Back to Reality

Our little jaunt to Vegas was a fun one. The morning we left started out pretty good, I decided that Southwest airlines were my now number one when it came to flying (mainly because you can seat wherever you want) and although it was about 105 degrees the entire time we were there, I might actually take that over humidity. No frizzy hair when there's no humidity!
Circus Circus was a nice hotel, and of course my first experience in walking through the maze of casinos to get anywhere-your room, a restaurant, to the outside world. Whoever came up with the idea of casinos totally got the floorplan right when they decided to make it to where you had a hard time finding your way out. I'm sure that they knew people would eventually throw up their hands and sit back down to play :)
The first evening there did start out a little less than happy as my cheapness turned to catastrophe. I had packed a bubble wrapped bottle of vodka in my checked bag for the plane, and the plastic cap subsequently busted, allowing the alcohol to spill all inside my luggage and on my clothes. Justin and I spent the first few hours of our vacation finding the laundry facilities at the nearby KOA campground to wash all my clothes. I definitely used up my quota of profanities for the week in about two minutes.

We toured the strip several times throughout the days, walking the first night and taking a co-workers advice by purchasing an all day bus pass for the double decker buses that run up and down each side all day long. It amazed me to see all these huge, intricate buildings in the daylight, but at night it was even more spectacular. The insides of the Bellagio and Ceasar's Palace were so ornate and rich, I definitely felt out of place the first time we walked through them as we were in shorts and tshirts. I did find a cute scene on the inside of the Bellagio that was made up of lots of moss, flowers and model trains :) Of course, I was most enarmored with the sunflowers.

Fun time was spent at M&M World, Coke World, Gameworks, Coyote Ugly, a performance of Ka by Cirque du Soliel, and the Penske Wynn Ferrari Maserati Museum I'm pretty sure that Justin got his $200,000+ car thirst quelched the first night there, although it never ceased to amaze me when he would continually point out cars driving down the strip that were an easy half million. Craziness. I'm so glad that I was able to take another trip out west, this time just a little short of the coast. It was a short enough trip to get away for a few days, and a long enough one to wear us out. It was the first vacation for Justin and I together and we can't wait to do it again. And as promised, no one came back married.

Hey baby let's go to Vegas...

So Thursday is the big day...Las Vegas! I've always been curious about Sin City and all the fun (and trouble) it had to offer and now I'll finally get the chance to see it all firsthand. Of course, no trip to Vegas would be complete without the best partners in crime, so we're making this mini vacation a group effort :)

I initally came up with the idea of heading west when it was announced that Cher would be starting performances at Ceasar's Palace this fall. I've always loved Cher and it would be the perfect oppportunity to see her amazing stage show as well as get to see the city that never sleeps. In the beginning, my fellow travelers seemed to be all right with the idea of taking in the show, but as time wore on I think it became apparent they just wanted to go to Las Vegas in general, not necessarily to see Cher. As sad as it makes me to think that I'll be there for enough time to actually see her perform twice, I don't want to sift through that large of a crowd by myself so in the end decided I'll have to just try and catch clips on youtube. However, I do retain the right to whine at least once a day while there about how I was swindled into the trip under false pretenses, lol.

We'll be taking up residence in Circus Circus for a few days. Justin and some friends stayed here a few years back on a spring break trip so I trusted his judgement on sleeping arrangements. He did make the good point that you don't need much from a hotel room when you won't be getting much sleep anyway. We'll be just a bit away from the hustle and bustle of the main strip though, which I'm sure will benefit us at some point during our stay.

With so much to see and do and four days just not being enough time to even make a dent in it, we had to narrow down our options as far as the shows were concerned. Any Cirque du Soliel performance was an option and Justin mentioned possibly seeing Penn & Teller. We're still on the fence as to what our final decision will be, but will probably decide by tomorrow night before we leave so we can order tickets a few days ahead of time. I've only ever seen Cirque performances on tv, but from that alone I know that I'd be in awe of everything on the stage.

I'm also hoping to be able to make an appearance in a few of the bars/clubs around town. I've always wanted to see Flare bartenders and I hear that there are quite a few places like New York New York that have bars just for them to put on a show. I told the boys that I'd like for us all to go to Coyote Ugly and of course they were all agreeable to that one :) The one thing that I can assure we won't be partaking in though is this:

There will be no midnight marriages officiated by Elvis. Cross my heart.

