Virginia Beach Weekend

This last weekend my Mom came to visit so we decided to get out of Richmond for a weekend getaway. Pretty much everyone I have talked to here has told me that Virginia Beach is not the greatest beach to go but it is the closest and most convenient to get to so we chose that to save some time. Compared to San Diego beaches I think Virginia Beach is way nice...but it is also the off season still and not that crowded...oh yea and it rained the whole weekend. Even still I was just happy to be doing anything. Thanks for a fun weekend mom! Here are the pictures:

Walking along the beach...it was very cold water






Getting Henna Tattoos with mamasita!

Sweet!


We ended up getting Henna all over the hotel room somehow...I still haven't received a charge for it yet.

Waiting for her turn to get her butterfly.

My Life Is a (little bit more) Complete

After many years of putting a little bit of effort into finding the perfect cookie recipe I have finally found it. I discovered all this time that I had been looking for the wrong thing. I mistakenly would tell google that I wanted "soft" cookies when in fact I wanted "chewy" cookies. If anyone knows me very well they would know I am somewhat of a food purist. I don't like when my pizza has anything exotic on it, I am happy with just plain old pepperoni. This is the same with my cookies.
Christmas time brings wonderful foods and feelings but it also comes with some interesting cookies that people make so that it makes the holiday seem extra special. A note to coconut, apricot, and pumpkin...you can just stay out of my cookies! I don't need these thrills and flashiness, I just want my chocolate chip. So without further ado here is the most wonderful chocolate chip cookie recipe ever in the world (slightly modified by me). It looks so simple but just give them a try...

2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt, set aside.
2. Cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. Beat vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips. Drop cookie dough 1 heaping tablespoon at a time onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
3. Bake for approximately 10 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet immediately to cool.

Rant!

People...please stop getting married in 2009...it is making me feel very sad!

That's all...

House Tour

Introduction



The beginning



The Middle





The End!

Ps. This took me 2 hours to upload so don't expect many more videos...

Mother's Day

I stole this text from Wikipedia and thought it was interesting but also kinda sad...this is just a part of the story...

"Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mother's Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors."

"When Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. In 1907, she passed out 500 white carnations at her mother’s church, St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia—one for each mother in the congregation. Anna chose Sunday to be Mother's Day because she intended the day to be commemorated and treated as a Holy Day."

"Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration."

"Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mother's Day infuriated Anna and she made her criticisms explicitly known throughout her time. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ..."."

Now I will think twice about purchasing an already made greeting card

This ones for my ladies...Amanda and Tiffany

Amanda and Tiffany have sent out strong requests for me to blog something. I kinda feel like I don't have anything interesting to say so I am just going to post pictures for now...
p.s. I already put them on facebook so you might have already seen them.

This is at Tori's engagement party..she is one of the senior interns. It was an unbearably hot day in Richmond so we are all a little shiny faced.

These are the rings they had on the dessert table for decoration so Miranda and I took the opportunity to become engaged...Can you tell which hand is mine?


This was at a party one of our managers had. He had all this delicious food but I had already eaten a hamburger...But I found a way to eat some anyway...Even the big shirt couldn't hide all the cannoli and shrimp cocktail.

I'm Alive

Hey ya'll....sorry its been a while. My stealing of others internet has been not successful recently so I have not had a way to update.

Amanda's Wedding
This was amazing and a big blur considering I was only home for 2 days. I got to see my family, friends, eat at Jasmine, get my hair done, and see Amanda and Jonathan get married which were all my goals for the weekend.
I didn't get to see them actually get married since it was in the Salt Lake Temple but I waited outside for about 2 hours for them to come out...to which I cried a little. Amanda looked beautiful and so happy and I had a lot of fun hanging out with her family.
By the time the reception came I was exhausted and sick of telling people how Virginia was but I got to see a few of my favorite people who I will leave unnamed. I also still had enough energy to do this to Amanda's truck with the help of her brothers and other watchers.








Let's just say Jamandathan was less than happy to see this but you only get married once so I seized the opportunity. They can just make it up to me when I get married. Also the highlight of the night was watching them pull away, not because the truck looked ridiculous, but because the belt squealed all the way down the street.
Here are some more pictures to sum up the night...