david sedaris.

a few weeks ago ricks and i got the chance to go see david sedaris. he was in town performing a book reading at the mondavi center on uc davis campus. ricks and i both really love david sedaris and have taken a collection of his short stories with us on vacation ever since our honeymoon. at the reading he read a few monologues and stories from his new book, "lets explore diabetes with owls." he is considered a humorist and so his stories are very funny but also give you pause to think about life and bigger issues. one of our favorite stories from his new book was about trying to one-up his depressed sister. very funny stuff. he also shared some very funny anecdotes from his personal diary that included many stories from his various book tour travels. on occasion, his humor strays toward potty humor... which we totally think is hilarious! haha!

here is a pg-13 joke that someone shared with him when he was on tour in SLC and that he shared with the audience in davis:

a man and a woman were on an elevator. after a moment of silence, the man confessed that he was on his way to donate sperm because he gets paid $50. the woman moaned, 'aw, i only get $5 for plasma!' a month later they found each other on the same elevator. the man said, 'are you back to give more plasma?' and the woman, with an obviously full mouth, shook her head and replied 'mm mm.

so... that is david sedaris!

game night.

lately ricks and i have been hosting game nights every few sundays at our place. it has been a lot of fun to get to know our friends a little better and relax a bit on sundays. ricks has also started hosting LAN parties at our house once every few weeks or so. we love playing games and this has been a really fun way for us to play games with someone other than each other! depending on the size of the group we play group games, board games, or card games or video games at the LAN parties. i tend to like the more social games like "smurf" or "celebrity" while ricks like more of the thinking games like stone age and dominion. its been fun to play a bit of everything.

haircut.

since getting married, i had this idea that i really wanted to grow my hair out and have long luscious locks. well the longer my hair got, the less inclined i was to spend the time doing it in the mornings (read: drying long hair takes forever, especially when you have thick hair). most days i just tied it up in a top-knot and forgot about it. i have had a long history of not doing my hair - at one point in jr. high, my dad agreed to paid me $50 bucks if i would wear my hair down for 30 days in a row. well it was getting to the ridiculous point so a cut was in order.

when i went to get it cut, it told my sweet hair stylist that i was going blond! so we cut it and dyed it and then when i got home, i had a major identity crisis. i quickly learned that i just cannot handle being blond and so i scheduled another appt to color my hair back to brown. here is photo evidence of the 10 hours that i was a blond:

general life update.

ricks and i are both right in the midst of finals. however, mine are drawing to a close and ricks have only just begun. i will mostly be done with all of my work come wednesday with only a few last bits to wrap up before  i am actually done and ricks will take his first final wednesday and the remaining on the following wednesday and thursday and then a take home final that he just has to finish before the 21st. friday we will be flying to utah for a glorious 3 week break. we are so entirely thrilled to go to utah and spend every day with family! we have lots and lots of fun fun plans including squishing 3 really cute triplets, seeing cyndi and jed after 2 long years of living a country apart, celebrating our 2 year wedding anniversary, and spending time with all of our other family and friends that we miss every second that we are in davis.

we are both really happy here, though. i have been volunteering at the library helping with all sorts of odds and ends which has been a ton of fun. we have been cooking up a storm as well. we have been obsessing over homemade pretzels, homemade fries, and cookies and mousses of every variety. we also have been on a trader joes sweet binge for the last year and a half, but the holidays take it to a whole new level with the limited release of their peppermint joe joes and chocolate covered peppermint joe joes. we have been enjoying the new whole foods that opened up a whole 2 minute walk away. we havent purchase much there (expensive!!) but we sure have enjoyed 2 or 3 day nights perusing their amazing ingredient selection.

ricks and i resumed our netflix account and have become SNL junkies. we are both in love with bill hader. oh, and we recently redecorated and switched out our yellowstone by moran for a more graphic triptych of charley harper national park posters. we even made the frames that are holding them up! DIY champs! well, we would be if the frames didnt suck so much. the good movie drought abated when argo came out. we about died watching it, it was so good. ben affleck is such a good director. skyfall was fun. and we are really looking forward to seeing lincoln, djano unchained, and zero dark thirty. can you guess what our anniversary plans are going to be?

the tree.

christmas time is officially here and the nativity, advent calendar, and christmas dishes are all a go! the christmas playlist has been created and plays 24/7 and white christmas has been watched. and the tree.... oh, the tree. this year ricks and i werent too excited to go buy a tree since we knew we would only be able to enjoy it for about 2 weeks before we head back to utah for the break. so.. instead, we went to my favorite ikea and purchased some fabric with a tree printed on it. i sewed an opening for the dowel to go through, screwed some eye hooks to either side of the dowel and hung it up on the curtain rod with some twine. we then hung some ornaments through the fabric and, wah lah! a beautiful, apartment space friendly tree! we seriously love it. when we first hung it up, we could not stop staring at it. we seriously just sat staring at it and talking about how awesome it was and how happy it made us. ah, christmas! we love you!

thanksgiving.

for thanksgiving this year we stuck around davis. we werent quite sure what we were going to do until the last minute but ended up having such a fun fun fun thanksgiving!! we ended up spending the day with the browns. we absolutely love the browns so it made for a really fun day. plus, since thanksgiving is a holiday focused on food, we were concerned about spending the day with good cooks. the browns are definitely good cooks. we split up responsibilities to ensure we covered all of our thanksgiving bases. i took over the pies (apple and pumpkin mousse), green beans, cranberries and ricks took on the turkey, gravy, and potatoes.  gratefully the browns took on the rolls, stuffing, scalloped potatoes, chocolate pie, and green salad. we ate really well to say the least. afterward we chatted, played a fun (but lonnng game) of stone age, ate dessert, and kicked off the year with the first screening of elf!! and we are moving right on to christmas!! 

Our feast!

A smoked turkey. Yum.

halloween.

ricks and i celebrated halloween early the saturday before with our good friends, the culbertsons. we went to the local corn maze which just so happened to be the LARGEST corn maze in the world. we were expecting to get way lost!! however, when we arrived, most of the maze had been ruined by storms. it ended up being a pretty simple maze due to all the damage, but it was still a lot of fun to be there with the culbertsons! afterward, we made caramel apples. we dipped our apples in caramel, dark chocolate, and milk chocolate! we had a ton of fun decorating them and drizzling the chocolate on in cool patterns.  and... pictures:

Please excuse the blurriness!