Texas Lou

Archive for the ‘Birthdays’ Category

Happy Thankful Monday!

Here’s what I’m thankful for today:

1. I’m thankful for a wonderful day Christmas shopping with Ben yesterday, and I’m very thankful and happy about our very first Christmas tree (pictures to come once it’s decorated).  I’m also thankful for a strong husband who is able to lift and move the tree and also knows how to take care of it (Ben wants to root the tree outside after Christmas is over).
2. I’m thankful for a wonderful weekend with family.  Friday night, Ben and I joined his parents and two nieces for our annual holiday trip to Richmond for the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens‘ Dominion GardenFest of Lights.  Then Saturday, I spent the day baking and doing Christmas crafts with my mother-in-law and nieces.  I made two terrariums that I’m very proud of!
3. I’m sooooo very thankful that I got to spend a day with my cousin Jennifer!  Her husband was in Baltimore for business so she came with him and drove down for the day on Wednesday.  We started off by catching up over lunch at Timberwood Grill, then headed to Monticello to do the tour since she had never been.  Then we went to the Downtown Mall, bought some Virginia Wine at Market Street Wine Shop, and met Ben for dinner at South Street Brewery.  We ended the evening by baking brownies at home.  Thursday morning, we had breakfast at Bodo’s before Jennifer headed back to Maryland.  I was sad to see her go but soooo happy that we got to spend precious time together.  I love my family!
   

   Jennifer & I at Monticello

4. I’m thankful for the wood stove in our house and for a husband who has been building fires to keep us warm.  Our heater broke again on Friday morning so we were forced to start using our wood stove.  Wow does that thing work great!  It heats the house almost well enough that we don’t need the heater!
   

   Eva checking out the first fire in the wood stove

5. Lastly, I’m thankful for the holidays and family to spend them with.  Last year I was somewhat of a scrooge because we couldn’t have a Christmas tree, I didn’t have much PTO saved up yet (and I work in retail), I was turning the dreaded 30, and I couldn’t go home for Christmas.  This year, we have a beautiful house to spend the holidays in, I can take a few days off of work, my family is coming to spend Christmas with us since we have plenty of room in the new house, we have our first Christmas tree together (after being together for seven and a half years), and I’m not turning 30 this year 😉 !

Have a great week and enjoy the this time of year!

Good morning and welcome to my weekly Thankful Monday post.

Here’s what I’m thankful for today:

1. I’m very grateful that my work is sending me to a 4-day training course covering ASP.NET, web application development, JQuery Mobile, and many other tools and technologies.  Since I have no formal training in web development (everything I know, I taught myself or learned from coworkers), I think this class is going to greatly benefit me!  Thanks to my job for the wonderful opportunity!
2. I’m thankful for good friends!  Over the past week, I was able to spend a lot of time with great friends.  Last Wednesday, I went to the free beer tasting at Market Street Wine Shop with Sarah and my friend Marian who I hadn’t seen in months.  Then Marian, her daughter Katie, and I checked out the new Livery Stable for dinner.  I also got to spend a wonderful evening drinking wine, eating Lindsey’s homemade chili, enjoying music, and watching the sunset at Carter Mountain Orchard‘s Sunset Series.  It was great to hang out with Sarah, Ian, Lindsey, Greg, and their family!  Then Saturday, we got to hang out with my friend Becky and her family at the race we participated in.  To top it all off, we had lunch with Robert and Crystal at Olive Garden on Saturday!  What a wonderful week filled with great friends!
3. I’m thankful that a lot of important people in my life have made it through surgeries safely lately.  My dad and some friends have had recent surgeries and though they are still recovering, I’m very grateful they made it through risky medical procedures and are on the mend.
4. I’m thankful for the opportunity to help raise money for a little girl in need.  Saturday, Ben and I ran the Benefit 5K for Shiloh Thompson.  It was a really fun race with great prizes and they had a skydiver show at the end of the race where we got to watch 3 skydivers jump from a plane and land in the neighborhood where the race took place.  Ben even won 4th place in the race and 1st place in his age group!  Most importantly, it was great to help a little girl in need and her family!
5. Lastly, I’m thankful for a close family.  My brother got to go to Houston for his birthday this weekend and even though I wasn’t there to help him celebrate, I’m very happy that the rest of my family was there to help him enjoy his birthday weekend!

Have a wonderful week!

Good morning and welcome to my weekly Thankful Monday blog post!

