The 3rd Saturday in October

As a life long volunteer fan I bleed orange and white. What’s strange is I fell in love with a girl that bleeds crimson.. Yes the third Saturday in October at the Glover house is one in which the husband sits on the couch in silence and the wife says, oh another Touchdown, oh another touchdown, oh my is that another touchdown? Not much longer babe, Coach Jones is on a mission, and Tennessee is the waking giant the SEC had better pay attention too.

Yesterday was Tennessee’s spring football game, known as the Orange and White game. As much as I wanted to be there, we couldn’t quite make it happen this year. Being on such opposite sides of the SEC fence as we are means that Emily likes to keep the orange and white memorabilia in the back room of the house known as “my office”. Meanwhile, i use the idea of getting her a mini helmet autographed by Julio Jones as an excuse to go to the sports card and memorabilia show.

I hope to continue to grow our competing memorabilia collections, and Emily enjoys spotting her Alabama boys at the card shows. Here are a few shots of some of the gems we have stuffed back in “my office”

At the memorabilia show last year I met Jason Witten and Julio Jones and got them each to sign a helmet. On the the other side of the Julio it says, “To Emily, Roll Tide”.. I had to pay extra for the inscription. When Jason saw my UT sweatshirt, he said hey Go Vols! and inscribed his helmet Go Vols – I didnt even pay for the inscription 🙂

This rivalry fish was a present from Emily’s sister and husband last christmas. It now has a prominent place in the office, after Emily found it behind a Robert Meachem autographed mini helmet.. don’t know who could’ve put it there.

This is a ball signed by several members of the 1998 National Championship team that had a gala in 2008 in knoxville that my brother and I attended.. I know thats Al Wilson on the left, Cosey Coleman, Fred Weary , Jeff Hall, Will Offenhusel, and John Chavis – Cedric Wilson is also on there.

This is an Eric Berry jersey I had signed through the mail after my mom got in touch with his mom and they became email buddies for a while. He was nice enough to sign the jersey and send a few copies of a magazine he was on the cover of signed as well! Thanks EB!

Here is a Mark Ingram Autographed football card that Emily is very proud of, and I’m a Saints fan, so thats cool with me.

Here is the whole shelf!

We have a nice collection going and would love to see pictures of other peoples collections! Leave a link in the comments!!

Weekend Wrap-up- Man Weekend

I always go silent on the weekends but that is because we are doing fun things to blog about ha ha! We have had a very busy weekend. It wasn’t until this afternoon while eating lunch that we sat down and watched tv, that is unusual for us on the weekend.

Friday night we had Olive Garden, did some shopping (check the picture of the cute sign I found) and then headed to church for a session from the Answers in Genesis conference that was being held at our church. It was about geology and Tyler was so excited about it, I went for him but learned some new stuff so it was interesting. That was the beginning of Man Weekend.

Saturday morning Dolly had her first training session. She has some problems with meeting strangers and letting them into our house. We met the trainer outside and walked with her and Dolly immediately smelled all the treats she had on her. Dolly let the trainer come into the house and we learned a lot of good stuff about positive reinforcement and working to desensitize her to situations with meeting strangers. So we are now looking for test subjects to come to our house and let Dolly try out her new skills on you, Aunt Kay I’m looking at you!

After the trainer we headed to the card show. Now if you don’t know Tyler then you don’t know the boy loves his football cards. We have a collection of Robert Meachem cards that I would guess no man can match. Now Robert if you would please become a super star so I can get my Range Rover, that would be great! At the card show we bought tickets to have our picture made with Michael Oher, plays for the Baltimore Ravens and oh you know has a whole movie about him, The Blind Side. I was very excited but we had to wait until Sunday for that. Then we headed to the card store (remember I said this was man weekend). After the card store we headed to Lowe’s to get supplies for our newest project that we just completed and I can’t wait to share it with you guys. It looks so good, I am so excited!

