A little bit of chicken fried

So we ate a super healthy, carb-free dinner tonight... minus the healthy part... and the carb-free part. But it was dang good! Ryan found a great recipe for fried chicken, which he even modified to make it better all on his own! Then I whipped up some other side dishes to go along with it, including homemade biscuits that Ryan requested at the last minute. Since I have never made biscuits before, I didn't have a biscuit cutter. So in honor of Valentine's Day and the Superbowl (even though we weren't honoring the Superbowl), our heart and football shaped cookie cutters became the biscuit cutters.

I love Ryan's awkwardly-fitting blue dog shirt. Seriously, we have made a lot of memories while wearing it! It makes an appearance every once in a while, usually while doing messy cooking things. The best part about this whole fried chicken ordeal was that we remembered we had a burner on our grill, so our apartment doesn't stink for a whole week like nasty fried food because we just do it outside!!!

If you look closely, you can tell it's a football. There's 3 ridges at the top-- definitely a football! Ryan didn't know that I was paying attention but I noticed he only ate the football biscuits, so to make it even I only ate heart ones.

Happy Birthday Mom!

It was my mom's birthday on February 3rd and the whole fam gathered for a little par-tay! I had to put this picture up because I thought it was funny. I think my dad and Ashlynn are in a race to steal my mom's birthday wish while she's not paying attention...

Haha.... Oh man, I love awkward pictures that catch people in a random moment. Kind of like this one that Ryan showed me the other day of coach Rose from the BYU/Utah game doing an extreme version of the Chicken Dance:

January in a nutshell

January is one of those months that I have always disliked because the holidays are done and I am so done with the snow and nasty weather. Also, I have always been in school and winter semester always seems to drag on. This January, however, was much different. First of all, there was hardly any snow for us here (there was freeeezing cold wind, but that's much easier to drive in than snow!), AND I didn't have school! The other great part was that Ryan didn't start class again until the 22nd, which meant that we had most weekends to do whatever we wanted!!! It was such a fun month, although, since a lot of it was just hanging out and relaxing there wasn't much to write about. But here are a few things we did do:

• Ryan was declared husband of the year only 2 days into the year when he suggested shopping at Park City, making a yummy dessert, and renting a chick flick that I've been dying to see (I won't even mention what movie it was because it would totally embarrass Ryan.... and maybe me, too. ha! But if the words "hoedown throwdown" sound familiar to you, then you know what I'm talking about).
• The next weekend, Ryan wanted to see Avatar, but since that is SO not my cup of tea, I {window} shopped at Gateway and then saw another shorter movie that ended up getting out at the same time as his. It was kind of weird seeing a movie by myself, yet I didn't mind and I'd even say it was a pretty fair compromise because we both got what we wanted!
• We also went to see BYU whoop Utah in basketball. Not only was it a great game, but BYU put on a pretty awesome pre-game show, too. Those Cougs know how it's done.
• I got a sewing lesson from my mom. This is how these work: we spend so much time picking out all the cute fabric and coming up with all sorts of ideas that by the time we get home to actually sew, I take 95 years to learn how to do it, so I end up just asking my mom to sew it for me and saying "I'll do it all by myself next time." Yeah, never happens. But I have a lot of project ideas up my sleeve, so maybe one of these days I will really learn...
• Ryan and I have been running a lot lately because we are training for another Ragnar Relay Race in southern California. We put together a family team and will run from Santa Barbara to Dana Point. Most of the run is right along the beach, so this will have much better scenery than our last one in the Las Vegas desert.
• Oh, and we kind of ate yummy banana splits for like the first half of the month (obviously I made no weight loss resolutions for 2010... not because I don't need them (I do), but because I'm all about setting realistic goals for now). So this pretty much sums up our January!

My smart treadmill

This morning after I entered in all of my info on the treadmill and chose my course, I received this scrolling message: "running is not recommended." Seriously.

