Long Awaited Update

After finally emerging from the onslaught of midterms I thought it was high time to give our poor blog a little attention.

Although its already been a few months, I'll start with a quick recap of our first holidays together. Thanksgiving was a bit of a personal triumph as we were able to pull off a full spread (minus the delicious sweet potatoes grandma brought) in our tiny apartment. Thank you Alton Brown for imparting your turkey knowledge onto we first-timers! Ironically, the only thing that didn't work out was the boxed pumpkin pie- that'll teach us to attempt to take short cuts!

 

{Joseph hones his carving skills on Mr Turkey}

Christmas was (of course) a ton of fun including running around to visit various family members and friends. We had a skinny little Christmas tree (which I somehow managed to miss on all of our pictures) and a few strings of lights on our second story railing. We established a new Christmas Eve- Eve tradition of watching Muppets Christmas Carol (which I had never seen) with friends, and then moved on to Christmas Eve with my family. This year was slightly different because they chose to keep it a 'dry' Christmas, meaning no alcohol- needless to say Joseph was thrilled to 'get off easy'. Our favorite part was by far Christmas morning. Joseph was especially excited to finally rip the wrapping off the big box that had been taunting him for the past few weeks.

 {Have you ever seen a smile so big?}

Joseph got me a lovely new iPod nano with double the space of my old so I now don't have to delete half my iTunes library whenever I want to add new songs. Plus a book on the art of Tangled (which if you haven't seen- go forth!). Speaking of Tangled, we enjoyed several family outings during the vacation- including a trip to the Midway aircraft carrier on Black Friday, and then down to Hollywood to ride the train and see Tangled for our niece Hannah's birthday. 

 {Jaron @ Grauman's Chinese}

  

{Disney Ice Cream Parlor. Yes- we consumed that monstrosity and yes- it was delish}

And of course, no vacation would be complete without a trip to the good ole land of Disney with our good ole married buddies Stemanda.

 {Snow-capped castle}

And so now we're pressing forward through school (half way through the quarter!) with the hope of spring break glimmering in the distance. Not to mention an anniversary in there somewhere. However, I promise to update earlier than that. 

Cross my heart! 

Oh Amazon

Ok, I just realized today how genius the people at Amazon are. This realization has been coming to fruition for a while, and, now that think about it, I am going to start from the beginning.

Kristin and I own two video game systems Ps2 and Gamecube (old, i know, but what can you do?) Now on PS2 we don't have the greatest multilayer games, which leaves us playing gamecube when we feel like playing together. On game cube we have 2 games (yes thats it): super smash brother mellee and mario kart double dash. Our normal game of choice is mario kart, and the problem with this is I owned the game before we were married. Therefore, i have logged the most hours played on it. You might ask why does that matter? Well it matters because 9 out of 10 times I will win the race. Now, I must say I am impressed with how much Kristin has improved; the games are getting closer.  She leads most of the game a lot of the time, but i will usually manage to sneak in at the end and steal the victory away from her. Now here in lies the problem with us playing the game: No game is fun when you keep losing. On the flip side when Kristin beats me i feel robbed and that the game is rigged against me. To sum it up, this game frustrates us to no end. Now you might ask what does this have to do with amazon- i will tell you. Because of this frustration I have wanted to get a new game for us to play. Then I remembered mario party 7- a game neither of us has many hours on and we will be evenly matched. If it was at the store i would have to get in my car, drive to the store, find it, stand in line, buy it and drive home resulting in an hour of my life gone. So instead, I just logged onto amazon and had an order placed all within 1 minute. 1 MINUTE!! Sure I have to wait for shipping, but oh well I have other things to do for that week and a half. Now, on top of that I ordered it while sitting in econ class which I feel is appropriate. I am putting what i learn in micro econ into action. To finish up I have to say "Sorry honey for spending $20 dollars it all just happened so fast i didn't know what i was doing." :). Thank you amazon. (sorry for spelling errors i don't care enough to proof read this before i publish it.)

Halloween

The party

On Saturday we had a few friends over for a Halloween party. Started with Pumpkin chili, then some Young Frankenstein, and last of all some killer bunnies. A good time was had by all. Guess all the costumes if you can!

