jodi and matt's wedding

jodi and matt had a beautiful wedding! there were a lot of the football players that i know and their wives/girlfriends there. it was good to see and hang out with them outside of the football arena and season! got to know some of them better! i didn't get any pictures of the bride and groom but they were gorgeous as were the bride's maids.



here is my new buddy brittany. brittany is married to charles who is super funny and britt just kind of goes with it! she's great! and i found out she's a snowboarder too, so i have someone to go with now!! woo hoo!! here's deidra and i. i had always known deidra as a football girlfriend but had never really had a conversation with her. she's great too!! unfortunately, her and nick just moved about 4 hours away... :( we'll miss them!!
me and jodi, i don't know where i'd be in eau claire without her!!! i heart her!!!
here's some of the boys at our table: al, charles, and nick
despite all my attempts to get nick or shane to catch the garter, al caught it.... dun dun dun...
all and all it was a good time with great people! so happy for jodi and matt!! and their maid of honor and best man are next in october!!!!

happy hour + more at rays

al and i met al's best friend (and former roommate) shane and his girlfriend jodi at ray's for happy hour last friday. we are pretty close with shane and jodi and we always have fun with them! well, the happy hour extended all the way until 11ish. we played a lot of games, had the most shots i've had since college, downed two pizzas and had a lot of laughs. we love these guys!

the boys found an electronic bean bags game and played for the first time. they got pretty into it, just as they do with any video game :)
mean while, jodi and i hung back and did a shot :) and made friends with the bartender. jodi is just about done with her crutches and can finally put weight on her knee! she's been such a trooper this summer! so glad she's come to ec a bunch. but now she's started teaching in chaska, afraid i might not see her as much.
at some point, i decided i wanted to arm wrestle shane. i definitely had to use two arms versus his one and it took a while but i did win...
al was telling a way too boring story for 3 drunk people to listen to, so here are jodi and shane "listening intendly" to his story and completely making fun of him ;)
here is my glow in the dark drink. i'd had a complicated day at work and loved happy hour
over all it was a very fun night with very fun people!

mary & travis' wedding

i'm back... finally. i've been soo busy lately and spend a lot of time in my wonderful truck who is amazingly still running after all the long, hot hours spent on the road between eau claire and the cities. the week and next, i have a break from softball (in between summer ball and fall ball) so i am catching up on too many things that have i have fallen behind on; including my blog. i am also ecstatic to get to watch the olympics. i haven't seen them the last couple of times. watching them makes me what to be in them... bad! in anything really. there are so many competitive sports in the olympics that i didn't even know about. i still got some learnin to do :)

this past weekend, we traveled down to st. louis missouri (or misery as i like to say it) for my cousin travis' wedding. so glad on of my cousins finally got married (and another to come next year!!!) and he found the most awesome girl!! mary is one of my favorite people!! she's an all around fabulous person and so fun and so great for travis (and our family!! she's an amazing cook!!) below are some pictures from the wedding.

here is me, my bro and my mom. pretty sad that i'm the shortest.... :)

mary and travis burge!! mary's dress was hand made by travis' grama. it was amazingly beautiful, i can't believe someone can hand make thatal and i using the color feature on my camera which worked well with my colorful dressanother color pic with two of the bridesmaids and my cousins. chelsea, khloe, kayli, and kayli's fiance travis. the bridemaids dress color was clover green and they all had different style dresses, it was cute.

me and my twin-cousin angi. i was so happy to see her, it'd been a while. i heart her!!

my "new" family. my cousin ronda, her fiance kurt, and her daughter chelsea rae!!another couple of color pictures, of the dance floor at the reception

fireworks and tippy cup

spent the 4th of july with the predators again this year and had a blast. their awesome quarterback was finally back for this game and they won 51 to 14!! it was a great game except that 3 of their starters got injured and 2 are out for the rest of the season. this couldn't be worse timing as they play their rivals, the crush, next weekend and then off to playoffs.... i forgot to take pictures at the game but tried out the fireworks setting on my new camera. they didn't turn out as good as i was hoping but still decent. i love fireworks and wish they had them every weekend!!!

