Las Vegas!!

We decided to try some fancy hotels out since they are heavily subsidized by people who think they can beat statistics. Our first hotel was Palms Place and is now my favorite hotel ever! Just look at the pictures!

Relaxing on the couch

Proof that we're cool

Palms Place bathroom

At the Palms Place pool, they have seats _in_ the pool

'Do Not Disturb' signs? Pah! Here, it's all electronic!

On our last night there, we stayed at the Bellagio.

Our room at the Bellagio

Fancy bathroom at the Bellagio

Our window view of the fountain at the Bellagio

Night view from our room

Crazy plants

Raking in the free amenities!!

There’s a much larger Filipino population in Vegas than here, so I was excited to get some good fooood! We went to a Filipino buffet, but unfortunately we didn’t take a picture. But we did go to Jollibee (the equivalent of McDonald’s) twice!

In front of Jollibee

Posing next to the Jollibee bee

Our Jollibee food

Buko-pandan!!!

Lots of flavored tuna! Unfortunately they didn't have Spicy. =(

We visited the Atomic Testing Museum and the Mormon Fort Museum.

Atomic Testing Museum

Scared of the bomb

Mormon Fort Museum

We toured the Hoover Dam. The tours and everything were really well-organized, probably because so many people tour the place since they’ve seen it in the movies. The tour was grossly over-packed with “dam” jokes. All the engineering and thinking that went into it was pretty amazing. They said the upkeep of the dam was entirely self-sufficient from the energy generated there. They didn’t say whether tourism contributed, but I estimate that they give tours to about 500 people per hour…and they charged $10-30 per person.

It's huuuuge!

In front of the dam

Angela in front of an intake tower

Hoover Dam generators

A family I knew from my mission lives in Vancouver now

This Saturday we took another quick trip up to Vancouver.  We met up with a family I knew from my mission that had moved to Canada.  It was fun to catch up on how they’ve been and find out all the news from the people I knew in the Philippines.  It turns out there’s a huge Filipino community up there.  We got Mango Tang, Balut, and Yakisoba!  We’ll definitely be going more often!

I don't have a picture of the balut because I haven't eaten it yet.

Front of the temple

The same day was the last day of the open house at the Vancouver temple.  It was a really good experience and I was really impressed with how organized everything was.  When we went to the chapel of the church building next door, they put us into tour groups and gave us a tour guide.  It was cool that there were lots of church members as well as locals taking the tour.  The temple was really nice.  Somebody asked the tour guide what type of wood they used.  Our tour guide said that he didn’t know exactly what type but that it is the best quality: “The best things belong to God.  So we don’t mind giving them back.”

At the front of the temple

It’s a small world in the church.  After the tour, we ran into a family from our ward.  Then we (re)met a guy that we had first met about three years ago.  I also met some people who know the Lacestes that we had lunch with earlier.

On the freeway heading home, we heard a loud screeching noise.  We looked over and saw sparks flying across two lanes behind a car.  They traveled for about 1/4 mile before they stopped.  We realized what happened when we saw that their rear tire had fallen off and was rolling down the freeway.

We waited for a few minutes and then the tour began.  The first animals that we got to see were a family of ring tailed lemurs.  They were really cute and could jump from the ground to the tour guide’s shoulder so fluidly it was really amazing.  We also saw some special breeds of pheasant that they had.  Next it was the big item, kangaroos!  They had the kangaroos in an enclosed area and gave us each a little bread so that we could feed them.  They ate right out of our hands and were surprisingly friendly.  I always thought kangaroos were sort of mean, but these ones were pretty docile.  We even saw some mommys with little joeys in their pouch and we got to pet them and feed them too.  They also had rabbits and tortoises thrown into the mix.  The wallabies also shared the same enclosure as the kangaroos.  I never really knew what a wallaby was until I saw them.  They’re just like kangaroos, but more furry and chubbier looking. They also had these really strange animals in there, I never really got the full name something like Patagonian Capris or something, but I dubbed them guinea deers because they look like guinea pigs with little deer legs, so weird!  After the kangaroos they took us to see and feed a ton of other animals.  They had mules, donkeys, more chickens and goats in one area and we fed them these alfalfa pellets.  Then we headed over and saw this miniature horse, which I guess is different from a pony.  We also got to see an ostrich and two emus, but they didn’t let us feed them (probably because they’d peck our eyes out or something).  The last animals we got to feed were some alpaca llamas.  They were pretty gentle and the tour guide coaxed some of us to feed them from our mouths.  I tried it…wasn’t the best experience of my life, but I escaped unscathed.   When we went back to the starting point of the tour we all got to hold a baby joey and take pictures with it.  It was really neat and he was soooo cute.

After we were finished at the farm Jon took me to Outback Steak House just to complete the Aussie theme of my birthday.  We both had really good meals and I even got a free ice cream treat.

I’d say overall it was a grand adventure and a really fun birthday!  Too bad birthdays only come once a year

The compost we started a year and a half ago actually looks like compost!  The things that decomposed really well were vegetable discards, fruit discards, leaves, and organic bowls.  But you can easily tell the things that didn’t do so well: egg shells, yarn, and spoons.  It doesn’t smell at all any more…but the question is if we want to withstand the gnats and stink again for more.

