Snowy Seattle

One of these days life might slow down, but until then we had lots of things to do this weekend! Friday night I rushed home from work to get ready really quickly before heading to my first wedding dress fitting! I had gotten the dress in a few weeks ago, but brought it back to the store to have it altered a little and have the bustle sewed in. I really hope everything turns out well, I always get nervous when she started talking about tearing out seams and cutting off fabric and such...I hope it doesn't mess anything up! I'll go back in a few weeks to try it on again, then have a final fitting late January. I still LOVE my dress!

In other wedding news, this is what I sent to the flower lady of ideas that I want for the wedding. I can't wait to see what she comes up with! And yes, I'm a huge nerd and made a pdf of my wedding flower ideas. 

After my dress fitting on Friday night, we went to see the new Harry Potter movie!!! It was killing me that I couldn't see the first midnight showing of it. I figured it wouldn't be the best idea since I would have to be up at 4:55 Friday morning to get to work. So I held off till Friday night. As always...soooooo good! This one was definitely much more dark than some of the previous ones, but it was broken up with just enough humor and lightheartedness. I might have to go back and read the book again now. I'm definitely ready to go see it again, and can't wait till the DVD comes out!!

Saturday morning even after a late night of Harry Pottering, I woke up at 7:30am. I have a feeling that my weekdays wakeups around 5am everyday is going to make me not be able to sleep in on the weekend either...boooo. Oh well, I had a few other things to get done that morning to return my wedding ring (which didn't match up properly to my engagement ring) and send off forms to get reimbursed from the Navy for my move. After I got all that taken care of, I had to take my car in for a maintenance. Saturday afternoon/evening we got a few more wedding things done including screen printing a bunch of our gift bags! I think they're turning out pretty well. We still have a lot more to do, and I can't wait to start filling them!

Saturday we also went to go check out a house that Ryan has been working on designing that is now in the construction phase! It's so much fun to see all the stuff that he's working on that is now starting to be built. I'm so proud of him!

Sunday we went to another job site of Ryan's. This time it was to demo an existing house! This client bought a property with a small house on it, so they're tearing that one down then rebuilding a new house on the existing foundation. We went this weekend to help them demo the existing house so spent a few hours sledge hammering dry wall and ripping down porticos and fun things like that. I can't wait till the new house starts going up!

Starting on Sunday, Seattle got it's first snow for the season. Monday it got even worse. Ben got his first little taste (literally) of snow. I don't think he's a huge fan of it yet...he seems to get chilly when it's in the 50's so snow might not be his favorite.

Hello Yellow

One of our many tasks for this weekend was to paint our bedroom wall yellow! All of the walls in the apartment are white, which is nice and clean looking, but I was aching for some color, so now I have it and I love it! It was really super easy since it was just one small wall. We also spent a good part of the weekend unpacking my stuff, which there is still a lot left to do. I think next weekend we'll have to get some organizational units to make spaces for all the rest of my things to go.

Elfed

Moving Day!

This weekend we made the big move of all my stuff down to Seattle! I headed up to Oak Harbor on Friday to meet with carpet cleaners and my landlords to finalize everything for terminating my lease then started packing up. Friday night Ryan rode his motorcycle up to Oak Harbor too to help me out. My roomie and her bf also came up Friday night to start packing up her things to move out as well. 

Saturday morning we picked up the uhaul and started loading everything up. Luckily most of my things fit into boxes that stacked nicely into the truck. After we got all of my stuff loaded in the truck, we put a bunch of Sarah's larger stuff in the truck to drop off at her new place in Anacortes.

After packing and cleaning all morning, we headed out to drop off Sarah's stuff first. We had a nice little caravan of Sarah, Allan driving the uhaul, Ryan on his motorcycle, and myself and the pups in the GTI in the back of the line. We ended up dropping of all of Sarah's stuff at her house and left Ryan's motorcycle in the garage so he could driving the truck down to Seattle Saturday night. We made a quick stop in Mt Vernon to drop off my washer and dryer and a few other things at the Salvation Army before making it down to Seattle and offloading everything there. By that time it was pretty late, so we just parked the truck and called it a night.

Sunday morning we dropped off the truck at a place in Seattle. Ben was pretty helpful riding shot gun in the truck cab.

From there we drove back up to Anacortes to pick up Ryan's motorcycle from Sarah's house. Luckily the rain held off for most of the afternoon, so it ended up being a nice, although rather chilly, ride down the island back to Seattle. Clearly the pups were pretty helpful on the ride as well. Ben really likes to cuddle with Tara and take up as much space as possible.

Sunday night we were pretty beat, but instead of unpacking I thought it would be more fun to bake. I still had some leftover pumpkin, so I made some pumpkin cranberry scones. So that's what I'll be eating for breakfast all week on my way into work bright and early in the mornings!