then after the fireworks there were soooo many people at carson park again this year there was no getting out of there any time soon so the preds started some games of tippy cup. the first couple of games were dominated by al's team ("dirty red") and i was not surprised as al has this odd talent of being very good at tippy cup. he'll usually get it on the first flip and if not then for sure on the second. well, some of us girls had enough of dirty red winning so we made a girls team (dubbed "team vag" by the boys...) and we won the next 3 rounds! it was a lot of screaming, a lot of chugging, and a whole lot of fun!!! and the best part is, the line of cars to get out of the parking lot ended just as we were out of beer and ready to leave. met some great new people and got to hang out with a few that i haven't seen in a while!! below is the boys' first round.
below are a few of the girls who didn't/couldn't participate in our girls team but were lots of fun anyway. jodi who i haven't seen since may was there on her crutches and was such a good sport about it! she made it the whole night with her crutches and didn't complain once. she's one of my favorites!!! :)

buck beer n bowling

wagners in eau claire has buck pretty-much-everything on wednesday nights. so since i had a bye for softball this week and we haven't done much with other people since the summer is so busy, al and i went for cheap bowling and beer with our friends jenny and kyle (who are getting married in october!) and what a perfect opportunity to try out some more new, cool features on my new camera. below is the pick-a-color feature where i can pick any color and it will only show that one and turn everything else black and white. so thankful kyle wore a sweet mountain dew shirt so i could play with the green.and jenny wore yellow. i think this pic is pretty cool with the yellow in the floor and tables!
jenny and i. they have buck beers, rail drinks, fries, burgers, bowling and shoes. it was awesome!
al and kyle after i told them to smile and pretend to like each other, this is what i got. goof balls ;)
and the engaged couple! so fun to hang out with them, it had been quite a while.

time after time

again, it's been a while since i blogged. my old camera died on me so i haven't had any pictures lately. but i got a new camera today which is really cool and has tons of features. al and i took our first bike ride from our new place today too so what better time to try out my some of the features on my new camera? we went discovering on some of the little roads we had never been down. it was fun! we saw some wildlife: bunnies, birds and wild turkey's (pictured below) the turkey's were actually really quite far from us so this is showing how far my new camera zooms. (it's not that clear of a shot, but it zooms way farther than my old camera!)i also have a "foliage" setting so i took some pictures of some beautiful flowers we saw. nice detail and clarity compared to my other camera!!

then on the way back, just outside our place, we saw a baby bird who must have just learned to walk cuz he was tiny! and didn't yet have functional wings. well the baby bird had gotten down the curb and couldn't get back up it. he we take a running start but just run into the curb and fall flat on his back. so al stopped and helped him up the curb (without touching him too much due to the whole you shouldn't touch a baby bird cuz then their parents won't accept them back theory) and he made it safetly back to his very noisy parents. way to go al! he saved his life! i tried to get a picture of the baby bird cuz he was so cute but my memory card was full cuz i was on the highest mega pixel setting and by the time i deleted some pics, he had run off too far. plus his mom and dad were very worried, so we left them alone.

new place

it looks as if no one's gonna come visit me anytime soon to see the new place, so here are a few pics of it.

here is the wonderfully huge kitchen and shoe closet to the right. and then perpendicular and right next to the shoe closet is the entrance door.here's our living room complete with fireplace and large shelf full of entertainment (we have a nintendo, super nintendo, ps2, atari, and wii!) to the right is another wonderfully large closet! the living room, dining room and kitchen are all pretty much one big room but the kitchen has tile flooring and the other two have carpet.
here is the dining room area which is more used for my sewing and scrapbooking area. (two things to note: the table runner, i sewed!! and in the corner is my very own shelf for just my scrapbooking stuff! so glad to have it out and easily accessible.)
here is part of the large master bedroom. the view is from the closet. the deck is off the bedroom which is a little weird, but makes for a much better view than if it were off the side (trees vs. buildings).
and here is the view from our deck, which is actually pretty decent sized. we have 5 plastic chairs and a mini table out there and they fit with room to spare. i have used the deck for working out and for tanning :) i love it! in the background of the view is a county highway so we do have highway noise but i don't mind it at all.
the blog would only let me put up 5 pictures (don't know if that's the limit-gina, some help please) but i do have a few more of different angles of the rooms. our bathroom is pretty big and the spare bedroom is decent sized for our computer room. there is a linen closet next to the bathroom, a closet in the spare bedroom and a huge utlity closet next to the entrance door which houses our laundry along with our bikes, golf clubs, and other mismatch things. so our place has tons of closet space!!!

after looking at these pictures it makes me realize how white and empty our walls look.... i'll have to see if i can't change that a bit....