Christmas and New Years

We just returned from a fabulous two part holiday vacation...part one: Christmas in Michigan! We flew in Christmas Eve and quickly got dressed and ready for the Christmas Eve church service. Turns out traveling all day makes you pretty exhausted. We were supposed to go to another party immediately afterwards, but decided take out Chinese food, frozen chicken wings, and large amounts of wine at home was a better idea. I mean, we did have a house of 9 people already, so we had our own party.

Detroit Airport

Christmas Day we got moving a little slow, but fast enough to open gifts before people came over for the next party! Uncle Rick's family came over for the traditional king crab legs and pizza. Soooo much delicious crab...we devoured it all!
























Next day...another party...whew! This time it was the Raetz side of the family which meant sooo many small children running around our house! Holy cow that was a lot of energy. It was great to get Grandma to see everyone at the same time.



Next day...another party...this time it was a baby shower for our cousin Melissa, so girls only. The boys went off to the casinos for the afternoon instead. I can't even imagine how Eric and Melissa are going to fit all that baby stuff in their New York apartment! This was the last party of the week, so after that we turned out attention to football watching the rest of the week.

We headed back to the airport on New Years Eve. Our original plan was to fly back to Seattle that night. A few weeks ago, some auburn friends started putting together plans to all meet up in DC for New Years. It's all a little easier to do last minute planning for them since they're all in the southeast, but after everyone else agreed to meet up for New Years, I couldn't resist adding that to our trip as well. So instead of heading home on New Years Eve, we headed to DC! We ended up with a house full of 10 Auburn friends for our New Years celebration! We hadn't all been together in about a year and a half, so it was so great to see everyone again! It also made for quite the New Years party night!















New years day we did a lot of football watching, then went to a bar for more football watching. After sitting around a eating all day a few of us decided to go for a walk to check out the Christmas decorations at Union Station. DC is such a great city to wander around.







The next morning we wandered down the street to Union Market. Oh my, I would be in trouble if I lived that close to this amazing place. It was just booth after booth of amazing food selections! I wish I could have gone back after day to try out each place. After all that food consumption we decided it was a good idea to do some more walking, so we headed down to the Capital building, walked around some sites, then ended up at an upper floor bar overlooking the white house.







This was our last night all together and by this time we were all pretty exhausted, so we headed back to the Smith house where Evelyn had amazingly prepared me a giant home made dish of tiramisu for my birthday! I was super impressed by those culinary skillz! Having my birthday that weekend was another good excuse to make this trip. It was my birthday present to hang out with so many of my favorite people, it made me so happy!

We didn't head out till the evening on the 3rd, so we spent the afternoon relaxing and watching movies with the last few people before heading out for our long trip home.

A Raetz Invasion



I just got back from a quick little getaway to sunny California! I had Tuesday, Veteran's Day, off of work, so I decided to take Monday off and have a 4 day weekend in California! I flew out Friday night to SF where I was immediately wisked off to SoCal by Kimberly and Lauren. We actually only made it about half way Friday night and spent the night in Pismo Beach before finishing the drive Saturday morning to LA. After picking up Yelan from her house in LA, we headed straight to the beach! After a long drive we were pretty hungry so we found a little place on the Venice Beach walkway and grabbed some food and drink to keep us going. It was amazing already just to sit in the sun!!

Since the sun sets so early these days, we soaked up a few more rays while walking the beach down to Santa Monica before heading back to the house we rented to get ready for a night out! We got all dressed up and headed out to dinner at a little Japanese place Lauren had been to before back when she lived in LA.







After bar hopping to a few places in Santa Monica, we ended up with a serious girls night of cuddling on the bed while watching Pitch Perfect...amazing!

 

Sunday morning we grabbed a quick brunch before heading to the beach to prepare for our surf lesson! It was so much fun! It was just the 4 of us girls and one other girl so we all got plenty of attention from the instructor. We all got up on the board at least a few times, so it felt like a pretty productive lesson!









The lesson was also completely exhausting, so we took a few hours to get cleaned up and relax at the house before getting ready for our next excursion. We decided to walk down to the nearby Abbot Kinney neighborhood for the night. 



Monday morning we checked out of our house had a few more stops in LA, then hit the road back to SF just in time to check out the little brother's new house! They just bought their first house!!!! It's a super cute place in the Dogpatch area of SF. I'm super excited for them and I was so glad we could make a stop over there to check it out for a bit (also to see Jordan and Kristen)!!!

Tuesday was my last day in town, so we spent it wine tasting/shopping in Napa. Perfect end to a little California getaway before heading back to 30 degree weather in Seattle. On the bright side...cold weather means snow...and snow means snowboarding soon..woohoo!







Happy Halloween

Halloween actually fell close enough to a weekend this year to make it doable to have a weekend Halloween party. We still have yet to get any trick or treaters at our house...I guess if we really want that to happen we need to put a sign out in front of our house...and actually be at home. This year we actually dressed up and went to a Halloween party on Saturday night. Of course we had to finish watching the Auburn panic attack of a game before we went out. Luckily it was a win, otherwise it may have put a damper on the evening!

We ended up dressing up as Indians. We actually hand made our costumes and did some fun war paint makeup to complete the look. Ryan even shaved his head into a mohawk for it! I did  a fauxhawk with side braids and a poof in the middle. Unfortunately I didn't really get a good shot of the costumes head to toe. We had fun partying though with some good friends!









Professional Instagrammer

So here's a fun fact for the week: I was contacted by Travelzoo last week who offered to give me a $50 voucher in exchange for the use of this photo! They saw it on my Instagram page and wanted to use it for an upcoming promotion...so keep your eye out for it! I do believe this officially makes me a professional instagrammer...I guess I'll still keep my day job though ;)

Whidbey Weekend



Sunset ferry ride across to the island

So we headed back to my old home island this weekend. The first two years that I lived in the PacNW, I had a house up in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. I haven't really been back there too much since then though. This weekend we had a group of 8 of us looking for a quick weekend getaway to a beach destination, so we ended up on the south end of Whidbey Island. Unfortunately I didn't take a whole lot of pictures, but the weekend consisted of a little beaching/boating, a lot of eating, some football watching, and a lot of game playing. It was a lot of fun and a great group of friends that we got to hang out with!