I aint skeered....

WE LOVE HALLOWEEN! I appreciate any opportunity to eat lots of candy and wear ridiculous outfits. Andy likes the icky gore part of it. Last year we decorated with Andy's decorations- the bloody beware sign, the entire front of our house covered in spider webs and icky spiders, amputated body parts, It was dark.
This year, I got to decorate my way!








Excited to celebrate, and by celebrate I of course mean see how many fun sized snickers I can eat in one setting!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO EVERYONE!

:(

On Monday I found out that I will be laid off sometime between November and January. I work for Quitline, which is a division of American Cancer Society. All of Quitline will be let go. There will be no more Quitline. Crazy. This is about 300+ employees.

I have only told a couple of people in the last couple of days as I am still trying to process how I feel about this. It really took me by surprise. The day I found out I was really at peace about it and almost excited (thanks to the unwaivering support of my husband who thought it was "a great blessing") but then the last couple of days I've begun to feel angry at ACS (lots of bad decision behind this) and sad because I really will miss my co-workers. On one hand, it certainly was not my dream job but there was certainly lots of benefits of it (work from home, getting off at 3pm every day, low stress).

I have been struggling with where exactly I was suppose to be in life for a long time- work, family, school, lots of options and not a clear answer. Well Priase God for making the decision whether I should work for ACS very clear! I know this is a part of the journey and as sad as I am about this I know it is God's plan and everything will work out!

We're getting closer.....

So, as I was gallavanting around Tulsa, sweet Andy was working his little hiney off on the bathroom. It was such a wonderful surprise to come home to! What progress he made. Here are some current pictures, excuse the mess!

I heart crown molding and smooth ceilings.....

Love the vainity! It's kinda tall though, but all the cool kids keep telling me that that's the hip new thing now. Plus bending over to wash your hands? Pssshhh....way to much work anyways...

There is literally blood, sweat, and tears that went into tiling that dang shower! It all worked out though!
Can you see my tone on tone paint stripes? I will try to get a better picture of it later, but I love the way it turned out!

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A!

What a wonderful weekend! I was able to spend a long weekend in Sand Springs OK! I got to spend 4 whole days of eating lots of yummy food, seeing lots of family and friends, and lounging around which was WONDERFUL. I had not been home since last Christmas and this trip was long over-due! It was the perfect weekend, thank Mom and Dad for making it so great!

One of my favorite things to do with my mom is to cook. I've talked on here several times before how she is the best cook ever, so I try to learn as much as I can from her. Here is a few of the wonderful meals I chowed down on(there was some yummy noises made, I'm not going to lie)-

Chipotle Turkey sandwich on blueberry and corn bread with dressed salad greens and a harvest couscous with cranberries/currants/squash.

Spinach tortellini soup



Chicken enchiladas!

Another really fun thing we did was go to the Sand Springs Soap Box Derby race. My dad's station had 2 cars they entered. One was a storm chaser (from last year) and then the Tornado. This is the car Andy had built and then my dad made a tornado body for it. It was really cool looking. It was such a fun event to just walk around and see all the different cars and their drivers. My Aunt Debbie, Aunt Cheryl, and cousin Madison all came down to the race. It was SO great to see them and to get to actually hang out, it had been a really long time and we had lots of laughs. It was fun to go around to all the vendors and we got tons of free t-shirts, balls, pens, candy, all sorts of good stuff!


So many creative cars!



Saturday evening my friend Sara and her mom, Linda came up to Tulsa for a girl's night out. I consider Sara and her family, the Jenkins like family, and I spend many many weekends in middle and high school over at their house so it was so good to get to see them. We went to the new Hard Rock Casino and had dinner and gambled a bit. We ate at Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill. They stayed the night and Sara and I had a good old fashioned sleep over where we stayed up late, laughed, tried to learn to dance from youtube videos, you know, fun things that you can only do with a best friend!



Then Sunday afternoon my friends Holly and Marie, also whom I've been friends with since middle school, drove up to Tulsa to visit. We went shopping and then ate at Los Cabos in Jenks. They are such good friends and no matter how many people I meet in my life, there is just no relationship like a girlfriends you've had forever. They know all my stories, how easily excited and spazzy I can be, seen my numerous faux pas and love me anyways.



The whole trip was amazing and I do miss living in Oklahoma but just in the few short years we've lived in Austin I do feel like this is our home and miss my life we've made here when I am away for more than a few days. I really hope that one day I can live closer than 8 hours from family and friends, but until then it just makes the times we do have together that much more special!

Dallas weekend with the Parents!

So Andy built a box car derby racer (apparently it is called a gravity racer though if you are an adult though) for my dad. This is the second year for my dad's to compete for him work in a soap box derby race. The race is in a couple weeks, so we met half way between Tulsa and Austin, in Dallas, to exchange the derby car. The boys went to a big Top-Fuel/dragster race (hopefully I called it the right thing-sorry boys if I didn't!) and my mom and I spend the day together roaming around Dallas.


