Football

My entire life I have avoided watching sports. Actually, I’ve really avoided playing sports too. Yes, I played tee ball and softball when I was little, and the obligatory six year old soccer. But I was the one sitting on the grass picking daisies hoping that the ball never came near me. It didn’t work too well when I was goalie. But now I have a boyfriend who is INTO SPORTS. Like… TV always turned to ESPN, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, plays sports competitively, bets on brackets, fantasy football fanatic, wears the jerseys, gets depressed if his team is losing, and is ecstatic when they’re winning… into sports.





The little exposure to this sports life that I had before now was from my brother in law insisting on watching the Cowboys game on Thanksgiving. Which was always a fight because Thanksgiving is about family not football. And okay I went to Virginia Tech and attended all of the home football games… but let’s be honest, that was about the tailgating and turkey legs, not the football.



And then I start work at a place that is male-dominated… which meant I needed to be able to talk sports for small talk. So Lauren and I cooked up this idea of starting an all girl fantasy football league.

*picture coming soon*

And now, I can talk putting in Wide Receivers and taking out Running Backs, and what Corner Backs are gonna affect what Wide Receivers with the best of them.

*picture coming soon*

Peanut Butter. And Jelly??? No, just peaut butter.

Bella loves peanut butter.



Bella loves peanut butter a LOT.



In fact, I don't think there's anything Bella wouldn't do to lick the end of a jar of peanut butter.



"How do I get the rest of this stuff out?!???"

The love of my life.

Once upon a time a little (okay, not so little) girl went with her boyfriend and a friend to the Pulaski animal shelter in search of her dream puppy. She wanted a small puppy, eight to ten weeks old, which would get to be a smallish medium size, hopefully hypoallergenic, and didn't require too much exercise.

The first puppies she saw were absolutely adorable.

They looked something like these little guys, but a little bit older.

These puppies were so sweet and licked her fingers when she tried to pet them and were crawling all over each other. Unfortunately, the animal shelter guy said they were baby st. bernards and were going to get HUGE. Cute as they were at that age, they were just not the right dog, so girl moved on to look at the other dogs at the shelter.

One pretty puppy stood out when the girl was walking around. The girl walked past her kennel the first time and commented "oh, she's so pretty!" but kept walking, cuz this puppy was a barking puppy and the girl did not want a yapper. But she kept going back to the same kennel because boy, was this dog pretty! And maybe she was just barking because she wanted to play, who could blame her? So the girl asked for a leash and took the pretty puppy in a play pen to try to determine her personality. The puppy ran all around the pen five times getting all of her energy out while she wasn't cooped up, and the girl sat down to watch. As soon as the girl sat down, THIS happened:

The puppy stopped running around and jumped right into the girl's lap! And oh my gosh the girl fell absolutely in love. This was exactly the personality of dog she wanted, a cuddler that loved people!

But the puppy was just too old! She was already ten months old, and the girl wanted a baby puppy that she could train and raise from infancy. Who knew what bad habits this puppy already had??

Then again, this was exactly what she wanted when the puppy WAS ten months old, and a dog is a fifteen year or so commitment. She only missed a few months in the beginning, and that's just a fraction of how long she would have the dog for! And who knew what type of personality a baby puppy would develop, it could be awful! And this puppy's personality was already developed and was sweet as can be.

The girl was in such a quandary, but the more she stayed and played with the puppy, the more she fell in love with her. However, her pragmatic boyfriend suggested that she sleep on it, and not rush in to getting a puppy the first day she started looking.

As they were leaving, the girl asked the animal shelter guy how long the puppy would be at the shelter, if anyone else would come adopt her really soon. The guy said she's an older dog and mostly people only adopt the puppies, she'd been here about a week and they'd probably give her another three weeks before they put her down. "PUT HER DOWN?????" the girl was shocked. She had thought it was a no kill shelter! They couldn't possibly put this puppy down!

