Christmas Break: Christmas Eve

We spent Christmas Eve at home preparing for Christmas :) Oh, and eating pizza! It's an Olsen family tradition to eat Papa Murphy's pizza!

Of course I didn't have any of my present wrapped, so Dad and I went out to his wood shop to wrap our gifts. It may be a wood shop, but it's perfect for wrapping Christmas presents! There's just so many big tables!

Kari and I then made our Ugly Christmas Sweaters. I didn't end up with a picture of the finished product, but you can take my word for it...the sweaters were UGLY! Supposedly it's a new cousin tradition to wear an ugly sweater to Christmas dinner and we recently decided that we should make them as well. Well, we showed up to Christmas dinner with our ugly sweaters and our cousins didn't wear one! So, I don't think I will do it next time. It's only fun if everyone does it.

Christmas Break: Portland Saturday Market

I figure I better get my Christmas Break pictures up before February :)

Jeff and I went to Washington for Christmas to spend some time with my family. I love going home and wish I could visit more often. We spent one of our first days there in Portland. We went to Gracie's for Brunch and then went to Portland Saturday Market. I remember going to the Portland Saturday Market when I was younger and let me say it's a lot bigger now!

We walked around looking at all the booths and then finished our trip with an Elephant Ear! My favorite!

Food Photography: Week 2 - Pomegranate

So, I decided to focus on fruit for the month of January for my Food Photography challenge. I know it's kind of odd that I'm picking a winter month to do fruit, but I was so inspired by some photos I saw on pinterest and I couldn't wait!

I found several pictures on google images of pomegranates that inspired the pictures below. We didn't eat a whole lot of pomegranate growing up, but it's a new found love! I can't believe how messy it is to eat :)

Linking to Simple As That, Weekly Top Shot, and The Long Road to China: Favorite Photo Friday

Happy Birthday Dad!

Happy 59th Dad!

Your 50's have been full of some wild good times and I'm glad that I could be part of some of them.

Bike trips down the West coast and up the East Coast

Several trips to New York and New Jersey

Yankee Games! (New and Old Stadium)

Too many Broadway shows then I can count

A trip to Maine and Massachusetts

Several trips to Disney (Land and World)

A couple backpacking trips

Chilled with the Amish

Crossed the Atlantic Ocean to visit London and Paris

and many more adventures!

The real question is what adventures will fill the last year of your fantastic 50's!

Whatever it is....I hope I can be there!

Thank you Ben and Sharon!

Ben and Sharon gave Jeff and I some KitchenAid Pasta Rollers for Christmas! All I can say is.....THANKS YOU! Jeff has made pasta three times since Friday. :) I can't believe homemade past is so easy and taste delicious!

New Year's Resolution 2013: Food Photography (Week 1)

One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to take more pictures of food to help improve my food photography skills. My plan is to take at least one food photo a week, and snapping a picture of my dinner before I eat doesn't count. I have to plan out the photo: subject, style, setting, etc. The idea is that I'm setting up everything to take a picture and not to eat it. Eating it is just a benefit :)

Will I be able to do it? I don't know, but I'm going to try.

To help me out I'm going to make a list of food items (example: fruit, veggies, desserts, fast food) to take pictures of and randomly select one each week. If you have any challenging ideas let me know!

For my first post I decided to try to replicate something I found on another blog. I don't know if they turned out quite as good, but it was sure fun doing it. :)

Hello 2013!

Happy New Year! I can't believe 2012 is over! It was a great year, but I'm secretly hoping that 2013 will be even better!

Jeff and I threw a little New Years party at our house this year. Jeff has been telling me for some time that he wanted to start throwing New Years Eve parties like his family used to. They would invite the whole ward over and the house would be packed with people and food :) Since the house is not in the same state of Jeff's youth, we decided to keep the party small for our test run :) It was fun actually having a party to go to on New Years!