Out at the Ranch

Friday night we went to a big party at Circle R Ranch. They throw it every 2 years to thank all of the hotels and meeting planners in the area for sending them a lot of business. Jen, Kyle, Casey and I all met up at Flips to have a drink before the party. Jen and I got ready at my apartment and the boys met up with us at Flips. When they walked in, it was so funny. They had gone to Western Warehouse and bought pearl snap shirts! They looked so adorable! Casey was just bummed he didn’t have cowboy boots to complete the outfit. When we got to the ranch, it was hoppin’! There were SO many people there. They have a big barn-like area inside with tables and a stage where the band was playing and then a huge outside patio with couches and all of the food station. The food was delicious. They had everything from smoked chicken quesadillas (my favorite), ribs, tacos, and chips and salsa. Everything was free…even the beverages. They had beer, wine, margaritas, and a very interesting purple drink that tasted like a liquid purple skittle…and not in a good way. It was so sweet you could only have a few sips and you were good. Later we ran into the sales managers where we were let in on a secret. If you had a special VIP card, you had access to their “full bar.” Luckily, the managers were willing to share their cards. This made me happy since I was now able to get my favorite…cran-vod with a lime. I think someone told me the technical name is a “cape cod” but I like crad-vod better. One of the highlights was that they had photo booths set up for FREE! Those things are normally like $10 at Six Flags. So of course I made Casey jump in one with me and take some pics. They turned out like most photo booth pictures do. The first one Casey is trying to figure out where the camera is. The second one I’m looking down at the picture laughing at the fact that Casey wasn’t looking at the camera. By the 3rd and final picture we got it right though. Towards the end of the night, I was adjusting my shirt and realized something…I had been so excited that my new outfit worked when I put it on that I completely forgot to take the tags off. I had been walking around with 2 tags on my jeans all night. Luckily my shirt was long so I don’t think anyone noticed until I did. Still, everyone got a good laugh out of it. We had all talked about going out somewhere to dance after the party until we heard that a DJ was coming on at the end of the night. We all danced the night away. It ended up being a ton of fun!

Photo op with Kristen and Jen

Whoops! Left the tags on!

Doing Casey's "old man" dance

The Sales Girls

Queen of Crockpots

I have a new passion in life…crockpots. This past weekend I made an investment in a 6 quart, stainless steel crockpot and I am happy to say that I have not one ounce of buyers remorse. My first crockpot experience took place on Sunday. My crockpot came with a cookbook so I already read through and picked the ones I wanted to try first. So on Sunday, I made my first pot roast. It was delicious! Taking after my father, I of course could not stick to the bland recipe provided in the free cookbook. I had to kick it up a notch and make it better. Thanks to some motherly advice, I replaced the onions with onion soup mix and the mushrooms with cream of mushroom soup. My favorite part of the crockpot cooking experience…only 1 dish to clean at the end of the night! How can you beat that?! After the initial cooking experience, I was hooked. Yesterday, while at work, I was slow-cooking some chicken with rosemary and great northern beans. Again, not to toot my own horn but TOOT TOOT! It was AMAZING! So the 3rd round will be this Sunday and it’s going to be a kind of cheesy chicken but after talking with my cooking buddy Kate, I am going to make it a little chicken cordon blue and add some prosciutto. It’s still in the works but I think I’ll have a plan by Sunday. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Until then, just call me the Queen of Crockpots!

Reata

Last night Casey and I joined my parents for dinner at Reata, a restaurant located in Sundance Square in downtown Ft. Worth. We had all seen the restaurant when we were driving to drop my parents off at their hotel to check-in. It just looked like this garden patio on the top of a building. When you actually sit up there, it is really cool. You see all these buildings lit up and it has a kind of garden terrace feel. The food was super good too! It’s all very classic Texas food but with a gourmet twist, for example, the jalapeno cheddar gritz. We all ended up getting the exact same thing, the chicken fried steak which came with these amazing mashed potatoes. Before our food arrived my mom told me that she had a surprise for us. She had eaten lunch with her college roommate and she said when she came out of the restaurant, she saw…SPRINKLES! The cupcake place that I had been telling her we HAD to go to. She bought 4 cupcakes for us and the restaurant had said we could bring them in. So after dinner, we all split the cupcakes: vanilla, black and white (chocolate and vanilla frosting), red velvet, and peanut butter chip (which was by far the best one!). We let our waitress have some too which I’m pretty sure made her night. If you are looking for a nice restaurant to try with awesome atmosphere and delicious food, you definitely need to try Reata!

