What happens in Vegas... goes on the blog

Vegas was awesome! The hubs and I took advantage of a long weekend and turned ‘date night’ into three days and nights of dates together in Vegas! We took a few hour detour on our way and stopped to check out the Hoover Dam, wow,  it is huge and pretty cool to walk over and marvel at how they built it.

 Neither of us had been to Vegas since we were kids so we did the normal site seeing and touristy things. We checked out all of the hotels and the cool unique things they had, saw some animals from the shows, went on roller coasters, and did some serious people watching. We made our way down to Freemont Street one of the nights to check things out and stopped to take some pictures at the pawn store from the TV show Pawn Stars! We also found an awesome shooting range that lets people shoot machine guns and things, so JD shot the SCAR (I’m not even sure what it is, haha, but it looked cool).

My favorite parts of the trip were by far the restaurants we ate at, yum yum yum! We ate some of the most delicious food while we were there, including lunch at Buddy V’s (The Cake Boss’ new restaurant), dinner at Maggiano’s and dessert at Serendipity. Our first night we had dinner at BurGR which is Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant and they really were the best burgers we’ve ever had. After dinner we had drinks at the Chandelier Bar, it was gorgeous, the bar is literally inside of a giant Chandelier. And our last morning we ate brunch inside of the Eiffel Tower overlooking the whole strip.

On the drive home we started planning our next trip, where we want to stay, restaurants we’d like to eat at and shows we want to see. It’s was so nice to have a little get away just the two of us. Vegas is now very Popular with the Poplins!!

 

     xoxo,

              Rachele

 

Getting my autumn on- DIY style

I’m posting a couple quick pics to show my pumpkin and wreath projects from the other night. It is still pretty hot here in AZ, so I am faking my way through fall and living vicariously through our friends and family who are enjoying Apple Hill and sweater weather at the pumpkin patches. My autumn crafts are as close to fall as I think I’m going to get this year.

For our wreath I gave myself a small budget and hit up Hobby Lobby (with my coupon pre loaded on their app!) and picked up a few supplies. Later that afternoon I spent a little time with my glue gun and voilá, I had a quick and simple wreath to help me get into the fall spirit. There might have been a slightly traumatizing incident that happened while making our wreath, and I may or may not have mildly panicked about a lizard in our house! After watching it run all over (including up and down our curtains) I trapped it under a big mixing bowl and waited for my husband to come home to my rescue. I have no problem admitting to being squeamish, jumpy and grossed out around a small harmless lizard in our home.

The pumpkins I made for our dinning table literally took 3 minutes each and I had everything needed to make them which was great. We have a bunch of mason jars that we use as glasses so the lids and bands really had no use to us, until now. I cut a strand of jute twine, strung a bunch of mason jar bands on, tied the twine together tightly to make a circle and spread the bands out around the twine to make the shape I wanted. Once the bands were in the shape of a pumpkin I hot glued a few cinnamon sticks in the center to make the stems and cut a few pieces of burlap into leaves. Ta-da! I also attempted to wrap one of them entirely in the jute twine, I think I like the idea of it more than the final outcome, but it works.

In non crafting news, we are doing wonderful! I had a great friend, Kaitlyn, come and visit for a few days, it was so nice to spend time catching up with her, she is awesome in so many ways. We are also fully reaping the “benefits” of being home owners and have had more appliances, pipes, water systems, bathrooms, and tables break over the last few weeks than I even want to count, but I’m thankful we have a home and we are learning new things from each situation. JD has a chunk of days off work soon and we are both looking forward to it so much, lots of fun things planned, cant wait! Happy autumn everyone!!

     xoxo,

              Rachele