Happy Wednesday!

What has everyone been up to today? We have just been hanging out with our family and trying to kick our colds. Last night was Deaner's dad's birthday and we had dinner over at his house. Happy Birthday, Dick and thanks for those delicious burgers! Yum!! This afternoon we met Deaner's parents and some family friends in our old neighborhood for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants. I mean, does it get any better than a deluxe grilled cheese with tomato, onion, smoked apple wood bacon on texas toast?? I didn't think so.

The real treat of the day (and it was hard to beat that grilled cheese and company!) was that my baby cousin Thomas came over for dinner. He is about the sweetest baby I have ever met and he is so happy all the time. It doesn't hurt that he loves me so much! My mom made a delicious dinner and baby Thomas really enjoyed chewing on the ribs once the meat was eaten off of them!He is just so cute. After his rib eating frenzy it was time for a bath. I needed both hands for that so there aren't any pictures of him from the bathtub! But he was nice and clean and happy when he got out!I just can't get enough of him. Tomorrow should be a big day. What are everyone's New Year's Eve plans? Sometimes I wish my husband would just agree to stay at home and chill out but something tells me it is going to be awhile until I can get him to do that! We have rented out the upstairs of the same beer brewery, Gordon Biersch, we rented out for our wedding after party. Should be a good time! I can't believe that our Stateside vacation is coming to an end but we have been here for 2 weeks already! I just have to figure out how we are going to get all of our stuff home. Should be interesting. Happy New Year to everyone!!!

Shopping Shopping Shopping

What more can a person ask for? All these stores in one central location!? At huge discounts and great savings?! It was a grrrrreat day. Minus the subarctic temperatures and gale force winds! We woke up early this morning and got on the road to glory by 10:30am. After stops at Gap, Brooks Brothers, Cole Haan, Ralph Lauren, Coach, Pottery Barn, Nike etc etc. we are sufficiently ready to head back to Germany. Since we have zero shopping there we have to stock up while we are home. While we didn't spend anything too outrageous, I think we are set until our next trip to the states sometime in the late spring or early summer.

Now we are settled into the basement of my parents house watching the UGA game on the big screen TV. Go Dawgs! Does anyone else think that Urban Meyer is the biggest asshole to ever walk the face of the earth? First of all, is it really necessary to announce your stepping down from a head coaching position DAYS before your teams big game? How about keeping quiet until after the big day? Secondly, the biggest bone I have to pick is the following. Meyer cites "health issues" as his reasons for quitting and his need to make his wife, children and faith his top priority. Not 24 hours later he decides to change his mind?? WTF?? On second thought, after seeing some of my players cry, I am confidant that I will be able to return to my head coaching position. Sorry kids, screw my health, gotta coach. I have just watched all this in horror at the audacity of this dude. Seriously? 'Nuff said.

Happy Monday and Go Dawgs!

Christmas In the Atl

Six Christmases have been completed. I am so exhausted I can hardly move! But we had a really really great time. If only we didn't both end up sick with horrible colds everything would have been perfect. Now we are both laid up on the couch sniffling and coughing and trying not to wince in pain every time we swallow. Ugh. Lord help me!! So what better time to catch everyone up on the events of the past few days?

I should back up all the way to when we landed in Atlanta last Thursday. We had dinner with all of our parents Thursday night, spent the night at Deaner's mom's house, and headed to Virginia on Friday morning to visit Deaner's grandparents. Since there were going to be 10 extra people staying at his Grandparent's house, we opted for a hotel room this time. I was a little sad at first not to be in the hustle and bustle of things but it became clear quickly that it was the best decision that could have been made. We actually got to sleep past 5:30am when all the kids would wake up and we got to enjoy long hot showers in the morning without worrying about hot water! Too top off the chaos of the weekend, the snow started around Greensboro on the way up on Friday and didn't stop until Saturday late afternoon. 13 inches of snow later everyone got their fill of sledding for the year! I don't remember seeing snow like that in awhile! It was definitely a good time.