Our green onions seem to be hanging in there all through winter.  During the winter, we were sad to see that our garlic was all dead, but it looks like they’ve made a re-emergence for the spring!  Yum!  I love garlic!!

I can’t wait for it to get warmer…because that means we’ll be able to plant some basil.  And you know what that means…PESTO!!!!!

Basically, the story is about two high school kids that fall in love, Toffee and Jonny (Jonny rebeliously removed the ’H’ from his name).  Toffee’s parents thing Jonny is unfit for her and makes her break it off.  After learning about the break up Jonny commits suicide by jumping into the town’s nuclear reactor.  Of course, Toffee is distraught and unable to move on.  She pines for Jonny and is mourning the fact that she won’t have a date to the Sr. prom.  Her pining and love somehow bring Jonny back from the dead as her undead lover…but Toffee doesn’t really want an undead lover.  Drama ensues, the media is alerted about the anomoly and Jonny becomes an advocate for undead rights.  In the end love prevails and Toffee decides she wants Jonny even if he’s green and slightly slimely.  Ah true love.   

Saturday night we were able to babysit for a family in the ward.  Their kids were really sweet and we had a pretty good time.  They have two daughters and a infant little boy who is absolutely adorable.  It was good practice for us I think.  Feeding the baby, changing the baby, being thrown up on by the baby…Yeah…poor guy, we were trying to put him down for bed and he got so upset he threw up his entire bottle…all over me.  I think I had baby vomit literally from head to toe.  Strangely enough, I didn’t find it gross at the time, I was more worried about the little baby.  That must have been pretty tramatic for him.  At least after that Jon was able to rock him to sleep while I tried to clean myself up.  Ah…we’re bad babysitters.  Well, at least that was the only major incident of the evening.  The girls were really helpful and helped clean up too.  After the baby was asleep we did puzzles and played Twister and tag.  Now I see why parents are tired all the time.  Well, like I said good training and we had a pretty good time. 

Well, not much besides that going on on the Northwestern front for now.  Jon and I are getting ready for our Olympics trip to Vancouver (maybe we should actually learn the rules to curling so it makes a little sense).  Pixel is doing well too, she’s actually been a lot better behaved these past few weeks besides her new affection towards rubbery items.  We’ve “lost” the remote in her lair several times already .  Overall though, I’d say all is well.  We’ll try to post more often as the spring and summer pick up (come back to us Sun!).

24 inches of pure High-def recipe enjoyment

About a week ago, we found a 24″ LCD full HD monitor for $170 with free shipping on the Dell Outlet website. Thanks to Twitter, I found a $20 coupon. So we got a humongous 24″ monitor for watching movies and viewing recipes while we’re cooking in the kitchen.

On Black Friday, we left for Old Navy at 2:20am. We bought 13 items including 50% off jeans. We got in the checkout line when there were four people in line and were out of the store in 20 minutes total. By the time we left the store, the checkout line had grown to about 30 people.

After Old Navy, I waited in line to get in to Target while Angela went to Kohl’s (which was already open) to buy a bunch of $3 board games and sweaters. Kohl’s gave us a $10 gift card for shopping there (woohoo!).

Our Black Friday treasures

Target was the best store of the day! As evidence, the line was about 1000 people long by the time the store opened. Since we knew that perfect execution would be critical at Target, we shmoozed with an employee and got a map of the store. We also found out that we didn’t have to waste time grabbing a cart at the entrance because there would be carts spread throughout the store. We planned our route and were able to beat the 50-100 people in front of us in line to the good stuff. We got one of the four piano keyboards they had stocked, a bunch of DVDs, and tons of clothes. As we were leaving the electronics area, there were swarms of shoppers like ants swarming around their kicked anthill. I wanted to snap a picture but was afraid of being trampled, so we fled screaming and clutching our prizes. Finally at checkout, they gave us a $10 gift card!

At Staples, I grabbed four $10 webcams that were normally $50. When people kept taking them, I had to try hard to resist not taking more. My heart sunk when an employee told me that they only allowed one webcam per customer. I decided to try to check out anyways and we were particularly nice to the employee. We found out that she was sick the past week and consequently missed all the Black Friday orientation meetings. And she let us buy our webcams! We also bought some other good stuff like speakers, a GPS, and 8GB USB drives.

We headed over to Half Price Books in hopes of randomly winning a $100 gift card. Unfortunately we didn’t win. But they did give us $10 in gift cards.

Ikea loot

Black Friday was a success! We got every item that we wanted to get that day. But wait! That’s not the end of the good deals! On Saturday, we stopped by Ikea and found a hidden clearance section! We bought 14 plates for 99 cents each (normally $4.99 each). And rubber gloves for 10 cents each.

What a great year for deals!

So I set out to build a barrier out of wood.  I’m pretty proud of what we ended up with, mostly because of how cheap it was.  The worker at Home Depot was extremely helpful.  We got some really MDF for really cheap since it wasn’t a full length.  The whole project cost $2.59.  Here are the pictures:

When we walked in, we were impressed by the nicely decorated environment and its cleanliness.  The seating was very well-designed, with high-back booths to increase the feel of privacy.  The center of the restaurant was raised, which gave it a trendy, but comfortable feel.

We ordered a Super Nachos, Super Burrito, Enchiladas Verdes, and a fried ice cream.  It was all REALLY GOOD FOOD!  The portions were generous and it tasted good.  The service was extremely fast too!