I am officially a cheesy fan...

So today marks 1 day after our 1 year anniversary. It's been a week of theater following our weekend home.

Last weekend we went back to Cincinnati to visit the fam. Sweet Vivienne is getting so big. Uncle Evan taught her how to *raspberry which was fun to watch her do while Courtney was feeding here. The boys (David and Matthew) are getting SO big and SO smart and still SO sweet. After the annual Sweeney Christmas, the next day was our smaller family Christmas and I was so, so happy to have C & A Maxie and the "Seevers" <-- this isn't Hannah's last name, but I don't want to butcher it. Got to see Jessie, Chris and oh my gosh, Emily and how big she is getting. Ashley and LC and their growing bump. It's insane how quickly EVERYTHING and everyone seems to grow when you're gone. It was the perfect visit.

Evan and I celebrated our anniversary by going to the Nutcracker here in Houston - he got amazing seats and it was pretty incredible. We went to a restaurant called Miglione's here in Houston. AMAZING ravioli! Evan has pictures on his phone.... I'll post them when I get them from him.

We also gave ourselves a dog for our anniversary :) His name is Charley, he's blind and amazing. He's a Great Dane/Sharpae (sp?) mix, about 10 months old and 65ish pounds. He is so cute, he knows commands like "step" - to step up or down, "careful" - to go easy when about to slam into something and "sit" - the basics, but not bad for a dog that can't see. He has really good spacial awareness and can get around the house really well. He sniffs his way to his treats and toys. And when he follows us around the house, he lets his guard down because he's depending on us to tell him when he's about to slam into something. SOMETIMES we may forget that he's blind until he does slam into a wall or "sold" sign outside. Those are getting less and less each day though. He's so chill and just hangs out with us. He's house trained already, has favorite toys and FARTS so much. It's TERRIBLE. Besides the farts though, he's pretty bad ass.
This picture is him poking his head in the bathroom. He lays like this when we're getting ready in the morning and just is happy being around us.

I am obsessed with him. Stinky or not...


My second new obsession has been Dancing With the Stars, I know, Lame. Big time lame.. and for a reality tv/dance junky like me, you'd think I would have been into this thing sooner, but I had no interest in ballroom dancing. Enter Jennifer Grey aka "Baby" from Dirty Dancing. She was on this season and that is one of my all time favorite movies and so I watched every single episode religiously and to this day, still have the finale saved on my DVR and I totally, without shame watch it 1 or 2x a week. Sad. I know. So, during my obsession, I learned about a few of the dancers on the show and they basically all know each other... blah blah blah, I'll spare you the details that only I care about. Long story short, 2 of the performers are in a show called Burn The Floor (http://www.burnthefloor.com/) and I went tonight with my neighbor Paula and it ABSOLUTELY BLEW MY MIND. IT was beyond anything I could ever imagine and no matter the dancer, I will see this show in every city I live in that it comes to. I cannot explain the intensity and just insane talent that was there tonight.

So, after the show, as much of a stalker I am, I am not the person who gets autographs, waits to say hi or anything like that - I actually hate those girls and think they're imposing on the perfomers, but at first reluctantly and then thankfully, my friend Paula wanted to stay. Via her...I met Corky and Mark Ballas and even spoke with Corky, shook his hand and then he hugged me after I told him that I admired his work. It was crazy and mind blowing and I know I sound like a crazy person, but for real... it was great. I now have to say that I AM one of "those" girls:


This is some of the cast (Paula's has everyone, I stood back because I was literally 10 million miles away from my comfort zone standing in the "fan line). Bottom right is Mark Ballas and in the middle is Corky. For real, call me a geek, but this man is amazing and has instructed some of THE most amazing dancers in the world.

Anyway, Houston is still amazing. It's December 20th and the high today will be 75. We have the greatest neighbors in the history of ever and Evan is never gone for more than 2-3 nights a week.

Life is pretty great.

Miss everyone, much love...

So much for weekly posts....

I feel like lots of new things are happening, I mean, aside from being newly married, newly moved and newly housed. These details are not in order.

Most of you knew I was, for lack of a better term, reluctant to move to "the burbs" of Houston, but we loved this house. Our subdivision is new, so all the neighbors are pretty new and interested in the other neighbors, so they put together a cook-out. I am happy to say, I LOVE our neighbors! One is even from Cincinnati (yay!). I thought it'd be much harder to meet people, but we really get along with so many of our neighbors. How lucky?

This is Eleanor to the left, yes, as Brandi pointed out, it looks like what COULD be our child, but it's not. We took a trip to Oklahoma (a first for me since before the wedding!) and the family got to meet sweet Vivienne. The picture to the right is Mike holding sweet V. Then we drove to good ol' Wichita to meet sweet Eleanor and see B Parks. Oh, how I miss her, and aren't these 2 of the most beautiful babies?


