Puppy in a Bow Tie {weekend recap.}

It's going to seem like all we did this weekend is hang out with Barley. And that's pretty much 100% right.

As promised, here is puppy in a bow tie:

We ordered this on Etsy for him for our one year anniversary photos.  He looks so dapper and handsome!  And the best part is that he didn't even mind wearing it.

This is my ideal Sunday.  Packers on tv (but they win), reading the Sunday paper, wearing leggings and being comfy, big mug of Spaten Oktoberfest for me, and getting some nail polishing done.

This is a beer I "found" last fall. I love, love, love it! It just totally tastes like fall to me. If you like beer, I highly recommend trying it!

I really wanted to do a fall color for my mani. So I tried a pretty dark red Saturday night. But it just felt wronggg.  It's still 90 outside, people were boozing at the pool all weekend at our building, and the Mosquitos are in full-force mode.  So I went with nude.  Because it's fall-ish. Sorta? Right?

Even if it isn't, I guarantee this candle will force fall into your life:

It is "autumn" from Bath & Body Works.  I am truly obsessed with how it smells and Bryan likes it too, so that's a win!  It's like being at an apple orchard with a bonfire going with some pumpkin pie being baked somewhere and all this time you're on a beautiful walk with crunchy leaves everywhere!

Maybe the change of season is affecting the pup, because Barley was extra into putting his head on our shoulders this weekend:

This is my new phone background-I mean my two boys, how could it not be?

He was sooo sleepy in this pic.  Probably had something to do with back to back dog park visits! 

He is pretty well-behaved in the car on the way there:

Looking a little sassy here though...it's those crazy-ass ears of his! 

Chasing after his new GS friend.

I didn't get as many pics as I would have liked, but we went Saturday and Sunday.  He loved every second of it!  Sunday he got to meet a Great Dane, which was hilarious because Barley thought he could run fast until he tried keeping up with Dutch. 

Everyone there was super nice and even though he needed a bath both days afterwards, we had a good time too!  It's nice to let out city pup run free and be a true puppy! 

Hope everyone had a great weekend! 

I did nothing this week? {5 on Friday}

I wouldn't really "high five" myself over any of this....I seriously feel like work was crazy-busy, I was running slow all week, and my whole right side of my jaw hurts.  Yes, so here I am bitching about it. Without further complaints about life, here is a list of five factual things that happened this week!

1.  Booked a place through Airbnb for our anniversary trip to New Orleans, which we will be on our way to two weeks from today.  Woo, NOLA here we come!  ((K I am actually pretty psyched about getting this done this week, so maybe it wasn't a wash after all.))

Isn't this place the cutest?  Kind of eccentric, really cozy looking, and I'm a sucker for a chandelier.  Not to mention the cost of this WHOLE apartment is about half of what we would have paid for two nights at a nice hotel in the French Quarter, and I think we will get a better, more local experience this way too!  

2.  ONE WEEK from right meow, I will be departing for Nashville for one of my best friend's bachelorette parties!  SO EXCITED!  I will be rooming with this amazing broad pictured below, who is just "my person" when it comes to so many things. The insane texts about places you just don't check in on on Foursquare (your ob-gyn office, fyi), the knowing looks about when it's time to run away from crazy people, the sneaking of shots when we are out, it's all so perf.  Baby Nippy & Baby G reunited!!  

Sometimes we play "baby simba" with pavers we "borrow" from sidewalks. And ICE each other, and climb steel moose, and make faces on Cinco.   Ya'll can look forward to quality photos after Nashville.  

3.  Our pup is recovering nicely from his neutering a week ago and is getting his stitches out tomorrow.  Followed by a dog park trip probs!  He is super energetic, and I think we will see some behavior improvements eventually as a result of getting him neutered.  Listen to Bob Barker people, always spay and neuter your pets!

4.  Team Luckness Monster is hoping for total domination this week in FF!  Really gonna be riding the fast cleats of my running backs to victory I think.  I took this screenshot when I still had some points from the Raven's defense...pretty sure I'm negative now.  Is that even possible?  Who let me manage my own team?! 

5.  And finally, some motivation for everyone having trouble finding their stride, myself included here:

Cheers to the freakin weekend, everyone! I know I will be unwinding with some extra sleep, and an extra glass of wine tonight!! 

