Finally a new post. I bring you my birthday weekend

So this post is only about 7 months overdue.  I've been incredibly behind in posting anything.  Life got a bit crazy last year.  I am trying to update everyone on the exciting events of my 2013.  So here goes. . .

In order for my birthday weekend to make sense I need to give you some background info about my current relationship status. In May I started dating John.  Zane and I wanted incredibly different things out of life.  I knew that the relationship wasn't going anywhere so I decided to end it.  John had moved to Utah in October of 2012 and we had become friends almost immediately.  We both worked at the studio and hung out with the same people so we had built a pretty decent friendship.  I could no longer deny the fact that A. I thought he was SUPER cute, and B. I had started to develop some legit feelings for him.  After a somewhat awkward email conversation (stupid phones being broken led us to discussing our feelings via email) we decided to give dating a try.  8 months later it is going EXTREMELY well :)

About a month into dating, John and I had a conversation about sports, baseball in particular.  Being from Texas, I am all about the football.  Being a huge Jimmer fan, I'm all about the basketball. But baseball was something I had never really gotten into.  John is a pretty decent Yankees fan and knows his baseball well. I knew the basics of baseball, but didn't even have a team that I cared about.  After getting on the google we discovered that there was a Rockies game in Denver the same weekend as my birthday.  Having never  been to a professional baseball game, and my birthday being that weekend, John and I decided to make the drive to Denver to check out my first ever pro baseball game.

Driving to Denver

Waiting for the shuttle to take us to Coors Field

Waiting for the game to start.  Pretty legit seats huh?

The game itself was pretty awesome.  We had freakin awesome seats.  The Rockies won, by a lot.  The game was action packed.  And we had a hilarious drunk guy near us that was all sorts of entertaining.  I couldn't have asked for a better first baseball game :)  It was a quick weekend getaway in Denver, but so much fun.  It's nice that there are enough decently sized cities just a few short hours away that allow John and I the chance to get away for the weekend.  And it's even more nice that I am dating someone that loves to go places and do things with me.

Happy birthday to me!  I have the best boyfriend ever

There are more updates to come!  Stay tuned :)

Enjoy life!

~Tara

Where in the World have I been!?!?!?!

Hello any and all of my lovely blog readers!

It has been MONTHS since I've written a post on the good ol' personal blog.  If it makes you all feel better, my personal journal is lacking in entries as well.  And it's not because nothing significant or interesting has happened to me lately.  I have been beyond busy!  Lots of fun stuff has happened that I hope to share with all of you in the next  few days.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am still alive and kicking.  I hope to make blogging a more consistent aspect of my life.  It's nice to type out my daily happenings and share what's going on in my life with the world.

Some things to look forward to reading about:

• my new job
• my new man
• my new puppy :) 
• my first trip to Las Vegas
• eventually my first trip to the North East, which is paired with the first time I'm meeting my man's family.  EEEEEEK

I look forward to sharing everything with you all soon!

~Tara

New Year, new resolutions

I bet everyone thought I forgot about blogging.  HA I fooled you!  I've just been pretty busy and exhausted and blogging has kind of been the last thing on my mind.  I will think about doing it, and then my warm bed calls my name and I have to answer it. . . yeah that's my life.

So 2013 has been a lovely year so far.  I thought long and hard about my resolutions.  Normally when I come up with resolutions, they are broken pretty quickly.  I think the only time I've really been successful at keeping one was when Ky and I went off caffeine for a year.  HARDEST YEAR OF MY LIFE.  No college student should EVER resolve to not drink caffeine.  Seriously a bad idea.  I figured that with this being my first year out of school, maybe I could actually devote some time and energy into keeping my resolutions. So now I'm going to share some of them with you.

Number 1: get engaged. . . Ok this isn't for realz.  Zane and I are perfectly happy in our relationship and will get engaged if and when it feels right. But this doesn't mean that if I were to get engaged I wouldn't be super happy.  Just saying.  But don't freak out Zane, I'm not rushing you. :)

Ok for the real ones:

1. budget my money better.  I have been living on a tight budget for a while now and have yet to be successful at budgeting it.  I am SO bad about impulse buying.  I have set up an entire jump drive for the purpose of budgeting my money and tracking my spending.  Hopefully that will help me see how much I am wasting on dumb stuff and will help me stretch my dollar more effectively.

2. be more healthy.  I'll admit I haven't done TOO great at this so far.  I did get a gym membership and have been meeting with a personal trainer over the past few weeks (thanks Gold's Gym for the 4 free sessions with my membership).  But the fast food has been killing me.  I NEED to stay away from the cheap, greasy food.  I love to cook, but when I come home from work I'm exhausted and lazy and just don't feel like cooking. I need a solution here!!!  And the fruits and veggies and me aren't getting a long too well.  I buy them, eat a few, and then the rest go bad.  So basically I need to be more diligent about going to the gym and cooking and less diligent about paying McDonalds. . .