That's when I realized the treadmill knew me too well and I decided I better listen to it. :)

(Okay, so maybe the message usually reads "hands on the bars while running is not recommended" and the first part of the message wasn't working. And maybe I accidentally touched the bar for a second at the beginning, causing the message in the first place. But I still choose to believe that the machine knows my capabilities these days.)

P.S..... another awesome giveaway here. Especially if you want/have a nice camera!

GIVEAWAY!!!

Hey, hey! It's a giveaway! You should all head over here to enter this giveaway. This locket would be a perfect gift for someone, or just for yourself. All of the jewelry has a cute, vintage look that is adorable. See for yourself:

Me, A Shower, and a Fire Alarm

Back in Chatsworth I had some crazy experiences with out bathroom, which I was convinced was cursed. For stories, go here. Pay particular attention to story #2 at that link, because that is what happened to me today. Only it really WAS a fire alarm, and there was no mistaking that! Once it finally shut off and I settled down a bit, it happened again. I grabbed my phone to call the office to see if they were doing fire alarm testing and forgot to tell us. Nope. It was a real one.

Our Crazy Christmas Story!

Christmas this year was fantastic, despite the fact that a lot of it did not go how it was planned. We were all supposed to be at my grandma's house for Christmas Eve and stay over for Christmas morning as well for our annual brunch and present-opening.  Half way through dinner, the fun began with my grandma choking on her food.  The choking got so bad that her face turned blue and everyone jumped up to administer the heimlich maneuver, but luckily her body decided at the last minute to get rid of it itself.  Only a few short minutes later, we heard a strange loud beeping and realized it was the carbon monoxide detector going off.  Since my parents had just bought it a few weeks earlier, we thought maybe something was wrong with it, so we took it outside and it immediately stopped.  When we brought it back in, it started beeping again.  To be on the safe side, we figured we had better call someone to check on this. A few minutes later the Salt Lake City fire department was at our curbside, flashing lights and all.  Turns out the house had a dangerous level of carbon monoxide in it and we had to turn off the heat, open all of the windows and doors, and leave the house for the night.  We ended up coming back to our apartment, but not without another adventure.  On the way, Lisa and Brandon realized their car's check engine light came on.  Luckily they made it back to Provo that night but they wouldn't have made it much farther since it blew some gasket or something. Basically I felt like we were living our own version of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. However, despite all of the unexpected craziness, we were still able to work everything out and have a good time together as a family, which is the most important part!

The only picture I got of Christmas Eve was, of course, the fire engine outside the house:

Our first Christmas together as a married couple:

We got a lot of great gifts (not that gifts matter) but some of the goods included an electric blanket (Hallelujah! I can sleep at night!), a basketball, ear muffs, gloves, some cute Christmas decorations, a leatherman (some fancy knife thing), clothes, a nice waterbottle, yummy hot fudge, family pictures, and some dinero!  Santa must have thought we were good this year!

Ryan got a present as tall as him! (Or maybe it was a decoy box and there was something really small taped to the bottom. :))

He also got a cool new coat (a.k.a. his mom's old coat from a long time ago that we found in the back of the coat closet):

We decided to save a little money and made our own stockings this year... for about $3.00 total!  They're no pottery barn stockings, but we had a lot of fun making them! 

We headed downtown for a little date to eat dinner and see the lights at temple square. We had a gift card so dinner was free... until we went to pay and realized I left the gift card at home, dang it! It was freezing cold that night and absolutely no parking anywhere close to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, but we still had fun and loved looking at the beautiful decorations in the building! (P.S. This is my first picture taken with my braces... hence the semi-awkward smile on my face):

All of this holiday stuff really tuckered Ryan out and this is how I found him one day.  Actually, he was home sick that day and our apartment complex decided to test the fire alarm in our building during his nap so this was his solution!

Well, another Christmas has come and gone, but we had a lot of fun and really enjoyed decorating our apartment together, starting some little traditions, and spending lot's of time with each other and family!