Your name on toast

OK, enough blogs about me and my life (for now, at least). Lets talk about something a little bigger and more important. Like toast. Well, not toast exactly but what your name written on toast can do for the world. What?



So I straight up stole this from my friend Jason's blog, but I couldn't resist passing it on. This website gives you the opportunity to buy your name written on toast, and all proceeds go to a couple of world-changing charities. You can give any amount over $20 and they will literally make you a piece of toast and write your name on it. You don't get the actual toast, you just get a picture of your toast posted on their website. And you can make your toast a link to your website (see Jason's toast in the top center there).

At our church, our leadership has started a huge movement to give ourselves away. What does that mean and what does that look like and why is that so hard for me to do? I live in Orange County, CA. Let me say that again. I live in Orange County, CA, and yet I find myself wanting for more money, more house, more stuff, more free time, more . . . I know. Its disgusting. As a Christian, why is it a struggle to do the most basic commandment of Christ that was clearly and perfectly modeled for us? At church last Sunday they had notecards for every person with a challenge on it. Call someone you haven't called in over a year. Tip 50% at the next restaurant you eat at. Do something nice for someone who is hard to get along with. All simple steps to giving our lives away.

May we continue to learn and grow in this area, starting with picking up the phone or simply buying a piece of toast.

Moneyhoon Blog v. 2.0

So here are the activities that we did while in Maui.

1)Sleeping (a minimum of 9 hours every night)
2)Eating (see below)
3)Laying out
4)Reading (Harry Potter 4 for me, World War X for Adam - I think it involves Zombies. That's all I know about it)

Literally, I think that is about all. No luau, no sunrise volcanos, no helicopter tour, nada. And it was awesome.

The food was absolutely incredible every night. Here are some of the highlights:

On our second night in Maui we went to Roy's - a recommendation from Adam's uncle. Wow - it was absolutely amazing! We were so excited to find out that there are a couple of locations in southern CA, so we will definitely be tracking those down! Here's Adam with their Melting Hot Chocolate Souffle:

The next night we went to probably my favorite restaurant, Pacific'O. It was such great food and atmosphere right on the water. You can tell who the picture-crazy one is since Adam is in all of the shots! At Pacific'O, when a fish item is ordered form the menu, they literally call the fishing boats and have them bring in whatever has been ordered. Doesn't get much fresher than that!


Our other two favorites were Mala and David Paul's. Here's our picture from Mala. I love this one of us because Adam's arm looks like its teeny and mine looks super long.




And here's David Paul's. It got Adam's vote for favorite food of the week.


One of my favorite parts of the trip was when we rented kayaks and paddled around in the ocean. I kept suggesting it throughout the week and sensed hesitancy in Adam's response every time. I finally got to the bottom of it: Adam was truly terrified of sharks thinking that our kayak was a seal and coming to attack us. I've never seen Jaws but apparently it got to Adam pretty good. Here we are paddling for our lives:


On our last day in Maui, we woke up, ate breakfast and headed out to catch our flight home. Of course I insisted on stopping at every scenic overlook and even one random field that I liked to take final parting pictures:

Little did we know that as we were frolicking our way back to the airport, our plane was preparing for departure. Turns out that our travel agent gave us the wrong time for our flight home. It was actually about 45 minutes earlier than our itinerary said! As we were standing in line to check our baggage, I kept feeling sorry for all of the passengers on the LAX flight that was earlier than ours because the lines were super long and their plane was boarding. Finally it occurred to us that maybe the flight that everyone in line was talking about might be ours also. It was, but luckily an attendant let us jump to the front of the line to check in and then we RAN through the airport to be the last ones on the plane. Not that it would have been THAT terrible if we had of missed it . . .

Overall it was such an amazing trip - we can't wait to go back!

Moneyhoon Blog

So its been several weeks and this is coming probably more than fashionably late, but I wanted to post a few pics from our fabulous Hawaiian honeymoon. We were quite put to shame by our Oct. 1 co-wedders, the Witts, who blogged DURING their honeymoon. See their wonderful pics and entries about their trip all over Florida. My brother was practically drooling when I told him that Jonathan and Ryanne attended an NFL game on their honeymoon.