But nevertheless, she did have some thinking to do, because just because it might break her heart if they put this dog down, if it wasn't the right dog for her then she would be miserable taking care of her for fifteen years. So she went home and thought about it.

She stayed up late that night trying to decide if this was the right puppy or not. She tried to look at it from every angle and be completely objective. Her boyfriend suggested that she try looking at other shelters to see if there were any other dogs out there that would be a better match.

So in the morning, the girl and her boyfriend went to two more places to look at dogs. The first one was the pound, and it was such an absolutely miserable place the girl left crying, she couldn't stay any longer.

The second place had two different litters of puppies that were eight weeks old! And oh my gosh these were some cute puppies! And so playful! And were going to get a little bit bigger than the girl wanted, but still would be a medium sized dog, which wasn't too big!

They weren't these guys, but were just as cute and playful!

But the whole time the girl played with these adorable puppies she kept thinking about the pretty golden puppy that was at the animal shelter. So after playing with these puppies for a while she turned to her boyfriend and said "Can we go get my puppy now?"

So off they rode to get the pretty puppy that had wormed her way into the girls heart.

This is the ride home from the animal shelter. The new puppy was so good in the car!

After much thought, and lots of help from her sister, the new puppy was eventually named Dakota. And as it turns out, the not so little girl was me!

So world, meet Dakota, the puppy that has stolen my heart!

Easter!!

Okay, so I got REALLY behind on posting. BUT I still want to post about Easter because it was cute and I had a good time.

I'm going to skip the entire day until the evening. I don't remember what happened during the day... probably just slept and watched TV. So skipping on ahead, to start off with we went to dinner! Yay!

This is an awful picture of the two of us, but it's all we took!

Dinner was at Olive Garden, and it was totally scrumptious. We wanted to get wine but we were both broke, so c'est la vie!

After dinner we made Easter eggs! And really, the easter eggs are all that this post is about. We were very creative making them, and they turned out really well. Alex loves sports, so of course his first three were all sport related.

The dye kit came with a wax crayon, which is what he used to draw the lines. I'd never done that before so I thought it was pretty cool!

After a while, I tried to find a way to have the egg sitting halfway in the dye without me actually holding it the whole time. I decided to use a shot glass.

This ended up being REALLY COOL because the shot glass blocked dye from getting to the bottom part of the egg, which resulted in a strip of dye.

I took the shot glass out of the dye and just let the egg sit on the glass for a little while to try to prevent drips down the egg.

The I forgot to take pictures of the egg for my next couple of steps BUT

this is what the finished egg looked like. The blue strip in the middle was the result of the shot glass.

While I was messing around with my shot glass idea, Alex got all sneaky with a wax crayon on an egg.

Sneaky sneaky. See my shot glass egg sitting beside him in the dye?

When he was done with his egg he showed it to me. This was the first side...

Please excuse the bad photography, eggs are trickier than I expected to take pictures of because they're round and reflect light. Maybe I need to take a photography course. But that's off topic.

This is rotating the egg around...

Can you guess what's coming next? Cuz I totally didn't. I was too distracted by my eggs.

Isn't that really sweet? He made an egg with him on one side and me on the other. I loved this egg so much. It was the last one I ate because I wanted to treasure it.

And for the finale:

These are all of our eggs! Notice the bottom right one? I had seen that Alex had an "A" on one side of an egg so I was like "Cool! I'm gonna do one with my initials too!" Guess how dumb I felt when I saw he was actually doing BOTH our initials.

So that's my easter evening! I hope everyone else's was fun too!

St. Patty's Dinner!!

I forgot to take pictures for it! I'm a tard.

So not to bore and just to sum: the food that was cooked as planned was the goulangeres, the main dish was of course the corned beef and a the side were bangers and mash. The goulangeres did NOT look like the pictures in the slightest. The corned beef was DELICIOUS and had a brown sugar and mustard topping that I absolutely loved and want to make again. The sauce from the bangers went awesome with the mash.

