Trick or Treat!

Happy Halloween!!

I love Halloween. It is one of my favorite holidays. I love dressing up and throwing parties and eating candy and it is what I consider to be the beginning of the "holiday season." Hence, it has a lot of good things going for it. This year, much like last year, I decided to through a Halloween movie night. I was debating it for a while since there is always that worry that people won't show up and the process of actually getting everything together, but Korina convinced me that I should and I knew that at least her and Nathan would be there.

So, I'm big into the decorating thing. I love having that "feel" to a place when it is decorated for a holiday. And I kept seeing all these cute ideas in Country Living, Home and Garden and Martha Stewart magazines. Anyway, here was my attempt at chic Halloween with an Edgar Allen Poe feel.

Notice the skull, apothecary jars, tattered book, candles.....yeah, I'm good.

And the raven.

We covered the chairs in black satin and the couch in white with only dreary pillows to brighten the place up. Haha. Pun intended.

Then our fireplace with black candles and stacks of books, shredded cheese cloth and leaves to finish it off.

I think the overall affect is quite good. What do you think?

Everyone looked so good for the party! I truly thought that Bryan and I would be the only ones dressed up, but everyone showed up in mourning! I loved it!! We watched Hocus Pocus and everyone had a really great time. I know....they told me. And we even had butternut squash soup from a pumpkin and rootbeer from a dry ice cauldron.

Can you guess WHO Bryan is? And that is totally a hint.

Does this help?

Okay, does THIS help? No....Well, he is totally Doctor Who. If you don't watch it. Start. Enough said.

This is not the costume I wore for the party, but to our ward party the next night. I call it Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. You can't really see the deadly makeup. At the party it was similar because of the hat, but I was a dead horseback rider with my khaki pants, riding boots, frilly collared shirt with a black riding jacket and crazy eyes.

Here, I wore it to work today too. This is what I was for the party.

Once again, Martha was my inspiration.

Anyways, it was a great weekend. We had a blast. Maybe I will get the energy to do a Thanksgiving party, but with Matt's wedding, I doubt I'll get to it. Plus Bryan and I need to recuperate. My parties always take a lot out of you. Just ask Emily.

1st Anniversary

So this past Sunday was our first anniversary!! Can you believe? Me neither. I must say that I have married one of the best men in the world! He is so wonderful, funny, caring, and handsome. I am so blessed to be sealed to him forever!!

For our anniversary this year we obviously celebrated on Saturday. I "made" us cinnamon rolls in the morning (thank you Rhodes Rolls!) and we spent the morning going to DI and stuff to see what old frames and books we could find for Bryan's brother's upcoming wedding---which I will be doing the decorations for!! Exciting!! I have some simple, crafty ideas that I think will look great. Anyway, then we got all ready and headed up to Salt Lake. We had reservations at The Roof (which Mom has always told me I HAD to go to one day---well, Saturday was that day). It was delicious!! And all the views are great, but our's was super-great! And they have a live pianist and she happened to play all the songs I would want her to play like Somewhere in Time, Rachmaninoff, and Claire de Lune. What are the chances? It's like she knew it was my anniversary.

I know that we are just so cute. And I had to take a picture because it seems like we never do it nowadays. And then we had tickets for the Utah Opera. The opera was Beethoven's only, Fidelio. It is a story about a wife who basically saves her husband from prison and death. It was very women-empowered which I didn't really expect from an opera from 1805. It was amazing and our seats were really pretty good. And we got to walk around Salt Lake which is really cool although it may not seem like it all the time.
After the opera was over it was past 10:00pm and all the Church Buildings were closed. Sadly, our car was parking under the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I was so worried that we couldn't get our car and would have to stay in a really chic hotel in Salt Lake. That would have just been the end of the world! But a side door was open and we safely got to our car. We even got to exit the VIP side and didn't have to pay the 5 hours for parking. It was pretty cool. Overall a wonderful night!! Thank you, my love, for everything!!!!