The end of an era

This weekend marked the end of an era that began what seems like forever ago. Meg and I, with the help of my mom and Justin, cleaned, packed and transported the last of our things from Apt 7 to begin the next phase in our lives- living with boys :)

After I graduated from college in 2006, Meg moved into my first apartment with me for the summer. Thus began the late weekend nights of neighbor stalking on our second floor balcony, Meg crawling into bed with me after getting in late from work to talk for a few minutes before heading off to her own room, weekly supper menus and alcohol friendly nights. She had to head back to campus (which was all of five minutes away) in the fall to finish her last year of school but we reunited a year later, along with our other friend Dre, to move into an awesome three bedroom place on the other side of town. My dad made the comment that our new place was like a train station with people coming in and out all hours of the day and night, but I really don't think we would have had it any other way.

We started out just the three of us, me assuming the role of "mom" pretty soon into the endeavor. It wasn't too long before we had the addition of Cedric, Dre's boyfriend, and then our little family fell into place. On Halloween, Michael came for a visit after work and never left. Literally. I can probably count the number of nights that he didn't stay with us on one hand, lol. I have to say that after a while you get to used to a full house, and when one or two of your "kids" are gone, things seem so empty.

After the first of the year, a lot of things changed. I met Justin and started staying more often with him than in my own room. Cedric moved into his own place in Lexington so Dre started visiting him there more often as well. In May, Dre graduated from college and moved back home for the summer, leaving Meg and Michael to their own devices as most of my clothes and such were already taking up space in Justin's extra closet. After some discussion, it was decided that at the end of the lease we'd pack our things and go our separate ways, albeit sadly. Meg brought me close to tears several times in these past few weeks by saying "it feels like we just moved in" as we piled belongings into boxes.

It's a rite of passage I suppose, at some point having to leave behind late nights, crazy escapades, collective bad decisions and those inevitable awkward moments that seemed to follow us in order to move into the next phase of things. Meg made the comment yesterday about how we swore last August that we'd be content with living in Apartment 7 for at least five years and I laughed and said "Funny how boys can change a person's mind." It's definitely a time in my life that I'm blessed to have been in the company of my girls and their guys, becoming "mom" and of course being Cedric's 'baby mama' (we all had our respective titles). But I look forward to what's yet to come. Beginning a more permanent part of life with Justin, watching Meg and Michael grow in their relationship, learning to schedule the time out to spend with everyone even if we live twenty minutes apart now instead of right there together. I've already told Meg that I'm planning ahead for the scary movie nights she loves so much that will fill the month of October. It's just another step into the adult life that you want so badly as a teen yet wish could hold off a few more years after college. Ah, that crazy cycle of life.

My Daily Dose of Romance

I knew I loved you before I knew you

The hand of time would lead me to you

An evening star was from afar

It guided me, it knew you'd be here

Now wrapped in moonlight, at last together

Here in the incandescent glow we are all we need to know

As we softly please each other til the stars and shadows glow

And we sleep with our dreams around us

It guided me, it knew you'd be here

I knew I loved you before I found you

I knew I'd build my world around you

Now all my days and all my nights

And my tomorrows will all begin and end with you

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

for grilling!

Justin's parent's bought him a wonderful grill for his early birthday present and after a few mosquito infested hours Monday night and yesterday evening, we (okay, well mostly Justin but I held a flashlight for him dangit) finally got this baby put together and cooked our first meal.

Cooking is something that I can always remember helping out with around the house when I was little. If it involved chopping things like for homemade pizza, or pre-cooking ingrediants like hambuger for chili, I was there. Although my enthusiasm for making full blown meals lacked in high school, once I moved into my first apartment after graduating college I was thrown into being "mom" and feeding myself and Megan every night. I think I did an all right job.

Nowadays I get to cook for Justin and I, so I'm always looking for new recipes in order to keep our rotation of favorites from becoming monotonous too quickly. I love cookbooks and I've also found that I get most of my new ideas from http://www.allrecipes.com/. I think I like the site so much simply because you can rate the recipe after trying it and leave a review. Those reviews come in handy since most people make suggestions for extra/less/substitute ingrediants and if some part of the recipe didn't work, they'll usually tell you how to prevent it from happening to you. I'm also trying to show Justin a few tricks here and there as we go about our time together, and I have to say that he successfully made himself pancakes while I was gone to California to visit Flo and Brian. He says that they each turned out to be as big as his head, but I was still proud nonetheless.