It's great to be an Auburn Tiger!

Auburn football has been full of excitement this year! This past weekend, besides watching lot of football, we screenprinted a few new Auburn shirts. They turned out really well and now I have the screens available to make as many more as I want! This weekend we made several tshirts, a sweetshirt, and a cute dress for me! Now I have all kinds of options to show off my auburn pride!

In addition to the Auburn gear, I also made a screen to print a bunch of tote bags that we're going to use for our out of town guests' gift bags for the wedding. Now I just need to print about 40 of them and fill them with goodies! I'm definitely going to have to keep one for myself, and maybe try out a few other prints on the totes!

This week I have started my new job at Naval Base Kitsap. Officially I don't start until January, but I have come over early to start taking over and doing a turn over with the LTJG that I will be replacing. There are A LOT of contracts going on over here, and I'll have a full load of work, so I hope I can get caught up quickly. I may be slightly overwhelmed to begin with, but hopefully being here early will help me out. It's also going to be an interesting couple of years here with an hour and a half commute each way. Luckily half of it is on a ferry, so I can relax a little, but it's definitely going to be some long days and early  mornings getting up between 5 and 530 everyday! It'll be worth it though being able to come back to Seattle (and Ryan) everyday. This weekend I'll be making the big move with all of my stuff to Seattle. I was waiting to do that this weekend because my roomie (who will also be moving out) is in Spain right now, so we'll both be there this weekend to move everything out and clean up and get ready to end the lease there. I can't wait to have all of my stuff in one place and hopefully get much more organized!

Also this weekend, Ryan and I had some fun playing around with photobooth on my computer, so here's some fun pics to enjoy.

More Foods.

I'm almost officially moved to Seattle! So I've spent the last couple of weeks in training where I got to stay in Seattle and drive to my new base. So when I came home for the night I got to try out a few more grilled cheese recipes (yes I'm sure I'm going to get sick of them soon, but it's fun for now). First I tried an asiago, turkey bacon, and pesto sammy. I used to be obsessed with asiago in Italy since it was so easy and cheap to get everywhere, so it was a nice little blast from the past for me. It also went really well with the bacon and a hint of a pesto kick.

Another night I had made some shredded lemon chicken in the crock pot, so I put some of that on a grilled cheese with edam cheese. It was also delicious.

This weekend while watching football games I tried out a few cupcake recipes. I am still very interested in baking my own cupcakes for our wedding, so these are some potential flavors for the event. I just made a few of each and they were the mini ones so we could taste them all and not get sick. The left one is a vanilla bean cupcake with chocolate buttercream, the middle is lavender, and the right one is chocolate mint. I want to try out a few more recipes, but I think these are all in the running for the big day! I'd love a variety of colors too like these would offer.

Monday I got home early from my training and started getting ready for a little dinner party at our apartment with my favorite middle school buddies, Leigha and Sarah and their significant others. Also along with my recent cheese recipe obsession, I made a lasagna with lots of different cheeses. It honor of the chilly fall quickly overcoming Seattle, I found a great recipe that had pumpkin in it.  I was a little iffy of the combination, but it turned out great with a little hint of pumpkin. It was also the first time I tried cooking with a real pumpkin instead of out of the can. It was a lot easier than I had imagined and now I have extra pumpkin that I need to make something else with! Also in honor of fall, I've been making some great apple sauce in my crock pot! It was the perfect dessert while I was sick, and sooo easy. It's so good nice and hot straight out of the crock pot and makes the apartment smell great.

Monday I start my new job, so I've been frantically running around preparing for that move. I'll move everything from my house the following weekend, then I'll officially be in Seattle to stay! I can't wait for things to settle down a little around here! Also...the first big snow just hit all the mountains, so it looks like snowboarding is just around the corner...hopefully I don't break my wrist again this year!

Grilled Cheese

There are a lot of amazing cheeses out there, and I'm determined to start experimenting with different ones. There are a lot of different restaurants around here that we've been to that have a great variety of cheese platters, and it's been great trying out the different kinds. Also right in the Pike Place Market there's a Beechers Cheese shop that makes and sells any kind of cheese you could possibly imagine! This week I decided to try a few varieties of grilled cheeses. I started out with a gruyere and apple grilled cheese on french bread. I've had gruyere a lot in crepes, so it was fun to try it out in a much simpler recipe at home! It was delicious and went perfectly with the apples.

 A couple nights later I made brie and raspberry grilled cheeses. A few weeks ago I had made some baked brie with a raspberry filling and it was divine, so I figured why not try it on grilled french bread? It was also divine. Grilled cheeses offer such room for variety it's amazing. A couple out in Newbern, AL used to feed the students of Rural Studio once a month and every once in a while they would have grilled cheese nights with 4 or 5 different cheese combinations to choose from. Obviously I love cheese and it seems you can't go wrong with grilling it!