    

And So It Begins {football season to-do list}

Ahh football season!  It is officially upon us tonight.  After weeks of boring pre-season games where the starters barely play and idiots find ways to get injured, the real deal begins.

In honor of Broncos v. Ravens tonight, I wanted to share my football season "bucket list"....a/k/a how I plan on spending all of my Sundays through February.

1.  Have my beer supply ready and stocked.  Or wine, or liquor.  Whatever is needed to get through the ups & downs.  

Packers won the Super Bowl about 9 hours after this pic was taken.  So, chalk that one as an "up" moment.

2.  Filthy food recipes.  Stock up on them & try to eat in moderation so you don't need a Suh-sized jersey for the Super Bowl.

3. Thou shalt have team ATTIRE.  

One of my traditions each year is to buy a new piece of Packers apparel....this year I'm thinking a t-shirt of some sort because it's just too warm here through fall to wear a toasty hoodie! Plus I have several toasty hoodies already.

4.  Proper technology for tracking your fantasy team.

We have two laptops, a smart tv, an iPad and two iPhones, so IDK guys, hopefully we are covered!

5.  We got some team spirit gear for Barley.  (not mandatory, but highly obnoxious and recommended.)

Umm we just ordered this for Barley and I'm so excited even though he will probably hate it.  Find a ton of teams here at Sew Crafts by Sam! 

6.  Have appropriate TV channels set up for watching as many games as possible.  Or multiple TVs. 

This is not our home.  But I bet Bryan wishes it was. 

7. Embrace your personal game-day rituals.  

Nothing beats being at the field with your fellow fans!

But if you can't do that...

 just shotgun a beer with your husband every time the 49ers score on the Packers in the playoffs.

Messing Up His Proposal Plan {wedding wednesday}

So, my lady love Lauren posted her engagement story and so now I have to as well!  Hers is so great and well-thought out and planned beautifully, and she didn't do anything crazy to mess hers up!  And ours is the exact opposite, so here we are.

See, showing off my empty left hand two months pre-engagement!

Basically, it was April 2011, and I had sort of given up on the idea that we were going to get engaged any time soon.  Bryan was working at a job he didn't love, we had decided to move in together in July, with me moving from Chicago back to WI, and commuting to school a few nights a week there...basically we were busy!  So I imagined we would get engaged in 2012, when I was done with grad school.

I would say, and Bryan would probably agree that I ruined his proposal scheme a little bit.

He said he was going to come pick me up the Thursday evening before Easter in Chicago because he had off on Good Friday.  So, we were all set for that to happen, and then earlier that week I started having bad panic attacks, so I went to the doctor on Wednesday, and got a slew of news from them and basically needed to slow down a little.  I was working part time, interning part time, going to grad school full time, and in general had a lot happening that year. 

So, I decided to go home early, and I left Wednesday night. 

Well, that was all good and fine for me, but poor Bryan had been planning to propose when he came and picked me up that Thursday evening. 

All of a sudden I was back in Wisconsin, and he had to re-configure everything.  At this time, he was working 4 am to noon every day in a lab, and so we planned to go out to lunch on Thursday.  His dad had recently finished a total renovation of an empty house that Bryan's church wanted to sell, and his mom was the realtor for it.  

We were on our way to lunch, and Bryan said we had to stop at the house to make sure that everything was ok there, just check in on it for his mom and dad.  This was a pretty normal thing for us to do, especially since no one had been there in a while, and the reason it was gutted was due to a pipe burst and resulting flood damage, so obviously no one wants that happening again.

Obviously, no one expects to get engaged in a model home, but that's exactly what happened.  We were upstairs, and Bryan stopped me and gave me a big hug and said he was sorry I had had such a bad week, but he that he loved me and would always be here, and that we were going to spend our lives together.

So my response was, "I know, I know, we've talked about this before..."  Basically I blew it off because we had talked about getting engaged a lot at this point, and I really didn't think it was going to happen for a while.

Oh but hi, then he was down on one knee!  And omg, he is asking me to marry him!  So I said yes, and he stood up, and we were hugging and kissing, and I said, "Are you serious, you're not joking?"  And then he got out the ringbox, and BAM!

obligatory crappy ring pic from a Blackberry!

So then we were engaged!  We eventually made it to lunch and had celebratory beers, of course.  The next day we took this picture, the obligatory left hand out photo.

Eventually, we did get real pictures taken:

 

So if you have a great engagement story where you did or didn't blow up your fiance's plans, share it!