These are my 2 main ones that aren't super personal.  Pretty cliche and boring huh?  I seriously want to accomplish both of these in 2013.  Hound me about them!!!!!  I want to develop better habits now so that when I have a family of my own, I can teach my kids without it being a struggle.


Just an update on my life.  As I said, Zane and I are happy.  We've been together 8 months and are going strong :)  I HOPE to be visiting Florida in March and going to Universal Studios.  Thanks Dad!  I have at least 1 wedding to go to this year.  YAY Allison and Kevin!  I am potentially looking for a new and/or additional job to help with the budget.  And I can't wait for my last W-2 to get here so that I can get all my money back from the Government.  I'm glad you could use it Government, but I want it back!

Sorry this post has been picture-less. I'll try and take more pics this year.  This is my 3rd resolution!

Love you all!

~Tara

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and everything in between

Hello all!

I've been pretty bad about posting lately, I know.  Honestly, besides these past 2 holidays, my life has been pretty boring.  Sad story huh?  But I figured I should probably play some catch up while I had the time, so here goes.

For Thanksgiving, my grandparents, 2 sisters, and I headed to Colorado to spend the holiday with my mom and everyone else that lives there.  We stopped at some pretty cool rest stops along the way.  One included a little museum and gift store:

Another had some other pretty cool, stuffed animal type things:

One of my goals is to stop at all the scenic overlook, museums, and other things like that between here and my moms.  There are TONS of stops like that in the short drive and they all look really cool.

So once we got to my mom's I got to see my 4 brothers: 2 of them humans, and 2 of them dogs :)  I love all 4 of them, but there is a special place in my heart for one "small" puppy in particular: Jake.

He's a cutie isn't he?  We brought that Jake sized bone with us as a Thanksgiving present :)  

One of my favorite things about Colorado is that they sell the worlds BEST ice cream: Blue Bell.  Utah doesn't sell this ice cream, except at the Provo Beach resort. And even there you can't buy it in cartons to take home.  My mom forgot to buy some vanilla Blue Bell ice cream, so my little sister and I made a grocery store run and entered blue bell paradise, or at least as close to Blue Bell paradise as we can get without being in Texas:

This is how every ice cream aisle in every grocery store SHOULD look.

Ashley and I bought the vanilla ice cream, and then picked up some Dutch Chocolate for ourselves. Seriously we can't get enough of this stuff.  Blue Bell's homemade vanilla ice cream is the ONLY vanilla ice cream I will eat with no toppings, so that's saying something right there.

The rest of Thanksgiving was pretty chill.  We just hung out at home and attempted to do some shopping on Black Friday, with very little success.

After getting back to Utah and hanging out and working for a few weeks, I woke up one morning to snow.  This is not that unusual, so I just cleaned off my windows and drove to work.  That day happened to be pay day, so after getting my check from work, I decided to go cash it.  I went back out to my car and did some more snow cleaning off.  While doing that, I noticed that the hood of my car looked to be popped. This struck me as a bit odd so I checked it out.  Much to my chagrin, the hood was NOT popped.  Someone had hit my car!!!!  It had happened the previous night while I was parked out on the street. So I had to call my insurance company and go through all that hassle of getting my car repaired, getting a rental car, and all that other good stuff.  Thankfully I had insurance because the damage to my car was about $1900 worth.  I only had to pay $100 though.  While I was pretty upset that some jerk face hit my car a few weeks before Christmas, I had to remind myself that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot that could be done other than repair the car and move on.

Yeah I was not a happy camper

Needless to say, this really put a damper on Christmas.  I've been a bit stressed with money since I haven't been getting a ton of hours at the studio these days.  To have to fork over any extra money, even if it's just $100 bucks for the repairs and $70 for the rental car, is not an easy thing for me to do right now.  But I'm getting by for now.

For Christmas, Zane and I spent the day at my Grandparents house.  But not before we bought a little Christmas tree and opened all of our presents for each other at midnight.

Zane also surprised me with a dozen roses, which was awesome :)  They were just 1 of the awesome presents Zane got for me.  One of the presents Zane got, which I don't have a picture of yet, is a BEAUTIFUL 3 stranded pearl bracelet.  And we are talking REAL pearls!  I've never had a piece of super nice jewelry before, so this is a great start to a collection :)

Christmas at the grandparents was nice, but quiet.  Normally for Christmas, my entire family is there and the festivities start at 6 in the morning.  With it only being Zane, my grandparents, my sister, and me, we opened presents at 11 and just hung out casually for the day.

