Friday Fun Day!

For those of you who follow my blog, I told you recently about the lovely Sarah who inspired me to make jewelry. Well guess what? She started a blog. You can check her out here, or you can find her on my list of homies! :)

Recently she dedicated a blog to a list of her favorite things and I decided that I too would dedicate a blog to just that...my favorite things. It's so easy to get caught up in our day to day lives, that sometimes we lose sight of the little things. So take some time for yourself and make of list of your faves too!

Favorite Books:

* Marley and Me

* The Wilco Book

* Tao Te Ching

* Save Me From Myself

* Scar Tissue

Favorite Smells:

* Honeysuckle

* Homeade Tortillas

* Clean Laundry

* My Papaw's aftershave

* Babies after a bath

Favorite Songs:

* Poor Places- Wilco

* Staralfur- Sigur Ros

* Un Puno de Tierra- Ramon Ayala

* High and Dry- Radiohead

* Clair De Lune- Debussy

Favorite Days:

* June 23, 2004 (The day I picked up Coco)

* Christmas Eve

* Saturdays

* My birthday

* Halloween

Favorite Places:

* The beach in Cozumel
* My Memaw's House

* Curled up on the couch with Coco

* Austin

* The Fidler's Lake House

And just like that....the holidays are over

One thing that is really great about working for Tech is the time off. My last day of work for 2008 was December 22 and my first day back was today. The majority of that break was spent in Southlake, but I'll get to that a little later.

We left for Lamesa on the 23rd and stayed until early Christmas morning. We had a great time with my family and had lots of fun playing with my Aunt's new Wii. Let's just say that Wii boxing isn't as easy as it looks!

One of my family traditions is each person draws someone's name and they have to make that person a gift. We all got a good laugh when my sister cut out pictures of the Jonas Brothers and replaced the oldest brother's face with my Uncle George's face. Underneath the photos it read, "By popular demand, Kevin Jonas has been replaced by the other brother, George Jonas." HILARIOUS! :)


We left for Southlake at 7:00 Christmas morning, and as soon as we got there we opened presents and went to the movies to see Marley and Me. I read the book last summer and when I heard the movie was being made, Taylor and I read it together since he'd never read it. He loved it as much as I did so we were both excited about the movie. The movie was good, but not as good as the book. I know, I know movies are rarely better than books. On a separate occasion, we went to see Yes Man and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The latter was an AMAZING movie. I highly recommend watching it, but remember to potty before the movie starts, it's a 3 hour movie so you may find yourself squirming in your seat wondering if the movie is almost over. I'm not speaking from experience, I just noticed a bunch of people squirming and used deductive reasoning!

Since we were in Southlake for about a week, we had to find things to do to occupy our time. We took Taylor's family dogs Tanner and Murphy along with my sweet Coco to to a nearby park. Murphy is a golden doodle (half golden retriever half poodle) and is pretty much my second favorite dog....of course Coco being my fave!




The Cotton Bowl signaled the nearing of the end of the vacation. Unfortunately this obviously didn't turn out the way we wanted it to. We got stuck in traffic, stood in a mass crowd of people trying to get into the game (apparently there were only about 5-9 ticket takers to accomodate thousands of people!)had to watch the crappy Ole Miss fans in their blazers (for guys) and high heels and short skirts (for girls) reapeatedly yell derogatory things (one young girl called my sweet 50 year old co-worker trailer trash to her face while another young guy in a blazer pushed an older gentleman in Tech gear into the stands after merely passing by him in a walkway ....don't worry about 7 Tech fans rose to this man's defense and pushed the guy and made him go back to the Ole Miss section). As if this wasn't enough, on the way back to Southlake, we got rear ended. Yeah, it was one of those kind of days...


Overall though, we had a great Holiday and were ready to return to Lubbock. I'll close with a pic of Coco sitting in the back seat of Taylor's PACKED CR-V. She was ready to be home too! Hope you guys had a great holiday!

Ahhh, the Holidays.....

So this year has been quite the change from last year. Last year around the holidays Taylor and I had just started dating, so celebrating the holidays apart from each other wasn't a big deal. Fast forward to this year and dividing up time during the holidays became and issue. In the past I was lucky enough to date someone from Lubbock and since I'm from Lamesa, we were able to see both families all in the same day! I've never been away from my family during the holidays....except for this past Thanksgiving.

Since Taylor is from Southlake, which is obviously more than an hour away from Lamesa, we decided that we would spend Thanksgivng with his family and then alternate every year. My first Thanksgiving away from my family was a little tougher than I thought it would be. I'm used to celebrating with at least 15 people (aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents etc)and including me there were 5 of us at Taylor's.

