"I'm going back to Cali... Cali, Cali"

Well, I guess it's more like I went back to Cali. For Thanksgiving the hubby and I were FINALLY able to go back to see the fam. It was so nice to be able to go since it had almost been a year since our last visit. I loved seeing and being with my whole family. We had so much fun. We went to Disneyland, ate great food, spent time with everyone, got a pedi, hiked and ate some more good food. Life doesn't get much better than that. Oh but before I forget, remember this?

Well that, turned into this...

Just kidding. We had a huge Thanksgiving lunch at school and I volunteered to cook one of those beasts. This was my first turkey that I've ever cooked. And it looks pretty dang good to me :)
But back to my trip at home. We spent all day Wednesday at Disneyland and had so much fun. We were exhausted though by 8:00pm. We're getting old, what can I say? After Wed. came Thursday which meant...TURKEY!! My dad made a deep fried turkey, which was delish, and my mom made EVERYTHING! She made potatoes, stuffing, ham, another turkey, yams and cranberry sauce. It was amazing! She did a great job. Best Thanksgiving ever! Friday was a pretty relaxed day. I got a much needed pedicure and then we finally ate our top cake from our one year anniversary. Best cake in the world! And then came our last day,Saturday, and we spent it by hiking and by watching the BYU vs Utah game. Which was INSANE!! Luckily, my smarty pants hubby found a site that streamed the game live so we were able to watch it. And it was probably the greatest win ever! But sadly, that day ended and we off to the freezing cold state again. But all in all, Thanksgiving was a blast. I enjoyed every second of every day. And I am so grateful for my loving husband and my amazing family. We're so blessed and I am so unbelievably thankful for all that I have been given.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and I am so excited for CHRISTMAS TIME!!!

What the turkey?! And my cake recipe!!

So one of our teachers/"learning leaders" at school who is in charge of student council has a pet turkey! Weird right?! Well, today she took those who are on the student council to go see and play with it. And let me tell you, alive turkey's are way more intense than your cooked ones! This thing was huge and actually really intimidating! It would gobble at us and it chased me! I think it could sense my fear of it, so it fed off of that. Anyways, I attempted to take many pictures with it, but it didn't quite work out so well...
First attempt (it scared me so I ran away)

Second attempt (I tried to touch it but not too sure about it)

Third attempt (close enough and brave enough to touch it with one finger)

Fourth attempt...Alas! I got one! Sort of :)

So that was my turkey adventure for the day. And to be honest, I think I prefer my turkey's on a platter...even though I still don't even like it then.
And I also wanted to wish my father a very very HAPPY BIRTHDAY! He's the greatest dad in the world, hands down. Can't wait to see him next week!
In other news, my niece is shown in this Neiman Marcus ad, http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/catalog/templates/SC3.jhtml?itemId=cat3820732&parentId=cat7680747&masterId=cat10130733&cmCat= Isn't she just the cutest?! Of course she is!
And lastly, I've decided to post that Pumpkin Chocolate chip cake recipe! Yippee! So here goes.
Ingredients

Cake
3/4 cup salted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
2 3/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 3/4 teaspoons nutmeg
3/4 teaspoon salt
1-10(depending on how "chocolatey" you want it) handfuls of mini chocolate chips

Frosting
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 8oz packages of cream cheese
3 cups powdered sugar
A lot of cinnamon sugar (I didn't measure, I just dumped in however much I wanted)
1 teaspoon vanilla
(this made a ton of frosting, so if needed, cut in half maybe and make more if needed)

Cake Directions
1. Cream butter and sugars until fluffy.
2. Add pumpkin,eggs and vanilla,beat until smooth.
3. Combine dry ingredients in medium bowl.
4. Add one cup at a time to creamed mixture,stirring until well blended.
5. Stir in chocolate chips.
6. Spoon into greased bundt pan or cake pan.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 55-65 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
8. Cool in pan 10 minutes,then transfer onto serving plate and cool completely.
Frosting Directions
1. Cream together butter and cream cheese.
2. Slowly add powdered sugar, mix until fluffy consistency and right to taste.
3. Add your vanilla and mix.
4. Mix in cinnamon sugar and spread over cake when ready :)

F.Y.I. Mine came out a bit dry, so I would suggest removing it from the oven a little bit early. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

Pumpkin chocolate chip cake w/ cinnamon sugar, cream cheese frosting

Long title I know, but it had to sound interesting/appetizing in order to catch your attention. Now, For those of you who have been to P Town have probably heard of a little bakery place known as Kneaders. Well, they have the most AMAZING Pumpkin Spice cake there that is to die for. I tried it once and fell in love. And so after tasting this delicious slice of heaven, I decided that I needed to make this for myself at home. So I hoped onto Google and I searched around on a few different sites to find the perfect cake recipe. Well, that was a fail. I couldn't find just one recipe that sounded right, so I pulled one and then adjusted it to my liking. And I must say, I did a pretty good job. It may need a few tweaks, but hopefully within the next few tries I should have it down perfectly. I made a cream cheese frosting to go along with it, but it tasted a bit off, so I thought to myself..."What is this missing?!" And then it hit me. It needed cinnamon sugar! So a little, well a BIG, dash of C.S. and BAM! It was complete. And smart me, I didn't take a picture of it so I've stolen the artwork of somebody else...again.

Yum right?! If any of you are interested in making this for, oh say, your Thanksgiving dinner let me know and I'll hook you up with the recipe :)
And good news, I finally got an updated picture of the hubby and I. We went to the temple last week and I forced him to take a picture with me because I was so sad that I didn't get any of us over the summer.

