birthday #2

yesterday was my cute husband's 26th birthday. the celebration was slightly low-key due to the upcoming GMAT, but i made his favorite foods and gave him his presents and we both left work on time so i'd say that's a pretty good day. plus, come on, this IS birthday month people! it's not like we've been doing nothing.



just wanted to give a shout out to brandon joseph wells for being the best husband around. not many guys out there like to clean the bathroom, compliment their wife's cooking/outfit/hair/sass on a regular basis, and think up cute little surprises for no reason.



i remember when i met brandon i thought he was a player. so when he asked me if i wanted to "hang out" -- we saw madagascar at the dollar theater and then went to cold stone, what a high roller -- i figured he was just playing me too. then we started doing homework together, seeing each other in class every day, etc. etc. and i started to realize how fun and cute he really was.



luckily for me he felt the same way and we've been together ever since. i'm glad he was born :)

pattie cake remix

i think i may have mentioned before that my grammie (who's first name is fortuitously pattie...pattie cakes, get it?) ran a fabulous cake-decorating business out of her north hollywood home for more than 20 years. she was basically famous...she'd do party cakes for the studios, wedding cakes for just about every person in town (including some celebs like jan from the brady bunch, who lived down the street), and every single one of my birthday cakes throughout my life.

just about all of my memories of gram have to do with her decorating cakes. i'd always get to visit them for a week each summer, all by myself, and she was always working on cakes when we weren't out on some fantastic adventure. typically she'd give me some tubes and frosting and my own little cake and let me go at it, decorating my own -- though i wasn't very good. not to mention the fact that her frosting is SO DELICIOUS that i grew up literally eating bowls of it, as you can see in the picture below (circa 1986) -- i blame my sugar addiction on this habit:



anyway, when the grandparents moved to arizona a few years ago, grammie retired from the cake business (although she now teaches decorating classes for the city when she's not traveling the world). she did however make my beautiful wedding cake, which people still talk about. bottom line -- grammie is amazingly talented.





basically, the main point of this post is that i've wanted to get more into cake decorating, and for christmas grammie gave me a totally sweet decorating starter kit that sadly i have not had time to use until NOW -- this weekend i sat down and actually made a batch of frosting from scratch, baked some cupcakes and got out my kit!

first i must say that spending a saturday afternoon decorating cupcakes is really the best activity one could find. i was pretty proud that the frosting turned out just as good as her version although i was seriously grossed out by the amount of sugar in it (and crisco? YUCK. yeah, i still ate a tub of it). my final conclusion was that while i am slightly better at decorating as a 24-year-old and not an 11-year-old, i'm still definitely a beginner as you will see in the following pictures.

i made allll kinds of cupcakes.




some blue & white ones for jeff & laura's goodbye party:




some nintendo-themed ones, per the request of the birthday boy:




some other more abstract ones so i could try out the different tips:



and a bunch more that are already in my tummy. yeah, so essentially i learned i need to work on it if i ever want to open up a second-generation pattie cakes, but this was definitely a fun (and yummy) way to start out. thanks again gram!

after-post

...get it? instead of aftershock? haha i crack myself up.

anyway just wanted to follow up on the previous post.

/no damage reported downtown
/my cell phone AND land line phone couldn't connect calls/texts for 20 minutes following the quake due i'm sure to overuse in the area (although for some reason i did get a call from an editor in NYC about 10 minutes after the quake...i'm pretty sure i didn't pay attention to more than eight words he said because i was still all hyped up, but i think we arranged a bike loan while my brain was on autopilot so i should probably follow up with him real soon :)
/i guess they're saying now it was a 5.4...whatever, that's still big
/when we got home i had picture frames, vases and books all over the floor. guess i need to work on setting things in sturdier places.
/my poor husband...this was his first earthquake and i think he's about ready to move. lightweight :)

gotta love california.

freaking earthquake

AHHH. big earthquake just hit. 5.8...not as big as the northridge quake, our last big one. but for that i was like 12 and sleeping. this time i'm in downtown LA next to a bunch of skyscrapers.