My sister in law made all of us aprons.  My grandpa and I are just modeling ours.

Zane and Me on Christmas.  You can kind of see the bracelet he got me.

After an excellent meal and a relaxing day, Zane and I left the festivities to relax for the rest of our day off.  I just want to thank all of my family for making Zane feel included (via presents and welcoming him in with open arms) when he couldn't go back to Illinois to be with his family.  You all better get used to him being around! 

It's been a great holiday season so far.  Stressful, yes, but awesome all the same.  I'm so thankful I have a wonderful family and boyfriend that make up such an awesome support group for me.

Until next time!

~Tara

6 months

On Monday, Zane and I celebrated our 6 month anniversary.  Our first date was a few weeks before May 12, but we became "official" on that glorious day.  I decided to pay a little tribute to the man in my life here with some pics and mushy stuff that I love about him :)

This is one of my favorite pics with Zane.  We took it at the zoo shortly after becoming "official".

We went to the Air Show at Hill Air Force base.  I loved this little helicopter.  P.S. It was FREEZING that day.

Our sad faces.  This is after we got hailed and rained on.  I ruined a pair of shoes here actually.  We decided to leave shortly after this picture.  We will be going again next year, assuming the weather is better.

Zane and me after carving pumpkins.  You can't see his, but it was a way awesome carving of Cthulhu, that he did by hand.  Mine was a not so awesome carving that I got out of a pumpkin design book.  Yeah he is way more artistic than me.  And yes, we do like to match our shirts ;)

So yeah, these are some of my favorite pictures of Zane and me.  He doesn't like to take pics, so I have to hold back on my picture taking, which stinks.  But I guess if that's the only thing I have to complain about, we are doing good. 

Seriously I haven't been this happy in a long time. Zane lets me be my weird self, and doesn't make fun of me for it.  In fact, he's probably just as weird as I am.  Which I love.  He is my best friend.  I'm glad that we decided to go against the "dating your co-workers is bad news" stigma and give it a go.  

Here's to another 6 months!

Love you Zane!

Boys Like Girls Concert

So Here's the back story of this concert, at least from my prospective. I'm sure the bands (Boys Like Girls, All-American Rejects, and Parachute) have a SLIGHTLY different story behind coming to the concert :)

 I LOOOOVE Parachute.  They are my hands down my favorite band.  I discovered Parachute about a year and a half ago, all thanks to the You Tube.  I was searching for a song by a completely different artist and stumbled across this video:

I fell in love at that moment. I mean, who wouldn't love the lead singer Will's gorgeous eyes?  I then proceeded to watch every music video they had on line, purchase both of their albums on I-Tunes, and fall more and more in love with them.  I have been wanting to see them live ever since that day, but I never found  out about their concerts in Utah until the week they were coming. So having a month's notice was PERFECT.  Honestly, had Parachute not been the opening act, I don't know if I would have bought tickets to the concert. So Boys Like Girls should REALLY thank Parachute.

When I noticed that Parachute was the opening act for this concert, I knew I had to buy tickets.  I had been waiting a long time for them to come back to Utah.  I checked their website like once a week to see if they had posted tour dates, I was that obsessed. I called up my sister Ashley to see if she wanted to come with me.  After she agreed, I bought us some tickets and anxiously awaited October 23.  I had to prepare myself for this concert, so I bought some All-American Rejects and Boys Like Girls songs on I-Tunes, made a play list, and listened to it like every day for 2 weeks while I was at work.

Finally October 23 came!  After work, I went home, changed into an appropriate concert going outfit, and headed up to UVU.  Ashley met me there and we got some dinner before going to the concert.  While at the Merch table (because I had to buy me a Parachute T Shirt) I struck up a convo wit the Merch guy. He told me that Parachute typically comes and talks to fans after their set.  I think I almost had a heart attack at that moment. I was going to get the chance to meet Parachute!!!  I told Ashley that we were going to meet them no matter what!

Ashley and me after finding our seats and discovering that we could meet Parachute.

So Parachute came out and put on an awesome show. I LOVED it.  I had no doubts that I would enjoy that part of the concert.  But part of me was distracted by the fact that in just a few moments I was going to meet the band.  During their last song, Ash and I headed back to the Merch table to grab a spot in line to meet the men of my dreams :)

He has some mad sax skills. But sadly he is married

Ashley and me with Will, the voice behind the band.  Oh man I'm in love.  Seriously, so attractive :)

Me with my autographed ticket stub.  This has been in my wallet with me ever since.  Don't think about stealing it, I will kill you :)

After meeting the band and getting some autographs, Ash and I went back inside to listen to All-American Rejects.  I don't really follow them too closely, so I didn't know too many of the songs they performed.  But I will admit, I did enjoy listening to them talk between songs and watching people around me get more and more offended at what they were saying.  All I will say is Utah Valley and All-American Rejects might just be polar opposites.  But I don't know what people were expecting when they came to a concert like this. Oh well I guess. . . I loved it.