Sunday we headed home for the marathon to begin. Monday evening we had Christmas at Deaner's dad's house with his sister, brother-in-law and nephews. Tuesday night we had Christmas with my Dad's side of the family in Covington, Georgia. Wednesday night we had Christmas with Deaner's Mom's side of the family in Lawrenceville. Thursday we had Christmas Eve with my Mom's side of the family at my parent's house. Friday night we had Christmas night with Deaner's Dad and Stepmom. We finally returned home this morning completely worn out! It has been a long fun week and it has been great to spend it with all our family. Now it is time to sit back, relax and try and get better!! Oh yeah, we have some friends we want to see too!

Remember me bragging about how good my gifts turned out? I wasn't lying! Here are a few shots of how they looked when I was done.So, now you understand what I am saying? Some people are just GIFTED at wrapping presents and I happen to be one of them! I wish I had pictures from all 6 of our Christmases but unfortunately my camera was left in Germany. Therefore I only have pictures from my parent's Christmas that I was able to steal from my Mom's camera. Look how great her house looks decorated! I hope one day I can do the same with our house!I want my Christmas table to look like this and my bar to look this fantastic when I grow up!It just isn't fair!! One of these days I guess (way in the future!). We have a family tradition at Christmas dinner of having Christmas poppers at each place setting. Each popper has a little toy but most importantly a paper crown. If you are going to eat dinner at our house, you must eat with your paper hat on.Pretty funny, huh? Here is my husband chowing down on the uneaten clams after dinner.No hat, no food. My cousin in the background wasn't allowed to eat! Ha. And that about wraps up the first 10 days of our trip. We had Mexican for dinner tonight and have been on the couch watching football all night with raw noses and congested heads! I hope we start feeling better by tomorrow because this stinks. I will post picture of our gifts as soon as I can take some because I have been dying to share what we gave everyone this year. I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas!!

Exhaustion

Anyone see the movie Four Christmases? We are having 6 Christmases this year. Not that I am complaining or anything but lord, I am exhausted and we are only heading to the 3rd one tonight! I might have to sleep for a week after Christmas is actually over. I got all my gifts wrapped up (finally) and they look fantastic (as usual!). I'm not afraid to brag about my wrapping job because I am good at it and I spend money on my wrapping paper. I just like to LOOK at them. I forgot my camera in Germany but I will try and borrow my Mom's to show them off a bit!

Hope everyone is having a great week. I promise to write more soon!

Home Stretch

I can't wait to go home on Thursday. I don't even mind that we are going to have to wake up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport. And by crack of dawn, I mean like the middle of the night so we can catch a 5:51am train and arrive at 7:00am at the airport for our 9:45am flight. This might seem a bit excessive but if anything happened and I missed that flight? Good things would not come from that. Today I managed to waste A LOT of time forgetting things and having to return to the base several times. Typical really. Tomorrow I am getting my hair done at noon and then I am going to bake cookies for our neighbors and mailman at the base. I will also have to find some time in there to pack. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a very last minute packing for me as I am normally packed with my suitcase by the door about a week in advance. Seriously. All that will happen between tomorrow and Wednesday. Hopefully. Unless I somehow forget I am going home.

In other news, I am starting to understand the German weather. It is officially here. Snow flurries and ice are normal. Today the high was about 21 degrees. I froze my butt off, INSIDE the house. Not cool. I'm trying to ignore it as best as I can right now but I have a feeling things are going to get ugly soon! I'm not a fan of the cold.

Anyways, I am off to have dinner with Deaner. It is Taco Soup again (we tend to eat things often when we love them!). At least it is nice and hot! Happy Tuesday to all!