I will also tattle that there was some texting back and forth between Jonathan and Adam about potential fantasy football trades while we were all on our honeymoons. Really? Is that necessary? At least I was fore-warned by my new brother-in-law Andy at our rehearsal dinner of the importance of fantasy football in Adam's life.

Anyway, after a night at the beatiful Hermitage Hotel in Nashville




and another back at our condo in CA, we traveled for our fabulous 6-night vacation to the Hyatt Regency in Maui:



From LAX, Maui is only a 5-hour flight, so the travel was very do-able. In between watching episodes of Lost and writing thank-you notes, I made Adam talk incessantly with me about our wedding and how much fun it was!! Here we are picking up our rental car - this was our first Hawaiian pic:



We then drove from the Maui airport to the Hyatt in Kaanapali. Good thing that Adam turned 25 that day so we could rent a sweet jeep!


We spent our first afternoon exploring the resort. Here we are from our balcony. Not too shabby!




We ate at a restaurant in the hotel for dinner the first night to celebrate Adam's birthday. Thus began our food obsession for the whole week. Our dinner was so good that I went the next day and bought a Honeymoon Journal, mainly to record what we ate at every meal so we can remember it all! Yum!!


Check back soon for Moneyhoon Blog #2!

Our first California roadtrip

Well, despite the coughing and wheezing and sore throats from out latest bout of illness, Adam and I decided to take advantage of a free weekend to spend some quality time with our new Lifegroup from our church Rock Harbor and go on our first official roadtrip to Mammoth, CA. Look how excited Adam is about it:



So we headed out on Friday around 4:30, braving the Friday night LA traffic to make the 6.5 hour drive up to the mountains. Our friends, the Blomquists (see below) have a family cabin that they graciously opened up to 11 of us for the weekend.



We got in late Friday night, and then woke up to a fun surprise on Saturday morning - falling snow! It was a great weekend filled with:

hiking in the snow:





rummaging through closets for sweet 80's hats and jackets:





enjoying the beautiful vistas and taking lots of pictures of them. I think Adam was embarrased that our group saw the real photo-obsessed Mary that he's been trying to hide:







And lots of playing Board Games including:

Scrabble (Adam and I came in second, despite our board-clearing entry of "guitars")

Yahtzee (how have I missed this game all of my life? Its awesome!)

Clue (totally forgot how great this game is - it takes on a whole new level of competition at 25 as opposed to last time I played it at age 13),

And below you'll see the boys vs. girls game of Pictionary. I think you can tell from the faces in the photo who won that one - Adam was particularly bitter over one All-Play sketch of mine of Madrid. I can't help it if one of my teammates was British and knows her European geography!





Overall if was a great trip and such a blast to see a new part of the state - quite different from where we live! I'll close with my favorite group shot. Don't miss Sarah (right) and Katie (left) on the ground!

Sweet Revenge

See my blog below entitled "Caring is Sharing" and then visit my husband's blog for the latest update on our condition. I don't feel too bad. I told him I would pay him back and I did. Take that.

On a side note, try finding an image for revenge. When I searched google images, it brought up Ned Flanders. Sure. Why not?

Album of the month

So I was driving to work this morning and had a lightening bolt ambition to do one blog a month about an album that I am currently listening to. I'm a big believer in music having profound and significant impact on our lives. At one point I thought about blogging once a day about what I listen to every day on the way to work, but this seems a little more reasonable.

So it starts. November's album is Eastmountainsouth's self titled album. What a great month/album match. Here are some vital stats and information about it.

Time of posession: About 1 year
Level of obsession on a scale of 1 to 10: Hmmm . . . I'm going to say 9.5
Similar sounds: If Nickel Creek and Jill Phillips had children, they would be Eastmountainsouth.
Songs to put on repeat for days: #1 - Hard Times, # 6- So you are to me
Friends who would love this album: Pregnant girls in Macon.
Other interesting facts:
"Hard Times" appears on the Elizabethtown soundtrack. Good movie, good song.
We almost used "So you are to me" in our wedding.

You can listen to 4 of their songs on their website.

This is one of those albums that initially I thought was OK but it grew on me for a couple of weeks until I couldn't live without it (you know how that goes - listen to the CD in the car and then run inside to where your iPod has it playing still from where you listened to it that morning). I think the things that you grow to love are the loves that stick the most. But thats another blog for another day.