Chocolate is deeee-vine!

Smores Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies!!!

Have you ever heard of smores stuffed chocolate chip cookies? They sound absolutely amazing but I have not had the time yet to make them. Here is the recipe...if you're reading this, maybe you have time to make them? Let me know how it turns out. ;)


It's here!! Christmas, that is. I can't seem to get into the spirit this year. Not sure if it's because I haven't decorated or because it's still 80 degrees here, or maybe it's because I still haven't been home to visit the family and I ALWAYS go for at least one holiday around this time. First year I've missed all the holidays and I'm pretty bummed about it. Yes we could have spent every dime we had to go visit and came back and been more in the hole than when we started. And I know money isn't everything and it's soooo nice to spend as much time as you can with family. But at the same time, it's still a little nice to have a little something saved up for emergencies. Hard decision to make to not take the trip, but hopefully after the new year we will be able to make it up without it costing an arm and a leg. I know eventually the time will come for us to travel with all of our appendages intact. Until then, dearest family, I miss you.


Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. :)

The Big 2-5!!!

I got older last week! To commemorate my 25th birthday, I decided to go to the circus, Cirque du Soleil to be exact. It was amazing! Those people are soooo talented and they make it seem almost effortless, like they 're just gliding in air. Expensive, but worth it to go at least once in your life.

On to the house buying situation....we're obviously broke now because we went to Cirque du Soleil so no house for us. :(  On a serious note though, we are still interested in the house previously mentioned, we're still waiting on a response from the 3rd party (side effect of short sales), we're going to risk losing our money on a premature home inspection scheduled for this Friday, and hopefully soon all parties will accept and we can get the house!! It will be exciting to know if the home inspector finds anything. At least then we will know if it's worth our time to keep waiting for a response or if we should just close the deal (if it's falling apart).

Other news....Christmas is just around the corner!!  I have found a really neat craft that I will have to show later since I'm going to be giving some of these nifty things away as Christmas gifts.

Other than that, Happy Holidays!!!

House Hunting

We have started the house hunting! Git yer gun and yer overalls cuz momma's gonna find you a new house! Ok that was really bad, but seriously this has been a very fun and exhausting couple of weeks already. We saw 5 houses the weekend before Thanksgiving. Out of those 5, two were really nice. Out of those two, we went back and saw 1 again but someone else had already put in an offer....that and the fact that the first time we saw it, it was starting to get dark and there was no electricity. The second time we saw it, it was daylight, and let's just say the house looked better in the dark. Those other people can have it! haha. It wasn't a bad house, just more fixin' up than we want to do. So the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we saw 2 more houses (plus that one that we revisited during the daylight). The last house we saw could very well be our next home! I don't mean to jump ahead or get too excited, but our realtor is going to help us put in an offer this week hopefully if all goes well and if our lender finishes up the final loan approval to make sure we can get our monies. It is a short sale home and I've heard that sometimes those take a while before you can even find out whether you get the home or not. So I suppose we will just do all we can and if something happens where we can't get that home, then we will keep lookin'!  

Ok for the juicy details on this home that we really like:  it's one story, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage, around 1600 sq. ft, tile floor in dining room, kitchen, and bathrooms, wood floors in all other rooms except for 1 bedroom which has carpet. Bedrooms are split which is nice (master on one side of house and other 2 bdrms on other side), open floor plan (kitchen is open to living and dining rooms). All in all, a really great find for the money. The downfall in my opinion is I really wanted a screened in porch and this house doesn't already have one....we can always add one later, it's just a shame it doesn't already have one. Also later in life we would want to fence in the yard since it's all just open and exposed. It's in a nice looking community. Not too far from our jobs. Farther from the mall sadly, but it's still an easy drive to get there. I guess that's the main points. 

Exciting, right?!

Two things...

#1)  These girls are amazing singers/musicians: Cimorelli sisters

#2)  This game is both funny and fun to play:  Plants vs. Zombies on pogo.com

Check it out!!

Has it really almost been a month??

Wow I didn't realize the last post was Sept 30, and now it's almost Oct 30. I have been wanting to post again, but when I finally get to the computer, all I want to do is play games and I end up forgetting what my blog topic was going to be about. The past few weeks have really not been very fun. I don't want to go into elaborate detail right here right now, but for a little insight, read some info on this.  I just may have to go back to school so I can get a Doctorate degree and try to find a cure for this. 