Travel Day

I think I might live to regret accidently turning off the automatic Dutch to English translator on the computer. Of course now everything is in Dutch and I can't figure out how to find the translator again! All my webpages are coming up in Dutch. Which is also puzzling since I am in Brussels and I'm pretty sure that the official language here is French?? At least that is what everyone speaks. Anyways......getting here was quite the event, as usual. Driving here is insane. We are staying about half a block from the Grand Place and traffic is a nightmare. We were driving down a one way street on the way in and a taxi in front of us stopped, then decided it no longer wanted to continue down the one way street. The lady taxi driver got out of the car and started motioning for everyone behind us to start backing up. WHAT?? Who does that? Sorry lady, go around the block!!! And that is exactly what I would have said if I had been able to communicate with her! Instead, she just started reversing until she was about to hit us and we had no choice but to try and get out of the way. Ugh. I just have to prepare myself when we come here because no matter how good of a mood Deaner is in when we reach the outskirts of the city, it will be gone by the time we reach our hotel.

We are not in our normal hotel this time but I can actually SEE the Marriott down the street from this hotel. We are staying at the Best Western Premier Carrefour De L'Europe. I think that is French for "not as nice as the Marriott down the street". Ha! This hotel is fine really but a small step down. However, I do have this view from where I am sitting right now.So I can't complain that much. I don't have my camera with me but apparently someone who stayed a few floors down from me during the summer did, and I was able to "borrow" it off the internet. I can actually see into the Grand Place and it is pretty cool. Also, right now there is a Christmas Market going on in the little square directly below our room.

I can almost taste the Chi-Chi's margaritas that I will be enjoying tonight! Now if Deaner would only get home from work. I shouldn't complain too much since it is only 3pm but happy hour starts at 5 around here! :) Ok, I am off to catch a few episodes of Gene Simmons Family Jewels before our outing! Happy Thursday to everyone!

Blaaaaah

Do you ever just have blah days? Today was one of them. I had NO plans today and was bored bored bored. As a result, we had excellent BBQ chicken in vinegar BBQ sauce for dinner and our house is clean from top to bottom. We also have freshly cleaned laundry and our bed is made. God, I hope tomorrow is better!! Oh yeah, I might have forgotten to mention it but we are heading to Brussels tomorrow. I'm so looking forward to Chi-Chi's margaritas! Here is how I filled the rest of my day.This is a hilarious show. I love it! I have the complete season 2 as well. I just can't believe that I forgot I owned this until now. It was such a nice treat because I hadn't seen any of the episodes that I watched today! Hope tomorrow is more eventful!

Yummy Delicious

I am ALWAYS in search of great new (easy) recipes to try out now that I am home full time and have time to cook dinner each night for my husband. Some have been awesome and other disasters. I often ask for ideas on my blog but I seldom get any response. Well last week I got a great suggestion from New Girl on Post for Taco Soup. I had been thinking of trying a Taco Soup recipe for some time now and this was the push I needed. YUM !!!!!! I made New Girl's recipe tonight and needless to say, it was a huge hit! Deaner ate 3 bowls of it and he only quit because I told him there was not going to be enough for his lunch tomorrow if he did not stop eating! He gave it two thumbs up and asked if we could have it again next week. Fine by me since it only took about 15 minutes to prep! Does not get much better than that! I am going to post the recipe the way that I made it. I think that New Girl said that it was originally Weight Watchers 2 point Taco Soup but after the buffalo meat I added, I'm not sure the point content was THAT low. However, the soup was definitely healthy and a great mid-week dinner!

Spicy Taco Soup

1 large onion, diced
1 (14 1 / 2 ounce) can diced tomatoes
1 (14 1 / 2 ounce) can diced tomatoes & green chiles
1 (11 ounce) canned corn with red and green peppers (they call it Fiesta Corn)
1 (15 1 / 2 ounce) can black beans (rinsed)
3 cans water
1 package taco seasoning mix (I used McCormick's Spicy Taco Mix, we like this for tacos as well!)
1 package ranch salad dressing mix (dry)
1 pound buffalo meat (or lean ground beef)

In a pot, brown buffalo meat with diced onions until meat is thoroughly cooked. Add all other ingredients and keep on medium heat until soup is simmering. Serve hot! Here is a picture of it but only after we ate! So there isn't much left!Once I finished making the soup I turned off the stove, covered and waited until Deaner got home before heating back up for dinner. It was really great and I'd recommend it to anyone for a fast, easy and tasty dinner! Thanks New Girl!