it definitely shook for a while. everyone stopped and i said "is this an earthquake?" and my co worker, who is not a native CAian, said "yes! can we go home now? i HATE these." lol. i didn't duck and cover because my parents just told me how you're not supposed to go under furniture, you should get next to it because debris makes a triangle shape of protection. so i just sat and watched.

and our awesome 80 year old building has been retrofitted for quakes so we wobbled back and forth for literally 30 seconds. i almost felt seasick. yeah that was scary. how am i supposed to work now?

expensive restaurants suck

okay so i've been blogging a lot this week but i needed to vent. tonight some of our friends came out from LA and we went to houston's for dinner. i've never been there before but i smell it every time i get off the train across the street, so i've been intrigued for a while.

this place is a little more expensive than i like (let me also preface this by saying that i'm a major cheapskate and am not ashamed of this fact) -- i prefer restaurants less than $20/person, and if you think that's ridiculous then i think you're stupid. anyway, houstons is a bit more than that on average, but it was fun to go with our friends and like i said i had been interested in trying the place out.

dinner was good (i had a homemade veggie burger which was very tasty, but nothing amazing) but they didn't give us bread or anything. i never get that -- the expensive restaurants don't give you free bread? if anything you'd think my extra money could get some carbs on the table.

here's the best part though. we went to celebrate the birthdays of ryan (today) and brandon (monday), so kinohi leaned over to our waitress when she was clearing the plates to tell them we had two birthdays. the waitress said "ooh, okay, i'll be right back." when she returned she said "for the birthday boys, let me tell you about our desserts." inference: birthday boys get free desserts. (this would be incorrect.) only brandon and ryan ordered dessert and then we all shared the two dishes, thinking they were on the house.

ten minutes later when the check came we saw that she had charged us for both the desserts! um, thanks, so birthday desserts aren't free? even though you basically led us to believe otherwise, didn't clarify, AND put candles on both of them? maybe i am a cheapskate, or maybe i like to budget too much, but i can't afford meals like this regularly until a. i make more money, b. the economy improves or c. i come into a windfall inheritance.

thanks a lot, you overpriced jerks. your food wasn't even that good.

free at last!

so my jury duty adventure is over as of 4:15 p.m. today. i apologize in advance if any of you are sick of my courtroom tales but i know i have at least one fan of these stories so i decided to finish up the set.

we had a full day in court today. randomly, one of my GH co-workers was on the case with me, so for our 90 minute lunch break we went back to the office to do some work. my motive for going there was to grab some stuff to be better prepared to work from home so i wouldn't need to go back to the office again till it was all done, but in retrospect i really should have driven to tito's for lunch. boo.

key learnings from today:

a. same guy. SAME PANTS.

b. the burping guy actually ended up to be pretty cool -- we are friends now, me and juror #11. (it's funny how you never learn anyone's actual names.) he's a film exec who produced dan in real life and some other stuff. he was a nice guy.

c. i made another new friend who rode w/ me & the co-worker up to the office so she could go to the library. she's a PA for criminal minds on cbs. she loves jane austen and wine.

d. various excuses stated for being a "non-drinker" (there were surprisingly more of these today):
- i don't like the smell
- my parents never drank so i don't drink
- health reasons and because both my parents were alcoholics
- religious beliefs (that would be me)
- never had an interest

e. one excuse stated for being a "non-driver" (i have no idea how this person survives in los angeles):
- i never took the time or had an interest to learn to drive

we went back into the courtroom for more "voir dire," my new word of the week. still no one was dismissed. then they put us on break for 30 minutes so the judge could take care of some other stuff, but in court talk 30 minutes actually means an hour and 15 minutes so i sat on the hard marble floor and chit-chatted about how they should let us all go home. then it was back to the courtroom and they finalllllly started excusing people, one by one.