Had to buy a new battery for my car this week. And the man changing the battery for me happened to do a quick sales pitch for himself as he is also a realtor. So that is kind of neat. Maybe a sign that we should hop on that train now to get a house while prices/interest rates are so low??

Work is becoming more and more depressing/frustrating. 40 hours a week of feeling inadequate, useless, the scum between someone's toes. I have had these feelings for quite a while now, but they just keep piling on and keep piling on. Probably shouldn't talk about work on the world wide web. Just wish we were more appreciated sometimes. 

Fred has made a new friend...it's called Mr. Laser! All you have to do is hold the laser (without even depressing the button) and he goes crazy for what may come out of it. If you just hold the laser in your hand, he will go around in circles and his eyes will be darting all over the room just in case that tiny red dot appears for him to chase. heee-larious.


We're ending part of our netflix, we will no longer be getting dvd's in the mail but we will still be able to watch whatever shows and movies netflix allows on our tv and computer. In our last month of getting the dvds in the mail, we have tried to finish up The Big Bang Theory. That show is soooo funny. If you haven't seen it, we highly recommend it. 

I guess that's all folks. Will have to talk more later on the fun with crohns, but for now those websites are good ones to check out.

Been a while...

It's been a while since I last wrote but definitely haven't forgotten....just not much to say at the moment. Been working a lot (no overtime, sadly) and haven't done much else but watching netflix, playing games, cooking, and working. As much as I want to promote Netflix, I'm still angry with their recent plan/price upgrades. It seems from looking online that they've lost a lot of customers due to that. We even switched our plan and may eventually cancel if we find something like hulu or amazon that may work better or is cheaper. Not sure what the CEO Reed Hastings is thinking, but we saw a video on our xbox where he apologized for the price increase and called himself arrogant...yet the prices still went up. Anywho enough about that. Next subject please...

 I've been thinking of making this blog about crazy funny things our cat Fred does and renaming the blog to The Cat Lady, haha. Seriously, he is a funny animal. He's like a mixture between a cat, a dog, and a bird. He looks like a cat and meows like a cat, but he plays like a dog (i.e. he loves when i throw the ball and he will go chase it... he hasn't quite learned to bring it back yet), and he makes noises like a bird when he's happy.

In our old apartment, not quite sure how this started, but I guess one day Ben came home and had change in his pocket. Well Fred liked the sound of the jingling change, so we threw one of the coins and Fred loved it! It got to the point where all you have to do is jingle some coins and he will get in his "super ready to play" stance, you throw one of the coins (making sure he can see it being thrown), and he will chase. At the old apartment, I used to sit on the bed, throw the coins off of the bed, and he would actually bring it back to me. But somehow that theory didn't stick anywhere else, so he hasn't remembered or learned to fetch at any other time.

Here is an old picture from the old apartment when Fred found an ENORMOUS grasshopper on the other side of the sliding door:

Fred may look very calm in this picture, but he was sooooo excited!!! He loves moving/living things like lizards, squirrels, birds, grasshoppers, so this was something he was stoked about! His tail was swishing so hard, he was moving the blinds back and forth, which is why I finally had to go see what the fuss was about. But it was the biggest grasshopper I had ever seen.

Dragon*Con 2011

DragonCon was tons of fun!!! It was my first year to go and Ben's second. And it was the 25th year anniversary of how long DragonCon has been around! We left around 8 am on Thursday, September 1st, stopped at Cracker Barrel about halfway through the trip, and made it to Atlanta around 5 pm. 

                                           this is a picture of a building from the 47th floor of the marriott in downtown atlanta

The owner of Artix Entertainment (Artix) had a pizza party in his suite around 7, so yay free pizza! He apparently posted on twitter his location and about the party, so there were lots of fans that stopped by to meet him and have free pizza. It was very interesting to see these people as famous icons in the gaming community.

Friday morning, we were the first ones on the list to watch over the fan table and give out buttons and goodies to people walking by. We did very well giving out little "Day 1" ribbons...we gave out almost 600 within the 2 hours we were scheduled there! The Day 1 ribbons were little things to go on people's DragonCon badges to signify that you went to the Artix fan table each day (there were Day 2 and Day 3 ribbons as well on the subsequent days). One of the mods, Dumoose, worked on challenges from loyal fans in playing the AQW card game. It's funny how the makers of the card game have such horrible winning numbers...of course I'm sure the fans enjoy winning against one of the creators, hehe. 