Here’s what I’m thankful for today:

1. I’m thankful for the opportunity to see The Book of Mormon musical with my friends Cris and Carolyn at the Kennedy Center on Friday.  Thanks to all of us working together, the plans for the night turned out great!  I’m cherishing these little trips right now as once I have kids they will be fewer and far between.  The play was hilarious and the Kennedy Center was a beautiful venue!  What a great night!
2. I’m thankful for the generosity from my sister-in-law’s dad.  He was cleaning out a storage unit this weekend and gave us several items that homeowners would need including a shop-vac and a miter saw!  I’m so grateful for his generosity and the future spending he has saved us!
3. I’m thankful for family.  Sunday, we had lunch with my in-laws to celebrate my nephew’s 20th birthday.  It was nice to spend time with the whole family and enjoy my mother-in-law’s awesome lunch, including her famous coconut raspberry cake!  She and I also made bacon wrapped figs using the figs from our fig tree.
4. I’m thankful for the cooler weather we’ve been having.  Our air conditioner has been broken so the cooler weather in August has been a blessing!
5. I’m thankful for a fresh start this Monday!

Have a great week!

Good morning!  Welcome to this week’s thankful Monday blog post!

Today, I am thankful for the following:

1. I’m thankful for the fit body and sufficient health that allowed me to run 8 miles and walk another yesterday morning with my husband and a new friend.  We are all training for the Charlottesville 10 Miler this spring and we had a great training run!
2. I am thankful for the various free educational opportunities out on the web.  I’ve been taking online courses, lectures, and seminars from Code Academy, Coursera, and I Will Teach You To Be Rich since the new year started and I am learning so much valuable information as well as building my experience base, and it’s all FREE!
3. I am thankful for birthdays because they give us an excuse to celebrate and a chance to come together with new and old friends.
   

   Thursday night at the Melting Pot celebrating Kristen’s birthday with friends!

4. I’m thankful for Netflix and Comcast On Demand that allow me to escape my worries and stress temporarily at the drop of a hat by having thousands of movies available.  This weekend, I watched Total Recall, The Switch, Man of the House, and Insidious.
5. I’m thankful for the fresh start to do better and live fuller that Monday brings us each week!

Have a great week!

Welcome to today’s Thankful Monday Wednesday post!  Monday was my birthday and yesterday was Christmas and my mom was in town so there was little time for blog posting.  Here’s what I’m thankful for this week:

1. I’m thankful for the BEST most wonderful mom who loves me so much.  She knew I was down in the dumps about not being able to fly to Texas for my birthday and Christmas this year (the first time ever) so she flew to Virginia and surprised me!  I love her so much it makes my heart hurt!
2. I’m thankful for my wonderful husband and friends who helped facilitate my mom’s trip by picking her up from the airport and delivering her to me at the ugly Christmas sweater party I was attending.
3. I’m thankful for my Virginia family who not only helped my mom plan the surprise but were generous hosts while she was here, making us dinner and desserts on several occasions.  I’m also thankful for them welcoming us into their home on Christmas Eve and Christmas.
4. I’m thankful for airports, pilots, airplanes, and everything else that allows us to travel far and wide these days.  Mom was able to travel to Virginia Friday night and then back to Houston on Christmas morning in order to spend time with my sister on Christmas after she got off work.
5. I’m thankful for my husband for being caring, considerate, and understanding, and giving me a shoulder to cry on when it was finally time for my mom to leave.  I miss her so much, but I’m so thankful for the people who I love who live close by to get me through the times when I find myself missing my family unbearably!

Merry belated Christmas to everyone and mom, if you are reading, I love you so much and am grateful for you everyday!

This is the last week of my twenties.  Next Monday, December 24th at approximately 1:38 PM central time, I will enter a new decade.  I’m looking forward to making my thirties infinitely better than my twenties.  As many people have pointed out to me, I have the following advantages going for me at the start of this new era:

• I’m more confident
• I’m more financially stable
• My relationships are more stable and of an adult quality (this does not mean that they aren’t super fun)
• I’m more educated
• I have more experience

Just a few goals I have for the next decade are:

• Become a mother
• Become a homeowner
• Discover my passion and my dream job and excel at it
• Continue to strengthen the bonds of my relationships with family and friends
• Have a blast!

And as a great ending to this post, I leave you with Tim McGraw’s “My Next Thirty Years”:

Have you ever heard of the Homesick Texan?  The other one, not me…haha!

