Christmas in Paris!

On Christmas Eve, we drove down to Paris to enjoy a few days relaxing with family and friends! My brother, the Guatemalan, had come in for Christmas and a friend's wedding so we were so happy to have him around! This Christmas ended up being one of our favorites! The highlights from the weekend included: everyone cooking together on Christmas, trying to make our own cheese, walks along the Paris trail, sleeping in, seeing Valkyrie and having drinks out with the Hudsons and Lindsay. The other major highlight was Mark taking pictures with his Nikon D90!! For those of you who may not know, Mark is very gifted at taking pictures! We will definitely feature Mark's work on the blog. Most of the pictures that we took were with the new camera, so we will have to post those later.

Our Dining Room

Mark and I have loved and cursed owning a historical home. We are really trying to become homeowners that can make updates and changes on their house without hiring an expert. We went so far as purchasing our first drill! Our first big project was the dining room. Half of the walls were covered in ugly wall paper so we had to rip down the wall paper and then prime, paint and decorate! Initially, we thought this project may take a weekend, but after 2 months of on and off again work, we finally finished. Below are the before, during and after pictures.


The hardest part was removing the glue that the wall paper left behind. It was gruelling!


We primed the wall with a gray primer, because you could still see a dark red seeping through the white primer.



Next we painted the walls. We actually painted the walls two different color greens. We had a vote with our friends and family on which color to paint the walls. The lighter green (Ellen's favorite) won out initially, but the first coat left little to be desired. We then went back and put the darker coat (Mark's choice) over the the lighter coat. The blended colors were a perfect match!

At Christmas, my parents gave us a beautiful Tunisian rug. They bought it at a cool rug shop in Tunisia when they went to visit my mom's cousin! So the dining room is a complete masterpiece!

The Pogemiller's Visit

We had a few visitors to our house in November and December. Mark's parents enjoyed Thanksgiving in OKC. We gave them a tour of the city, walked through the Botanical gardens and served them buttermilk pie (a southern treat!) It was a wonderful weekend!

In early December, Kristin (Mark's sister) and Aubrey (our niece) came down to experience the real OC! We also tried to show them all of OKC. We ate OK-Mex, our favorite pizza and took a boat tour of Bricktown. It was so fun to be able to play with Aubrey. She is so cute!!

I also had a Junior League "Ugly Sweater" party that weekend. Below is a group of us decked out in our ugliness. It was one of those situations where it seemed like everyone else made their "ugly sweater" look cute and I just kept it ugly. Thankfully the picture is not a close up!

Our Trip to Fayetteville!

Last weekend, we traveled to Fayetteville, Arkansas to surprise our good friend Traci for her birthday. We were very close friends with the Sips in Ohio and had not been together since Mark and I moved to Oklahoma. Matt, Traci's husband, invited us down to surprise Traci and boy was she surprised!

The weekend was awesome! It was also incredibly cold! We walked around the farmer's market in Fayetteville's downtown square and we also were able to see beautiful views of the city. We spent the rest of the day catching up, watching football and playing with Jack. Mark and Jack become the best of friends through a unique and hilarious version of catch!!

That evening we had dinner at the Hog Haus Brewing Co. near the University of Arkansas Campus. Imagine our surprise, when in the lobby of the restaurant we saw our current Oklahoma State Senator Andrew Rice. Andrew had recently ran and lost the US Senate race in Oklahoma. We, of course, introduced ourselves and were reminded at how small our community really is.

We are so excited that the Sips live so close to us and we hope there are many more reunions in our future.

Mizzou Homecoming 2008 (game)

So here are a few more pictures from our trip to Mizzou Homecoming 2008. I think our campus is the best looking campus EVER (of course I am not biased as a former MU tour guide) but here is a great shot to show those that have not had the pleasure of being in Columbia, MO on MU's campus.While Ellen and I were in Columbia, we had to go to Bouches to get some burgers and who did we happen to sit next to at the bar... none other than the voice of the Tigers... Mike Kelly!!! He was very nice and I was able to get my picture with him. Great start to the weekend!!!

If we only had one game to make it to, this was a good one to be at... and our seats weren't that bad. 6 rows up even with the endzone. Here is a Chase Daniel pass that went for a touchdown early in the game:

Here we are cheering on our TIGERS!!!

Isn't that a beautiful site... 58-0! I had never seen Mizzou shut out anyone before (let alone a Big XII opponent). Of course Ellen did not see that as she left part way through the 3rd quarter to go hang out with some of her friends at a bar, but I will not leave a Mizzou game until the clock reads 0:00!

What an AWESOME weekend!!!

Mizzou Homecoming 2008 (friends)

Ellen and I made our annual trip back to Columbia for a MU football game. This year we were able to make it the actual Homecoming weekend for the MU vs CU football game. Of course we wanted to see as many people as possible and trying to split our time between 2 different groups of friends is always difficult, but I think we did an excellent job and all in all had an AWESOME weekend. Here is a quick recap of all the good friends we got to see:

First of all, Sarah Jean was gracious enough to offer her beautiful house for us to stay at on Thursday night. It was great to see her, Adam (her husband) and her 2 cute kids (Molly and Luke). Unfortunately, I was an idiot and never got a picture with any of them.

Then on Friday after some Mizzou shopping for me while Ellen was working on homework at Panara we were able to stop by Amanda's house and see her and her 2 (yes now 2) kids Cole and Chase.

Then that night we had to get some pizza at Shakespears and met Chelsie and her husband Jason (who recently got back from Iraq). Always lots of laughs with Chelsie!

A little later Ellen's friends Jill and Suzanne met us a Shakespears and we went to House Decs with them. Both KKG's and KA's house decs left a little to be desired (although admittedly KKG's were better).


After a night on the town, the next day we had some tailgating to do so we met Katie & Andy at Katie's parent's tailgate.

And finished it up at John & Jen's tailgate where Travis was there as well! It was good to see some old med school friends again. Ellen and I also got schooled by Travis and his wife Allison in a game of washers.


All in all a great weekend for visiting with some old friends that we unfortunately don't get to see often enough. Hopefully they all know that we have a couple of spare rooms here in OKC if they ever make it down this way!

Halloween Weekend

We had an awesome Halloween weekend. Both of us dressed up for work! Mark was Clark Kent/Superman. He wore a suit, but underneath he had on his "superman" uniform! If you look closely at the picture, you can see his Daily Planet Press Pass. I wore my German Beer Maid outfit that I bought while we were in Germany last March.

We bought a lot of candy to pass out and we invited our friend Colen over for the festivities. When we went outside, our sweet neighbors invited us to hand out candy with them. Afterwards, we went to dinner with our other neighbors.

On Saturday, we drove down to Paris to celebrate my Dad's birthday. It was another great day! We ate burgers at a new Paris joint, went on a long walk, ate a delicious dinner and cursed as the Longhorns lost the game in the last second.