Our Halloween

Some of our best friends spent Halloween weekend with us. We had so much fun! Saturday, we did Trunk or Treat. Sadly, I have no pictures. Sunday, we did Halloween at our house. Pictures speak louder than words.

Cute Babies

See my niece and nephew in their Halloween costumes here. My mom made the hair and I made the shirts. It is amazing what you can do on Powerpoint.

Halloween Preview

We are doing Pirates this year. I am more excited about Halloween this year than I was last year because I have been making our costumes. Pictures to come next week!

How sad...

Well, it looks like that cute blog I wrote about won't be doing any more pictures :( You can find out why here.

Cute Blog

Have you seen this blog? I love it!

New with us

• We are getting excited for Halloween. We plan to have a pirate ship in our driveway. Also, we will be taking the bubble from last year up to our church event and make it a black light room.
• We still love our house and we are still slowly unpacking and organizing everything.
• I am working lots lately because the school dedication ceremony is next week.
• We are finally starting to feel like we know our way around in our part of town.
• We still miss our friends that we moved away from last year and our family back home. I wish I could convince everyone to move here :)

What's up with us?

• We have a new niece and nephew!!
• We bought all the materials to create a raised garden bed
• We also bought some plants: jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, poblano peppers, sweet tomatoes, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. We got a great deal since it is the end of the season. Everything was at least 50% off!
• My sister is moving back to Texas!!
• Halloween is next month and our theme for the driveway is pirates.
• We are prepping to host my family for Thanksgiving this year. I am determined to make my own turkey.

Blog Update

Reading Chez's blog inspired me to update mine as well.

Our summer in bullet point form:

• We bought a house around the corner from where we were. We love it!
• I took a two week course in Orff Schulwerk, an approach to teaching music. It was eye-opening and I can't wait to use what I have learned.
• We went to North Carolina to see my sister.
• We spent lots of time with our family in Texas.
• Grant built a fire pit in our back yard and is dreaming of cooler weather to build a stream/waterfall/pond.
• We spend just as much time in our yard as we did in the other house with the pool. It helps that we have a great deck and lots of trees.
• Our cats love going between inside and outside through the pet door in our new house.
• This week, I have been setting up my classroom at the new school. I am so happy to have my very own room (last year I was on the stage).

KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker Attachment

I bought the ice cream maker attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer. I love it! My mom and I made ice cream last weekend and it turned out to be really good! i would definitely recommend it.

Why Kitchen Aid is Amazing

You can buy accessories like this:

AN ICE CREAM BOWL!

I want one.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/KitchenAid-Ice-Cream-Bowl/8065419

Buying this house...

We close at the end of this month. Moving date is still up in the air. I am kind of sad to leave the pool in our current back yard, but happy to leave the actual house. God definitely led us to the house we are buying (or maybe just away from the one we live in).

Want a Dog or Puppy?

We found this mama dog and her three puppies close by our home. We left them where we found them because we cannot handle a dog with our cats. Let me know if you want one.

Saw this on Christmas Day

Look at the top of the car.

White Christmas

Us during the Texas Blizzard of '09

My Christmas Present

What happened?

What happened to It's Hip to Save??? I am going through withdrawals.

Thanks for visiting us!

Our friends, Sam and Sarah, came for a visit a couple of weeks ago.  We had lots of fun with them at the pumpkin patch and at the Tea Gardens.  We miss our Austin friends and look forward to having all of them down at some time.

Halloween Night

This is what we had in our driveway on Halloween:

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Sarah (my sister) and Patrick on their recent engagement!  We are so happy for you!

Still playing summer catch-up

Our friends Andrew and Kaleena are out of the country in El Salvador.  Luckily for us, they have Skype and we still get to talk to them and play our nerdy board game online.

Corpus Christi

This summer we spent a month in Corpus Christi while we waited to find out where I would work.  We had lots of fun and did pretty much everything there is to do while we were there.  Here are a few pictures:

The Lexington, "Blue Ghost"

A sea turtle at the Texas State Aquarium
Jellyfish at the aquarium
Old bridge that used to cross the bay
The big bridge in Corpus
Dolphin at the aquarium
Seagulls on Mustang Island
Sailboats in the bay
The Atlantic Coquinas were really thick this year
We went to a sea turtle release at the National Seashore while we were there

Magic Kingdom

My favorite park!  I could have easily spent 2 days at this park!

Cinderella's Castle

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party (the spinning teacups)

The River Boat (from Huckleberry Finn)

Funny poster outside of one of the shows

Downtown Disney

We went to Downtown Disney a couple of times while we were in Orlando.  It was good entertainment and it wasn't as exhausting as the parks.  It mainly had places to buy Disney souvenirs and restaurants.  We didn't really want to spend lots of money on the video game park and Cirque du Soleil, so we stuck to window shopping and eating.

These are some pictures from the T-Rex restaurant.  It had really neat atmosphere and great food.  The food was a bit pricey, but we somehow managed to spend under $20 for our meal.  If you have ever been to the Rainforest Cafe, T-Rex was a lot like that.  We sat in the ice cave where there were "fossils" embedded into the wall.  Every 30 minutes there was a light show with sound effects to simulate a meteor shower.  It was lots of fun and I definitely recommend it. 

Here we are with the Rainforest Cafe and some lego statues in the background.
The sea monster and dinosaur below are made from Legos.

