hello 2013!

Being silly on It's A Small World Holiday (Disneyland, of course!)

Happy 2013!  As this previous year finally comes to a close, it's time to start the new year fresh and begin blogging once again.

Everything about this last year was challenging, exhausting, and stressful, so it definitely feels really good to get a 'fresh start.'  Here's hoping for new and great things this year!  (Looking at you, Year of the Dragon...)

Nothing felt better than having a long 4-day weekend... one that actually started off early on Friday since we were allowed to leave work at 3p - woo!  Saturday we braved the crowds (which turned out to not be too bad) at Disneyland.  Sunday we met with my friend/co-worker at Disneyland for our usual Sunday vinylmation trading at Downtown Disney.   We even had time to get some lunch at Earl of Sandwich, which I've been dying to try.  I had the special Holiday Turkey Sandwich (basically, Thanksgiving dinner on a roll... I was even surprised that I didn't mind and actually liked the little bit of cranberry), potato salad, and a brownie creme sandwich (chewy brownies made with Ghirardelli chocolate sandwiched with chocolate creme - essentially frosting), all of which I've read about before and it was all delicious.  Even Matt, who is not always a fan of toasted sandwiches, liked his turkey and swiss sandwich.  I'm just excited to have another tasty food option at Downtown Disney.

 Earl's Holiday Turkey Sandwich - yum!

Monday, we met with my Norcal/Stanford alum cousins for Korean BBQ for dinner (they were visiting for the Rose Bowl game today) and it was great to catch up.  Clearly, I am an old person though because my actual NYE night was pretty lame - I barely stayed up until midnight and fell asleep soon thereafter, not much celebrating done around here and I didn't even have a drink to toast the occasion lol. 

Today has also been equally lazy... I meant to do some things like bake some chocolate chip cookies or have a major crafting day but I just couldn't get things going.  I did have Matt help me pick up a tray of pint-sized mason jars which I've always wanted - for crafting and kitchen purposes.  Can't wait to see what I can do with those!  I think I'm mostly sad that the long weekend is coming to a close (felt too quick yet again!) and am trying to avoid thinking about going to work tomorrow (ho-hum) so I spent the majority of the day watching sports, napping, and reading.  Very relaxing but it would've been good to be more productive.  Ah well, I think it's never bad to ease into a new year... Just have to live in the moment sometimes!  

And it feels really good to be back in the blogging world... especially with a new blog design :)

2011 photo yearbook project day #2

Happy Sunday!  Today was another cold and rainy one for us.  Not too sure what's been up with this LA weather the past few weeks.  It was pretty chill for us.  We decided to catch a movie in the afternoon and check out the new Arclight theater they opened up in Manhattan Beach.  They basically gutted out an already existing theater and renovated it into an Arclight that opened up in November.  I've only been to the Arclight in Hollywood once (to see 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' years ago) and it was fun.  This Arclight wasn't bad, but the parkng was a bit confusing to figure out (but thankfully it was free).

Matt's not big on movies so whenever we go, we tend to watch animated films.  I figure you're guaranteed to at least see something cute or funny which is better than ending up with a crap movie you blew a bunch of bucks on just to see.  Since it opened in November, I've wanted to see Disney's 'Tangled' so I bought our tickets.

If you're not familiar with Arclight, you can pre-purchase tix online and it's assigned seating - no need to go super early to fight people for seats anymore!)  Buying online also got me a $1 off each ticket.  Last row, aisle seat - score!

Concessions are a bit limited but they did include popcorn with real butter, fresh caramel corn, sausage baguettes with 2 sauces (one even being watermelon BBQ, I think) and smoothies.  Matt had a hot dog and I had some popcorn - of the butter and caramel variety.  I saw a segment on Food Network's 'The Best Thing I Ever Ate' claiming that this caramel corn was the best ever, so I had to try it for myself.

Although it's pretty tasty, I can't say it beats my all-time fav of Garrett's in Chicago.  Once you've had that, it's hard to find anything that even comes close.  The movie was fun, though, although it was a bit more sad than I thought it'd be.  But you can't really go wrong with Disney princesses and Rapunzel was definitely cute.  I think we'd go back to the Arclight since it's closer to us than AMCs are, but we don't see movies that often anyway.  Fun stuff though, and the night was capped off with some yummy Round Table pepperoni pizza, as always :)