because of how we had been originally arranged, i was already sitting in the jury box. this made me nervous because the defense attorney kept saying "the defense is fine with the jury as it stands" when they were allowed to release people. luckily for me the prosecutor was on a rampage and kept dismissing people like crazy. i was one of the last people to be dismissed. i guess i wasn't unbiased enough, being a non-drinker and all :)

(and in case you're wondering, the kid with the dead parents got excused as well. i wanted to hug him when he left.)

the burp guy, the PA girl and the co-worker all had to stay on the jury. i went back upstairs, turned in my badge, got my certificate of completion (a check for a whopping $30 + mileage is coming my way in two weeks) and got the heck out. and that is the end of my civic duty, for the next year at least. i must say i was slightly dreading being put on the jury, but now that i'm done i'm a little sad that i don't get to see the whole thing through. luckily my little "inside source" friends can keep me posted.

now it's back to work...touring hotels in newport beach & laguna beach tomorrow. and the wisdom teeth removal is still on for next week! guess my fun couple of days off was good while it lasted.

day 2 in court

some random thoughts on today, in no particular order:

a. the miller lite pj guy was back. in the same pants.

b. jury duty isn't so much fun the second day. especially when you have to work for five hours before going to the courthouse. two jobs is a bad idea. stress made me eat a bag of peanut m&ms.

c. we all had to answer a series of questions today so the lawyers could determine if we were unbiased enough to be a fair jury. this led to all sorts of revelations including but not limited to:
- a middle aged chinese nightclub owner who claimed to have been kidnapped, shot at and abandoned
- a ton of people claiming that they're completely opposed to drinking and driving ... but only a few people said they don't drink at all. you'd think if they were that anti, they wouldn't drink.
- one potential juror (not sure how old but definitely younger than me) raised his hand for the question about drunk driving's effect on immediate family. when the judge asked him to elaborate he said in 1997 his family's car was hit by a drunk driver -- he broke his leg, his sister broke her arm and leg, and both his parents died. um, yeah...can we just let that kid go home NOW? he shouldn't even have to enter a courtroom for a drunk driving case ever in his life.

d. the guy next to me burps a lot. ew.

e. about 3/5 of the potential jury works in "entertainment." ahh, los angeles.

f. seeing a random cross-section of the population like this and hearing all their experiences reminded me a lot of the movie crash. it's so crazy what people have been through.

g. going back tomorrow to finish selection. i'm sort of hoping that i don't get picked for the case at this point.

jury duty take 2

today i had to go back to jury duty. i say "had" because i'd already postponed enough times to hit my legal limit (including this trip that you may remember). fortunately today was a lovely experience. i learned that jury duty is basically an excuse to sit and read, watch tv and take two-hour lunches (and, in my case, still get paid).

no celeb sightings today...i did get to watch a whole bunch of crap tv and get thoroughly depressed by the news, including a disgusting story about the new rage in pedicures -- it involves flesh-eating fish and i almost threw up.

no one had been called in all day and we were so excited because maybe we'd get to go home without doing anything. then at 2:30 they called in the first group, which included me. by the time they lined us up and brought us into the courtroom (my first real courtroom, unless you count the one in the j. reuben clark law building where i had church my freshman year. i always thought it was weird they blessed the sacrament at the witness bench) it was past 3 p.m., so after the judge spoke to us and we got sworn in they set us free for the afternoon. nice way to spend the day.

however, being the reliable worker that i am, i decided to stop by the office to check in and catch up on the 200+ emails that piled up during my 3 1/2 day weekend. tomorrow i have to report back at court at 1:30 p.m. for jury selection...if i get picked i'll be on a seven day misdemeanor trial. which maybe wouldn't be so bad. if nothing else, this little extension to my vay-cay has been a lot of fun.

all in all i found the whole thing pretty interesting...part of me almost wants to get put on a trial, which i may end up regretting around day 3 of the trial. it was cool to see how it all works though...talk about my american heritage class in action. also these types of activities are always great for people watching...so many crazies around here, i tell ya. my favorite guy was a black man who showed up in miller lite pj pants. more updates on my civic duties will be coming soon...

