Thursday, March 01, 2007

like a virgin

My birthday day in Vegas was exceedingly fun, and filled with firsts. We ate lunch at in-n-out and had animal style french fries for the first time ever. Previously, only animal style burgers have graced our arteries. a'course, first I had to stop at Carl's Jr. for two side salads with balsamic vinaigrette because I didn't want to fill up on junk. I got my first ear piercings while Dave watched and inwardly giggled at me while the lady was drawing and re-drawing the dots on my ears. I briefly considered gambling for my first time ever, but we weren't anywhere near any slots the whole time we were down there. We had dinner at Eliseevsky, a Russian restaurant, for Dave's Valentines present. I felt slightly out of place because almost everyone in there was speaking Russian. Vegas has a tiny Russian community, who knew? We shared an order of Pelmini (meat dumplings with hot sour cream) and I had shashlik, it's basically a pork kabob with really extremely good sauce (Me and Dave determined that the sauce was tomato based, but besides that we couldn't even begin to guess what else is in it). We were able to squeeze in some dessert this time, we had crepes with warm strawberries and cream filling. With the live music (a petite little blonde russian woman dressed kinda funky played an accordian...thing?)it ended up being kinda romantic. We spent two and a half hours at dinner, but it didn't feel like we were there that long.

For my birthday I got a gift card, which I used to buy some leopard print ballet flats. Surprisingly they go with almost everything. Laura got me some earrings (she knew I'd be getting my ears pierced), and Dave gave me a really great time and some pierced ears.

Midterm exam last night. I studied and aced. This week I have to get cracking on designing a logo for my made up company. They do high end custom cabinetry. I was thinking of doing a really simple image of woodworking. I have no idea if I'll be able to pull that off though so I need to come up with some alternate ideas.

Yesterday I worked. We hiked through Snow Canyon State Park, which is where most of our hikes are. Snow Canyon, named after Lorenzo and Erastus Snow, not for it's abundance of frozen precipitation, was uncharacteristically filled with the cold white stuff yesterday. I got some pictures while I was on the hike. I was sad that my camera wasn't picking up the red in the rocks very well. Red rocks and snow: in my opinion one of the prettiest sights to behold.

The night before the big snow I had been online playing World Of Warcraft with Dave (sometimes we play with Alan from across town). My character is an elf, but since the Lunar Festival was going on I got to travel (via Lunar portal) to any of the major alliance cities. I went to Ironforge, the dwarven City in the mountain. Outside Ironforge is a wintery white snow-filled forest, so me and my pet bear tromped around in the snow (we even left foot and paw prints wherever we went) and chatted with dwarves that called me "lass". Anyhow, when me and Dave went to bed that night Dave shrieked and asked why my feet were so freezing. My reply was something about how me and Bear had been running around in the snow all night. I was unimaginably tickled the next day to be hiking through so much real snow.





ah! I almost forgot. Alan was in an offroad motorcycle race and we went and watched the beginning (only the beginning because we had to leave early for yet another visit to the emergency room because Dave accidentally gave maddie what the doctor and nurse called "nursemaids elbow", but that's a story for another day). It was cool to see the insane amount of motorcycles lined up far away and then hear the roar of the motors as they kicked up a cloud of dust on their way towards us. I got pictures.

far away in the distance you can barely see the mass of motorcycles lined up.









My brother’s wife, her little boy (in the back carrier) and little girl, maddie, the twins, me. We were totally spectating.



...and this is me playing with the close-up function on my camera