After "manning" the fan table, we walked around, grabbed some lunch, walked around a little more, and then went to the Artix Panel, which was from 2:30 - 5 pm. Some of the Artix Entertainment team dressed up as their in-game characters, which of course the fans LOVED! Artix had on plate mail that clinked every time he moved around. It was hilarious. Their new game Pony vs. Pony was released that day...and after playing it today, it is a pretty addictive game! It's not really anything like their other games, seeing as how most of their other games are MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games). It's still fun though....just don't listen to the intro song too long or you may go insane.

                                                Artix fan table Day 1

                                  Dumoose playing the AQW card game with fans

at the Artix Panel (Artix team in back)

musician Voltaire crashed the panel and sang us a few songs 

 On Saturday, we enjoyed our free time, met some famous people (i.e. the girls from the hit web series The Guild, and Christopher Lloyd), and then we got to hang out with Ben's uncles that live in Atlanta and his brother and his wife who came up for DragonCon. We people watched for a while (not to sound creepy but there are a lot of cool costumes and sometimes ya just gotta sit down and watch), then we went out to eat at a nice Italian restaurant, and then we people watched some more. Oh, and before we went out to eat, Ben and I went to a panel for Boris Vallejo and his wife Julie Bell. They are famous fantasy artists, and Boris was a big inspiration to Ben when he started drawing. The panel was about how they work together being husband and wife and was really cool to learn how they got started and how they are now. Ben was able to get one of his books about Boris signed, so that was really cool!

Here's a little photo collage of cool costumes. I tried to fix the pictures using picnik, but sorry for the bad quality, they're from my phone.

Here's another collage of some guys trying to kill us. I looked worried at first but I guess when they took the picture, I was already laughing. I can't hold a serious pose for nothin'!

On Sunday, we slept in, went to the art room to admire fine art and meet Boris Vallejo again (when we met him at the panel on Saturday, Ben didn't get to tell him what an inspiration he's been, so he was able to do that at Boris's art booth). We bought a couple pieces of artwork for a couple of people... hopefully the recipients will like them. We went to the game room and played some games with Barak and Stefan. I actually can't remember what else we did on Sunday, it was definitely a day where we kinda just went with the flow with nothing planned. Apparently at the pizza party on Thursday night we were gypped out of a large number of pizzas (not sure how since we seemed to have PLENTY of pizzas on Thursday)....anywho the pizza company replaced what we were gypped, so that meant another pizza party on Sunday night! It was a lot of fun. The artists of Artix hosted a "Drink and Draw" where they drew people dressed in costume within 3 minutes, and the costumed people were able to keep 5-10 hand-drawn pictures of themselves for free (free isn't a word commonly heard at dragoncon....dragoncon: where bottled drinks can cost anywhere from $3-6 and a moderately yucky meal can cost $10.  it's a lot like disney). 


Monday was the day we came back home, so nothing exciting there. Overall it was a great trip and we can't wait for next year! We will probably be attempting to make some cool costumes for next year. The scariest thing we encountered at DragonCon was when we were coming up one of the escalators, the line at the top of the escalator had stopped. However, the escalator did NOT stop, forcing us all to squish into the person in front of us. When will people realize you can't stop at the end of an escalator, you must keep moving at least a little distance so others can get off. In a place where there are 30,000+ people, I guess it is hard to remember to keep moving when there are so many cool costumes and things going on. Definitely fun times!  :D


Oh and by the way for those who don't know, Atlanta has a subway (Marta). We didn't go on the subway, but there is an escalator (not the same in the above paragraph) that is the absolute longest escalator I have ever seen. Here is an attempted picture of the escalator (and yes that is a pirate behind us).

It's all fun and games...

I LOVE days off from work! I keep telling the lead tech on my shift that all I want is to work 20 hours and keep getting paid for 40. Ahh that would be the life. Anywho, hafta go back to work tomorrow....but Wednesday starts my 8 day vay-cay-see-own! 

Found a cool website today: Pinterest, as in Pin your Interests. On this website, I found one of the funniest posters:

This is my Fred! I thought something was a little "off" with him and all along he's been plotting to kill me!

