Deep fried turkey

Does anything more really need to be said?

Ok, one more thing needs to be said.  Don't try to teach babies how to open beer.

Good work, Mike.  On the turkey.  And the beer. 

When a task looms large...make ice cream. Really.

Task looming large:

 
Another task, but enjoyable task, that helps with task looming large:

When faced with addressing a rather large pile of wedding invitations...I recommend ice cream.  Homemade ice cream.  Courtesy of a wonderful shower gift from my future mother-in-law and a few key ingredients...including Guinness.  Beer ice cream.  Not beer with ice cream, which was extremely disappointing in Prague, but actual beer ice cream.  Potential kitchen adventure ACCOMPLISHED.  David Leibovitz's Guinness-milk chocolate ice cream.  So good.

And obviously the invitations have made it out by now.  Phew.  Because with two weeks to go, that would be kinda disastrous.  Now if only all the RSVP cards could come back...

Come back to Texas...

...it's just the same since you went away.  Before you lose your accent.  And forget all about the Lone Star State.

Oh, you're already back?  AWESOME.  Then you can come visit us!!

All in reference to my dear, wonderful, amazing friends from forever, Carrie and Jason and the adorable Alan, who made the journey back to Texas (Houston!) from an extended stay in New York City (which don't get me wrong, I loved visiting them there...but it's nice to have them HOME).  Yay yay yay!!  So of course a summer road trip was in order, and we were more than happy to have them come hang out in Dallas with us for the weekend.

In July.  When it was 28 bajillion degrees outside.  Every minute.  And yes, almost three months ago.  Deal.

We had plenty of chill time, and Mexican food time, and for the kid in all of us...aquarium time!  Also apparently a fun activity...house cleaning time!  Who knew.  Two year olds have a fascinating kind of attention span.

Alan + Swiffer = kitchen tile moments.  Both toy and cleaning apparatus.  Awesome combination.  I'm totally putting Swiffer pads on the knees and feet on all onesies.

Cleaning is exhausting.  Apparently for both dog and human.  Also, tile floors are nice and cool in the summer heat...

I wish I still saw the world through his eyes.  Everything is AWESOME.

Check out the fun in the Picasa album.  Mainly aquarium shots.  I refrained from photographing all of our food.  You're welcome.

Carrie and Jason, so glad you guys are close again!!  See you in a mere two weeks for this whole wedding business!  YAY!!

Giant big deal #1 - we totally went and bought a house

Can you believe it?!?  Normally I'm a huge overanalyzer and delayer of doing and major procrastinator...but we just DID this thing.  We'd spent a few weekends with our realtor checking out houses in various areas to get a really good idea of what we really wanted in a house and where we wanted to be geographically...and did you know there are about a million things to consider when you're buying a house?  Things like square footage (Craig won this battle - his belief is bigger is better) and number of bedrooms and school districts and size of backyard and age of home and how much do you really want to spend and dear HEAVENS the commute time and so on and so on and so forth.  And imagine two people who both like to have their way making this decision together.  We made it through this - good pre-marital test, methinks.

And while I wasn't 100% really ready and totally on board with buying a house RIGHT NOW - it just worked out.  We both fell in love with this place, and it has absolutely everything we want, and I want to live in this house for the next fifty years.  I love it.  And Craig loves it, too.  And when that actually happens, you dang well better just buy the place.  Especially when the sellers are more than happy to do a sale-leaseback so the buyers (ummm...us) aren't stuck with rent+mortgage for a few months.  It just all came together.

So I crunched spreadsheet numbers and panicked while Craig told me it would all be ok...and it was.  I'm such a worrier.

Yay for our own little slice of Carrollton!!

That day we celebrated with lunch at Abuelo's (extremely close to our new home AND site of many fond A-town memories AND delicious Mexican food!!), and then we also had giant steaks and a bottle of bubbly for dinner.  Because food is really the best way to celebrate, you know.  A little anticlimactic since we don't actually live in the house (and won't be there until December/January, btw), but still really, really exciting.  And really, really real when we make that first mortgage payment here in about ten days.  Yowza.

I grabbed the pictures from the realtor website and tossed them into a Picasa album if you'd like a better look.  It's all perfect and wonderful in those pictures (except for the color of the dining room - I'm dying to paint, and other than that it's pefect...and maybe some more painting, because I'm demented and actually really love to paint walls), so it might look a little more sad when we move in and have less furniture (fact of new home ownership, right??  there is a dining set in our near future...), but it will be our home.  For a very long while.  And I'm so, so happy about that.

Oh?  What was that you said?  We're totally insane for adding "home purchase" to the list of life events occuring over the last month or so, especially with the wedding coming up?  I totally agree.  Hoping my stress levels at least burned some calories.

Just a little crazy around these parts...

...what with, oh, I don't know...planning a wedding and buying a house and going to New Orleans AND Philadelphia AND Atlanta and oh yeah there's this thing called fall busy season that I'd managed to pleasantly avoid for a couple of years while doing the DC thing but returned with a vengeance this year and deprived me of sleep and sanity.  You know, just normal stuff.

So get ready for a mini-blog-extravaganza.  Just to catch up.  With shortened posts.  Less wit.  Fewer pictures.  Much sadness.  Think of it as a condensed weekend marathon of one of your favorite shows.

GO!

Also, if anyone has tips on how to get the header picture to actually match the width of the blog, that would be stellar.  I don't have the energy.

I'm alive

Promise.