What's a Blowout?

Inaugural day at Mclane Stadium. 

If we could be cookies or roast humans, that's exactly what we would have been after baking on the brand spankin' new black top asphalt for 4 hours in the August heat. Even with my attempts at hiding under an umbrella, I still managed to get mildly sunburned, and looked like a drowned rat from my own sweat. It sounds like a ton of fun, right? Regardless of our preferred tailgating conditions, coming out to celebrate this occasion was not optional, especially as a family of season ticket holders.  

Thousands of people joined us for Baylor's first game in the brand new football stadium, and every single person there was giddy with excitement. Helicopters swarmed the sky, fancy boats occupied the river sail-gaiting spots, and fans populated the entire radius like a colony of ants. A sold out season in it's finest.
But first, we kept tradition intact by meeting at Rudy's for a pre-tailgate BBQ lunch.

 And then, we checked out the new conveniently located family gig, the Wink's recently opened scooter store, Oso Scooters ("oso" is Spanish for "bear"......get it?)!!! Baylor campus never had it so good........a scooter store for rentals and purchases to get to and from class, dorms, and games......say what?!?!?

Back to the game.

By half time, we could barely hold our eyes open.......because being a parent automatically initiates you into the Ol'-Geezer-Bedtime Club.

I was so deliriously tired, my Mom asked me, "Was it a blow out?" (in reference to the game), and I told her a blow out is when you poop so big it leaks out of your diaper (thinking she asked, "what is a blowout?"). But yes, it was a blowout......a very sloppy one (pun intended).

Nail Biters

Just picture it. The age old rivals......Mav's vs. Spurs. Game 6 of the playoffs. Spirits and tensions are high.

Patrick and I found some decent seats for a decent price and couldn't pass up the opportunity to root on our favorite basketball team, my favorite of all sports. I was fired up, but not as fired up as the loud mouthed drunk girl behind us who noticeably quieted down during the last half of the 4th quarter. And not as fired up as the man sitting below us in the suites who got an entire beer spilled on him during the game by the guys down our row......but pretty fired up.

It was everything a game 6 should be, quite the nail biter, especially since it gave these Mav Fans for Life (#MFFL) a glimspe of hope to make it to the next round. But we all know what happened next. The dog butted Spurs ate our lunch during game 7, leaving us in the dust.......and such is the heartache of a DFW sports fan. One day.....one fine day, Parker, Ginobili and Duncan are going to get old!

There's only a couple of ways to fix a broken heart, and although our hearts had yet to know exactly what was coming, we premedicated with Hypnotic Donuts. I'd heard nothing but good things about this dreamy donut shop, and we finally found the motivation to get out of bed early enough to snag a few of it's staples.

When you get to a place and the line is out the door.....you know it's going to be good. Expresso cake donut, donut covered in peanut butter/honey/banana/bacon, donut covered in maple glaze/bacon, the classic regular glazed and chocolate glazed, and my personal favorite..........(drum roll please)

The glazed donut cut in half like a bagel, turned inside out and paired with a perfectly battered piece of chicken with a little honey drizzle (the kind of sandwich that's so scrumptious you must make it a conscious decision to not accidentally bite your fingers off when going in for the chomp.......could this classify as a different kind of nail biter??). YES!!! Foodgasm.

A Saturday morning with the family can't get much better than a perfect spring picnic at the park, followed by a walk to burn 1/1000th of the calories we'd just consumed......because let's face it, I'm not quite as mobile these days as I usually am.
It was just the tip of the iceberg for our weekend of fun. My mom would soon be arriving to celebrate her birthday. After spending the day shopping, we opted for another food coma at La Hacienda and went to bed early in hopes of beating the heat come morning time. We needed all the cool air we could get to plant my herb garden (which is now getting eaten by some invisible pest that I can't seem to defeat) without me having a heat stroke.
The next nail biter on the list, who will win: the invisible un-satiate-able herb killers or the this human's organic home remedies?

Cooking, Cooking, and (the best part) EATING!

Super Bowl weekend might not have been a very exciting time for football, but it was great in the food department!

We went to a party in a very cool decked out garage turned bar and met lots of new people who all brought yummy treats.  There was way too much food there (like banana bread with caramel drizzle sauce and homemade croutons from artisan bread with shredded buffalo chicken dip), resulting in left over fruit pizza (one of my personal specialties), and since it's not the greatest left over and I knew my work people were had been really slammed, we brought the rest to them on the way home, hoping it'd brighten their night.

Patrick did quite a bit of cooking himself that Saturday, including surprising me with my favorite, mexican market short ribs. 

