Oklahoma City

Chris and I decided that we would have a “staycation” this past Memorial Day weekend and headed to Oklahoma City. I’ve always wanted to see the Memorial and to do that on the holiday weekend just felt patriotic. So we hopped in the car and drove north. Three hours later we pulled into The Skirvin Hotel (terrible name, awesome hotel) in downtown OKC. After checking in, we walked a few blocks to the Memorial for the Oklahoma City Bombing.


It wasn’t very crowded, being a Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend. We spent 4 hours walking thru the inside and outside. I was a senior in high school when it happened in 1995, and being that age I remember feeling removed from it. After having gone I think it’s something every American should do. It’s so tastefully done, thoughtful and moving. The tour moves from room to room as you experience that entire day from 9am thru the following weeks, and ending with interviews of survivors and families years later. The fact that with a daycare inside 19 babies were killed will forever, to me, make it worse than 911. Killing children takes things to a whole new level.
We wandered the reflection pool. On one end the metal structure shows 9:01, and on the other 9:03. The reflection pool in the middle with all the chairs showing that life changed in the 1 min in between.

We looked at the chairs, 168, lining 9 rows representing the floors they died on. Little chairs for kids, big chairs for adults. All had flags flying for Memorial Day as well. It was so quiet and peaceful.


We decided to go to Bricktown for dinner, an area they created in downtown with a canal similar to San Antonio. It’s lined with restaurants, bars, starbucks, a movie theater and right in the middle is a ball park. The Big 12 Championship Tournament was that weekend, and I’m happy to say that UT won, but the area was filled with Big 12 fans. We had drinks after dinner at the Melting Pot and called it a day.

The next morning we checked out, and took our time going home. We stopped in a casino for some slot play, and then had lunch at a diner we saw. The hot dog I ordered was well over 1 foot in length! It was nuts. We also had to get a DQ blizzard of course. It was a great weekend with beautiful weather and I can check the Memorial off my bucket list

Baby Buckaroo

Rob & Allison spent a sunny afternoon at a shower for baby Heinrich. Her sister, also pregnant, made the trip from Reno. Grandparents, Aunts, cousins and friends were here as well, but I don’t know anyone more excited to be an aunt & uncle than Chris and I.

I planned Rob & Allison’s baby shower, and in my head it was going to be beautiful weather and the entire party was going to be outside in the yard we had been working on forever. Saturday I woke up to rain, and it rained all day. By about 3pm Chris told me that I was going to need to plan on having it inside. I was totally bummed, but agreed, and spent the rest of the day moving furniture to other rooms of the house to set up the entire shower inside.



I woke up Sunday morning to the birds chirping, and I knew without even looking that the day was the beautiful day I had dreamed of. I looked at Chris and he knew that we would be spending all the hours leading up to the shower moving it all back outside. Good times.


Not knowing the gender of the baby created a few challenges. We went with a western theme, baby buckaroo, the same as the nursery. So bandannas, mason jars and cowboy hats completed the look along with some sweet tea, and homemade ice cream sandwiches. We added a western scene as a photo booth for a little added fun.



Now the countdown begins! 6 weeks until I'm officially Aunt Sassy.

The Break In

Many of you know about this, but for those that don’t...having a lack of a computer can hinder blogging in a big way. A few weeks ago Chris got a call from our home alarm company asking us if we had set off the alarm. Um...no, we were both at work. Knowing that clearly something had gone wrong at home he called me, and we both raced home from our offices to the house. We beat the police by 18 min, don’t even get me started, and found the back gate broken, and the back door pried off the frame and all or our electronics and most of my jewelry gone. Don’t worry; I was wearing the best stuff. These thieves were crafty, breaking in during a shift change for the cops, parking in the back alley, cutting the power and wearing gloves.

(empty mount with fingerprint powder)

It’s been a few weeks now, and it is still strange to walk in and see the mount on the walls, but no TV’s in sight. The first few nights Chris and I wondered what people did with no TV? I have to say we’ve been so busy we haven’t missed it much, with the exception of the season finale of Grey’s anatomy. It is a violating feeling, but I think we have the attitude that the “stuff” was never really ours to begin with. It's inconvenient but we still have a house, jobs, food and each other. A TV and a tiffany’s necklace are just “nice to haves”.

People have been so amazing from bringing us dinner, to offering to loan us a TV or even bringing a bottle or wine. So now we wait for insurance to finish processing our claim and eventually we will be able to do a little shopping to replace some of the things we’ve lost. I think our priorities are the iMac, a TV, an iPod and the DVD player. Who doesn’t like shopping?