Birthday Month and the end of Summer

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Back again, for an update on the lives of K and I. 
Recently  it has been my birthday month and man has it been a doosey. I got utterly spoiled and our bank account lost several pounds as I got to do so much fun stuff. 

K also got to have his bachelor party as well this month. Although he came home from paintball with some bruises and there were a pair of mystery man underwear found at the lake house, I believe all parties had tons of fun :D
BB babysat me while I had nowhere to be so I also had fun going to Beer Kitchen and Firefly Lounge (did I mention the part about my wallet groaning this month, yikes!)

In terms of my own celebrations we first celebrated a good review from my job with  a trip to the plaza. We ate at Brio for brunch, which was delicious. 

 

K drank sparkling water and felt like a champ. 

We also went to Urban Outfitters, which I believe we have somewhat outgrown, as most of the clothes made us laugh with their extreme hipsterness and total lack of purpose.

I can't say it wasn't fun to really try to reach our inner hipsters. 


 

We capped off the night with a date of watching Inception and making nachos:) 

We had so many fun dates this month it is difficult for me to relate them all, but I know there were several others in there, in which we ate Mexican food with some old friends, meet some new coworkers from India  etc,

I had several other actual celebrations, including two birthday celebrations and a birthday dinner. 
Number one was an excellent party that BB threw for me, a beer scavenger party which was full of fun people, excellent food, a giant costco cake and much dancing with the Xbox Kinect. 


Thanks everyone who came for all the delicious and interesting beer. 
P.s. dear readers, beware the delicious costco cake. Its volumes of butter cream icing and layer of vanilla mousse will tempt you with its giantness, but there will be leftovers which will possibly make you sick and definitely make you fatter. 

K also took me out to Grunauer (groan, groan wallet) for an excellent birthday dinner on my actual birthday. I had no idea I love German food but I do. It is so funny, when you are a kid you hate things that are full of vinegar and mustard (or at least I did) but that is what I love now for sure. 

Finally, I also got to go to Marmi and Papa R's for a birthday lunch of delicious chipotle shrimp tacos and blueberry peach crisp. We got to visit with these lovely persons before they left on a jet plane to Budapest and while also catching up with LP and company after they got back from India. My family is so international, considering LH and company just got back from Ireland/London as well, exciting! 

I also got some excellent b-day presents that will very much help me in the winter months to come. K got me some ROCKIN boots which will become my uniform because I love wearing boots so much. Marmi and Papa R also helped me get this amazing down coat that I found on clearance from Soia&Kyo, and I will never have a freezing tush again!



 See, I told you I got totally spoiled this month. I have no idea what is so special about year 24, but apparently we just needed to live it up for a while. Now it is back to the grindstone of working out, cooking at home and eating more vegetarian, whew.
 In wedding news, the dress is done. It isn't completely sewn together as I am on the road to losing weight and will hopefully be a little more successful in two months, at which time we will sew the final seams. I did get to try it on though and I am so happy. I love that my mother so lovingly stitched this thing together, it makes it a magical dress to me, not to mention that it is pretty gorgeous anyway:) 

KR also got to come up for the weekend and we spent a fun if fruitless day shopping for a bridesmaids dress. We are burdened by choice as there is no bridesmaid "dress" for these nuptials, but I'm sure we can get her something fun in the end. 

I'll be spending this month trying to accomplish some of the last wedding crafts as next month I'm getting married (!!) and there is something every single weekend, whew. We will also be participating in the BikeMS 2 weeks from Saturday so wish us luck and donate to K if you feel so inclined.

A Monster Post

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So, this post isn't about monsters but it appropriately enough has a lot of photos taken in the dark. Sometime soon, I'm going to get smarter people to teach me how to take better pictures in the dark. In the meantime, however, you'll just have to settle for my blurry, grainy moments. 

Back to the title, we are squeezing in at just under a month since the last post. We have been doing better with taking pictures though, so at least we have lots to say. 

This is a random (see: Monster, a word that is conveniently analogous to many things) account of the rest of our summery happenings. 

Number one: We went to the drive-in and it was my first time. It was very fun but pretty late on a Friday night. We saw Captain America and Cowboys and Aliens (which I only saw about ten minutes of before I was a goner).  
Luckily we have K's car, which is a perfect bed to cover in blankets and peanut shells. 


