What are you Thankful for?

Every Thanksgiving, we get together with our best friends Pat and Lindsay and make an awesome Thanksgiving dinner. It's tradition for us to be together on Thanksgiving, and before every Thanksgiving dinner, we go around the table and say what we are thankful for. This year, we thought it would be fun to share what we are thankful for with all of you.

We are thankful for our amazing friends and family (that would be you!) and that everyone is in good health. We are thankful that in the last year we have gotten in better shape and have a lot more energy for life. We are thankful that in this bad economy Patrick has an amazing job that he loves and we can afford a comfortable life. Yes, we have to cut back on things but we have everything we could possibly need. We are thankful for the possibilities in our lives and the unexpected in life, in general. We are thankful for each other, because after all these years, we are still having fun.

I could go on and on. It makes you feel good to reflect on all that life gives you. So, what are you thankful for? Big or little, we want to share in your thanksgiving!

Life in SoCal

Well, it's a couple weeks into November and we're still using our air conditioner, the surrounding areas are burning and we had a couple small earthquakes this morning. Oh, to live in Southern California!

This past week the temperatures were in the high 80's to mid 90's and the Santa Ana winds were blowing. We always enjoy the winds except when they lead to fires. Yesterday, when I dropped Patrick off at the skatepark and went to the gym, you could tell the air quality wasn't good due to all the fires. Just in the hour I was at the gym it got so much worse; the sun was disappearing in all the smoke and the air glowed (it is a really eerie feeling to see the sky like that). I decided I better go get Patrick because it wasn't healthy for normal people, but with Patrick's asthma, it could be so much worse. We both could feel the smoke burning our throats and even for me it felt like it was harder to breath. In the two years we've lived here, this is the worst we've ever seen. You couldn't even see the mountains that were only a mile away.

Needless to say, we went home and hide in our apartment the rest of the day, where we could breath our nice, filtered, cool air. Gotta love air conditioning, even if it does cost you a fortune in the summer down here.

*Patrick and I are sooooo excited to be going home to Oregon for Christmas. It will be wonderful to get some nice cool, clean air into our lungs.*

Happy Halloween!

Patrick and I love Halloween! The other night we carved our pumpkins in preparation (they're already molding, so we'll be throwing those out today). We bought a bag of candy to hand out in case we got some trick or treaters and we've been listening to Halloween music for the last couple days.

Since we didn't have anything else to do on Halloween, we decided to have our own Halloween party, just the two of us. Patrick made some scary snacks that were delicious. We had monster mouths, brain, zombie fingers, bloody mummy toes and worms in dirt. Yummm! I dressed up as a 50's housewife and as part of my costume I had to bake some cupcakes (What? It was part of my costume). We were really hoping for some trick or treaters because we haven't had any in 8 years. But, once again, we got no one. We're just glad we didn't get a lot of candy.

We watched a scary movie, ate our scary snacks and had a really good Halloween overall.

I designed the pumpkins and Patrick carved both of them. He did a good job.

Spiderweb cupcakes

Patrick's creations!

Hey, save some of that brain for me.

I really wanted some trick or treaters so I could answer the door in my costume! Totally bummed.