The big party week!

But first....

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER CHRISTMAS PICS

Before I jump into this week's adventures, I want to go back and show some pictures from our Heithaus Christmas celebration up at the lake. Somehow I missed these pictures in my Christmas posts, I think because they were on Joey's good camera and I usually just use the little point and shoot for the blog. Anyways, better late than never!

Here is a sampling of pictures from the weekend. It was so nice to see the whole family together for something other than a wedding. We all had a great time. Enjoy!

Martin in his santa hat. Awww..

Jenny with Grace and Leah. Grace is looking a little worried..

Uncle Tim with Brianna. Cute face, Brianna!

Me with Katelyn. She was a squirmy one!

Sam smiling (well, kind of) after opening his ornament.

Chris and Sam helping Martin open his present.

Me with the greatest gift ever - a giant wok!! I've already got some great use out of this!

And the family picture - all 18 of us! Just wait until the rest of us have kids, its going to be a full house!

NEW PHONE

Despite the fact that I love design and I read up on all the latest trends and new products, I tend to be one of the last people to actually adopt new technology. I get very attached to my things and I don't often upgrade. So I've had my little Motorola razr for like 3+ years and in the past 6 months it was really start to die on me. I was having all sorts of problems with it - losing calls, randomly shutting off, not ringing, etc. Joey has been begging me to get a new phone for months but I just loved it so much and no other phone on the market was good enough. But finally, Joey won the battle and I got a new one. Meet my new phone - the LG neon. Isn't she cute?

I liked the colors and the slide out keyboard. I wasn't quite ready to catch up with the rest of the world and pay a million dollars a month to get an iphone but I thought this was a nice compromise. The BEST part about the phone is that it has a little camera, which means I can take more real time experiential pictures for the blog! Yay! The only problem is that I can't figure out how to get them OFF my phone yet. So for the time being, I'm just going to take pictures of the picture on my phone. Please excuse the quality...

So to try out the camera, I took a picture of Colbi, one of the little girls I babysit for my fitness friend Cathy. Joey and I babysat for her last weekend when she had a last minute event at work. Isn't she cute!?

JOEY'S THE MAN!

Last week Joey had his one year review with his boss at work. As usual, he told him how awesome he is and how much the company appreciates all that he does. And to show their appreciation, they offered him a raise, and a nice one too! He didn't even have to ask! (In the meantime, I had my review at work and I was told that I was really smart and productive and did great work but I have issues with communication...so needless to say, no raise for me! :( maybe Joey can teach me a thing or two...)

So to celebrate his achievements we went out to his old favorite - Stoney River. We both got a delicious filet and a baked potato. Mmmm! Here is a picture I took with my phone that night.

CULT FITNESS

I think I've mentioned this before but my regular gym I've been going to for years stopped holding fitness classes in November due to tension with the instructors or something like that. So since then, I've been trying to maintain my fitness routine by running, teaching Step to my friend and doing videos in my living room. That was working for a couple of weeks but with the weather getting cold, its just so much harder to go outside for a run or even convince myself to put on workout clothes in the house.

Luckily, lately my fitness friend Cathy, who is the national program developer for the BTS company that trained me for STEP, has offered her basement studio to a couple of us that used to depend on the gym for our workouts. So about 6-7 of us have been meeting in her basement on Saturdays to do kickboxing, led by a former instructor. It's a nice little personal studio but 7 sweaty kickers makes for a tight squeeze. It's also a little weird when you think about it. Last weekend I was on my way there and I had one of the moments where I asked myself how in the world I got myself where I was. I was thinking - what have I done in my life to be doing secret underground kick boxing with a group of random people (mostly older, gay men) in an Australian's basement? I couldn't help but feel like I had drank some Kool-aid at some point. (FYI, The last time I had this type of awakening, I was standing in a coffee field in Brazil trying to communicate with a poor portugese farmer about how he drives his tractor) Anyways, I really like our little "fight club" as we call it but its just a little strange.

So now Cathy has offered the secret studio to me to start teaching larger groups of Step classes. This week I taught two older men who used to take Step at my gym. It went really well. Hopefully I'll be teaching up to 4 people next week. I have a few more weeks before I should be fully certified and teaching in a real gym soon...

FAMILY VISIT

Thursday night we had a nice visit from Joey's family. Joey's brother Tim who is currently living in Chicago came into town and his dad came down to pick him up. Since they were in the area, they stopped by and had dinner with us and spent the night. I cooked garlic basil shrimp with orzo (even though apparently Tim hates shrimp and Joey didn't even tell me! but Tim said he actually liked it, but he was probably just being nice...) and we had a relaxing evening chatting about movies and work and life.

Friday night we were having a big Mexican Fiesta so we had a little preparation to do. I had to prepare the sangria, with some advisement from Tim.

Oops! A little spill! Anytime I'm near something that will stain, I will without a doubt drop it on myself. Luckily Joey was there to clean me up!

I was especially excited to use our new punch bowl we got for the wedding. Although it was quite large and took up a lot of room in our fridge!

A fun night! Our spare bedroom is open for guests anytime!!!

MEXICAN FIESTA AND MARGARITA CONTEST

Friday was our big party. Our wine tasting event we had before the wedding was such a hit, that I've been wanting to have another one ever since but we just never got around to it until now. My idea for this party was to have a Margarita contest and have friends submit a recipe to be tasted and voted on. To incent people to participate, we offered a bottle of Patron to the winner. Here is Joey preparing our entry - made from Simply Limeade, Montezuma tequila (which apparently is terribly cheap tequila), and Triple Sec.

Here is the apartment around 7pm before the party started. I spent the afternoon cleaning and setting up. The place looked so pretty, I had to take a picture. I knew it wouldn't stay like this for long...

Here was my voting set up. We had 7 margarita entries and I labeled each one with a letter - F I E S T A ! . You can see the Patron "trophy" in the middle.

I made "votes" and scorecards to help with the tasting. Each person got a scorecard to rate each margarita as they tasted it to help them remember which ones they liked and which ones they didn't. After all the margaritas were tasted, each person could submit their vote to their favorito.

We had quite the turn out. I invited about 30-32 people and had 28 people show up! Isn't that amazing!? Everyone always says expect 50% but I guess giving away free margaritas and a bottle of Patron bumps that up a bit! The place was PACKED! Everyone brought some mexican inspired food and it was all so delicious. I guess we are all growing up and learning how to cook. We had carnitas, chorizo empanadas, smoked gouda jalepeno poppers, a taco bar, cheese dip, guacamole, and much more! Mmmmm!

Here is Joey with some of his good friends that could make it: Ryan, Lainey, and Sophia. BTW Lainey was the margarita winner. She won with 9 votes. The runner up had 6, and we only had 1!

I was busy playing hostess all night so I didn't get as many pictures as I would've liked but my friend Jenny took quite a few. Here are two that I really like. See the rest on Flickr here.

Me serving the samples for the Margarita contest!

Overall, a very successful party!!! And as with every big party, there was a big mess left over! That's ok, it was worth it!

We are already planning our next one. Joey came up with a great idea involving a game where you guess the ingredients for a mystery drink. Maybe in February...

Up next time, LA! Joey, my mom, and I are headed out to see my brother this Friday. Wish us luck getting there safe! Have a good week!