I've started a new job.
No way ever could it every fill the void in my heart that is TAZA, but it literally fell in my lap the day before I took the big move to Houston. It has turned out to be a great transition for me. It's 7 minutes from my house and the hours are incredible flexible because they asked me to manage it, so I make the schedule ;) This shop isn't the typical shop. Dawn, the owner, has these huge ideas. Before I knew it, it is more a small cafe, not a coffee shop. At first, we thought we'd be able to use La Terza, our (Taza's) roaster from Cincinnati. Unfortunately and fortunately, there is a local "Chuck/La Terza" called Katz Coffee that the owners daughter has a relationship with from a previous coffee shop. They do fair trade and all the service that Chuck did. So in my mind, it's a local Chuck and therefore, I feel better about that. Sorry Chuck. I miss you! Either way, I feel lucky, it's nice to be in a shop and meeting local people. One thing I've learned about this area of Texas is that they don't like "fancy" coffee. I had some of Chuck's Sumatran brewed and literally every single customer said, "Don't you have regular coffee?" So now, I write "regular coffee" in parenthesis underneath the name of the coffee we brew. Oh Texas...

And tonight, I got home from work and the sun was setting and it just looked so pretty. My phone doesn't do it justice, but our house definitely feels like HOME. We went to Lowe's last week to try to start playing around with colors for some of our walls. So fun...

Speaking of home, we have some incredible visits coming up from some of our favorite people. Well, let's backup, the day after I got here, Jessica was here for 3 WEEKS! It was so good to have her here and it helped me transition so much from living with 9 people to living with 1 person and sometimes having an entire house to myself. I love you Riddle, but you ruined me for a small amount of time and I couldn't be in the house by myself. This picture to the left is Jessica touching Evan's neck. It was SO fun having her here. She helped me drive around the city lost. We went to some of my favorite places that sweet Jen Caro took me to see. And all of this before we found out that SHE PASSED THE BAR EXAM! Congrats! Oh, and COME BACK!

One of the other things we almost did while Jessica was here was get a dog. A few things happened that day, Jessica almost passed out of heat, Evan agreed to and we adopted a dog and her name was Sammy and she would have been the perfect dog for us. We were pretty sure she was house broken. She was a red heeler and that's a dog that's good for kids and super chill according to the shelter. She was sick though. We thought it was just a bad case of kennel cough, but after a full 24 hours of green puke, no eating or pooping, we reluctantly came to the conclusion that we were not cut out to take care of a sick dog. If either of us had been "dog people" and would have known what to look for, we could have kept her, but she was so sick and we had no idea what to even look for in her. Christy, if you ever read this, I'm so sorry :(

So, back to our visitors. My best friend Jessie is coming in a week and a half! I'm SO excited. She will be here for exactly 48 hours and I cannot WAIT to pack every minute of that 48 hours! Evan's parents and grandmother will be coming down the last week of October for an entire week. We're so excited to get things ready for them and to show them all the great things in Houston. Plus, it's our first house! How fun is it to show them through all of those new things. And last, but certainly NOT least, my Mom and Dan will be coming in January for the week of MLK Day. I'm hoping my baby sister can join them... I'm pressuring her to. And maybe Miss Armstrong will grace us with her company as well ;)

And I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but I have to go to bed because I have to be at work at 5:30am tomorrow (yuck) so the last thing that is the most recent and right now most exciting is that WE BOUGHT A TRUCK. Now, before I get e-mails about gas mileage and everything else that makes buying a truck a bad idea, let me assure you that the second we signed the papers, we started saving a substantial amount of money in every single possible way. And I LOVE it. LOVE.

So, lots of stuff happening. Miss you guys...

Week 1 of pre-Houston

So a quick update -
As most of you know, we are in the process of moving to Houston. Evan has started flying out of IAH (Houston's airport code), we're all moved in and I am slowly but surely transitioning down here as well.

There was a slight chance that I was going to be sent to San Antonio for a training job (my job in the Air Force) and that ended up not happening. Which was disappointing at first, but also pretty awesome because I got to spend this entire week IN Houston WITH Evan. So this week was fun. It felt like what it WILL feel like when I'm here full time. My friend Jen was in town and we made dinner and had some wine (maybe too much) but I got to use our awesome oven and our awesome dishes and our awesome cookware (thank you wedding gifts!)


So the first meal was poppyseed chicken casserole (thank you Iris). The wine getup there is sweet Emily's creation - basic white wine and cut up some oranges and throw it in there. VERY yummy.

