Fire Pit Building...

Birthday celebration

It's only been a month since my birthday and I just now saw that this was still a draft and never posted. So here you go...
I'll start by saying I'm not a party person, I think of myself a fairly reserved, so for my big 3-0 birthday I had a nice evening with two of the most important people in my life and the most important fur baby in my life, ha.

Enjoying one of my favorite beverages

Sitting around this gorgeous fire pit, I got a steal on it at Garden Ridge, the pit and stand together $40! It may have been on sale because of the painting but I find that makes it more unique, the butterflies are a nice touch in my opinion.

The next day the hubs took me shopping and out to lunch at one of my favorite places, Cheesecake Factory. If you have never been be prepared to spend some time reading the menu, they have everything you could imagine. This salads is one of my usuals that I order, it's the mexican salad on the skinnylicous menu.

Did more shopping that I needed to, but hey, it was my big 3-0 birthday afterall.

The big present ware these fab oakleys! I had a great pair that I loved and was hoping they still made them but apparently not and this is what I went with, and they are pretty darn great. These are going to get a lot of wear this summer that's for sure! These were to replace the old faves that some animal, that shall remain nameless, decided when no one was around to take them off the dining table and tear them to bits with his teeth, ahem... Guido Bianchi!

All and all I had a pretty fabulous birthday to the Casey standards, all thanks to two beautiful people, my husband and my bestie!

Sephora haul!

I've said it once and I'll say it again, I love Sephora.com!
Yeah, yeah, you can go to the store and pick up what you need but if you know what you want why not become a VIB member and order it online, then you get bonus samples and coupon codes to get you full size deluxe minis!

Above is some new stuff I'm trying on my skin, I recently read about this in a magazine article, it's for those of us aging women with acne and wrinkles. The AHA/BHA combo is supposed to force the skincells to turnover and force your skin to plump up with collagen at the same time...promising isn't it, hope it works.

And here are my free goodies! You always get three free samples with your purchase but if you look in the right place you can usually find a code to enter at checkout for a deluxe sample. I find the codes by googling sephora coupon codes and it's usually the first thing google finds for me, it's actually on sephora's site but I can never remember where to find it. I used the code this time for this boscia luminizing black mask, which was a ton of fun by the way, and if I was more daring I'd post pics but you can google and get the idea from that. I also got some perfume samples and a moisturizer sample. Perfume samples are great because I can change up my scent often without having to pay the high price for a quality perfume. 

This Sephora haul was actual from a month ago, I have another one scheduled to arrive this week full of all kinds of travel size goodies for an upcoming beach vacation. Stay tuned...

St. Patrick's Day

I have a bit of Irish in me, don't we all on St. Patrick's day, I like to celebrate and get in the green spirit with trying to cook up creative green food. Regular old green sugar cookies, donuts, and cupcakes weren't going to cut it since I've been trying to eat more natural and learned that adding food coloring to your food is like adding chemicals and processed ingredients into your food. So I did some digging around on the internet and found an interesting recipe for Green Muffins, courtesy of http://pamelasalzman.com/. The green muffins were colored with spinach instead of food coloring and from the pictures on the website I decided to give the recipe a try.

You can get the basic recipe on Pamela's website here http://pamelasalzman.com/green-muffins-recipe-perfect-st-patricks-day/.

I did a few things different-I left out the oil and added an extra banana-total of 3 bananas and I added a handful of so of blueberries to the batter. I also used half the amount of spinach listed in the recipe and they were a lighter shade of green than the originals, which may have something to do with why you can't taste the spinach, I'm not sure so I can't comment on that.

You mix all your dry ingredients together and blend all the wet ones together, Pamela folded in the mashed banana at the end but I just added it to the wet ingredients in the blender and it worked fine.

These turned out great, I may be adding spinach to baked goods more often! My husband was a little hesitant to try them, we were both very curious.

In the end they were a great St. Patrick's day breakfast and a great way to pack in some extra fruits and veggies. I strongly suggest hopping over to Pamela's site for this recipe, it was made with wheat flour and there are no added fats or sugars, that's if you omit the oil like I did, you are using Maple syrup instead of refined sugar and I promise it doesn't taste like a spinach pancake, it will taste like a blueberry banana muffin. I'm excited to experiment with this recipe maybe adding chocolate chips or a glazed icing on top...hmmm my wheels are spinning.

Of course I got festive with my attire for the day, I celebrated with some green fingertips and leprechaun socks!

Hope you enjoyed your St. Patrick's day!

Operation restoration-Subaru 1985 Brat

So I decided that with this new Iphone 5S that I just got that I would have a nice photo shoot out in the garage with one of my husband's toys. You probably know from other posts that my husband loves his Subarus and of course that's what he would choose for his project car.