And on the following Monday, I spent the day baking a cheesecake while the puppies window watched. 

Thankfully, the threat of a wintery mix had been postponed once again, because we had a hot date at Lara and Tim's house to eat her homemade loaded potato soup, something we'd been trying to get together for since the last bad storm demolished our plans back in December! It was a near miss opportunity for irony and would have been a not so subtle hint from some other power that we weren't meant to have this soup! But I'm glad we did, because it was amazing.

By Wednesday, I was counting my blessings, since we found out people we'd hung out with on both days came down with some sort of sickness after we'd left. But little did I know, impending doom awaited...............

I can't feel my toes!

It would be the coldest Baylor football game in history, with dangerous driving conditions for traveling to Waco, but you couldn't convince these boys to miss the game to save their lives. Oh no.

This was the very last game to ever be played in the Floyd Casey Stadium, and it's history was to be celebrated under conditions we'll not soon forget. 

If you've never had the pleasure of experiencing how cold Texas can actually be, you're missing out. 

If it weren't for our ridiculously thick apparel and white breath, you might not think it was very cold outside by the landscape's appearance, but I assure you even though it was 24F, the wind chill of 11F, cloudy skies, freezing fog, wind, and humidity of almost 100% were the real kickers.......without any snow to romp in and make it all feel fabulous and worth the suffering. 

The family gathered early for a tailgate party, complete with a T.V. to watch more college football, a Keurig machine to make hot chocolate, two little space heaters (because all the really awesome propane heating lamps in North Texas were completely sold out due to the winter storm and lost electricity), and a generator to power it all. 

This game was sold out forever ago, so Baylor made accommodations to squeeze in more people by opening up the cement bleachers and even removed part of the stadium to add more seating. 

And the weather didn't seem to scare many people away......at first.

I had on my insulated winter running tights, blue jeans, ski socks, Uggs, a tank top, a long john under shirt, a sweater, the inner layer of my ski jacket, a trench coat, running gloves AND ski gloves, a scarf, my fleece neck guard that I used to cover most of my face (and hide the fact that my nose was constantly dripping cold-induced-snot), and a fleece lined knit hat; so bundled, in fact, that my trench was overstuffed, comically limiting my range of motion........and I was struggling. 

We assumed after we were out of the open wind and nestled within a crowd, the cold wouldn't feel as harsh, but boy or boy were we wrong; even sitting close and using a blanket on our legs was no match.

"My toes are so cold!" 

"I can't feel my phalanges! They're numb!"

Everyone had the same complaints, but the strongest of the strong toughed it out, together, for the big finale. 

Sure, some of the crowd bailed early, but the important part is they came out and tried. 

The heavy fog even tried settling down on us, in efforts to scare us away, but if these players were sticking through it to play their hearts out, so were we to scream our hearts out. 

Even more importantly Baylor pulled it off with a solid win to conquer the Big 12.

Smiles were abundant as we watched the fans rush the field for the last time.

Public displays of affection were pretty common too.

And even Patrick well tell you, emotions were high as he hugged his dad and reminisced about all the great times they spent in this very stadium. 

We waited for the shutting down of the lights ceremony to commence, celebrated the win over a Mexican dinner, and then Patrick and I tried not to die as we drove home over too many frozen, melted, and refrozen overpasses to count. 

Did I mention I wasn't sure if my toes were still attached by the end of the game and I was afraid to walk because I literally couldn't feel anything past the balls of me feet?!!

Wanna Know How to Annoy Me?

A really generous higher up that Patrick works with gave us lower level tickets to see the Mav's play the night before Thanksgiving, which turned out to be the perfect excuse to take the train downtown and stay out late enough for all the holiday traffic to die down before we made our quest to Waco.

At only a few rows from the floor (and we didn't even have to lie, steal, or cheat to get there), our seats were amazing compared to anything we're used to (you bet I'll be baking that guy some fresh cookies soon, in hopes for more donations); it's so nice to actually be able to gage how tall the players really are.

We scarfed our Philly Cheesecake's down as neatly as possible (because it would only figure that at the very moment our faces got nonchalantly covered in gooey melted cheese, the fan cam would unmistakably thrive on our embarrassment, like the older couple who got caught making-out later in the night), then devoted our complete focus to the game. 

