Another Jar Opened

I'm a huge fan of Halloween. Every year I have high ambitions to make it great and then I usually drop the ball. Well not this year! Or at least, not all the way this year! I finally put together this bat wall art project. I stole the idea from a former roommate. She made this for our house one year and I finally sat down and made it for my house. It involved a lot of tracing and cutting, which is basically the extent of my artistic ability. On the actual day of Halloween, we had fun celebrating! I went to work as Buttercup from The Princess Bride and won an award at our work Halloween party. J's school doesn't allow him to dress up, so he went as a teacher to work. We don't get many trick-or-treaters at our door, so we splurged and got full sized candy bars. Our door only rang four times, so we still had about 1/3 of this bowl left by the end of the night. Our Halloween tradition is to buy a Papa Murphy's pumpkin shaped pizza (because I'm a suc

One of my favorite bands is The National Parks, a Utah local band. Their song "You Are Gold" is mine and J's song and the song is the reason I chose gold as one of our wedding colors. A few months ago, J found out The National Parks would be putting on a concert at Antelope Island, a place we had never been to but talked multiple times about going. So he got us tickets. A few weekends ago, we packed ourselves a delicious picnic dinner and headed to Antelope Island. We had plans to explore the island, hike a bit, eat our picnic dinner by the scenic lake, and then head over to the concert. Unfortunately, we didn't realize how large the island was and due to a lengthy stop at Walmart for bug spray, we arrived at the concert location too late to visit any other part of the island, but too early for the concert. We were literally the first people there (besides the band tuning up)! So we had our picnic in the car. Once we started eating, we realized we didn'

Just a few small things that have been happening lately for us.... Yesterday was our monthly Restaurant Roulette! We tried Sugarhouse BBQ Company. When we were dating, J and I would park just south of this restaurant, and the walk past it to get to his Sunday ward meetings. It always smelled so good, but we could never stop because it was Sunday! Fast Sundays were the worst. Finally, we stopped by! It's a cute place, and while some of the dishes (like the Burnt Ends) blew us away, some of the other dishes (like the mac n cheese) were just okay. Neither of us are huge BBQ people, but we think we'll go back. Also, I was so distracted while eating, I only snapped this quick pictures as we were leaving! Last Sunday, we went to visit our new house. Windows are up! That's pretty much the big update. Last Friday, my friend (who I'm pictured with) suggested we go to a humorous storytelling event. I convinced J to come along because one of the storytellers was

This is our third year attending Comic Con, but our first year not dressing up! J looks forward to Comic Con and he got a three day pass (although he ended up only going to two days) and I got a full day Saturday pass. We spent a lot of time looking at the booths and enjoying the nerdy stuff. We both love the movie Galaxy Quest and while attending a panel hosted by the script writer, we saw this group dressed as the cast!! They did an awesome job with their costumes! Never give up, never surrender The convention is at the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City, just across the street from City Creek, so for dinner, we headed to the food court. We got dinner at Bocata, which is where we had our first date! So romantic!! Every time we eat at Bocata, I get all sappy and nostalgic, and you can tell by J's face in this picture that he really enjoys my sentimentality.

Earlier in the summer, J asked if I would be interested in going to a demolition derby at the Weber County Fair. I gave a VERY reluctant yes. He assured me I would enjoy it and got us tickets. So on the second weekend in August, we headed up for Ogden. Neither of us had been to Ogden before, so the day before the event, I got a dinner suggestion from a coworker who lives in the area. He suggested  Rovali's , an Italian restaurant on Ogden's historic Main Street. The night ended up being a delightful surprise! The restaurant was great. We got there a bit early so it wasn't too full. Despite it being an Italian restaurant, the decorations were mostly posters and album covers of older rock bands. My coworker suggested we try the lavender lemonade so we got a glass to share. Didn't expect it to be as good as it was! Joey noted it tasted like a much better version of Squirt. I love good garlic bread and that place did not disappoint. After dinner, we wandered around the

Back in April, Husband and I decided it was time for us to move. We looked around and ultimately decided the best option for us was to build a new home. There is a longer story on the whys and hows that decision came about, but I'll save that for another post. For now, I'll share the pictures we've slowly been collecting ever since we started visiting our new house. Our first visit was in May. I purposely included the lamp post in order to keep track of where our house would be built. May 2018 In June, our basement got dug out! You can't see the lamp post in this photo, but it's next to that blue garbage in the right side of the picture. June 2018 Our July visit had some concrete going up! You can also tell that our neighbors homes are going up. During this visit, we walked through some the neighborhood homes that were further along than ours. We could tell the slight variations we had made. I'm excited to see how all our homes look when complete