Two

Two things that made my day today.

1.


My co worker gave me two of these today; I don't know if knew that these are one of my favorite candies, and they are kinda hard to find.

2. This video. Way too cute. Yeah, I know, good product placement. Great strategy too, because let's be real, if it was just a {human} baby doing the same thing, it wouldn't be nearly as cute or cool.
BTW, petting/playing with an elephant is on my bucket list.

I don't remember the last time I checked out this many books from the library at the same time. One word: renew. (x 50)

Does this make me a book hoarder?

The Desert Beauties

Last week we finally made it to the Desert Botanical Gardens. It was a beautiful day in the low 80s, and we have the t-shirt tan lines to prove it.

And we adopted someone in the process.

Life's better at the beach.

I'm sure you're heard that phrase before (or maybe it's just on Pinterest?) but I tend to agree with that.

In the last couple of days, I've come across these, also from Pinterest.


And it reminded me of how I miss living around water. Seeing that I grew up in sunny Arizona, I really like the sun, and I've lived around a lake/ocean for most of my life, give or take a few years.

Lately, I've been going through "that phase" when I think that I could potentially go back to living on an island. Well- to be more general, I guess just to live somewhere that is pretty and tropical-ish, and by the ocean (or lake with swimmable water)...which usually= islands.

But of course just like anywhere, there are pros and cons of living at such a place. With my short experience of living in Hawaii {is 3 years short?}, some of the pros of course were lots of vitamin D, tan skin, and beautiful days at the beach, and generally really kind people. Cons of course, would be really expensive to live, so far away from family and friends, etc.

But who knows? Anyone who knows us well, knows also that settling down in one place is not really on our agenda for right now. Maybe moving to such a place is actually more realistic than we think. After all, we do work for an International company.

Oh, the possibilities. {And wishful thinking}

Definitely getting my tan on tomorrow. 

I like food.

My goal for the last two days off from work, was to try something new from my Pinterest boards. I decided to do some new (and old) recipes. {Food for the win!}

Although one thing was actually not food itself, but a way to make food look a little cuter. I did this to some boring cheap paper plates for a plate of cookies I took to a church activity.

As for recipes:
Two days ago I made this Lemon Pepper Chicken recipe. Very easy. We even used our apartment complex BBQ for the first time! We were pretty excited about it.

Today I re-made vegetarian chilli, and also the pork recipe I've blogged about before, which is currently in the crock pot. We've having the missionaries over for dinner tomorrow night, and so it's in preparation for fish and pork tacos tomorrow! Mmm MM!! More excited about having the food than having 4- 19yr old boys in my house. Uh, I mean....

This evening I made cookies that I found the recipe for in a magazine I was skimming through, but I found the recipe online, so there you go. I improvised with the chocolate- I melted mini semi-sweet choco chips I had left over, and then used left over milk chocolate chips for the Step 2 for chocolate. I also didn't use Ancho Chile Pepper, and added a little more cinnamon and flour. Still turned out good! Tacos and Cookies? hmm..

Oh, and "Breakfast Cookies" I don't have a link, so here it is:
1.5 cups of oats
2-3 super rippened bananas
1 cup of unsweetened applesauce {didn't have that, used almond butter instead}
handful of craisins
cinnamon
just throw everything together, mix it up pretty well, throw it on a baking sheet at 350 for about 35 minutes

I only put them in for 30 minutes, and they were plenty done. They are kinda crumbly, but I still liked them.

Mm food.