Hangin' with Big Tex

Friday was the big opening of the State Fair of Texas and I was there for it! After work, Casey and I went with our friends Kyle and Jennifer (who also happened to be on a blind date this particular evening). We all met up at my place and then we piled into my car and made our way to the fair. After stopping for gas and finally finding some parking, we made it. The first thing that we hit up was the car show. Casey found several trucks he was interested in of course. I was looking around to see if they had a Nissan Morano there because that’s the car I’ve been interested in and wanted to see one in person. However, no luck, I should have known that Texas would only be featuring American made cars. Sometimes I really do believe that Texas is its own little world. Moving on…I was hungry so we decided to hit up the all the classic state fair food. I started off with a “sausage on a bun” which was so good that after Casey had one bite of mine, he had to go back and get one for himself. Next on the menu for me was a kabob of chocolate dipped strawberries. I had seen these last year at the fair but hadn’t had any, so this year I had a goal of eating some. They were delicious. I had heard from people at work that there was a giant butter sculpture at the fair and figured this was something I had to see. It was pretty impressive. It was King Tut themed and very detailed…for butter. After stopping by and watching a little bit of the Lady Antebellum concert, we made our way to Midway which is the place where all of the games and rides are. I stopped this older man who was with his wife and children and asked him to take a picture of the 4 of us. As he was about to take the picture he said “ok, now everyone say…Sex!” What ever happened to “cheese”? His wife looked so embarrassed and we all couldn’t help but laugh. Kyle and Casey had planned on battling it out to see who could win a prize first, but when we saw the insane costs to throw a basketball ($3 for 1 throw) we decided to skip that idea and go for a ride on the Ferris wheel. The views from the top were amazing at night! Overall, it was a really fun night. I just love going to those types of things where you kind of get to feel like a kid for a few hours.

"Everyone say...Sex!"

LIFE

You'll notice that I have put up a new quote of the week. This one struck me because recently I have been thinking a lot about what I want to do career-wise. Sometimes I wish it could be like the board game LIFE, where you just draw a card and find out what your career is. That might be a little easier than actually figuring it out for yourself. I know I don't want to be an assistant forever so for fun I took some online personality tests that are supposed to tell you different careers that you would be good at. According to the test, I would make a good dental hygenist, teacher, counselor, interior designer, and realtor. Working in the hospitality owrld for the last year has also made me think about being a meeting planner. I just feel like there are so many things I could do out there and I guess I just need to decide what it is that I want to do. Easier said than done, right? I've been praying about it though and figure that God has a plan for me. I'm excited to see where His plan takes me in life because I know it will be great, wherever it is.

The Gummi Bears

I’m sure that a lot of you will have a hard time believing this announcement but here it goes…I am now the proud owner of 2 Fantasy Football teams. Before the season started, Casey had a couple teams which meant that we watched a lot of football on that starting weekend so he could “watch his players.” Personally, I did not particularly care to watch that much football but the whole fantasy team thing did look kind of fun. So I told Casey that in order for me to enjoy watching TONS of football games each weekend, I wanted to have my own teams. Now, the leagues Casey is in are very exclusive and they have waiting lists, try outs, or something like that to get in so he set me up in a public league and started a private league with his family so he could play (and lose) to me. If you hadn’t guessed yet, the name of both of my teams is, drum roll please…The Gummi Bears! Doesn’t that name just strike fear into your blood? So last weekend were my teams first games. Let me tell you, having a couple fantasy football games really does make watching the games on TV a whole lot more interesting. In fact, I actually stood up, screamed, and jumped for joy when DeSean Jackson ran a touchdown last week, only to find out in replay that he had been a little cocky and threw the ball for a victory dance before entering the end zone. As his manager, I of course was furious and believe me, I thought about benching him. So I can now name a lot of players in the NFL and tell you which ones are good and bad. Apparently if you want me to take interest in something, just turn it into a competition!

Mystery Date

So last Thursday, I told Casey that I wanted to do something romantic this weekend. Earlier that week, he had mentioned that it would be fun to get ice cream and take it to the lake to watch the sunset and I had talked about going to Cowboys Red River to go country dancing. I figured that we would do one of those things and I was excited about that. Well, Friday, Casey sent me an email at work that said "Be ready to go at 6:30 tonight." That was it. No clues or anything. Since the dancing would have been on Saturday, I assumed I was getting ice cream and a sunset. I told him I was excited about ice cream and he let me think that that's what we were doing. I was convinced that's what the romantic moment would be. My suspicions started to change when at 6:15 (when I was still on the couch in my comfy clothes because how long does it take to get ready for ice cream?) Casey went into my room to start changing and came out with a bouquet of a dozen roses (see the pic to the right). Now I had been in my room since I got home from work and never saw the roses and still he won't tell me where he hid them. That was when I thought it might be something more than ice cream. I decided I should actually touch up my make-up at that point. Then I saw what he was wearing: nice jeans, a collared shirt, and his dress boots. Ok, so this probably was going to be more than a trip to Braum's. I put on my nice jeans, a blouse, and my new shiny heels and believe it or not, I was ready exactly at 6:30pm. We started heading down 635 heading toward Dallas which just really confused me. We ended up at a place called Bruno's which is an italian restaraunt that overlooks the canals. Quick flashback: On our way to the Cowboys game a few weeks ago, Candace and Ryan were talking about when they lived in Las Colinas on the canals. I mentioned that I had never been to to canals and how it would be fun to go to eat there sometime. Well let me tell you, Casey remembers everthing and he remembered that. We had a table reserved for us in the glassed-in patio that overlooked the canal. It was such a nice dinner and I just enjoyed talking and spending time with him. After dinner, we walked along the canals for a bit which was also very romantic. I was just so surprised and impressed that he came up with the restaraunt and everything on his own. A girl could get used to nights like that!