Ok, those were the worst pictures; I thought I would start with low expectations. Despite my terrible photography, it was very fun. 

In other news, K has been put on Morning shift, which means we have tons more time together. Already the weekends are better, as he is done by 9 or 10 a.m., so we have the whole weekend. The first weekend, we ended up mostly veg-ing out and cleaning. Here you see K partaking of some Shark Week on Netflix after we supped on some frozen pizza like real 'mericans. 

 

This weekend, however, we have been putting the time to some better use. We have already had fun playing a live trivia game as The Brick with BB (one person, two awesome initials) and friends. We held our own against some serious regulars and had fun eating The Memphis. We also had some late night sausage (don't be gross)  at Grunauer. 

Yesterday we rode our bikes up to the River City Market and back (a nice 20 mile ride, yay training). 



Later, BB came over and her and I made spring rolls and sushi. 




I feel like we did a pretty good job, especially since we made our own peanut sauce that was not too shabby and our own tamagoyaki which we served with grilled eel. 

Speaking of cooking, K has been holding his own this week in the cooking department. 
This could be because he is sick of my tricks. I may or may not have assembled what I told him was a casserole, but was really a strata. I put all sorts of tempting and delicious ingredients in it, knowing full well he hates eggs. 




I thought perhaps the egg thing was mainly mental, but at least he got to prove he isn't just a whiner:) Even though he suffered through several iterations of eating this before fessing that he hated it (don't get me wrong, I gave him ample opportunity to say he did not like it but he refused) I think he decided to start taking more of the cooking on. 


Out of inspiration was born two different baked products from scratch! First up was a delicious no red sauce squash and chicken pizza. Even though his yeast wouldn't foam, he made it through with a nice (if squat) pizza. 


          

He was also inspired to make peanut butter cookies from scratch. 


Why, you ask? Because a very exciting thing happened, we got our first wedding present! The oft mentioned BB sent us our very own mixer and man were we excited. I even waiting until 11 to open it with K when he got home, which was fully documented. 








In other wedding news, things are coming together nicely. K had a meeting with the caterer, also known as Papa K, so we are right on track to a supremely fun day. I also found the last fabric we were looking for (projects of secret decorating). 


Tomorrow I'll have one of my last fittings for my wedding dress with Marmi, who has amazingly pretty much finished. She spent all summer and some of spring diligently working on this and I am excited and grateful:) 

In random news, we have had lots of new neighbors (one of which apparently rejected their stove, which sat outside for about a week, haha!) 




All this moving has got me itching to move as well, so if you know of a great place in KC that is a decent price and isn't north of Roeland park or south of the Triangle, let me know. We still like living basically in the city (not Downtown, but close enough to it and the plaza and westport). 

Also, I finally got to meet some of my team members at work from India. They brought me this awesome good luck figure (the elephant, not all the rest of my wacky desk ornaments) as well as some spices etc. to make Indian cuisine, which I'm sure you'll see in the coming posts. 


Until next time, I'm getting excited for Fall!

K's Birthday Month

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Photo dumpapalooza needs to be explained. These are all bad photos.....the end:) 

Before I jump in to K's birthday celebrations can I also just say that I got to babysit Princess Nithi and her little friends this week and what a treat. I don't have one non-blurry photo of them but it was adorable seeing them all romp around together. It really has been years since I've been in a whole group of little kids (whhhaa?) and they all played so well together and had a giant giggly mess of fun. Honestly, this reminded me of my sisters and I when we were little, bossing each other, telling on each other but fiercely loving each other too.




What fun! 

Ok, on to K's birthday celebration. This weekend K got a whole four days off, for much birthday celebrating. We kicked it off by going to see the Harry Potter midnight showing Thursday night. It was spectacularly awesome. We went with K's friend T, bought candy at the grocery store and got our own limited edition 3D glasses to keep, which turns out to be beneficial as well as very rad as they are much more comfortable than the standard fare. We went to see the show that started with Part 1 at 9, then released part 2 at midnight. Annnddd, since we are nerds and wanted good seats, we got there at 7. So, if you can't do math, we were at that movie theatre seven and a half hours. I very much loved the last movie though, and that is saying something because I didn't really like most of these movies, though I clearly adore the book series. 