We went to Galleria mall (neither of us had ever been there), it is huge! We did some serious shopping. I think the highlight of our afternoon together was going to Penzey Spices. I've mentioned this before, but my mom is serisouly the best cook ever. Seriously. She is all about quality ingredient and buys all her spices from this catalog-Penzey's. Well Penzey's has a store in Dallas, so you better believe that we went! Equipped with her page long list that only someone with OCD could appreciate, we had fun picking out spices, which is a hard thing to do when there is 5 different types of any spice you could ever imagine. I bought some things there and am super excited to try them out!
We also went to Sprinkle's Cupcakes. How to I even begin to describe the deliciousness of these little bits of heavens? They were AMAZING. This is a cupcake place that started in Beverly Hills, and I've heard of celebrities being obsessed with them, well now us common folks can have a taste of the good life too! Mmmmmmmmm.

After the race we all ate dinner together and then Andy and I headed over to Midlothian to visit Andy's sister's family. It was so good to get to see everyone, but sad since it was such a short trip and didn't get to really spend much time with our nieces. I forgot to take pictures unfortunately, but we had a blast and am looking forward to seeing them again hopefully soon!
The race!





It was a fabulous weekend, but so glad to be home and get back to life. I even got a guarantee from Andy that the bathroom would be finished by the end of the week- we'll see....
Have a great week everybody!

Self- Care

So today I am taking a "mental health day". My work has been stressful and I am feeling the physical and emotional tolls of burn-out (I studied about it in school, but never made the connection that it is real thing that happens to your mind and body). I am glad that I chose to take care of just myself today.
So here goes my big day of beautiful unscheduled goodness! I hope that you all can do something to do just for you!

VIVA LAS VEGAS

Holy Moly. LAS VEGAS WAS SO FUN. I am so never planning another trip again, most of the fun of the trip was just showing up and doing whatever the heck we wanted to do and everything worked out so perfectly.
I hadn't been there since I was 14 or so with my family and Andy had never been there so we didn't really know what to expect. We had stand by tickets and were kind of expecting to not get on a flight or be stuck at the air port for hours on end- nope! We walked right up and got on the exact flight we wanted. We arrive in Vegas around 9 am Friday morning, so we had all of Friday to explore and see what we wanted to do.

We stayed at New York New York and it was so great. They have a little mini Central Park, SoHo, downtown area. We really enjoyed just exploring our hotel.




We couldn't check in to our hotel for a few hours so we decided to gamble our $10 that we allotted for ourselves each day. Well I put in $5 in the penny slots, made $35, then put that in the $1 slots and won....$832. Andy and I of course were completely spazing out in the casino of New York New York. As I told this to a friend of mine she commented that "the craziest part of the story isn't that you won but that the Luksys' were playing the $1 slots!". Everyone knows we are cheap, like to a fault cheap. So for us to gamble at all was a stretch, but then to win that amount of money in such a short period of time- crazy.


Andy called our winnings "dirty money" and convinced me that we had to spend it as to not "taint" our bank account with it. Did I know this was his excuse for me to not feel guilty about spending the money? Yes. Did it work? Absolutely. So we set aside the money for our hotel and food and then with the rest went to some shows!

The first Cirque show we went to was Zumanity. It advertised as the "Sensual Side of Cirque du Soleil" and after seeing the show I would say that is putting it very tamely. Now I know that I am sheltered Church of Christ girl from the buckle of the Bible belt- but holy moley. We were both a little out of our comfort zones but it was still an enjoyable show none the less.

The next night we went and saw David Copperfield. I remember as a kid watching his prime time tv specials and just thinking he was the coolest guy ever. Well now he is kind of sad. Andy and I both noticed that he seemed a little annoyed with the tricks, the audience, and just kinda over the whole magic thing. Anyways, during the show we threw out 4 frisbees in the audience and 1 landed right by me. I tried to get Andy to go up on stage, but of course he wouldn't- so I got to go up on stage and assist in a David Copperfield magic trick! I held this big rope around these other guys, they put up a sheet, and then 5 seconds later there was a car there! It was crazy- I was 2 feet away from this and still have no idea how it worked. That was a once in a lifetime experience for sure!




One of the Cirque di Soleil shows we saw was LOVE- it was all Beatles. The Beatles have forever and will continue to be my favorite band/obsession forever. The show was so amazing and beautiful.



I was a tiny bit excited if you can't tell....


There is no doubt that Vegas is a wild town and has a lot to offer people who are into that sort of thing. We wondered if we would run out of stuff doing being that we aren't too into the whole Vegas scene, but we absolutely did not! There is so much to see! Just walking down the strip and walking around the casinos and seeing all the free stuff can easily take a weekend.