First Day of School

Well it was our first day back at school after a very long summer. Kristin went back to UCR and I started at Cal Poly. Both of us enjoyed our days and look forward to making it one more quarter closer to our degrees!

A True Vacation

Labor day weekend came up on us bearing a gift more rare than a short line for Space Mountain (it was the first reference I could muster, yes I'm a major nerd): the elusive Three Day Weekend! After the rejoicing subsided the question was raised, "Vacation?" Isn't the reply obvious?

We'd been craving a real vacation for some time- whether it be camping, visiting family, or what-have-you, but had simply been lacking in time with Joseph's work at the bank. So without further ado, we hopped on the internet and booked a hotel for our favorite beach location in SoCal- Laguna. The week-day vacation slashed prices for us, any further worries were eased Joseph received a bonus from USBank (which he hasn't worked at for the last six months). It seemed that the universe was on our side!

We enjoyed a day hopping around tide pools playing with little hermit crabs, eating South African seafood (slightly disappointed to be seated by a very drunk, very loud party) and Italian gelato, and relaxing in the hotel spa and heated pool (the day was too cool and windy for the beach). It was amazing to finally enjoy a vacation as a (tiny) family, even if it was in minature.

                      

  {Dinner at Mozambique. Those parrots behind us say "Hello" and "Goodbye" as you pass- awesome!}

On a slightly different note, my sister, Krisale, had her daughter. My first blood-relation niece is named Brialle, and she is such a cutie.

Am I right or am I right?

Summer- The Second Installment

     During the middle of July, as this summer's heat wave descended on SoCal, our baby Honda, Harley, got a bit of a cold. Well, more like a 'hot'. Her head-gasket needed to be replaced, which came with a hefty price-tag. Meanwhile, one of Joseph's co-workers had a $2,000 outage and was fired, so he picked up her hours in order to help compensate for our unexpected bill. It is quite fabulous how one door opens after another closes. 
     Joseph working full time put a bit of a damper on our summer plans (what plans?) but there was still plenty of fun to be had.
     Living in SoCal (and with a self-professed 'water-child') makes us obligated to hit the waves. We headed back in July for a short fun trip, and again in August for the 'Super Trip'. We were in Huntington for ten hours, hanging with friends (including many of my old high school buds), boogie boarding and roasting s'mores when the sun went down. Ah the beach!

 {After drying off and waiting for pizza to arrive}

Then came another trip to Disney after the summer black-out. You know us- can't get enough. Hopefully we can afford to renew our passes. Prices are getting ridiculous!

 {Jungle Cruise with one of the best skippers we've had}

When September came, it was finally time to use our Huntington Library Free Day passes. The Huntington had been on our list since our early dating days, and we were so happy to finally make it.

                                                                                                                       {Can I keep him?}

                                                                     {Royalty must ponder}
 
To keep myself occupied between adventures, I've been cultivating my 'domestic' side. I made jam with my sister-in-law Rebecca, Joseph and I babysat her two oldest for three days (never met kids that were easier to put to bed...means they wake you up at 6 am though), and I tried my hand at baking bread. 

{Honey Oat Bread}

It was a delicious first attempt- I highly recommend throwing around some dough of your own. Its rather therapeutic: Honey Oat Bread

School's Out For Summer

While we are overjoyed at Joseph's acceptance into Cal Poly and the current buzz about the house focuses on school school school, all the fun is coming from summer summer summer. Over the past few weeks we've enjoyed two trips to Disneyland (the first we've had over the last three months, a new record of separation since we've been together, I think):

[Splash Mountain]

[Third Highest Score on Buzz- Joseph was VERY excited]

[Waiting for the World of Color show]

After our trips to the park, we finally cooked up the Easter ham we picked up on sale. Joseph insisted no ham dinner would be complete without the full spread, so we had "Christmas in June", exactly six months before Christmas.

 [Stuffing, GB Casserole, Carrots Ham]

 

Needless to say, we've been eating lots and lots and lots of ham. We then enjoyed the first of many fabulous beach outings with friends, and spent four hours on the sand (it got cold early) playing phase ten. And finally, last Thursday we were able to return to Redlands market night for an evening eating delicious lamb gyros, purchasing produce, and wandering through antique stores. Ah summer, how we love you so!