a day OFF!

today i took a day off from work. as you know we have been saving up all vacation days for our trip in sept., but luckily for my sanity GH gives everyone two summer days to take each year between memorial day and labor day.

brandon and i had originally decided to both take today off so he could recover from e3 and i could actually spend some time with him, but he ended up taking friday off instead. this left me with one whole wide open day all to myself, and let me tell you it was MUCH needed.












basically all i've done is a lot of catching up. but really, who needs more than this? so far i have caught up on the following:
pool time
sleep time
regis & kelly time
h&m $5 sale time (which was surprisingly disappointing)
h-bowl drive time (see previous post)
target & grocery time
family chat time (mom and grandma included)
craigslisting furniture time (well, i'm about to do that one)
kitchen time (hello, homemade black bean salsa...the perfect answer to my new low-carb diet cravings)
cookie dough eating time (so much for the low-carb diet)
blog time

as you can see, it is very valuable to have so much extra time. now if only i could arrange for a day off like this a little more often...

julie andrews, heath ledger and pinkberry

the title pretty much sums up my fabulous weekend. friday got off to a nice start when i met up with brandon after work to go to dinner at our favorite new thai place, saladang song -- conveniently located about two blocks from our house. it was delicious (so delicious in fact that when brandon unwittingly at my leftovers the next day i just about beheaded him with a steak knife). and my mouth literally starts watering just thinking about their mango sticky rice. mmm.

then i left him home to study and finish recuperating from his horrendous work week, and took myself over to the hollywood bowl. a few LA friends had called that afternoon with an extra box-seat ticket to the julie andrews/hollywood philharmonic show that night, so i HAD to say yes to that! i mean, hello, it's julie andrews, one of my lifelong heroes/idols/whatever...and what's summertime without singing along to "do re mi" under the stars anyway? (yes, i've done that more than once.) plus i was excited to see my old friends, so i hightailed it over.

(tangent: for anyone on my side of the hill planning a trip to the hollywood bowl, i highly recommend the shuttle from the la zoo. for just $3/person you can park in their nice lot, avoid the traffic and moronic parking situation at the bowl, and get home way quick after the show. brilliant! i'll never be able to repay the baers for teaching us that little secret.)

we had a great time at the show (although i maybe could have done without the extended fairy tale after intermission) and then i took my shuttle home. this morning i realized that my digital camera, which i had taken to the concert, was not in my purse and briefly freaked out. LUCKILY i called the h-bowl lost & found and they had it! (my camera has taken a beating lately and brandon keeps giving me crap about not having a case for it, so i recently stuck it in a little workout sock for added protection. when i called today and sheepishly explained that i lost my camera and that it was probably in a sock, the guy put me on hold, came back and said in a surprised voice, "wow, yes, we actually did have someone turn in a black camera in a sock." LOL. just for the record...i'm not crazy :) can i get a shout out for miraculous returns of missing cameras? (you know who i'm directing that to, b.fo, even if you are en route to china right now)

so today i drove back out to h-wood to retrieve the camera, fully in tact and safe as ever. however i will still post pictures courtesy of whitney vandermyde because hers came out better than mine:




yeah...vocal cord surgery and she's still amazing.


ashley, kinohi, whit & me

saturday i went to brunch with my PR mentor/friend and her adorable baby. can i just say how great it is to be able to talk with people who get you and help you clear your head. i feel SO much more at peace about life, just being able to talk some things out with her and get new ideas. thanks linds!