Then Boys Like Girls came out.  They were pretty enjoyable. I knew more of their songs then I did All-American Rejects. And they made it fun.  At the very end of the concert, when they sang Love Drunk, they insisted that everyone put up their phones and cameras, if we were sitting in the seats to get out on the floor, and we all just rocked out. I was a bit scared for Ashley, since she is so small. I didn't want her to experience death by mosh pit.  But we had fun.  

I have never gotten the opportunity to go to a concert like this. Most of the time I stick to my country music concerts.  This was a completely different atmosphere, and I loved it.  I did however, go to the concert with a cold and come out of it even more sick than before. But it was definitely worth it. I mean, I got to meet my favorite band. I will take having a cold any day if it means meeting and hugging Will Anderson :)

I can't wait for Parachute to come back to Utah. I hope the next time I see them live, it is just them performing.  I would love to hear more of their songs live.

Great concert, great company, great bands. The end :)

Trip to My Mom's

Every once in a while, a girl just needs to visit her mom.  I had that desire come in September  I was stressed with work and bills and all that good adult stuff.  I just wanted to get away.  Luckily, my mom only lives about 10 hours away from me, so I took a day and a half off of work,  got in my car and drove to visit her, my step dad, and my little brothers. We didn't do anything special, but that was ok with me. I enjoyed just hanging out at my Mommy's :).

I left work at noon on Friday and began the journey. I took some cool landscape pics on my phone, but haven't uploaded them to my computer yet.  Driving on Highway 6 through Spanish Fork canyon allows you to see some pretty cool rock formations and such.  I loved the scenery a LOT.  And that's saying something because I'm not a huge fan of the mountains. I got to my mom's around 930 or so on Friday night.  My little brothers got to stay awake to say hi to me and then my mom, step dad and I just kind of stayed up for a little bit longer to chat.

Saturday we went out for breakfast at this local Mexican food restaurant.  While there, my youngest brother David asked me if I really had to come back to Utah.  I told him that I did because I had to go back to work.  He then said that I didn't have to go back. Mom could just give me an allowance if I stayed with them.  I said "Well David, it's not that easy".  And then David, being the smart 8 year old that he is said, "Well of course not Tara, you have to do your chores. . . "  Oh how I love that boy.  I sometimes wish I could go back to those days of getting an allowance and living at home.  But alas, I have grown up.

After breakfast, Mike (my step dad), changed the oil in my car while Mom and I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some food for dinner and some snacks for my little brothers' soccer games.  Then we all piled in the car to go to the soccer fields.  My little brothers both play soccer and had games at the exact same time.  Luckily their fields were back to back, so we got to watch both games at once.  They both played goalie at the same time, and we were lucky that they were goal tending at back to back goal posts.  I had never gotten the opportunity to see them play soccer, so I loved it!  I don't know much about the sport, but it was fun!

My brothers before their games

David running back to the net after tossing the ball back into the game

Aryan goal tending like a champ

David and me after his game (which he won.  He claims its because he was wearing the Maroon jersey).

Aryan and me after his game.  (Which he lost.  David says it's because his team won and Aryan's team always loses when David wins)

After soccer, we all went home and relaxed. It was hot outside during the games, so we all just needed to cool off. Once dinner time came around, Mom made me my favorite meal: Ranch Chicken and mashed potatoes.  I LOVE that stuff!  It was delicious!  The rest of the evening was spent talking and relaxing.

On Sunday, we basically just hung out around the house.  Mom made me another one of my favorite meals for dinner.  At dinner, another awesome conversation took place between my brothers and me.  I had asked Aryan and David what they wanted to be when they grew up.  Neither one of them knew for sure.  A few minutes later, David said that he wanted to be a Ninja.  This is the conversation that followed:

D: I know what I want to be! A Ninja!

A: You know that Ninjas' have to live in like China or Russia, right?

D: Oh well then I'll just be a retired Ninja!

Oh if only it were that easy!  I wish I could just skip to retirement right now too!  At least I know he's my brother with that mentality!

This is how I awoke every morning.  With a big Alaskan Malamute jumping onto my bed pretending to be a lap dog.  And then a Chihuahua joining in because he wants to play.  I loved it.  Jake (the big one) is such a big cuddle bug!  This is the best way to wake up :)

Monday morning I left my mom's to return to the real world :(  I had an awesome weekend with my family.  I love every minute I get to spend with them.  I can't wait until Thanksgiving when I get to see my little brothers and mom again!