Friday we headed to the lake with (K and J) and (L and F). We eagerly did everything we could, including game playing, reading, floating in the relaxation station (Costco rocks that apparently!), tubing (which made K and I sore), taking pontoon rides, riding the wave runner, cooking etc. It was really fun and what a great way to kick off some steam. We have been saving the large bulk of our vacation for the  wedding so it was so lovely of K and J to host this little getaway. 

Some choice pictures from the event include Odie trying to keep cool


K with a signature Rolling Rock, our cheap beer of choice this season.

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The birthday boy and his candles. Consequently this story is something of a disaster but it turns out to be something K loved anyway. I tried to pick up an ice cream cake on the way to the lake at DQ, but the one we looked up was closed. Went to the grocery store there and they didn't sell cakes, bought him ice cream which got melty in the malfunctioning freezer. I ended up sticking those gosh darn candles in a bowl of melty ice cream and we all supped. 



Yeah, I'm going to buy him an ice cream cake on his real birthday still though


This...is the face of a girl who just stole an early bite of breakfast. 


J poses with the fruit.....and some of K's delicious chocolate zucchini bread. 

To top it all off, we spent yesterday with B, who came to town to go to the Reel Big Fish concert with K. I believe they had tons of fun as they came home sweaty and grinning. Before I dropped them off I also got to chaperone dinner at what is quickly becoming one of our favorite places Beer Kitchen . I always love a good gastropub. 

Speaking of food that is bad for you, we had one last hurrah tonight after my work/on his dinner break when we made a dinner date at Pizza 51 . We had never tried it before, but this is where all the cool kids from UMKC go. I was pleasantly surprised by a pretty light pizza. Here are some photos of us chowing down. 





The wedding highlights of this post are that my Marmi is a goddess. She has been sewing away on a dress that must remain secret, but is totally fabulous already. I am pretty excited that we dipped below the 100 days mark and will be printing up some invites come next with my sis LP. Also, been looking up the average October temps. Last year, between 77 and 65 on our date. Year before, between 54 and 43.....umm crazy Fall here we come! 

A Post About Food

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In importing my recent photos (taken from my phone, shame on me for never charging my lovely camera's battery lately), I realized that these are all about food. I'm taking this as a good sign of all the fun times we've been having. 

Before I tantalize 'all my reader's' taste buds though, I must preface this with the fact that we have also been having lots of exercise to counteract this. We have still been riding, including some very fun rides with Mom and Dad and training for the BikeMS also. 

However, the fun part is the food. 

Witness, our 4th of July celebration. We had crappy food at Cheeseburger in Paradise (ew, and in all honesty, we went there looking for a bathroom:) Really, K convinced (see, he thought I didn't know what he was doing) me to go to Nebraska furniture mart (which was closed) to fake shop for T.V's (which we aren't buying, unless somebody dies and leaves us tons of money, in the hopes there would surprisingly be some blow out sale for the 4th with a deal I wouldn't be able to pass up (it is fun to dream). 

However, K got a milkshake and was therefore happy 


The one cool day last week I spent a little time baking. I took a recipe a work friend gave me for the German Bierock and modified it, american man style (i.e. what I had in my cupboard). It ended up like a shepard's pie in a soft roll. K went crazy in love with these. 





We also hit up the Westport Food Truck Festival with the awesome L and F  and had a great time despite the serious heat. It could also be the fond memories of sitting with this food in our bellies while watching HP 1 with the commentary of Wizard People, Dear Reader 


A delicious Asada taco and alternately totally blah chicken taco



Fried catfish (pretty darn good, I've never had this) 

L's nachos, which all declared as 'How could they possibly make this taste this bad' 



K with his pretty darn good Philly Cheesesteak. 

Not pictured here was a cookies and cream cupcake from Ms. Nene's cupcakes and it was really good. I wouldn't say it was as good as my fav Cupcakes a la Mode, but it was much lighter and delicate, and therefore much more welcome in the 100 degree weather. Dear Westport, next time you want people to eat, don't charge 5 bucks for entry AND 5 bucks for beer, and invest in some umbrella rental:) 

All in all it was a wonderful time. 

This post's wedding sneak peak is of two of the DIY (i.e. thrift store items plus glue) stands for the dessert table. 



We have been trying to get all the rentals down this month. We also received our AMAZING invitation from awesome F , which we are very excited to send out. If you missed the seriously numerous posts, check out the engagement picture gallery where you can see pictures for awesome L, a la the link to wedding website on the right hand navigation. 

Until next time!