(on another tangent, i really think i've been feeling subconsciously deprived from female socialization...or any socialization for that matter. brandon enforced a moratorium on our collective couple social life a while back so he can focus on the GMAT -- can you imagine how hard it is for me to not be able to invite peeps over for game night, dinner etc. after moving into a new ward?? BOO -- but apparently i've been missing out on girl time as well. last week i hung out with friends, sans the husband, three different times and LOVED each venture. thanks to my great friends for hanging out with me and getting me out of the house :)

after that brandon and i, along with most of the adult american population, went to see the dark knight. don't get me wrong, i love a good action flick as much as the next person, but i'm still not really sure why everyone loooooves this movie so much. brandon had been foaming at the mouth for weeks to see this thing and he and my brother still maintain they'd be willing to watch it another five times in theaters at least, but i'm okay with my single viewing. it was very entertaining, pretty funny at times and had great special effects. i'm a big christopher nolan fan so of course thought it was well done...and the music was awesome.

but other than that it was a little unnerving, to be honest. first of all i kept staring at heath ledger trying to see any tiny trace of the cute boy who sang and danced at julia stiles' soccer game in 10 things i hate about you, but he was definitely nowhere to be found in this movie. it's still so sad to me how he ended up. and the way they have taken a formerly comical comic book character and turned these movies into such a dark, gritty message on society is more of a sad take on our culture than anything else to me. oh well...still worth seeing, i'd say, but just know it's def not a feel-good flick.

we rounded up the day with a trip to pinkberry and working on our plans for europe. a while back we discovered a guy named rick steves and have since become his biggest fans. we check out all his relevant travel books from the library and read his web site all the time; he is SO helpful, at least to someone like me who has never been to europe and is easily overwhelmed by the quantity of things to do over there, in guiding us to the best deals on hotels, tourist activities, planning our trip, etc. i love him! we ordered our train passes last week via rick and received a travel dvd in the package, so we've been watching that and getting so excited.

sunday my hermano came to visit because my parents are stillll out of town (returning today from the world's biggest kayak race, located on the missouri river...my uncle founded this whole thing a few years back, and my dad oversees his web site and flew out this year to help him out. read more about it here or on my mom's blog. random? yes.), so we brought him to church, let him take a nap at our house, cooked him dinner, made him play a rousing game of sequence and then sent him on his way. fun weekend had by all.

24 is the new 49

i've spent the past year thinking that 23 sounded so young. i was never proud to inform people of my age and every time it came out of my mouth i thought, "they must think i'm a baby."( i may have developed this stigma from having every single person at my work say "you're 23 and you're MARRIED?!?" whenever i meet someone new. apparently i'm still overcoming this chip on my shoulder.) maybe i feel young because in the corporate world everyone seems older, or maybe because i'm the only one in my ward without a baby, or maybe because i graduated from college young so now people older than me are actually lower in their careers than i am. what, it's not my fault i'm a go-getter :)

anyway, now that i've hit the big 2-4 i have started thinking that sounds so OLD! next year i'll be 25, which is a quarter of a century and halfway to 50. which is also sick. it freaks me out how fast life moves. this weekend we were driving through the old hood and i couldn't believe that we had lived there for a whole entire year and a half but that it's already over, that my life has just flashed by. crazy.

but to get to the main point of this post...i had a fantastic birthday. i've had some killer b-days in the past (sound of music singalong @ the hollywood bowl, WICKED, martina mcbride concert, etc.) and i knew this one would be low key, but i had such a great time just relaxing with my cute husband. we slept in, had delicious cereal (hello, what else would i be eating on my favorite day?), ran some errands and then headed to malibu.

we had lunch at dukes, overlooking the rocks and the ocean and the surfers. they even gave me a piece of birthday hula pie that i swear was as big as my head. then we headed up to zuma and just laid on the beach...we read, took naps, went for a walk, people watched. i totally needed that. and then when the sun went down we stopped at my very favorite westside eatery of tito's for dinner (i have been craving their tacos for months on end...it was sooo worth the wait. MMM.). add to that all the wonderful texts, facebook messages, phone calls and cards i got and it was a perfect day. thanks to everyone who remembered me!



beautiful.


yeah...i was excited about this.