Back to the website, it's really cool for decorating ideas or crafting things. I really want to go out and buy tools and equipment to build my own things now. But I think those things are better off me wanting to do them and not actually doing them...I'm afraid the end results would be way worse, i.e. cutting off my finger. 

As for games, Ben has got me hooked on Age of Empires (the online free version). It's a little hard for me to explain exactly what it's about, but basically you have an empire that consists of workers, fighters, and healers. You get different quests to either build up your empire or to destroy an enemy empire. There is some time management involved (which I really really like playing time management games) along with strategy, hence the genre of it RTS (Real Time Strategy).

As for time management games, some good ones are Build-A-Lot and Diner Dash. 

Funny story about games: I was playing the game Ben helped create and I broke about 6 different things in his tutorial! It's bad that that many things broke just during the tutorial, but he was sitting next to me while I did it, so he was able to see what a new player would be going through and the frustration that comes with bugs. A free online game with enough bugs to make you frustrated at the game will more than likely make you not want to play...therefore it was good for him to see so that he can fix the bugs and hopefully keep their players...which is also good for our personal life because that means he keeps his paycheck! Win Win Win!  

(sidenote: for an inside joke on the "Win Win Win" comment, please watch The Office episode for "Conflict Resolution")

Wellll...that's all folks! Let's all pray for those that may be and have been affected by Hurricane Irene and pray that the damage, if any, will be substantially lower than they are predicting. Goodnight and sayonara!

Picnik

I love love love looking at neat pictures/art. I'm not as great at creating it, but sometimes I like to give it a whirl and see if I can be artsy. I've recently discovered Picnik and am in love again (I know, I know, Picnik has been around for a million years and I'm always so far behind what's out there...) but really, this site is amazing! I've really gotten into the 60's picture looks, so every picture I play with gets this effect, haha.

 

 Maybe it's just the rounded corners I like so much. Anywho, for anyone who hasn't tried picnik yet and loves playing with pictures, go check it out! It's free and I love free (coming from the girl who opens the itunes store once a week just to get the free songs)!

Bewitched

I have been watching the original Bewitched from the beginning (I've seen episodes here and there, but I like to watch things from the very beginning...so that's what I'm doing), and I've realized...I would really like to be able to wiggle my nose like Elizabeth Montgomery and voila! The things (a.k.a. housework) I want done but don't want to physically accomplish would be in their respective places. It's funny because I had finally got this apartment cleaned up, and I guess it needed to be dirty/unorganized again because I asked Ben if he'd help me clean out the garage (a storage place for packed things....the things that got moved there a year ago and still haven't come out of their boxes). So we did some unpacking, however now the living room is a mess and I can't summon the strength to finish....all I wanna do is play computer games all day on my one day off.

I think it's time for a fudge round.

Married Life

our "blue steel" faces

Well we've finally tied the knot! Eight years of us proclaiming our love for one another and now it is legal (yayyy!!!) We are so happy to open this door and see what the future holds for us. It's been a little over a month and trying to do all of the post-wedding stuff is exhausting! We have yet to send out the thank you notes. We are really bad at procrastinating though. I finally went to the social security office to change the s.s. card. Now just have to wait a couple weeks until it comes in the mail to go change the driver's license and hopefully get a new passport as well.  But really, married life is wonderful! We've become so much closer in this past month and it feels AWESOME! Even though right now I feel too young to want to expand our family, I have been looking forward to the future and in hopefully a few years we can start settling down and thinking about such things. Although I probably am a little behind...some girls I went to high school with already have 3, 4, or 5 kids. I can't imagine having that right now. But someday.... 

One of the best books I have read (in the past few years at least) is Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson. I have started to re-read it, and gosh it really does make you go through an emotional rollercoaster. I have also started Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (thanks to a dear friend who has recommended it for months now). It is really a funny book! It also kind of gives you an emotional rollercoaster. Anywho, with work and reading these books and being married and cooking and rewatching Ugly Betty, I haven't really gotten super far in these books. Granted, one of them I have already read, so it's not a reading priority like Water for Elephants. They are really good and I am excited to read what happens next in Water for Elephants.

So, to sum it up, married life is wonderful/amazing/fabulous/awesome/fun and we've both been working so much lately that it will be soooo great when we finally get a mini-break in September when we attend Dragon-Con in Atlanta. It will be my first time going and his second. But we can't wait (and looking at the lineup of who will be there, I am getting even more excited just thinking about it!!!). Yay for married life!