Saturday night we enjoyed a delicious dinner with some friends at Texas Roadhouse. The rolls, YUM! Then we went for some late night grocery shopping.

Sunday, that’s today, we went to church and then rushed over to the card show only to find out that Michael Oher had cancelled. Que sad face :(. So we got our money back and to console ourselves bought some cards. I got two Dwight Howard cards and Tyler got one of someone from Tennessee. We finally got home for lunch after breaking the cardinal rule of going grocery shopping on an empty stomach because we had to grab some stuff for the new recipe I am trying tonight. If it turns out good I will share it this week! This afternoon we did the exciting project that I spoke of and will be sharing with you tomorrow!

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! Still a few hours of it left so enjoy it!! We are having beautiful weather here, yay warm weather! My daffodils are finally blooming, so pretty!

Oh and p.s. the most exciting thing about my weekend, they now bottle and sell Olive Garden salad dressing at Wal-Mart!! SAY WHAT? I was so excited! I can’t wait to try it. I hope it’s as good as Olive Garden, the only place I eat salad!

So is it Fall or Summer?

I don’t know about the rest of you but where we live the seasons seem to be a bit confused. It looks like fall outside, the leaves are changing and falling off the trees too but it is 80 degrees outside. And we live in Northern Virginia so this is not typical. I’m not complaining but I am afraid that when it gets cold it’s going to be a terrible shock.

Last week I was fortunate enough to get off at 2 everyday so I was able to actually cook dinner every night which I thoroughly enjoyed. I love to cook. I tried a new recipe, Chicken Alfredo Lasagna Roll-Ups. I even made homemade Alfredo sauce. I felt very domestic. It turned out pretty good although I should have followed the previous bloggers suggestion and doubled the Alfredo sauce recipe. I will attach the link for anyone interested!

This past weekend we were our typical boring selves on Friday. We went to Olive Garden for like the first time in 2 weeks. It was delicious! Olive Garden never fails. On Saturday we decided to drive up into the Shenandoah Mountains and went for a drive on Skyline Drive where Tyler took some wonderful pictures. It was a lot of driving but we saw some beautiful fall foliage! Saturday night brought the big house rivalry to head with the Alabama/Tennessee football game. We kept it civil and the #1 team came out on top 🙂 If you can’t tell, I am the Alabama fan!

On Sunday we went to church and then came home and planted flower bulbs in the yard so hopefully this spring we will have some beautiful flowers! Then Tyler carved his pumpkin while I watched, he is the skilled one in that department. We then went grocery shopping and yeah we are pretty boring. Four weeks from today we get to fly home for Thanksgiving! Yay! I can’t believe the holidays are so soon! I need to get to working on some more holiday decoration crafts!

Hope you are all doing well and having a wonderful week! We are halfway to the weekend!

Chicken Alfredo Roll-Ups

Apples, Pumpkins, and Cupcakes!

I apologize for being completely terrible at this blogging thing. It’s been quite awhile and it is now FALL! Growing up I did not care for fall but apparently the 2 week trips to New England that we took every year, instead of going to the beach like everyone else, the apple picking trips, the fall foliage viewing, apple cider drinking, and mountain hiking has rubbed off on me. So congratulations Dad, you got me, I now love fall. I look forward to the trees changing, I dragged my husband to the apple orchard, I drank some apple cider and enjoyed it and I keep saying “Gosh I’d love to go to New England again.” I even said let’s go walk around the battlefield, but that’s about as close to hiking as you will probably get me when it’s my choice. The one thing I don’t like about fall is that winter comes next and I am not looking forward to that.

So anyways since my last post we’ve been up to a lot. First, my bcf (that stands for Best Cousin Forever) Jacob came up to visit from college. That was a lot of fun and I was excited because during my college years I spent almost every weekend with his family so it was nice to be able to feed him some home cooked meals and do his laundry like his mom did for me. We took him down to National Harbor so we could get him a little Northern Virginia culture experience and then we came home and watched football. I think he had a good time. He gave “Casa de Glover” 5 stars and we look forward to his next visit!

