New Glasses, Lunch, and Prep for Thanksgiving

As the blog title states, I bought new glasses.  My prescription changed a little bit, and I figured it would be good to have a second set of glasses, so, BAM new glasses!  See if you can see the difference:

Before:

After:

Yup, they look almost identical.

I tried making Rolls on Friday night, but added too much flour and they turned out like biscuits.  Oh well, live and learn.

Monday, I met up with Manders and KW for Lunch downtown.  Neither wanted to let me take a pic, so, as promised, here's a stock photo of exaggerations of my friends:

Yesterday, in preparation for Thanksgiving, I made the cake part of this recipe:  http://loveandduckfat.com/chocolate-pumpkin-cake-with-spiced-brown-butter-frosting/

Dad recommended making the cake ahead of time and freezing it, to make icing it easier.  I'm excited to see how it turns out.

I've made the cakes, and practiced the rolls, so I think I'm about ready for thanksgiving.  KW is making the turkey and stuffing and some other things?  I can't remember.  Mitch and Dom are making the Pumpkin pie and bringing the drinks.  It's going to be a good thanksgiving!

Baking, Birthdays and Bunnies

The weekend started off with an Indian buffet at Tadka with Mitch, Dom and KW.  Considering I haven't had Indian food for a while, I was beyond surprised with how spicy it was.  I was tearing up quite a bit, but, on the upside, the food was mighty delish!

That evening I setup to make Overnight Oats.  I was so excited to wake up to hot and ready oatmeal the next morning.  Sadly, I woke up to a slimy, grossness that had managed to partially burn onto my crockpot.  I ate one bowl, and, it was edible, but it was so gross I had to throw the rest out!

I then walked over to the eyeglass store and made an appointment to get an eye exam and new glasses the next day.  I walked home and then cooked a ham, and vigorously scrubbed my crockpot, in preparation for my Crockpot Ham and Bean Soup.  I was NOT disappointed with this recipe.  It turned out SOOO good.  My only regret is that it didn't make more!

Tuesday I got my eye exam and ordered new glasses (which should be here in a week or so).  While I was in the eye dr.'s waiting room, I received a message from KW:

i want to do something awesome to Mitch's desk for her birthday and you are the birthday decorating pro

How could I say no to that?!  So I drove into Cleveland, and hit in my car until Mitch left for the day.  I had to hide for an extra half hour because she got stuck on a call at work.  It was cold, but totally worth it!

KW came up with this funny phrase:

And this one too!  He was on a roll!!

As we were leaving I saw a giant bunny outside of the office, and couldn't pass up the opportunity to give it smooches.

Overall it was a pretty great weekend and I got a lot accomplished.  Next weekend is going to be more cooking in prep for thanksgiving, which is at KW's house this year.

Sheets, Snow and Anime

This weekend was a recovery weekend after the whirlwind of fun I had when Joel and Kate came to visit.  My main chore was washing the bed sheets, so they'd be fresh in case anyone else came to visit.

Isn't it funny that you clean and clean and clean before friends/family comes to visit, and then when they leave you have to clean some more.  Long story short, if I never wash another bed sheet again, it will be too soon.

Monday night we had our first noticible snowfall of the year!  So exciting.  I was playing on my phone, when the weather app told me it was snowing.  I looked outside and BAM!  Beautiful!

Tuesday evening I met up with KW, Mitch and Dom to watch the Anime Movie "From Up On Poppy Hill".  I'm not usually a fan of anime, but after watching this movie...I'm still not a fan of anime.  It got weird and awkward  partway thru and was a bit too much for me.  I did have fun hanging out with my friends though!  So I guess the evening was a push.

Over all it was a relaxing, snowfilled weekend.

Joel and Kate Come to Visit

I spent all weekend cleaning in preparation for Joel and Kate's visit to Ohio.  I cleaned spiderwebs from the walls and ceilings, washed sheets, dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed floors, cleaned 2 microwaves, washed mirrors and windows and scrubbed clean and caulked my tub.

Have you ever caulked before?  The first hurdle was realizing I needed a caulking gun.  Thank goodness Michelle and Dom had one (actually 3) that they could lend to me.  

I cut off the end of my caulk, and put it in the gun, ready to caulk the tub.  A start pushing on the trigger, but nothing comes out.  I push harder and harder and feel something give, but still no caulk.  After a minute, I decided to read the instructions.  Turns out there is a foil inside that needs to be punctured.  When I pulled the caulk out of the gun, this is about what it looked like:

Caulk was all over the gun and the bottom of caulking tube was no where to be seen. I ran out to target and got some more caulk, and finally was able to finish caulking!

Joel and his new fiance Kate arrived on Wednesday afternoon.

After a quick shower, we headed out to the Cleveland Horseshoe Casino to try out the buffet.  Kate managed to double her money on slots (although she only put in 1 dollar).

When we got home, everyone was pretty tuckered out so we watched elf for an hour or so, then gave up and found ourselves in bed before 10pm.

The next day we woke up, Joel got some high scores on CoD Black Ops.

Then we headed out to CiCi's Pizza buffet.  Since they don't have cici's in philly, Joel and Kate were rather excited to try it out.

It was pretty good.  It wasn't the best pizza I had ever had, but still pretty good.  After CiCi's, we headed to the outlets in Aurora.  Joel was full of pizza, so he took a nap in the car while Kate and I did some shopping and got up to shenanigans:

We picked up some chocolates from Malley's

Then drove over to the Christmas Story house.  We started in the giftstore where Joel bought us all tickets for the tour.  There was tons of awesome merch, of which we took lots of pictures:

Finally it was tour time.

We learned about the history of the movie and how the house was bought and sold until it became the landmark that it is today..  Then it was picture time!

Joel got under the sink and was making a sad face saying "Daddy's gonna kill Ralphie!!"  That had to be one of my favorite parts of the trip!!

Although it was also pretty funny when he was pretending to be the mom on the phone after Ralphie said "Oh Fudge"

We then went across the street to the Museum.  It was pretty small and the only thing of note was this scary doll:

After we were all A Christmas Storied out, we drove around looking for a bowling alley, but, alas it was league night at the 2 alleys we tried.  We finally gave up and drove to the North Olmsted library to get some movies to watch.  As we were driving there we saw a Donato's pizza place.

Joel was SO happy.  I guess he had some fond memories of Donatos, but they closed the only one near him years and years ago.  So we had pizza and watched parks and recreations until about 10pm, after which we all promptly fell asleep.

I was SO sad to seem them go this morning, but beyond thankful that they made the trip to cleveland, even if it was only for a couple of days.  I'm so lucky to have such a great brother and soon to be sister-in-law!!!  Best.  Weekend.  Ever!!