So here's to the rest of the year full of hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, steaks and veggies. I can't wait to throw some skewers filled to the ends with zuchinni, squash, mushrooms and tomatoes for kabobs!

Feeling grown up

This weekend seemed to bring about a lot of thoughts concerning maturity and growing up into my mind. I guess a combination of cleaning the old clutter from your room and declaring a huge step in life to family members will do that for a person.

For the first time in a long time, I went home Saturday to spend the night with my parents. I used to do this fairly often, but it seems that every since Justin and i started dating, there's just been a lot of events happening on weekends that aren't conducive to spending more than just the afternoon and part of the evening at home. Mom and I spent a few hours at Mamaw and Pap's that afternoon, doing the usual. Talking gardens, flowers, quilts, the latest family news. It was also this day that I had decided to tell them that I was moving in with Justin at the end of my lease term. I forewarned my mom the week before saying "We're going to tell Mamaw next weekend about me moving" to which she responded "We?" It actually went better than I had thought, but only because Mamaw had been expecting as much and seemed to have prepared herself. THere wasn't a lot of discussion, as she doesn't like the notion one bit, but it felt so good to have that off my chest. Mom and Dad have known for a few months now, so it's just been a waiting game with her.

Saturday night I holed up in my room to start cleaning out what had come to be a nine year collection of stuff in my room. A clutterbug/hoarder by genetics, I've started making myself go through my belongings with less tolerance for emotional attachments as of late, because really, who needs to hold onto class notes from that Business Calculus class you took your junior year of college? But over the course of three trash bags full of things to throw away, I found letters from friends, from old boyfriends, from people that I used to have such a good time with and somehow messed things up with along the way. Such is life I suppose, but it really made me stop and think about how bad of a friend/girlfriend I had been in past situations. And those thoughts then lead me to where I stand today.

I finally feel that it's the point in life where I'm a real, mature adult now. Despite the fact that I've stayed at his house for more than three months now, in exactly a month from today I'll be taking the first step to a more permanent relationship with Justin by officially moving in. No more backup plan of an apartment I'm paying rent on that I can run to just in case, just me and him in what will be my new home. I've never lived with a boy before. It had been contemplated at one point in time, but that was purely out of finanical concerns. And I'm glad that it didn't happen that way. It just wasn't meant to. And to add greater joy and meaning to the occasion, after the last bits of carpet have been cleaned and furniture moved into what will then be "our" humble abode, I will be able to open a great bottle of wine to share with Justin to mark our six month anniversary. To me, the stars couldn't be better aligned.

There was a moment last fall that everything changed. That as I look back, I can see where I transformed from an unsure, always indecisive, constantly questioning pre-adult, stuck in between the carefree days I had in college and the wanting so badly to feel like a respected grown up, to a live for today but think about tomorrow, place myself first on the priority list, be nothing but happy in all the decisions I make kind of woman. I finally put my foot down, said "No more" and stepped it up. And after living in my new perspective for a few months, everything started dropping into place like I had always hoped it would. And that leaves me here: staring at the horizon of a full life I'm going to live. The mistakes and naive decisions from the past will always be with me, but they merely remind me of how far I've come and where to not go back. My heart and mind are finally content.

Shana goes Acoustic

I have always been a fan of stripped down, acoustic music. Granted, I'm also one that normally gravitates toward more "breakup" and "I'm in love" music than just regular every day stuff in general, so of course anything put into acoustic mode usually makes me happy. What makes me even happier is when the biggest badasses of rock can take it down a few notches and show off their chops with just some vocals and guitar. Here are a few of my favorite acoustic versions of songs, not in any particular order.

First off, I'm a huge, beyond huge, Papa Roach fan. Their latest cd, "The Paramour Sessions" was incredible and they put on one of the highest energy shows I've seen yet. And of course, I may have a small celebrity crush on Jacoby :) Here's two songs of theirs that they've done live acoustic performances of in recent years, and as Jacoby says in the first, they don't do many stripped down performances. It's during songs like these two that it's reaffirmed the man can sing :)



(For the actual song, skip ahead to 3:22)


I fell in love with Paramore the first time I ever heard "Misery Business" on the radio. I immediately hit youtube and listened to everything they had available and had the band in constant rotation on my phone within days. I think Hayley is really talented and she shows it well here.


Crossfade has several songs that I really enjoy. This particular one is awesome in it's full, high energy version, but I've always had a greater liking for this recording of the acoustic version specifically.


And of course those are only a few of many. But I just thought I'd share some entertainment for the day. Enjoy!