10 DAYS!!!!!!

10 days from now I will be about 3 hours from touching down at Hartsfield Internation Airport in Atlanta to start our Christmas vacation! I seriously can't wait. I just have to take a deep breath and relax though because the whole trip is starting to stress me out. We already have plans for the first 9 nights that we are home and I'm starting to get unnerved about all the running around that we are going to have to do. I guess that is just the way it goes when you live in another country and have limited time to come home. I've already had to rearrange time to see friends etc and I just hope that everything works out. I know once we get there things will be okay but thinking about them right now gets me worked up.

Things have been pretty boring around here lately. I even contemplated starting to pack today but figured that would be dumb because I would have nothing to wear until we went home if I did that! I feel like time is standing still and next Thursday will never get here!

Did everyone have a good weekend? Deaner and I decided yesterday that we would make some Christmas cookies. I don't really LOVE Christmas cookies but Deaner likes all things having to do with Christmas so I was happy to do it. On our way out of the commissary I saw this.Dear Honda Accord Owner,
You might not know this but there are European plates that are made to fit American plates holders. Yes, there is actually a license plate that would have fit your car and would allow people like me to pass it by without thinking anything of it. This just looks retarded.

Sincerly, Concerned Citizen

After making a disaster in the kitchen I was surprised that the cookies turned out at all!! Here is a picture of one of my batches and one of Deaner's batches.
Can anyone tell which one is my batch and which one is Deaner's batch? I'll give you a hint. I like things to be a bit more simple than Deaner does. :)

Today I had to go get my finger prints taken for my substitute teacher application. (I am pretty sure at the rate we are going I will never have a chance to sub before school lets out for the summer) Of course I showed up around 11:40 and was informed that the person in charge had just left for lunch and wouldn't be back until after 1pm. 1pm?!!! Who gets to take a lunch break that long and completely close their office??? Must be nice to work for the government! Luckily Deaner came over to meet me for lunch and it wasn't hard to waste the time. Now I am just waiting for him to get home from the gym so we can have dinner! Hope everyone is having a good Monday!

Christmas is coming!!!

Have I bragged enough about the fact that I was done with my Christmas shopping weeks ago? Because if I haven't, let me take a moment and toot my horn a little bit. This year I was determined not to get stuck spending a million dollars at the last minute and scurrying around picking up last minute stuff. We have a big family and that means TONS of gifts to purchase each year. For those who don't know me, I love buying gifts and I really like for it to be something that I think the gift getter will really like. And that means that I run out of ideas OFTEN. This year I think that I did really well. We had to buy for a grand total of 14 different people and 4 white elephant gifts. The only thing that I have left to pick up is two of the white elephant gifts and I already know what I am going to get. This doesn't include the shopping that we do for each other! Yikes! This year the vast majority of what I bought has been shipped to my parent's house and I will wrap everything when we arrive home before Christmas. That is really my favorite part! The only sad thing is that this year we have a big house and a fantastic tree and I will have NO gifts to put under it since they have all already been shipped to the U.S.! Oh well!