This was a really good looking statues outside of the Rainforest Cafe.

Disney's Animal Kingdom

The park was the best zoo that I have ever visited!  Here is the African Safari ride.

The famous tree of life.  Notice that there are animals carved into the trunk.  P.S. The tree is fake.
We thought all of these signs leading up to the Everest ride were funny.

Time to play summer catch up

We are finally getting settled in our new place and have our own internet connection!  Now I can play catch up on our whirl wind summer!

Maloney Update

Things new with us:

1. We went to Disney World to celebrate graduation

2. We have been at the beach enjoying life

3. I have accepted a job, I start in August

4. We will be moving away from our town very soon

We will really miss all of our friends when we move and hope that everyone will come and visit.  Of course, we will be back every once in a while to see everyone.

We have a weak internet connection where we are staying, so I will have to upload pictures later.  I would rather not give out more info on where I will be working since my blog is public.  Feel free to call or email me if you are curious.

Anniversary

Today is our 6th anniversary!  We went to the gazebo we were married in and talked about what we could remember from our wedding day.  It was fun, but now I am at home alone.  Grant had to go on a trip for work :(

We went to Disney World last week.  I will put up some pictures one I find a new charger for the camera battery (I left it in our hotel room).  We had a ton of fun and I can't wait to go back!

Graduation

My graduation is tomorrow.  I am so excited!  Commencement is on Saturday and I am singing at it with the choir.  It will be awesome.  The guest speaker is Robert Rodriguez!  There will be fireworks shot off from the tower after the ceremony.

Be your own travel agent!

We are going to Orlando next week and I found some really great deals online.  I frequently plan vacations that I would love to go on, but can't afford yet.  I find great deals all the time on Hotwire and Kayak

Hotwire has very low prices but has the disadvantage of not knowing exactly what hotel you will be getting; their star rating system is pretty reliable.  Kayak searches hundreds of travel websites for you to find the best deal and will give you a link directly to the website you wish to use.  On both Hotwire and Kayak, you can sort the results by price, star rating, location, etc.

While trying to find a good deal on a flight, I recently discovered Cheap Airlines.  By using Cheap Airlines, we saved about $150 more than we would have by using Kayak and several other travel sites.

On the move...

We are moving! Where? We don't know yet.  I take that back, we are moving all of our stuff into storage.  We will be going on a working vacation (work for Grant and vacation for me) for about a month. After that, who knows where we will live.  I have to find a job and I would like to live somewhere near my work.

We started packing this week and have gotten 33 boxes packed and stacked in the garage and almost all the laundry, including blankets and curtains, is finished.  I think this will be the smoothest move yet!

Hopefully, we will have plenty of help when it comes time to load up everything and move into the storage unit and again when it comes time to load up everything and move into a new place (wink wink, nudge nudge).

It is finished!

I am finally done with college.  I am in disbelief!  I have been ready for this for a long time.  A new chapter of my life is about to begin and I can't wait because in that chapter, I will be getting paid.  Please pray that I find a good job.

1 week!

I can't believe it is almost over.  I have a ton of homework to do before my last seminar class! 

2 weeks

I have only 2 weeks left of classes! Yipee!  Summer is almost here.

4 weeks

4 weeks left of classes!!! I can't believe it.  It's almost over.

Things we have been doing lately

I haven't posted any pictures lately, so I am playing catch-up with this blog.

We went to the river parade in San Antonio for St. Patrick's Day.  Each float helped to dye the river green.

We have been hiking and fishing several times at McKinney Falls.  Here is a picture of all the beautiful trees the first week the leaves were out.

I went to the shooting range for the first time and chickened out.  I ended up sighting the whole time since the old-timey gun my husband has doesn't have a modern scope.  The owner of the range is determined to end my fear of guns.  The first and only time I have ever shot a gun (excluding air rifles) was this past summer at the Parks and Wildlife Expo.  This is a picture of the ground in one of the shooting stalls.  The range is an outdoor range.

Goodbye Redbox

We are officially boycotting Redbox and you should too!  A DVD we returned was lost and they have charged us $25 (full price) for a movie that we don't even have!!!!  They also don't seem very interested in keeping our business as evidence from the customer service rep's attitude.

I was told that this could happen if we put the DVD in the case backward.

We could have had 3 whole months of Net Flix if we had known this would happen.

Busy, Busy, Busy, Excited, Excited, Excited

I have several pictures that I have been meaning to post, but it is a little bit of an ordeal to get them on here since they are all taken with my phone... The pictures will have to wait.

Right now, I am gearing up for a long haul of busy weekends.  I won't be off the hook until May 8.  It's okay, everything that we are doing is going to be fun.

Today, I started at my new student teaching assignment.  I have finished with middle school and am now on for elementary.  The first day was great and I really love my cooperating teacher.

Starting today, I am counting down until the last day of classes... 7 WEEKS!!! Yay!  I am not really counting down toward graduation, just the end of class.  If you are interested, my graduation is on May 22 at 3 (this is where I walk across the stage with the College of Fine Arts) and commencement is on May 23 (this is University-wide and I will be on stage to sing with the UT choir, but they won't call my name).

As graceful as a swan...

on the freeway.

This is a picture of a swan that I saw on I 35 this morning.  Luckily I was traveling north, while the was traveling south.  There was a pretty big back up of traffic behind it... of cars, that is.