Thanksgiving Break

I am in Arizona for Thanksgiving break. I decided to make a vacation out of it, so I am staying for a week. It's nice and sunny here with occasional bouts of chilly 60 degree weather. I flew in on Thanksgiving morning. Surprisingly Thanksgiving is a really good day to fly. My flight was full, but the airport wasn't very busy.
People were generously happy and even at times, goofy. It reminded me of the nation's happier days. It seems like there has been so much chaos about the TETs (tough economic times). Thanksgiving is the holiday when people are reminded of gratitude and appreciate blessings.

The ride home from the airport was eventful. First of all, Jeremy forgot which of the 9 levels he parked his truck. Luckily we only searched two levels before finding his truck. On the drive home, there was a wreck. The traffic was moving slow as we were going uphill through a mountain range. As per usual, we had the windows down and were rocking out to some music. Our new favorite song, Pumped up Kicks is wildly over played on the radio. We listened to that song two or three times. Imagine us with the windows down, in a traffic jam, busting moves, and occasionally encouraging other drivers to sync radio stations to ours for a party. We were having fun.

Then suddenly out of nowhere his truck starts to over heat. We were on the side of the road cooling down and one of our fellow drivers pulled over and gave us some anti-freeze. Thank you local citizen. We drove to the next exit which thankfully was a rest stop. Then Lori, Amanda and the kids had to come and pick us up. It was a 40 minute drive so Jeremy and I familiarized ourselves with the rest stop. I took some photos for a group of Taiwanese tourists; we met some dogs and their senior citizen owners; spotted honeybees, cattle, and birds; and we read some AZ trivia.

By the time we got home dinner was ready. The table was beautifully set with flowers and the feast. It was somewhat weird celebrating Thanksgiving away from home. I am usually in Utah. Amanda and Lori prepared the spread while Jeremy came to the airport to pick me up. As we sat around the table, I realized that we are all adults (minus Jadin and Ava).  Here we were eating Thanksgiving dinner, creating traditions, and influencing a new generation. We struggled as a whole about what rituals were to be performed before eating. We unanimously agreed to say at least one thing we were thankful for during our feast. We were all excited to be together and to eat yummy food.

Whether you spend the holidays with family, friends, or animals the uniting and joyful denominator is love. Love is all there is. We could have been stuck at the rest stop eating vending machine food with a bunch of seniors and dogs and that would have been wonderful. But we lucky enough to be in cozy house with many beloved family members and a feast. Hope your Thanksgiving was filled with love and gratitude, I know mine was :)

Halloween Make-up

First attempt

Thanks to a little site called pinterest, I decided to have fun butterfly make-up for Halloween. My first attempt was the worst, but still awesome. I was in a rush after work to make it to a fab Halloween party. I put on the make-up at work, by a lamp lit room, trying so hard not to make a mess. In my haste, I neglected to arrange for my wings, but in hindsight the make-up was enough.


Then, on Sunday, we had a little family Halloween get-together. Heather's kids wanted to show off their costumes. I also wanted to show off my new make-up tricks. Long story short, I got so excited that I somehow managed to convince Heather to let me do her make-up as well.