Last Friday we went with Deaner's parents and picked out a Christmas tree. It was a lot of fun and thankfully we didn't have the same incident with the tree on top of the Jeep as I did with the bed. It all got home in one piece and we didn't even have to stop on the Autobahn to re-secure it! It was exciting to pull out all the Christmas ornaments because at the end of last year I bought a TON of ornaments at Pier One on sale and I had forgotten how cute they all were. I also got to put our new Christmas Weinachts Pyramid out that we bought in Rudesheim this summer. Here is what the finished product looked like!Sorry the pictures aren't the highest quality but I took them with my iphone. And don't get me started on the colored lights. Deaner and I have this argument (nothing huge) over what kind of lights are going to go on the tree. I always want all white and he always wants all colored. This year I told him that being the fantastic wife that I am, I would concede and he could have the colored lights. That and that we already had the colored lights and I couldn't find any all white ones and I was sick of shopping that day! :) So, I think it turned out pretty good. We wanted to get it up early so that we could enjoy it before we leave to go home on the 17th! Two weeks from tomorrow we will be on a plane home! I really can't wait to get there! I haven't been counting the days as closely as I did this summer but I am definitely excited.

Today was relatively uneventful. Steph and I met at Ikea to shop but I found NOTHING that I had to have. I was looked for some frames but the sizes didn't fit right and I wasn't really into forcing it to work. I also grocery shopped. I'm in a serious food funk lately and need some new ideas for dinners during the week. Any suggestions welcome! Hope everyone is having a good Wednesday!

Neuschwanstein Castle and Thanksgiving

We weren't so lucky on our second day of vacation in Garmish. It hardly mattered to us though since we had seen the most beautiful view ever the day before. Tuesday morning we got up nice and early and headed to visit perhaps the most famous castle in Germany. Neuschwanstein Castle was built by King Ludwig in the 1800's and it is said that the modern day Disney Castle is modeled after Neuschwanstein. Deaner and I visited here last summer while on vacation but we were happy to come back. The weather, like I said, was sort of typical for Germany but since the tours are inside, no big deal! There is another castle right next to Neuschwanstein called Hohenschwanganau (God, I hope I spelled that right!) and we toured this one first. It was actually built by King Ludwig's father. Here are a few pictures of it. Imagine it with a bright blue sky in the background and it might look better!Our second tour was of Neuschwanstein and here are a few shots from that.In the next picture you can get an idea of exactly what elements we were facing!All in all it was a successful day of sightseeing. When we returned to the hotel late that afternoon we boarded a bus to head on a tour of the Greisbrau Beer Brewery. What a treat this was! We had a tour of the brewery before settling in for dinner and our beer tasting. Normally on beer tours the tastings are really skimpy and we were not disappointed this time. After taking our test, receiving our beer diploma and a big ole German dinner (don't worry, I got to have pizza!) we had our picture taken with the Brewmaster, Wolfgang.We also left with a mini 5 liter keg of the Christmas beer that was AWESOME. I think that Steph and Jon can vouch for that since we got to enjoy it on Thanksgiving. Which brings me to Thanksgiving! It was the first time that I have hosted a Thanksgiving dinner of my very own and I was really excited about it. I quickly found that I don't have NEARLY the amount of decorations that my mom has always had for our Thanksgiving dinner table. Here is what my table looked like. I was not thrilled about it the way that it looked. So bland.Here is my Mom's table.It's just not fair!! I am going to be searching year round now for good decorations for my table! So annoying! I do think that all my food turned out well. Deaner's dad grilled a 7 pound tenderloin, Steph and Jon made a turkey and I made hashbrown casserole, toasted almond green beans, green bean casserole, gravy and rolls. We also had sweet potatoes and stuffing. Not to mention the desserts! Needless to say, no one went home hungry and a good time was had by all!

Tomorrow I will post pictures of my Christmas tree which I am happy to say we are enjoying very much. I went to spin class today and it was a great workout. I was slightly surprised when two mothers rolled their infants into the class in strollers and parked them by their spin bikes. No big deal but this class is a little on the loud side with the instructor constantly yelling over the music. Towards the end I glanced over to see how the babies were fairing. I was quite surprised to see that the mother was HOLDING THE BABY while continuing to spin!!! I'm sorry, but how can this be safe? I think that the instructor was thinking the same thing because when she noticed it she got off her bike and took the baby from the mother so she could finish up the class. A little bizarro but whatever!! Hope everyone had a good day! More pictures to come tomorrow!