He did some serious searching for this baby, she's a 1985 Subaru Brat, and she's miraculous!

I love the Brat, possibly for it's starring role in the show "My Name is Earl" or for the awesome seats in the back, it could also be because it's part car part truck and very strong for being such a tiny little thing.

Guido loves her too, he likes to sit up in the front  for now but when she's fully restored he'll be riding in the back.

My husband is slowly working on the Brat right now mainly because it's his busy time of the year for traveling and the weather is freezing. Once the weather warms up we'll be peeling away the plasti-dip and cleaning her up and working on restoring her back to her 1985 glory.

Yes I said we, I will help and learn some things like how to change a tire, brake pads, oil stuff like that but what I'm excited for is the painting and the exterior part...let's get real I am a girl and my main appreciation of cars is that they look pretty and they go fast, what more do you want.

She is in pieces right now, remember that when you look at these pictures.

Before something can be restored you typically have to strip it down to it's basic structure and work it back up from there.

This baby is from 1985, you can imagine the things that have been done to her in the past 29 years.

It's going to take a lot of work and elbow grease but it's going to be worth it.

It's cool that it's an old car, that is very rare in the area where we live.

I'm excited to get this plasti-dip stripped off and get started on the cleaning, since that's the biggest part I get to help with of course.

My husband does love teaching me things so I'll let him go through a few pieces of information, but I'm telling you there is only so much my brain can retain about cars.

The important thing I know is that this car is going to be gorgeous when she's fully restored, I've already had dreams about riding down a winding country road sitting in the back of the car with Guido next to me...while hubs is driving of course.

Stay tuned...

Zulily and Toms

Have you heard of Zulily? I always see their ads online and never thought anything of it, but one time they had the most beautiful shoes and I couldn't ignore them, I had to click. I checked out their site and they were having a great deal on Toms shoes, if you haven't tried Toms it's a must, and not for the look, it's for the fact that they are super comfortable!

I checked out their site and they were having a great deal on Toms shoes, if you haven't tried Toms it's a must, and not for the look, it's for the fact that they are super comfortable! Toms also gives a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased, that's a pretty good deal if you ask me.

I chose a pair of the slip-ons in the silver herringbone color, I would recommend going down a half size in the slip-ons, I am usually a 6.5 but these would have fit perfectly in a 6. The wedges I ordered were perfect in a 6.5 and the color is described as black metallic but it's more of a dark denim look, these wedges are fabulous and comfortable, now I just need warm weather!

Now with all that said, if you do order from Zulily.com be prepared for a long wait time for you purchase, they do warn you and explain the way they operate so you know that it's going to be anywhere between one and three weeks before you get your order, but I saved like $40 ordering the Toms from zulily versus any other site I have seen them on, the wait also wasn't too bad because it's too cold, snowy, and wet to wear either of these right now, but I'm happy to add them to my shoe collection!

Weekend wrap up

Okay...it's catch up time! These pics are from 2 weeks ago actually, I know they've been sitting in my drafts for awhile I just haven't got around to writing anything and clicking that little publish button.

We had a nice blast of warm air roll in for a Saturday and we took full advantage, you can see Guido enjoying the sunshine on the deck.

We headed to the park for a nice walk around the pond, you can still see the ice has not melted but the sun was shining and the wind was not too bad.

Later on Saturday night we headed out to Pompilios, to celebrate my hub's birthday and our upcoming anniversary. Pompilios is a little wonder tucked away in Newport, Ky and usually it's fantastic but that night was not a good night for them. The weather had warmed up for the first time in a long time so it drew out people go dining and Pompilios was one of the hot spots, they had a two hour wait and they do not except reservations, they should work on that it may improve operations. We waited and waited and finally got a table, I think that the kitchen was a little rushed that night because I'm usually very happy with my meal at Pompilios but not this time, the pancetta in my pasta was very thick and I'm not sure if it was under or over cooked or re-cooked but it was big, chunky, and terribly chewy, I was very disappointed.

Sunday the temperature dropped back down and reminded us that it was still winter for awhile longer, we cuddled up inside and lit some candles. The weather was not pretty at all so we stuck around the house for most of the day, but I did somehow talk the hub's into grilling me a burger!

He got a new grill, I guess you could call it his birthday present. The grill was awesome and the burgers turned out perfect and hit the spot on a cold and nasty day.

Later on...out of boredom I decided to give meringue cookies a try, I've always heard they were so difficult to make.

The meringue cookies are not difficult to make, quite easy actually, but they take forever to cook. They bake at a low temperature for 45 minutes and then you turn the oven off and let them sit in there and cool for at least one hour, but be aware that letting them cool too long you will end up with meringue cookies that crumble in to a million little bitty pieces.

I would definitely make them again, possibly for the upcoming St. Patrick's day with green sprinkles, hmmmmm that's an idea.