birthday eve

today was a fantastic day for various reasons, in no particular order:

exhibit a:
my lovely co workers threw me a little surprise birthday party complete with a DOZEN sprinkles cupcakes, my fave. mmmm. we had a nice little tasting and i spent the rest of the day handing out extras to friends. happy birthday, you get to go to the gym for two hours tonight to work this off. but totally worth it.



exhibit b:
our new phones came today! they're just the dumb verizon chocolate phones, but hey they were the cutest ones i could get for free. yay for new phones with extended battery life, new chargers that haven't been in the burner, and a combo package with a headset so now i can talk while i'm driving.



exhibit c:
very productive evening. i finally cleaned my kitchen (including the fridge!), planned my yw lesson, went to the gym, grocery shopped, cleaned out google reader. all in all a pleasant evening.

exhibit d:
while on the aforementioned grocery run, i pulled into the ralphs parking lot and saw two ABC news vans, one KTLA van, one NBC van and one FOX van so i knew something was going on. i eventually figured out they were there because the grocery store is right across the street from the indymac hq, who apparently got shut down today -- so i came home and watched the news to get more details.
and who do i see on KTLA, reporting from lovely pasadena, but my total newscaster boyfriend jaime chambers! if you don't live in LA you probably don't know who i'm talking about, and even if you live here you might not, but i have had a major crush on this guy since he started doing the morning news surf report in like 2002. i almost got in my car and drove back over. so close!



exhibit e:
um...it's birthday eve. duh.

oh, and did i mention that brandon left for work at 6:30 a.m. today and he's not home yet? yeah, awesome. what's a girl to do? round 2 of tad hamilton, naturally :)

and another thing...

i try not to make a habit of these totally random short posts, but yesterday my co-worker and i were walking down flower street and a guy did the horse click at us. ANOTHER one! it must be catching on around downtown.

"i will bring you similes."

yet another great thing about birthday month...my fantastic husband put win a date with tad hamilton at the top of the netflix queue per my repeated hints. yessssss.

good idea, bad idea

good idea:
taking the young women to hollywood to see grauman's chinese theater and get ice cream at the disney soda fountain.













bad idea:
eating ice cream with the young women at the disney soda fountain. when you haven't had dinner. and you're lactose intolerant. and you haven't had full-fat ice cream in YEARS.

blecchhh.

thank you, costco

something monumental happened in our apartment this weekend, and i have costco to thank for it.

waaaay back in november 2006 i was a little newlywed trying to settle into my first married apartment. naturally, one of the first steps to becoming my own real person involved getting a costco card. one night brandon and i drove to the marina del rey costco, our closest one (conveniently located so that you have to drive by tito's tacos to get there...mmm) and set ourselves up with a costco account. that night i'm pretty sure we bought three things: toilet paper, granola bars and fruit strips.

i'm also pretty sure that's about all i ever buy when i go there. in retrospect, getting the card was a lot better than actually using it -- what use do two people have with 96 ounces of peanut butter or a slat full of peaches? those things go bad in our house before we're able to eat them all. granted, it is nice to have the card to get gas or to go on hot-dog-and-churro dates (still a favorite activity from our provo days...one of our first unofficial dates was to go get hot dogs between classes), but i don't really buy anything there unless it's something i find myself buying ALL time time at the grocery store (i.e. granola bars, bottled water, etc.)

as a side note, that was also a big night for us because i got my first ticket. i was driving down washington blvd. in culver city and ran a red light (something i'm known to do) -- and saw a flash. three weeks later i got a nice little $400 ticket in the mail, complete with photos of my car, license plate and my happy naive face behind the steering wheel. last time i ran a light in culver city, i'll tell you that much.

but i digress. so please note -- in november 06 i bought a 36-pack of toilet paper. we used the last roll from that pack on SATURDAY, july 5, 2008. almost two years! thank you costco for allowing me to ignore mundane household purchases for years on end.

god bless the u.s.a.

