Baking and Penne

So below are some pictures of what we have been baking at the apartment. The first picture is of a red velvet cake that had peppermint frosting and peppermint candies in the middle and on top. Brian decorated his first cake and it was very good. Then for today's Super Bowl I made carrot cake cupcakes with green grass frosting and football shaped oreos on top. I think they turned out well and it is what I was expecting in my head.

The video at the bottom is of Penne being calm, which never happens in our house. So with our new camera that we got for Christmas, I took the video while Brian was calming her down. She gets very excited when he comes home, so eventually he tries to get her to stop being crazy. This time he succeeded.

She is funny as always and yesterday after I came home from a conference she was playing with herself by pushing the crate door open and close with her nose. Every time it would bounce back open she would turn her head in amazement and then continue the game. I started laughing at her and she stopped. Wished I had that on camera as well.

A New Year

We have been bad bloggers, considering we haven't posted since Halloween. So I apologize, but the end of the semester along with all of the holidays was so busy that we didn't have time. I will try and summarize what has been going on since then.

We were fortunate to have family come down for both Thanksgiving (my parents) and Christmas (Brian's parents). Both holidays were very nice and a lot of fun, so thank you guys for sharing it with us.

The end of the semester was crazy for me, but I was so happy for a break. I was able to go home for a week after Christmas and it was great seeing everyone in Kentucky. However, school starts back up on Monday and it is going to be even busier. I will be working as the project manager for the research project that will be starting up for my assistantship. This will be a difficult work in progress for everyone involved. I also will be starting a second job as a study hall monitor for student athletes. I can only work 10 hours a week due to my assistantship, but it will be an easy job and extra money always helps.

Brian has been working extremely hard at Toys R Us. I know this is not his ideal job, but it is better than not working at all. He worked long hours throughout the holidays and was unable to come home with me. He has officially completed all of his graduate school applications and now it is just a waiting game to see where he will get in. I am so proud of him for working so hard and I know it will pay off in the end.

Below are pictures of some changes to our apartments, the 6 inches of snow we got at Christmas (which delayed me getting home for a couple of days), Penne's snowballs attached to her legs and Christmas morning.

Hope everyone is doing well and we will update as new events happen!

Halloween

So as you know in a previous post, we got our pumpkins from the farmer's market a couple weeks ago. But due to the craziness of graduate school, I hadn't had the chance to carve them yet. We finally sat down Saturday night in the living room and did it while watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (my Netflix choice). I carved the face of a schnauzer (found the template online and it looks similar to Penne) on my pumpkin and Brian made his own template of Big Red to carve in his pumpkin. I think that both of them look really great!

Also a couple weeks ago, I made brownies and used some cookie cutters (thanks Vickie, Staci & Barb) to cut out ghosts and pumpkins. Then I put them on my cake plate that has the candy corn ribbon. On Saturday, I also made cupcakes (thanks to Mom, Vickie, Staci & Barb for the cupcake liners) and used orange colored frosting to make them more festive. The orange isn't as bright as I had hoped, but for my first time coloring frosting it came out pretty well. Again these went on my cake plate for display!

Sunday was Halloween and we had bought two big bags of candy in preparation for all of the trick or treaters. We thought that we would have a lot of kids because there are 5 or 6 apartment complexes on this road alone. But we only had 27 kids stop by and we have a lot of candy leftover (although Brian doesn't mind that at all). Penne did pretty good with people coming to the door, at first she was barking at them. But as the night went on she got less and less excited about the visitors. So she is doing pretty good.

BBQ Festival

Again sorry for the late postings, I have been super busy studying for tests these past couple of weeks and just now have had the chance to relax. So keep a look out for some more postings. On October 23, Brian and I decided to go to the BBQ Festival in Lexington, NC. For some reason, this weekend was packed full of festivals to choose from. There was the BalloonFest in Statesville, NC and a Wine Tasting Festival here in Greensboro. But we both decided that the BBQ Festival had the most that we wanted to do plus we were craving some pulled pork sandwiches.

We decided to try and get to the festival early because there was a steel drum band we wanted to see and to try and avoid some of the crowds. So we parked at Childress Vineyards and took a trolley to downtown Lexington. On the trolley, the tour guide told us that they had been preparing the sandwiches since Thursday and that they were expecting 150,000 people to attend. At first it was nice not having huge crowds because we were able to walk around with ease, but it soon filled up quick.

First, we saw the sand sculpture. Every year they carve a sand sculpture, usually of pigs but it has a different theme each time. It was really cool! Then we found the steel drum band that we wanted to see. It wasn't quite what we were expecting, but it was still good. Next we went to the antique car show and there was some really nice cars there. I think my parents would have really liked them. The next thing we wanted to see was the BMX stunt show, so we looked through some more booths before taking a seat in the stands. The show was good and my favorite was the flat rider. He does stunts on the ground by using momentum to keep his bike going. I thought that was really impressive. I also got some really cool shots of the stunts in the air (see above).

There was definitely a lot more booths to go through and then we decided to get lunch at one of the BBQ stands. We got pulled pork sandwiches, pig's tails (curly fries) and drinks. We sat on the grass in front of a church and ate our lunch. We actually hated the sandwiches, which was really disappointing. The onions on them were nasty and the buns were soggy. The only thing that saved us was the fries. From there, we went to the lumberjack competition where they compete in different events with saws and axes. It was really interesting, until this very tall guy suddenly appeared and gradually stood in front of us which blocked our view. It was quite frustrating since he probably could see just fine due to his height, plus he knew he was doing it on purpose. So we just decided to leave.

We tried to see the pig races, but it was too crowded. Then we saw the corvette show, but since we lived in Bowling Green for so long there wasn't any corvette there that really impressed us. Basically, the festival was good at the beginning but gradually got worse. However, we are really happy that we went to experience it.