We made got a lot done. We have just a couple boxes left. We hung pictures and got a shower curtain for the guest bathroom. We are SO ready for guests!!!



We also went and drove around the Woodlands...IN THE RAIN. And if any of you know Evan, you know, this is REAL love that he drove his car in the rain for Jamba Juice

This is a cute little store that reminded me of sweet Emily Marie













I went to a job fair on Tuesday - it was actually pretty intimidating when I thought about the last time I REALLY applied for a job was in 2000. No offense Aaron, but I figured I was a shoe-in for Taza ;) Had a few promising discussions and it was nice to see what Houston has to offer.

All in all, it was a good week. I can't wait until this is my full-time life. I'll miss everyone, of course but we'll love showing all of you this amazing city!

Life in Transition

A few weeks ago, Evan and I moved all of our stuff to Houston. We rented a 24ft truck, packed up my life, drove to Oklahoma, packed his life, then drove to Houston and unloaded our lives into our new home.

It was really cute. We showed up and there were balloons and "Welcome Home" signs all over our house. The builder put our key in a little present box.

On a side note, my friend Jen, who has been vital to my feeling like home in Houston got AWESOME news and got promoted (YAY Jen!) but her promotion is taking her to Denver before the summer is over, so unfortunately, our time together in Houston was short-lived. I'm EXTREMELY happy for her. Just when I thought things were looking lonely, our door bell started ringing. Neighbors from all around us came over to introduce themselves and it was so, so nice!


So things are going nicely. Thanks to the movers, Jen and "Mac" - we got everything in, unpacked and put away that weekend. Evan and I were wiped when Jen came over and put some great finishing touches, like pillows on the couch and Dyson-ing up all the packing junk. Evan put the last bookshelf together and now all we have to do is unpack clothes and ..... move there permanently ;)



We hope everyone visits soon..that is, soon after we move in for good!

A Night at TAZA...

Tonight I worked the door at TAZA. Saam and Sarah Jaine were behind the bar. The band was done at 11:30 and we just left at 1:30...sitting at that damn circle table just telling random stories.

I love nights like these and it's this kind of night that I'll miss...

Our Houston Days...

So, without putting too much catchup in here - we're moving to Houston. We're here this weekend to do our final walk through on our house and HOPEFULLY close on Friday. I love the house,I love it. I really wanted to rent, but we fell in love with it the SECOND we walked in.

I have this AMAZING friend here, her name is Jen. She has shown me the "local" version of Houston and I have to say, I love this city. Of all the times I've left my dear, wonderful Cincinnati, I can honestly say, this is the first time I'm really excited all the way through me about it. Except Taza, my sweet Taza, I'll miss you.

So I thought I'd start keeping track of our days...

Today we were supposed to do our walk through. They had a few more things to fix, so they pushed it back to this afternoon or tomorrow morning. So, we have the day to hang out in Houston. Now, when I'm with Jen, I feel comfortable navigating the city. It's just me and Evan today though, so we got to explore.

First stop...food. We're hungry and I have only done dinner here, we (Jen and I) normally grab Jamba Juice (amazing!) for lunch and do a big dinner. SO I got on my "magic phone" as Saam calls it and used UrbanSpoon to find a spot. We fell on Barnaby's Cafe. It sounded the best.


In Urban Spoon, it only had one dollar sign which meant cheap, so we didn't know what we'd be driving to or what kind of place would be there when we arrived.

First, Barnaby is a dog apparently. The place has bones and clouds on the ceiling and it seemed pretty nice. People were on their laptops and there were "CityBeat-esque" (local mags) type magazines outside the door. Our drinks...they make fresh strawberry lemonade, like Red Robin...but they were out so we "settled" for regular lemonade. It came out in this huge milk jug type thing. The type of jug they used to deliver milk back in the days they delivered milk and it was AMAZING. All "pulp-y" and what not. As soon as I figure out how to post pictures on this thing I will.

The reviews talked about these waffle fries with blue cheese fondue, so we ordered that and it did not disappoint. I didn't get a picture, but imagine waffle fries....with blue cheese fondue ;)

I thought I'd get something light and I went with an egg salad sandwich, easy. Evan got a hickory bbq burger. GOOD-NESS there was nothing light about anything. My egg salad sandwich was HUGE, it had tomatoes, onion, lettuce and bacon on it. It was held together with very tall toothpicks with olives on the top. Evan's sandwich was that burger, right, but it also had 3 slices of ham, shredded cheese and bbq sauce... it was CRAZY.


The COOLEST thing is that everything is either recyclable, able to be composted or 100% biodegradable. Even my to-go cup was made out of corn and I could compost it. HOW AMAZING.


I'm super excited about this city! And I'm even MORE excited about living here with Evan!