Our weeks are not very interesting so I don’t really blog much about them. We both work all day and come home and eat, watch a little tv and crash. I spend at least 2 hours a day in the car commuting so I am looking forward to this week where I will get off early everyday and miss the afternoon rush hour!

Last weekend we engaged in some true fall fun and went and picked our own pumpkins and then apples as well. We came home and had cooked apples (YUM!) which is one of my favorite things mom makes in the fall. I have a wonderful husband who peels the apples for me and this weekend we invested in an apple slicer/corer (best purchase ever!). So we each got a pumpkin and found some apples to pick. Tyler enjoyed his first apple orchard experience and his first caramel apple. We also had some delicious apple cider and enjoyed the beautiful weather! That Saturday evening we enjoyed our visit to PF Changs and went to see Taken 2 which was very good! Don’t mess with Liam Neeson!

This weekend Nathan, Tyler’s brother, came up from Bristol and they had man night and went to a concert. They had a lot of fun! While they were gone I had a girly night and was going to try out some Molten Lava Chocolate Cupcakes, YUM right? Well I ruined that. They were all prepared and ready to go and as I put them in the oven the pan was hot from resting atop the stove. I let go before the pan was all the way in and well you can look at the picture for the result. So my evening turned into an evening of cleaning chocolate from every nook and cranny of my oven. On Saturday we went shopping and nothing very exciting. We checked out a little town which basically was just worth driving through and then we were done with it. But it was a beautiful drive to get there. We had the most delicious dinner last night that I got from a friend who posted it on Facebook. Chicken Pot Pie cupcakes! And no it’s not chicken pot pie mixture in real cupcakes. Tyler was very confused by that at first. I will post the link below! It was soo good! We also made copycat Bob Evans Pumpkin Bread which was also very delicious and fallish. Today we are having a very lazy day. Catching up on blogging, laundry and watching football.

I hope you are all doing well and I will try harder to blog more!

Chicken Pot Pie Cupcakes!

Homemade pizza and dressing alike…

We had a pretty typical weekend. Just relaxing, I had my first full day of work on Friday which started with a 6 am alarm so I was ready to sleep in on Saturday. This week I plan to get used to waking up early every morning, driving to work, enduring DC traffic and spending all day with kids again. Oh the working life. We went out to dinner Friday, can you guess where? If you thought Olive Garden then you were correct :). We did a little shopping without spending, we are becoming pros at that. And no we aren’t shop lifting. We are resisting buying things. So I guess really I should call it browsing.

On Saturday we went shopping with Kohls cash and got some good stuff! Then as we were heading to Wal Mart for grocery shopping a massive storm hit! The clouds were crazy and super low. The wind was whipping and the rain was pouring. So we opted to stop by Giant and just pick up what we needed for dinner. I jumped out of the car at the sidewalk into about 5 inches of rain that took my flip flop. Thankfully I rescued it. We made homemade pizza on Saturday night! Homemade pizza is the only kind of pizza that I like. I made the pizza dough in the bread maker and then we halved it and each made our own personal pizzas. They turned out good except I made the mistake of cooking mine on the bottom shelf on the oven. Rock hard bottom. But Tyler’s was good! We might be needing a good Pampered Chef pizza stone for Christmas. I have also taken up cross stitch, or re taken it up. I used to do it when I was younger and now I am working on cross stitch christmas patches for our christmas stockings!

Today we went to church and it was the opening day/dedication Sunday for our church’s brand new building. It is awesome looking! The weather today is beautiful since the storm cooled it down. We did our grocery shopping, watched some football and went on a walk around the neighborhood. Earlier in the week we went on a walk dressed alike, gray shirt and red shorts, unknowingly. And today for church we both had on jeans and an earth colored shirt. We don’t plan this. It’s strange.

Hope you all had a great weekend. Oh and check out the football rankings. Both of our teams are ranked! Roll Tide and Go Vols!!! I will cheer on the Tennessee Vols until the 3rd Saturday in October. Then we will be spending game time on separate sides of the room cheering for our respective teams.