Champs, Good Meals & New Puppy Ears {long weekend success!}

Welcome back to reality from that beautiful long weekend everyone!  We had such a relaxing weekend, honestly I am dreading being back to real life today, and I'm sure most of you feel the same way.

This weekend was mostly about drinking only champagne, and eating lots of delish food, most of which we made ourselves.  So without more b.s. introductory remarks, here is our weekend.

Friday:

I worked Friday, and I'm using the term "worked" pretty lightly.  My company was having a charity golf tournament that I volunteered at all day, and there was a mimosa dispenser.  So, yeah.

Also discovered this fun fact on Friday, Barley has two different ears now:

Wednesday is pre snip-snip happening, and Friday is post snip-snip.   Is it possible that being snipped has changed his ears? I will be delving into puppy pics, because I think both ears used to be like the one on the right, and then both went back and cropped a little and now they are both different. 

After a warm day at the golf course for me and just a rough week in general for Bryan, he came home and announced that we should go out for dinner, specifically Italian.  So we decided to try Prego, a new place for us.

It went as follows:

1.  A delish bottle of red that was 70% Sangiovese, 30% Cabernet.  2.  My meal-steak per usual, duh guys.  We all know I literally can't resist steak at all. 3.  THIS WAS MY 25TH ITALIAN RESTAURANT CHECK-IN ON FOURSQUARE.  Twenty. Five. Different Italian restaurants.  Omg we are Italian food lushes.  4.  Bryan go some type of seafood fettuccine.  He said it was delish.  

Saturday was pretty chilled out--we had a nice morning family walk, I ran and rolled my right ankle (sweet.) .56 miles in (thanks Nike app.) so that kinda sucked, but the rest of the day made up for it in that we did basically nothing.  I ended up going shopping to buy some presents to send  for my friend in Chicago's baby shower that is next weekend.  And then I went to Half-Price Books and scored big time!

$13 ladies & gents.  For approx. $53 worth of books.  HARDCOVER Freedom, people.  

Part of my 30 for 30 list is about reading more books again (I was a huge reader through part of college and then I got busy with life.)  and trying to read books I wouldn't normally pick up.  So out of this stack, I would say Gone With the Wind and Freedom are two of those--a classic & a book that was so popular I wanted to avoid it.  So we'll see.  I'm 200 pages into Nineteen Minutes and about 20 pages into GWTW.  

Umm so obviously I rewarded myself with some champppsss for my efforts in book shopping!

Then we grilled maybe one of our best summer meals yet:

Cheddar-Jalapeno Chicken Burgers (with bacon on top, because yes.)

Corn

Sweet potato fries

Bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers (homemade, not from HEB although you know I considered it.)

Here it is in all of it's finished glory:

Chicken burgers are my favorite & HEB grinds its own boneless, skinless chicken breasts so I love knowing it's freshly ground chicken.  The other grocery store *cough Kroger cough* does not do this. (I like Kroger too, no grocery store discrimination, but HEB dominates when it comes to produce and meat.)

So Sunday I have really no pictures of--another nice "family walk" in the morning, then we went to breakfast at a Black Walnut Cafe and decided we prefer Buffalo Grille.  Ain't nobody got time for a cold pancake, BWC!!!

After that, we relaxed around home, I ran a couple errands, and then Bryan made us crunchwrap (like Taco Bell crunchwraps, yes) rip-offs that are at least somewhat healthier than the real-deal.  Naturally, in true blogging fail-fashion, no picture!

I wrapped up my weekend with my blogger fantasy football draft! I did the whole thing myself and I'm pretty proud of it!  More about that for Fan Friday this week, but needless to say I'm pretty happy that I had first pick and was able to secure Adrian Peterson!

this is my fantasy picture.  AP living it up with Blue Bell (the best ice cream ever, TEXAS WHAT?!) after his knee surgery on New Year's Eve.  

As much as I obviously hate the Vikings, all-day AP was a big win for the Luckness Monster.  I also have Andrew Luck, haha, get it.  Let's start a count of how many times I change my team name this year.  So far this is name #2.  Armed Rodgery was my first, but I don't have A-Rodg and I feel like your name should be about a player you have.  Or something funny from The League.  I'm still considering switching to "Password is Taco" or "Carmenjello".

Only time will tell!

Hoping everyone had a great weekend/long weekend/extra-long nap days!