My Old Man & Bad Weather

I didn't get a chance to post last Sunday since I spent most of the day at Jeff and Kelli's. Let's break our recent events down by week then, shall we? (Pictures are at the bottom!)

January 27 thru February 2:

I spent most of this week preparing for tests and quizzes while secretly organizing a surprise party for Danny's 25th Birthday. I had to bake his cake in stages throughout the week since I had so much studying to do. I let him cut a piece on his birthday and told him that we had to save the rest for when we had people over on Saturday (LIE!). He wanted to have people over on Friday so that the cake would still be fresh but clearly, I wouldn't have time to make a meal and get the house ready for company after work on Friday (2nd LIE!).

I really was going to be pressed for time since I get off work no earlier than 5:00 PM and people would be arriving at 6:00. So I had to be creative about bringing home the groceries I'd need for the surprise party.
Danny: "Why'd you buy a bunch of salad and stuff? We don't eat that much salad." Jacquee: "Kelli asked me to bring taco salad for their superbowl thing on Sunday."
(Danny, I love you, but who brings taco salad to a superbowl party? LIE #3!)

As luck would have it, it started snowing like crazy Thursday morning and continued all night meaning....SNOW DAY FRIDAY! Rock on! Since SIU never closes, Danny still had class to go to and my community college gave me the day off. I spent the morning getting the house ready and making my little "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DANNY" sign. When that was finished, I called Kelli and she brought her kids over to play in the snow.

After I got off work in the afternoon, Jeff and Kelli came over. Kelli was going to "help me organize my pictures" (absolutely believable since Kelli is a meticulous organization freak...LIE #4) and Jeff really wanted to go to Dick's and Best Buy and asked if Danny wanted to run there with him. While they were gone, we transformed the house, put out the food, cooked the beans and the meat in an amazing 30 minute time frame while guests arrived. Then Kelli called Jeff and told him that Sadie (their baby) was throwing up everywhere because she had eaten some of the dog's food and she also pooped through her clothes so they had to come back. (you can imagine the laughter of everyone listening to this absolutely disgusting excuse...BIG FAT LIE #5)

Here's how the math breaks down:

3 believable lies
+2 ridiculous, I-can't-believe-you-bought-that-crap lies
--------
=1 surprised Danny

The party was fun, we had a great time and the only time Danny suspected anything was when he pulled up to the house and saw the Yardley's car because I'd forgotten to tell them to park at the church across the street. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DANNY!

FEBRUARY 3 thru FEBRUARY 9

-Superbowl party at Jeff and Kelli's: extremely fun. I think I raised my cholesterol 10 points in one fowl swoop.

-On Tuesday, we had Pablo, Paula and Tamara over for dinner and they brought their friend Rebecca. We had a nice meal of just the girls since the boys were late. When Danny came home he brought a tornado home with him, literally. He had only come in and finished eating when the tornado sirens went off. Since we have a tiny house with no basement, all of our rooms have an exterior exposure. We brought our blankets and flashlights into the hallway and camped out until the sirens stopped. What a party! Since the weather was still terrible we didn't want them to drive home in the waterfall outside so I started to make cookies with Tamara (Almond shortbread cookies with Lavender icing. Amazing. watch for it popping up on pimpmydinner). When the cookies were done and the weather wasn't as horrific our friends went home and we settled in for the night.

-Friday, I went to the Taste of Chocolate festival with Kristin Beasley. It was very fun. It's one of those rich people gatherings since it's a fund raiser for the local women's shelter, but someone gave Kristin the tickets for free so I tagged along and donated a grand total of $1 when I purchased a water bottle (I tried to bid on a silent auction item but I was outbid very quickly. Embarrassing, but I had a much lower limit than most of the people there.) We ate a ton of chocolate. I could have eaten more if I hadn't tried to be "well balanced" and tried the chili from one of the vendors. I've heard of putting chocolate in chili but I think these people put white chocolate and some sweet gummy things in it. Barf! I was sick the rest of the night.

-Saturday, Danny and I had to drive down to Cape G. for a youth activity and dance. We tried to help with the music since the guy who normally runs the stake dances couldn't make it and I discovered 4 things:
1. My music is already out-dated and not "mainstream" enough for the youth
2. My music isn't NEARLY as out-dated as our stakes list of "Approved Youth Music" I'm pretty sure we had the same playlist that was used at my first stake dance.
3. I don't have as good of moves as I've always imagined
4. I can limbo like a rockstar, in heeled-boots no less!

PHOTOS
This was taken on our Snow Day while I was demonstrating for Spencer the proper technique for creating a snow angel. Thanks for the nice camera angle, Kelli!


This is the picture of Danny's birthday cake from my cookbook....


...and this is what it looked like in real life. Sloppy, gooey, and oh so yummy!



I was clearing off the pictures from my camera and this photo was too funny to go unseen. For Christmas, my mom sent Danny and I PJ's to match the rest of the family. I've got to hand it to her that this year's outfits were unique. There's no way we could have that embarrassing run in with the neighbors where we find out that we got the same Christmas PJ's...unless we lived in Thailand! For your viewing pleasure, here is Danny and I modeling our underarmour shirts with our one size fits all Thai fisherman pants. It just seemed like a hard core yoga outfit so we both tried to pull a dancer's pose.