Dessert first and then dinner. That’s how we roll.

We had a wonderful Labor Day weekend with our families! First we headed off to visit Tyler’s family on Thursday night. We drove to Tennessee and then spent Friday shopping with his mom and Friday night celebrating his dads birthday! On Saturday we headed off to a lake house in Virginia where 20 of us, yes 20, stayed in one 5 bedroom house. Call us crazy but my family likes each other and seems to enjoy cramming as many people as we can into one place. There were pallets everywhere and for those of you who don’t know what a pallet is, in Ballard terms, it is what you sleep on on the floor. But we make some pretty cozy ones, lots of blankets and foam pads and there you go a bed on the floor. Some people don’t know what we mean when we say pallet hence the explanation.

Thanks to Uncle Tony we had this wonderful house on the lake and a boat with a tube, skis, kneeboard and wakeboard. It was a great time! We got to see the youngest person there learn to water ski (Lily) to the oldest of the parents ski (My dad). The grandparents weren’t up for skiing. But my dad did ski and still had swagger from his younger days. He got up and successfully was able to Slalom. For those of you unfamiliar with ski terminology that means he was skiing on two skis then dropped one and proceeded to continue skiing on just one ski. He was going back and forth over the wake. Very impressive. And sadly I didn’t have a camera with me. What was I thinking? I learned a lot about skiing but did not attempt it my self.

We ate and ate and ate. Delicious food. The first night we had dessert at 8:30 and dinner at 9:30 then the next morning Aunt Mel was pulling out dessert for breakfast.

One of the funniest moments was when a boat got stuck on the sand or mud bar out in front of our dock. It was about a foot of water then three feet of mud. The men heroically slogged through the mud and helped to rescue the group which included Frank Beemer’s (coach of Virginia Tech) cousin.

Another heart pounding high light was when the boys decided to take up cliff diving. Most of it was just the boys going about 10 feet up a rock and jumping. Except for when Miles decided to hike to the top of an 80 foot rock then make his way down the front of the rock to about 50 feet up and then he stood there as I watched him with binoculars and screamed at him that he better not jump. But he did and he survived. Almost gave me and Grandma a heart attack. But he was given three punches on his man card so he was pretty thrilled.

We were very excited to see Tennessee and Alabama win their first games of the season! That was followed by a heartbreaking loss for Georgia Tech on Monday night 😦

I think that covers the highlights of the trip. I think this may be my longest blog post yet! We had a wonderful time with our families and can’t wait to see them all again soon!

A house divided, it’s almost football time!

We have not been very interesting this week. We are still working on getting the rest of the before and after pictures ready of the house! I guess it is Monday now so I am speaking of this past week. I started my new job. My second nanny job. It is two little girls who are 2 1/2 and 6 months. I start full time next week. The new car has been great. I have not even had to fill it up yet which is amazing!

We did a little shopping this week, had a date night, and had dinner out with Matt and Katie. Matt was one of Tyler’s groomsmen and they live near us so we were excited to finally get to hang out with them!

My big accomplishment for the week was my next craft project! I am making a house divided wreath, Alabama and Tennessee, in case you don’t know our teams. I am the Alabama fan and Tyler is the Tennessee fan. I started this craft by buying a white foam wreath, pieces of felt in the colors of my choice and straight pins. I cut the pieces of felt into little squares (approx. 2.5 by 2.5inches) and then folded them diagonally corner to corner and then again. Then put a straight pin through it leaving one little flap not pinned so it left it looking fluffy and somewhat covered the pin. I proceeded to continue putting these pinned felt squares all over the wreath. I only covered the front not the back because the back won’t really show. So this is my wreath. I have a wooden A and a T which I still need to paint and add on to it. I am pretty pleased by how it turned out!

We have a shorter week this week then it’s off to visit the in-laws and then a few days of lake fun with my family 🙂