The Homesick Texan is a blog written by fellow Texan, Lisa Fain, who now lives in New York.  Like me, I’m sure she had a hard time finding good Tex-Mex food outside of our beloved Texas, so she decided to make it herself and document it on her blog.  She even wrote a cookbook, The Homesick Texan Cookbook, that my Aunt Connie and Uncle Mike gave to me as a wedding gift!  It was such a surprise since I don’t think I’d mentioned to anyone that I read her blog.  However, I’m sure it wasn’t difficult for anyone who knows me to see that I would love and identify with the theme!  I mean I LOVE food, I LOVE  Texas, and I’m constantly homesick for the great state and all of the wonderful people in it!

So, why am I bringing up the Homesick Texan all of a sudden?  Well, besides the fact that she is awesome, right?  My friend Cara is having a birthday party/cookout tonight and she asked all of her guests to contribute something edible for the evening.  I  announced that I’d bring chicken for the grill, but I also wanted to make some sort of appetizer or dessert that was new, exciting, unique, and personal.  Well for me, what’s more personal than a Texas themed recipe?  I headed over to my Pinterest “Cooking and Food” board to get some ideas for recipes I’ve found on the interwebz in the past that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.  As soon as I saw the Homesick Texan’s Bacon-Jalapeño Cheese Ball, I knew I had to make it.

The recipe was really easy to make, the ingredients weren’t complicated at all, and it didn’t take me long to create the masterpiece.  The finished product also looks very pretty and festive.  I haven’t tasted it yet, as I’m saving it for the birthday party tonight, but I did lick the bowl when I was finished and it was quite tasty!

If you are looking for something AMAZING to make, head on over to the Homesick Texan’s blog and check out the recipe.  The main ingredients are jalapeños, bacon, pecans, and cheese so it can’t be anything but awesome!  If I remember, I’ll snap a picture of it before it’s all gobbled up tonight and post it here tomorrow.

I started this blog 3 years ago on August 31, 2009 with my very first post!  Since then, I’ve published 123 blog posts!

It’s funny how much can change in 3 years!  Since I started this blog, I got a new residence (moved in with Ben), got a husband, got a new car, got a new job, met alot of new and amazing people, seen alot of new and different places, and experienced some awesome adventures!  I’m hoping the next three years will bring even more wonderful surprises and I hope to document them all here on the blog.

Thanks to everyone who reads this and follows along with my life!  Happy blogoversary to TexasLou.com!

Cheers!

Celebrate!

***Update*** I just read one of the blogs that I follow, Kath Eats Real Food, and Kath, a fellow Cville resident, is celebrating her blog’s 5th anniversary today!  So excited to share my blog’s anniversary with such an amazing blog/blogger!

YAY for the weekend…it’s the first one in a month that I won’t be traveling!

Don’t get me wrong, I love traveling, and I had a ton of fun in Washington D.C. at the zoo, in Warrenton for the wine festival, in Texas for Megan’s wedding, and in OBX for the girls’ weekend, but man was I EXHAUSTED from all of that flying, driving, and getting up early so as not to miss a single thing (my motto when on vacation is I’ll sleep when I’m dead)!

Tonight we are having dinner with good friends at Outback and getting to meet little miss Erin (technically I met her at the hospital when she was born, but only through the glass).  Tomorrow is my company’s picnic which I helped plan as a member of the Events Committee.  I love company events like the picnic and holiday party because its so nice to get to talk to people outside of work in a very relaxed setting and meet their families.  On Sunday, we are heading to Ben’s parents’ place to celebrate his mom’s birthday!  I found her the most beautiful, unique gift in OBX last weekend and can’t wait to give it to her!

Besides all that fun stuff, I plan to do some more unpacking and clean up around our tiny little apartment, spend some time with my kitties, get some quality outdoor time, including a 6 mile run, which is part of my half marathon training, and maybe even lay by the pool.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxing weekend!

Top Ten Things from This Weekend’s Trip To Texas

1. The look on my dad’s face when I surprised him by showing up for his 60th birthday party
2. Spending Friday evening drinking wine and enjoying the company of all of my siblings – Carrie, Mikey, Farris, Christian, and Bradley
3. Eating great long-overdue Mexican food with the fam
4. Getting Starbucks and kolaches with mom for breakfast Saturday morning
5. Playing Farmville with mom
6. Watching the Longhorns play while helping mom cook for a friend’s wedding
7. Having time to catch up on some good TV
8. Getting to drink St. Arnold’s Oktoberfest and Christmas Ale
9. Also having the time to start reading a really good book (so far)
10. Just being home

And it’s only Saturday morning so there’s plenty more fun to be had!