Happy Halloween!

This Halloween season has been very..."Halloweeny" for me. But to be honest, I'm not really a huge fan of this holiday. I could actually probably skip it and be okay. But these past 2 weeks I was given the opportunity to go do make-up at a haunted house in SLC called Castle Of Chaos. It was so much fun and so interesting to see how things worked and happened behind the scenes! They weren't so scary backstage, but as soon as they stepped foot into that haunted house, they completely flipped into these creepy, scary things. I finally got the courage to walk through it tonight and it was pretty cool to see how everything was set up and how they pulled everything together. Super creative and a lot of hard work goes into preparing for this.
I learned a lot about airbrush make-up and all of these different techniques that I'd probably never learn if it weren't for this. Their characters consisted of vampires, zombies, "crazies," clowns, and a voodoo witch doctor. I didn't get to do much hands on airbrushing but the first one I did turned out okay...

This girl was so cute! She was only 16 but looked about 12. She was so quiet and innocent, but tonight when I saw her in action, she creeped me out way bad. She was really my first and only girl I got to airbrush but I thought I did a decent job.
Besides the haunted house stuff, our school threw a Halloween party (that I helped plan because I'm on the school's student council). My friends and I dressed up as lady bugs and we were THEE cutest ones there. We made our costumes the day before for super cheap.


My mom was also here for a few days, and I got to see her pretty much every day that she was here. It was so nice to see her and hang out with her. It just made me really look forward to Thanksgiving, when our whole family can be together.
In husband news, well, he's been done with work for 3 weeks now! Hooray!! He got an A on his chemistry mid-term...Bigger HOORAY!! And well, that's about it :) He's doing great, just studying super hard and keeping busy with school. Oh and he really enjoys eating at Kneaders now, which is a plus. And well that's about all that's been going on in our lives. Happy Halloween!

My first photo shoot.

Our school held another opportunity for us to do a photo shoot to help build our portfolio's. My friend Catelin and I decided to go in on it together to create a rad master piece. The theme for this photo shoot was "Horror-lesque." We played around with the ideas of "Modern" ballerina meets Coraline (It's a movie in case you didn't know). We did a modern twist to a basic bun and incorporated red thread throughout the hair. We paled out her face and "zombie-fied" her lips and Then the finishing touch to her face was big black buttons that we stuck over her eyes. We ended up using Catelin's younger sister as our model and she did an amazing job! She was blind throughout her whole photo shoot and took directions so well. I was really impressed with the photos. They looked amazing! And well, I don't have the professional proofs yet, but here's a few pictures that I took outside of our school after the photo shoot was over.






I'm excited to see how my future photo shoots turn out and then compare them to my first. It was so much fun doing this but really exhausting!
Speaking of exhausting...I think I'm going to head to bed early tonight. Hope you enjoyed looking at some of my art work :)
And I hope to blog about this next...

It's a creamy chicken, wild rice, veggie soup! I'm really excited to try to make this...well something similar at least. Good night.

Chop chop chop!

Okay, I know I'm really bad at updating my blog, especially updating it with pictures. But TADA! I have pictures for you! Like I mentioned in my last post, I colored my hair black, and now I've chopped all of my hair! I ended up cutting about 8 inches off the back and 6 1/2 inches from the front. It's a slight "A-line" with lots and lots of layers and texture (in Paul Mitchell terms, I did a triangular one length with triangular and square layers). And I LOVE it! I'm not sure if I'll keep this cut forever, but I really enjoy having it. I also convinced my friend Rachel to chop off her hair as well, so we ended up booking appointments together, for moral support :)I'm sorry I don't have many pictures of the final result, but you can kind of get the gist of it.
Here is the before...

And the after...

And a side view...

Hope you can kind of see what it looks like. But like I said, I love it! It's so nice to be able to take 2 mintues to blow dry it and like 5 minutes to style it. I feel bald actually. But a cute kind of bald, if that exists.
And Happy Autumn by the way. This is my most favorite time of the year. I wish it could last forever, but I guess if it lasted forever, it wouldn't be very special.
Lastly, I'd like to share a little clip that Conryd found, that we both found quite hilarious. I hope I don't offend anyone, it's all fun in...laughs?

Black as night....

So being in hair school and all, you'd probably guess that I'd do some "CRAZY" stuff to my hair. Well, after six grueling months, I've caved in. I died my hair black! And I bet you're all thinking..."Well Aly already has black hair." FALSE! In the hair world there are 10 levels of hair "lightness and darkness." Level 1 is being jet black, and level 10 is pale yellow, almost like the inside of a banana. Here's a chart to give you a visual...

Well on this chart my natural hair color falls at a level 3. So, technically, I've gone down 2 levels! It's pretty black! Like black black! I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, but Conryd loves it and so do my friends. I'll play it out for a few weeks and possibly change it? I added some blue color shots into too so it kind of has this blue hue to it. But in those ugly fluorescent lights, it almost looks greenish...ick! Anyways, I don't have any pictures yet, but as soon as I decide to take some pictures I'll post.
Other than my "drastic" hair color change, nothing else is new. We're still doing the same old things. Conryd's working hard at school and at work, and well I'm just going to school. I'm at about 750 hours...only 1250 more to go. GAH!!!!
And a big congratulations to my sister who is having baby #2! I'm so excited! If you need to send baby #1 away for a while, you can send her to me :)