BrewFest 2011 and Mason's New BFF

Another week come and gone...I can tell this fall is going to be hectic, exhausting....and a ton of fun.  I feel as if we have finally adjusted to working life and are settling into a nightly routine that actually allows for some relaxtion.  Currently, the three of us (Chris, me, and Mason) are watching The Office at the end of a long Monday, recovering from an eventful weekend.

Before I get into the details of the weekend, I thought I'd share a couple of pictures....here is a picture of my office.  There's not much to it...I really need to put a plant in there or something.  Right now all I have is my diplomas...I get a lot of comments from coworkers, all of which who are MSU or Bama fans, about all of my Auburn paraphernalia. That just makes me want to put up more, so I'm looking for a sign that says "Auburn Fans Only" :)

We used both our fantastic breadmaker given to us by Gayle, Clint, Kate and Campbell this week and our ice cream maker, both which were very successful.  For the bread, I made a cheddar beer bread...so yummy! The bread machine is soo easy. You just put the ingredients in there, and it does the rest.  Here is a picture of the rasberry yogurt Chris made with the ice cream maker given to us by Tammy and Greg:

Delicious and nutritious!


Here is something I found in a really cute store in downtown Columbus...if you have a special wine bottle that you don't want to throw away, but don't really know what to do with an empty wine bottle, we found these candles that you can use to turn the bottle into an oil lamp.  This is a bottle of wine that we got in Napa the day after got engaged...it was from our favorite winery and you can't buy it in stores.  Now we have a different way to enjoy it! We love it!

I got the lantern at Pier One and the mason jar at the Base Exchange. We love candles (and I do mean we...Chris has actually discovered the joy of a Yankee Candle recently)

We think it's really funny that Mason has decided to make a lair underneath our kitchen table.  He drags his bed and toys underneath there (along with other things around the house that he finds and claims) and stays down there a lot.  It looks messy, but we just let him do it because it clearly makes him so happy and it's nice to always kind of know where to look for him.

So now that I've shared all of these random tidbits...we had a really fun weekend back in Auburn with Autumn and Jon...this was the weekend that they picked up their puppy.  It also just so happened to be the weekend of the Beer Festival at the Event Center.  So we made a whole weekend of it, and it was jam-packed. On Saturday I went to Publix to do some couponing...I am thoroughly disappointed at how ineffective couponing is at Kroger, which is really the only grocery store around here where I can do it! So I brought my cooler to Auburn and headed to Publix to spend $29 and save $55 on groceries.  Normally I had gotten to where I consistently saved twice as much as I spent, but its a little harder to do when you are buying for a man who requires to be fed certain things, such as meat (I could skip meat all together if I had to, and did so often in college because it is so expensive). So I missed the mark somewhat, but still think I did okay. We had lunch at Tammy and Greg's (mexican--my fav!) Then we all headed to the mall where Dillards was having an extra 40% off their sale stuff...so I bought some stuff I didn't need and had a lot of fun doing it.

Jon, Autumn, Chris and I headed over to the Event Center around 6 and had equally as much fun, if not more fun than we expected to have sampling various beers at the Brew Fest.  We danced and ate BBQ and had tons of fun, then headed to the Irish Bred Pub for an interesting end to the evening...and I'll leave it at that haha

Here are some pictures:

Sunday we went to church, the first time we had been back to AUMC since the wedding (so we got to go to the church and the Event Center...lots of memories).  We then had lunch at my parents' house and then it was time for the main event...picking up the great dane pup from the breeder! It really is amazing to see how big is it going to be compared to Mason...when they are currently the same size! They are about the same height and length, but Mason weighs 8.5 lbs and Dubs (the great dane) weighs 17.5! Anyway...they made fast friends and cuddled the whole way home.  It was the cutest thing! We think that Mason will get used to Dubs before he gets big, and he probably won't even notice how much different they are in size.  We also thought it was funny to think about whether Dubs would think he was a pomeranian, since Mason is going to be his best friend.  Here are some pictures of the precious pups:

I can't wait to post next week about the first football game!