On Thanksgiving morning, Taylor's mom was out running errands, Taylor and his dad were outside hanging Christmas lights and Taylor's brother was still asleep while I sat on their couch alone, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Tradition in my family is to watch the parade with my little cousins Katarina and Mickaela. As I sat there alone, I let my emotions get the best of me and I started to cry! I feel pretty silly about it now, but like I said, this was my first time away from my family.

For Christmas though, we are celebrating with my family Christmas Eve and then driving out early Christmas morning to Southlake. I'm not looking forward to the drive, but we really don't have much of a choice. We will spend New Year's with some friends in Dallas and then my present to Taylor for Christmas is Cotton Bowl tickets. Yay, go Tech!

So in closing, I'll leave you with some pictures of our silly cats who thought our Christmas tree was their own personal jungle gym. At first their climbing warranted adorable pictures to be taken but now my tree looks downright sad as they have damaged several of the limbs. There is much truth in the saying that cats are untrainable, but by golly Taylor and I have been trying to keep the kitties out of my Christmas tree!




And lastly, I can't forget about my sweet Coco....she's the good one! :)

It's October....really?

Wow, things have really been flying for me lately and I'm starting to wonder where all my time has gone! Working on the website is pretty much a full-time time job, on top of my full-time job at Tech. Between catching bands (for the site of course!) interviewing, attending events etc., etc., life has been pretty hectic lately.

One event we recently wrote about on the site was about Nightmare on 19th Street. For those of you not familiar, it's a Halloween "Scream" Park. It has 3 attractions and literally takes about an hour and a half to get through. I don't like haunted houses and I told Taylor that I didn't want to go. He basically made me go since it was something we were writing about on the site. His explanation went like this, "Jenn, it's like a rollercoaster, you can't write about it unless you ride it." Touche Taylor.....

So last Friday, I put my big girl panties on and Taylor, myself, Court, Logan and Ian went to Nightmare. They have people going through the attractions in small groups, so since Taylor was taking pictures for the site, he stayed a little behind us. I didn't like this at all because it meant that I had nobody to hold onto or hide behind. Well I say I didn't have anybody to hold on to, but I pretty much clung to Court and Logan for dear life. I don't like scary!

The three attractions were Clown Town (yeah another thing I don't like), Witch's Walk and Blood Moon Manor. There are people waiting behind every corner ready to jump out and scare the begeesus out of you and during the witch's walk (which is outside btw) There are people jumping out of bushes with running chainsaws. Like I said, I don't like scary.

At the end of the attractions, there is guy who works for Lubbock Online who takes pictures of reactions. Well now for your viewing pleasure here is the picture of me hanging on to Logan and Court! Again....I don't like scary!

P.S. Upon interviewing the Nightmare owners for the story, Taylor found out that they had to bust out a pee mop last week because someone literally peed themselves!

Update...

At midnight last night the Tech Emergency system called and cancelled classes and said only essential personnel had to report to work. This morning when I talked to my boss I found out I didn't have to go in today. YAY! No work for me and no school for Taylor!

The rain has stopped, but I'm not sure if we are expecting anymore. We will see...

Double Yowza...

So the Lubbock Mayor just decared Lubbock in a state of emergency. We have gotten almost 8 inches of rain in less than a 24 hour period and we are expected to get at least 2 more inches through the night. Apparently, Lubbock has never received this much rain in a 24 hour period....ever! They are calling this the 100 year flood.

All Lubbock schools have cancelled classes for tomorrow. Well almost all Lubbock schools, as per usual, Tech officials are making students/faculty/employees (bleh that includes me) boat to campus tomorrow. Luckily, I only live about 4 blocks from campus so I won't have far to drive. Well, let's just say Taylor doesn't have that far to drive me! :)

Yowza....

So I've been quite the busy bee lately. Between working full time during the day, catching local bands and interviewing them, promoting the site via facebook and myspace, I haven't had much time for anything else....except Tech Football, I gotta make time for that!

Taylor and I have had a blast so far and we're nearing a month that we've been up and running. Taylor has been just as busy as I have between school, his job at O.L.L.I. and working on getting promos for giveaways for our readers. We have high hopes for the site, so hopefully we'll gain more readership and be able to reach some goals that we've set for ourselves.

So with that said, please keep me in your thoughts because at times all of this can be overwhelming. I've found myself having minor anxiety issues knowing that people are out there reading and critiquing my articles. I know it's just something I'll eventually have to get over.

One story I recently wrote is about an Austin based soul band (T-Bird and The Breaks) competing for a spot to play ACL in just a few weeks. If you haven't checked out the story, I highly advise you to check out the band and vote for them in the competition. Voting closes this Friday. The bass player (Cody) for the band is from Lubbock and also happens to be my friend Kenny's little brother. They even have a couple of videos on youtube that show a bit of their stage show. They are pretty awesome, so be sure and check them out when you have a chance, and vote, vote, vote :)