised me with tickets on our anniversary in Mexico. Not only was I surprised that I was getting a gift on top of a vacation, I was surprised that he was able to get tickets at all. We had talked about going at the beginning of the summer and by the time we had gotten around to looking at tickets (the beginning of June at the LATEST) they were already sold out. Apparently Taylor Swift is just a little bit popular. 

Here is a picture of the arena - Energy Solutions Arena - almost completely full. At the start of the concert she mentioned how there were 14,000 people there. I would believe it - almost every single seat was occupied.

Again, you can see the massive amounts of people in this one. The cooler part of this photo though is the balcony like structure in the middle. Yes, Taylor Swift is in it, being whisked around the arena. 

This is a little closer up version to help you get a better visual. She had incredible stunts like this the whole way through. This particular stunt was for Love Story, which was the last song she sang.

She was waaaay fun to watch in concert. She talked, laughed, sang (obviously), and seemed to be having a really good time which made it so that we were all having a really good time too. Also, she uses the pretty long blonde hair of hers. She flipped it around so many times. haha. 

They had a screen that you could text messages to and it would enter you to win pit passes (too bad we didn't win...) and this is a picture of it. Every one was intently watching to see if their messages would come up before the concert started when the following came up. Every time it switches color it is a different message and so comes up at a different time. Needless to say, the crowd went WILD! I don't know if I have ever heard a crowd that loud - and I have been a member of many a crowd. And that was only the beginning...the incredibly loud noise continued throughout the whole concert. I'm pretty sure every one of us 14,000 sang along to every song. When we left and it was quiet again, my ears felt confused - they had been overwhelmed with so much noise to process for hours straight and then suddenly it was quiet and they weren't quite sure what to make of that. haha. 

I'm pretty sure it took us 10 tries to get an acceptable picture like this. 

We decided we had to join the throngs of girls getting their picture taken with Taylor Swift. Since we didn't see her up close for reals, we figured this was a good substitute. 

Here is a video of Haunted. It will give you a little taste of just how awesome her whole concert was. 

And just because I thought it was funny...

However, it is very fitting seeing as there were probably 5 women for every man there. 

Moral of this post: if you ever get the opportunity to go to a Taylor Swift concert do not, I repeat, DO NOT pass it up. She does not disappoint in any way, shape, or form. 

As a side note, we left this little dog home alone with free reign of our apartment. By the time we drove downtown, ate dinner (Happy Sumo...yuuuuummy), partied at the concert, and drove home it had been about 7 hours. We were both a little worried that our couches would be chewed up and there would be pee puddles on the floor, but neither happened. She behaved herself very well and didn't make any messes at all! Way to go Ameya! I guess this means we are going to have to start trusting her home alone a little more. haha.

Side note #2: Taylor Swift writes all her own songs about her own life stories. Here is an interesting article dissecting her current album, Speak Now, and who all the songs are about. 

Swimming with Dolphins!

My answer to the popular question "What animal would you be?" has always been a dolphin. They get to swim around all day, are very smart, and who doesn't love dolphins? I think that would be the life. So, when we saw that swimming with dolphins was something we could do in Mexico, there was no hesitation. This was easily our favorite activity of the whole trip.

The place that we did it through was called Dolphin Discovery. They had a few different aquariums, but the one that we were in head 9 dolphins in it. There were multiple trainers and vets in the aquarium.  We learned that all the dolphins were either rescued or born there. Our particular trainer was working with 2 dolphins. Because it was the off season, we were the only ones in our group which worked out wonderfully for us. 

The first pass the dolphin made was just to say hi. This first dolphin we worked with was a 32 year old female that was rescued. Interesting side note: dolphins can live to be about 50 years old under human care.

The next time, we got to touch the dolphin for the first time. Despite the look on my face, I was really enjoying myself.

Then we got to hug the dolphin. Basically, we put our arms out like we were carrying a stack of wood and the dolphin swam right into our open arms. It was way cool.

Hunter seems to be far more photogenic than I am. haha.

Then we put our arms straight out and the dolphin swam up, put it's nose on our hand and swam around in a circle so we were spinning like clocks. Also way cool.

Again with a basic touch, keep the dolphin feeling safe and comfortable.

Then the dolphin got to show off a little bit more. This is where the second dolphin started participating as well. He was a 3 year old that was born there.

The dolphin kiss. We put our hands out in a cupping position and the dolphin swam right up and put it's head in our hands.

It is amazing to me how calm and well trained they were. Again, dolphins are super smart.

The handshake - only dolphins are cooler than humans and shake both hands at once.

And the ball. These pictures only show them touching their noses to it. What it doesn't show is that they know how to play basketball. There was a little hoop on the edge of the aquarium that they would bounce the ball into.

With very simple hand motions they knew exactly what they were supposed to do. 

This is where it starts to get so much more exciting! The trainer had us float in the water with our arms straight out then he sent the dolphins to us and they swam up, one on either side, and we grabbed their dorsal fins and they swam back to the trainer with us holding on.

One dolphin was a lot stronger than the other and, consequently, was able to swim a lot faster.

After that, he had us lay superman style, with our feet out behind us, and sent the dolphins again. This time they put their noses on our feet and swam back. The faster they went, the more out of the water we got. 

When it was Hunter's turn I was waiting with the trainer and the dolphins on the other side of the aquarium. It took the trainer several times to get both dolphins to swim to Hunter at the same time. He said this was because of dominance issues. The older and more dominant one, would tell the other one what to do and that often resulted in him swimming back to the trainer long before he ever got close to Hunter.

Because we were the only two in our group we got to experience most of these activities multiple times. As I said earlier, this was easily our favorite activity of the whole trip. It was such a cool experience. Water, dolphins, fascinating facts, and fun swimming activities? It doesn't get much better than that.