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!

Sisters in Seattle!

A few weeks ago Kimberly mentioned that Jason would be out of town for s guys weekend so she was looking for somewhere fun to go herself and ended up buying a ticket to Seattle. A few weeks later Lauren decided to join in the fun too! So last weekend we got to have a sisters (plus Ryan) weekend! They both came in Friday night so we picked them up from the airport and headed home for a nice little night of wine drinking and chatting. Saturday morning we got up and made some breakfasts while watching some football. A couple of weeks ago a Navy Civil Engineer Corps Officer from the Seattle area passed away. As a result all of the civil engineer corps officers in the area (that would be me) attended the memorial to show support to his family. So after a nice breakfast I headed off to the memorial service all dressed up in uniform while Kimberly and Lauren headed around the corner for some shopping. I've been pretty congested and had a little cold for the past week or so, but when I got back from the memorial service I was feeling pretty icky. After trying to watch some football with everyone, I ended up having to lay down for about an hour so I could be ready for a night out for dinner. We went to a really great sushi place near our old apartment. When we got home we settled in for the night with some wine and a movie. 

Sunday morning we got up with plans to head out to a pumpkin patch/corn maze! After breakfast we drove  about a half hour north east of Seattle to Bob's Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch! It was slightly obvious that we may have been a little older than the average crowd, but it was awesome! We started out with some hot cider from the store before jumping on a tractor ride over to the corn maze. It was a huge maze, but luckily it came with an aerial map so we could find ourselves a little easier. It was such a nice day out too which made it even better. After maneuvering through the maze we ended up at the pumpkin patch where we picked out some pumpkins for carving later! After we loaded up our purchases, we headed off to the airport to drop Kimberly off for her flight. Lauren stayed through Monday morning, so we headed back to the apartment to carve our pumpkins. I think it had been a while since any of us had carved some pumpkins. It was a lot of fun and I'll definitely have to do it again next year or maybe even again this year! We also baked the seeds for a delicious snack while carving.

The rest of the night we just relaxed and went to bed a little earlier to get ready for waking up at 5am to get Lauren to the airport. Can't wait till we can do another awesome girls' weekend! Also...Ben is super cute still :)

Save The Date!

This past weekend I had to work again in Oak Harbor, so while I was on call we took the opportunity to address a whole bunch of save the date post cards! Our friend, Danny, from Auburn printed the post cards for us and they turned out beautifully! We got so excited about those that we spent some time designing our official invites too. Hopefully we can get those going soon too! So exciting! 

We also spent some time updating and revising our wedding website. Hopefully this will be helpful to get out all the information to guests and give them an opportunity to RSVP digitally.

Rural Studio Reminiscing

A couple of weeks ago Lions Park (a Rural Studio Project that I was a part of in my thesis year) was published in this magazine. It starts on page 81 and my part of the park was the toilet rooms. It's always fun to see the project or any Rural Studio project published. It also made me reminisce a little bit. So here's some fond memories of a video by my team mate, Mark Dempsey, of our tilt up construction on our toilet rooms. The quality had to be lowered a little to upload in a reasonable amount of time, but you get the idea. Yay Rural Studio and Lions Park!

Puppies and Treats!

Here's a few little puppy videos for your enjoyment. The first one is of Ben trying to wrestle with my roomie's much larger dog. They wore each other out after quite a while of this. The second one is Ben showing off all his new tricks. He's getting pretty good!

This week, one of the guys I work pretty closely with is retiring. Tuesday mornings we always have a weekly staff meeting, so tomorrow will be his last one. I made some treats for everyone for his last day. Some blueberry streusel mini muffins and pumpkin scones. I love delicious treats in the morning!

We have also been taking a great East Coast Swing class at the Century Ballroom in Seattle. It works out so nicely because it is so close to our apartment and it's Sunday nights. It's a 5 week class and we just had our 3rd week. Soon we'll have some sweet new moves to show off! Our instructors are in the top left picture here.