Dinner was running late (as usual if I have anything to do with it) so Margaret helped me out and brought an extra appetizer: Gouda and crackers. I love cheese and crackers, really one of my favorite appetizers. Also, I forgot that Ashley was a vegetarian and pretty much everything involved meat so I ran out and bought some asparagus for an extra side dish. And I didn't have time to make dessert so Margaret also brought little short cakes with strawberries, blueberries and whipped cream.

And, although I had planned to be the master chef for this master dinner I ended up kinda just being the coordinator. Alex and his little brother Dan helped a ton (they made the goulangeres and helped with the corned beef) and Margaret and Cally did the asparagus. I used premade mashed potatoes and cooked the sausage. But I swear I was busy and running around the whole time! I'm not very good at big dinners though, and the Easter dinner got canceled since the Irish dinner was only three days before and was a LOT of work, so from now on I'm gonna not say I want to cook everything. Maybe I'll just stick to desserts, that's what I'm good at.

I swear this was just a summary, I really could have gone on for pages more, but what's the fun without pictures? I've got some really exciting blogs coming up soon, as soon as I upload my pictures!

Post Secret

This is my favorite Post Secret card for this week:

What an interesting tale THAT would make!

St. Patty's Day Dinner!

Which will be roughly a week late, because it's still in the planning stages. In fact, it's barely even a plan because I have yet to invite anyone to it. And I want it to be BIG! I love big dinners. However, because I am excited about all things irish, and because yesterday was St. Patrick's day so I still have GREEN on the mind, I'm going to start planning the food I want to make right now. And beware, I may have relied heavily on TastyKitchen! Hold on to your coattails boys and girls!

The Appetizer:

Blue Cheese and Irish Cheddar Gougeres

These babies from TastyKitchen have three VERY scrumptious sounding main ingredients (two of which can be found in their name): Blue Cheese, Irish Cheddar, and Dry White Wine. I'm going to start making these an hour before I tell everyone to come over, so that when people arrive these little suckers will have just been taken out of the oven and will be ready to eat!

The Main Dish:

Authentic Corned Beef and Cabbage

This picture is just a random picture of corned beef and cabbage because the recipe I'm going to use doesn't come with a picture. St. Patrick's day dinner is just not the same if it doesn't have corned beef. I loooove corned beef SO MUCH but I get it less than once a year (because there isn't always a St. Patty's dinner) so to skip it on this important day is just sacrilegious. At least in my eyes. The TastyKitchen corned beef recipe I found looks delicious, and comes with a perfect score in its ratings. It claims to be a recipe from an old irish pub, and just that fact makes it sound even more perfect for the dinner I'm planning!

The Sides:

Bangers and Mash

Bangers and Mash is apparently the irish way of saying sausage and mashed potatoes. And wow, I like their way of saying it! This side is actually labeled as a main dish in TastyKitchen, I guess because of the sausage, but I'm still going to make it anyways, probably just because of the name. I think it's actually the only side I'm going to do because the corned beef is made with cabbage, so we'll have cabbage, mashed potatoes and sausage all as sides. Does that sound good enough? I was also thinking of making some type of bread item, although I'm not sure I need to because I'm making the Gougeres for an appetizer. Thoughts anyone?

The Dessert:

Irish Potatoes

I actually really don't like irish potatoes. The main ingredient is coconut, and for some reason I can't make myself chew and swallow coconut. Unless it's in a pina colada, but in that case it doesn't have the waxy gross texture, which is where my problem with it lies. BUT. Just like corned beef, St. Patty's dinner is just not St. Patty's dinner without some irish potatoes, so they will be made! I'm going to be calling up my mom for the recipe on this one. I'm also looking for ideas for another irish dessert... any suggestions?

So that will be my St. Patrick's Day (A Week Late) Dinner! I'm looking forward to it! I will of course also be decorating the place with lots and lots of green, and I will probably be serving Guiness as a drink. Wish me luck!