Of course, this would be the night that a complete a-hole with a nasally voice that projected like he was yelling into a megaphone sat directly behind us and didn't stop talking long enough to even take a breath for the entire 2.5 hours. He had no idea what was happening around him (a very suspenseful game), especially the part where the girl in the aztec sweater sitting in front of him was literally seconds away from turning around and ripping his face off (because there was no way duct tape was going to do the trick for this guy). Even the woman sitting next to me (whom I bonded with after we both almost got clobbered in the head by a thrown t-shirt ball) had a shocked look of disbelief when she realized the same guy was still going strong after her and her man came back from the half time break. I'll give him this much: the man had endurance.

Have you ever had an extremely annoying person by you at an event? Did you tolerate it or resort to intervention?

Eight People Slept in Our House!

Since Patrick's highlight of the week is going to see one of his favorite teams beat the crap out of another team, he likes to make sure and keep his style super trendy. It's prudent to feel good and look good in a new outfit, but all the mirrors were being used so we resorted to staged life like situational phone photography as a substitute. (Yeah.....this didn't look awkward at all....)

Decked out in game day appropriate gear and ready to cheer, we packed the whole family into the big bertha mobile and headed to Jerry's place.

This place is seriously so big, you can be a mile from it and think it's just a block away. Mind blown......

After our walk across the metroplex (I may be exaggerating a tad, but barely....those bike and carriage guys made a killing off of the swarms of people who didn't want to walk...), we only had a few minutes to spare for hitting up the Vaherencamp tailgate.

For some reason, we can never figure out how to arrive in time for a more decent amount of pre-game celebrations.

I know what you're thinking.....best looking windblown couple in Arlington, right? It turned out to be a really crummy day for flowing locks of hair. Mine was so tangled when we got home, I almost just took out the scissors and went back to my old pixie days.

Let me just say, Patrick was very lucky to make it into the game alive. I was so close to forming a angry mob to take him out during our 45 minutes in line just to get into the doors of the stadium. I'm sure he just thought he was being comical, but my hormones had a tendency to disagree. 

Despite having a great time, I think we can all agree our seats were just ridiculously high....about 9 rows from the tip top, to be exact. The only time I actually spent watching the field instead of the big screen was during Baylor's impressive half-time show, a tribute to all the armed forces with very creative formations to represent each one. 

But let me be completely honest here.....I didn't stay awake for the longest football game in the history of college football. I can barely stay awake for any extensive amount of time these days, no matter what's going on. Some people think this is funny.....

The more I look at this picture, the more I'm embarrassed that this isn't exactly the most flattering pose for me.......but hey, I am who I am!

The sad part about the night is I'm a little slow and wasn't very keen on how to use my new self timer yet, thought I took a great group photo of the entire family with the beautiful shiny empty stadium in the background and then had a lady take our picture also, just in case......to find out once home, that none of those pictures were actually taken!!! Bummer. 

Good thing we paused for a microscopic family picture in the sky mirror before heading to IHOP for dinner because it was basically the only thing left open, and then back to the kpLOVE residence for a gigantic slumber party (a record for us).

What's the most amount of people that's ever slept in your house/apartment/townhome/tailer/car/hotel at one time?

Seeing Stars

What I'd wish someone had mentioned to me before attending a hockey game, was how cold the venue is kept in order to maintain the ice! I obviously should have known, but wasn't exactly putting two and two together, considering I'd been to the American Airlines Center a million times (It's incredible how fast that place can be made over into something entirely different; just the very night before that floor was a basketball court!) and always find it fairly warm inside. Needless to say I found myself extremely jealous of the girls sitting in front of me wearing mittens and jackets. 

I've been to a ton of DFW sporting events, but never a Stars hockey game, so when we got the invitation from Patrick's friend, Seth, we of course jumped at going. (Not to mention, I'm always looking for excuses to be near Victory Park so I can eat at Naga or Neo's.)

The only thing I knew about hockey was what The Mighty Ducks taught me, so to put it mildly......I had a lot to learn. Seth and Patrick were very patient with me as I asked more questions then a 5 year old, and then I found this handy dandy tip sheet in the program to teach me more in depth about all the penalties I wouldn't be paying attention to.......I was too preoccupied with how many sticks were broken and left on the ice during the game.

In the mean time, my hero Patrick, went on a search to find me some hot chocolate to keep me from feeling like Miley Cryus at a Late Night Show (Freezing......in case you didn't get it......because she doesn't wear clothes these days and always talks about how cold the sets are.)

I wonder how many people around us were wondering why me and that guy in the plaid shirt were yelling, "Pick 'em up! Put 'em down!"? (Too bad for them, they never went to that Allen hockey game with us a few years ago when we got to be on the Kiss Cam and made up hilariously ridiculous things to yell at the players while drinking a little too much.)

Thanks, Seth, for dinner and a game. We owe you one, buddy.