Visits With Lexi

During the March Madness craze Lexi and her friend Dallas came down for the BYU basketball game on a Friday night. Unfortunately Jimmer couldn't pull this one off, and they drove all that way just to see the Cougs get beat. But I guess they still had fun. Especially since they came to our house after the game and we had dinner together. I had gotten a Bountiful Basket that day with an Asian pack, so I was excited to wow her and her friend with an exotic Asian dish. Everything was looking good, but when I added the fresh ginger, I just wasn't getting any ginger flavor. Now as many of you know, ginger is pretty strong, especially fresh. Well, the dish was really tasting kind of bland, so I kept grating more fresh ginger into it, with no results. Very strange. Anyway, the dinner was not as wonderful as I had envisioned, and we were all adding salt and pepper to jazz up the flavor a little. We had a nice evening, but I felt a little bad that the dinner was kind of a flop. It was only the next morning when I realized that I had been grating the Jerusalem Artichokes (which are pretty tasteless) that I had gotten a few weeks before in another Bountiful Basket, into my Asian dish! They look almost exactly like fresh ginger, so I didn't even realize what I was doing. In hindsight, I should have figured it out, but I was getting kind of flustered about the whole thing and was a little stressed trying to have everything perfect. It's pretty funny to think about now, and we all had a good laugh about it!

Then In April, Lexi and her roommate, Amanda came for the night on their way to Phoenix to participate in Pat's run. It seems like every year Lexi manages to come home either on her birthday, or close enough to it that we can have a little celebration. I let her pick the dinner menu and she chose steak so that's what we had. I tricked her and told her I didn't have time to make a cake, but there was a poppy seed bread left over from Christmas in the freezer that we could have. I could tell she was a little disappointed at that. So when I brought out her favorite cake she was pretty happy.

If anyone is wondering why there is a 4 candle on her cake, the reason is it was the only birthday candle I had in the house. Lame, I know. But she had to blow out something! A few weeks later I was cleaning out a drawer and found a whole box of candles...............typical.

So happy to you Lexi! I hope your birthday was fun, even though you had to have a stupid number 4 candle on your cake!

Scrap-A-Thon

Patty, Debbie, and myself met up at Patty's cabin again this year for our 4th annual Scrap-A-Thon IN APRIL MIND YOU, and this is how the weather was! Debbie and I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever, but Patty, who has been in snow country all winter, was not so enthralled. We spend most of our time inside scrapbooking, so that's why Debbie and I didn't mind.

It really was beautiful.

We tried to get a picture of all three of us together, but our arms weren't long enough!

I didn't take very many pictures this year, for some reason, but we ate a little chocolate (a lot!), scrapped, stayed up too late, ate at some yummy restaurants, and on the final night Patty made us the most delicious corned beef dinner! It was so yummy, and the whole weekend was a blast. We've got to figure out how we can make this a semi-annual event!