Unemployed no more!

It's been a while since my last post, but I have a pretty good excuse. These past couple weeks I have been getting back in the groove of working full-time and trying to settle into my new position as an Executive Assistant to one of the Assistant City Managers for the City of Austin (Woohoo for having "assistant" in my title twice :).

It's similar work to what I was doing in College Station, but I'm still getting used to the increase in scale. My boss has five departments under his purview so I will primarily be working with Transportation, Public Works, Aviation, Solid Waste, and Code Compliance. I can already tell that this position will be a great learning experience for me as I get to work for a bigger city and interact closely with some large departments.

So the blog posts about new recipes might not happen quite as frequently, but I think we'll trade that for having two incomes again. Below is a picture of my new workplace, a.k.a. Austin City Hall.

More birthdays!

March is starting to become a busy month for birthdays. First mine and then exactly seven days (and many years) later comes my nephew Connor's birthday. Jake almost kept up the seven day difference when he was born last year, but his birthday comes six days after Connor's. So last weekend was a busy one for us when both of the boys had their birthday parties.

Megan asked me to make a birthday cake for Jake to match his owl themed party. Hayden and I made a test cake a few weeks ago to see how it would turn out and more importantly to give us an excuse to eat cake. Friday night we got busy working on his birthday and smash cake. Hayden baked and helped get the cakes ready to go. I got to do the decorating. After a long night the cakes were packed up and ready to go.

The first stop was Connor's six birthday party in the park. He had a Pikachu themed party with all of his friends from school. I can't believe he is getting so old already.

The poor Pikachu pinata didn't last very long once the boys started swinging.Connor opening some of his presents.Getting ready to blow out the candles.

The girls enjoyed their snacks out on the playground.Jake was really concerned about the cupcakes and who would share with him.

After Connor's party we dropped off Jake's cakes and headed to New Braunfels for the night. We decided to stay at a bed and breakfast for the night rather than drive all the way back to Austin for the night and back down the next day.Jake's CakesJake getting ready to dig in.I think this boy might like his cake.He pretty much destroyed it.

Here is Jake's birthday gift. Tim is a huge Cubs fan, so we had to make Jake a Cubs gift.

Happy birthday Morgan!

Today is my beautiful wife's birthday! We began celebrating a little early starting on Friday with a Kyle Park concert at Midnight Rodeo with our friend Casey.


We didn't have too busy of a Saturday, but we did do a little shopping, found a good burger place (with gluten-free hamburger buns!) called Terra Burger and cleaned up the apartment a little.

After Mass Sunday morning, we headed to Trudy's for a surprise birthday lunch with Morgan's family. Morgan says she knew something was up when I wanted to go home and wait a little while before going to lunch, but she was still excited to see her family and lunch was delicious. After lunch we all headed back to our apartment to visit and for them to get a chance to see our place. We got to have some birthday cupcakes and our nieces and nephews played on the apartment playground.

I figured Monday evening was close enough to Morgan's birthday for her to open my gift. I think I may be enabling her craft addiction, and the Silhouette I gave her probably doesn't help. I'm not entirely sure what it does, but she had been wanting one for a while and was excited when she opened it. Happy birthday Morgan!

Our day trip

Last weekend we took a short trip down to Johnson City and Pedernales Falls State Park. It was nice to get out of Austin for the day and enjoy being outside, even if the rain almost washed out the day. We headed down to the river first to check out the falls.
Of course we had to take a self-portrait once we got there. We have so many pictures like this. I'm not sure why we don't ever just ask someone to take a picture of us. Hayden had never been to Perdenales Falls before so we took a while to explore and take in the views.
We tried to find our way down to the river bed and the falls. I think we got lost on the way down because it took us about 30 minutes to weave through the rocks and we kept seeing more and more people quickly make it down. It turns out most of them were just jumping down 7-8 foot drops. I took the picture below of Hayden scaling the rocks.
We thought the picture below would make an awesome tube shoot. Too bad they do not allow swimming on this section of the river. On second thought, it may not be the safest tube shoot, but it would be fun to try.

After trekking around a bit more, we drove down to meet the Smith family for lunch in Blanco. I can't pass up an opportunity to see one of my favorite people when I'm already so close by.

And a Couple More

Here are a couple more dishes that we've made in the past week. The first is Jamaican jerk chicken, polenta and asparagus. We've been wanting to make jerk chicken for ourselves ever since our honeymoon in Jamaica last May. The chicken and polenta recipes came from Morgan's gluten free cookbook. Even though the chicken was a little spicy, it had good flavor, but I'll have to work on making a firmer polenta.

The second is blackened catfish with vegetable stir-fry rice. Once again, I made it a little too spicy, but it's flavor was great and I got to use a lot of vegetables.

Catching Up...food-wise at least

It's been a while since I've posted so I've got a bit of catching up to do. This post is our Valentine's Day 4-course dinner.

We began with an Onion Soup that I've had before at Christopher's, my favorite restaurant in the College Station/Bryan area. The chef is nice enough to place some of his recipes online and this one turned out really well.

The next two recipes come from The Learning Channel website courtesy of the "Cake Boss." He's recently started a cooking show that has quite a few good dishes. The second course was a squash and zucchini casserole.

Followed by shrimp scampi which Morgan had been requesting.

Finally, for dessert I baked some cookies and took some leftover strawberry icing from the Valentine's Day cake we had made and made what I am calling redneck macaroons.

Valentines Day

Hayden and I said that we weren't going to do very much for Valentine's day. We decided that we wouldn't even get each other gifts. Well, we ended up celebrating for almost a week... and we did get gifts.

Last week I came home to my Valentines gift. Hayden had gone to the craft store and gotten me a cake pan that I wanted. He also picked up some lilies in advance so they would open up before Valentines Day. For Hayden's gift I got him a super goofy K'nex Jeff Gorden race car to put together. For some reason I encourage the goofiness.

My lilies

On Saturday night we had dinner with our two favorite Leander couples the Johnsons and the Shoemakers. Jaclyn and David made an amazing dinner and Hayden and I supplied dessert.

Dinner at the Johnson's

The fancy Valentines Day dinners continued on Monday night when Hayden prepared a four course dinner- french onion soup, zucchini and yellow squash casserole, shrimp scampi and pasta, and macaroons to finish it off. We even sat at our dinner table to eat. I may be a little spoiled by my husband. After we finished eating Hayden realized that he may have set the Valentine's Day bar a little high for future years. But, I really won't mind if he keeps trying to top this year.

Hayden putting together his "redneck" macaroons.