4th of july is pretty much my favorite holiday, just a half-step above christmas (okay, maybe tied with christmas) and a notch ahead of halloween. i'm not sure when i started loving it quite so much but i have so many great memories of awesome 4ths. from community picnics in rancho to watching fireworks on our boat at lake powell to just spending time with my family, i love this holiday.

i've always been pretty patriotic (one side of my family comes from myles standish, the captain of the mayflower, and the other side has a signer of the declaration of independence -- i'll chalk up my country-love to them :) but the 4th of july just makes me so proud to live in this free country. especially lately, because in the past two weeks i've visited new parts of the US that i had never been to, and because brandon and i watched a fantastic german movie about world war II, so i've been thinking more about how lucky we really are to live here.

but enough of my exposition. this was a fantastic three-and-a-half day weekend and we had a great time. on friday, my parents came out and we spent the day swimming, BBQing and hanging out (and i will admit we watched "independence day" about four times...i love that movie, as cheesy as it actually is). then we went over to the rose bowl for the "biggest fireworks show west of the mississippi"...









they actually had a bunch of drum corps from around the country perform, which was very exciting to me as an ex-band nerd. the blue devils were fantastic and reminded me of when we went to see them at RCC when i was in high school :) then all the bands played patriotic music and they kicked off the fireworks -- and i am not lying when i say it was the best fireworks show i've ever seen. and i've been to my fair share of fireworks shows, including the totally awesome disneyland fireworks they have going right now. it's amazing that i'm 23 (almost 24 :) and could go to that stadium and see displays i'd never seen before.

saturday we went to the movies. we had actually been planning to see hancock, predominantly for the reason that i saw them filming it in downtown alllll last summer (as you may remember) but i heard so many bad things about it that we vetoed that idea and saw iron man instead. i was pleasantly entertained and liked it a lot (probably because i totally love robert downey jr. and am fully rooting for his new post-rehab life), but would still like to see hancock regardless. any reviews / input are welcome.

later that day we shopped, cooked dinner together, played wii and hung out with some friends. it was lovely. today we went to church and then drove to rancho to celebrate birthday month with the fam. so fun and so relaxing...it is just great to take a break from the day-to-day. which starts again tomorrow (thanks for the reminder :( boo...). and that was our weekend.

summer vacation

turns out when you're an "adult," summer really loses its awesomeness. especially if you happen to be saving up all your vacation days for, say, a three week european vacation extravaganza. thus, my beloved summer -- formerly a time of lake powell trips, daily regis & kelly viewings, leisurely afternoons and sneaking into neighbor's swimming pools -- has become just another season where i'm trapped inside corporate america 8 - 10 hours a day. boo.

however today was a great day. we got out at 1:30 p.m. and i'm FREE until monday morning. three and a half whole glorious days, mine all mine -- welcome to my summer vacation.

we kicked off the weekend with celebratory cupcakes from dots. we really like this place but not because it is particularly good, more just because it's right down the street from my house and also -- let's be serious here -- i'll eat just about anything with sugar and butter.







here's a wild confession for you -- as much as i love cupcakes now and have fully joined the trendy food posse, i will admit i used to hate them. in elementary school i refused to eat them, maybe because they were fed almost weekly to us for birthdays and other events and they were usually waxy and gross. and also my grammie ran a wildly successful cake decorating business out of her north hollywood home for 30 years (she made wedding cakes for celebs, regular cakes for the studios, random cakes for everything else) and i grew up eating bowls of her frosting, so when it came to other frosting suppliers i was anti. good thing i grew out of that because i love love love cupcakes.

but i digress. in closing i should also add that we do not usually have special random desserts in the middle of the day, holiday celebration or not. but today is day three of BIRTHDAY FUN MONTH. both brandon and i have birthdays in july. in my family birthdays tend to last a week, so with two b-days in one month i decided to just throw in the towel and celebrate the whole dang month. we try to do something fun and exciting every day. so far this week we have played mario kart on the wii, watched jon & kate and now had cupcakes. like i said, we TRY to do something fun :) hopefully the coming days will be a little more exciting.

hooray for the long weekend!!!