potter explains it all

So Julie and I have been friends since the 10th grade and every year since, we would always try to meet up and go to the State Fair of Texas together.  Even when we lived in other cities, we would try to meet up and go. (The State Fair of Texas is a BIG deal to us Dallas kids).

This is where I would insert a plethora of old photos of us at the fair, but unfortch, digital cameras were not around back in the day, meaning most of those pics are stored in boxes somewhere. Here are a few to give you an example of all our State Fair awesomeness… 

(please disregard the bandana on my head. I was in an NSYNC phase and apparently thought this was cool.)

we would win HUGE prizes as you can clearly see on the left side of this pic.

I always chicken out on the rides and make Julie ride solo….

except for the swings…. “weeeeee”.

Ok, so I promise there is a point to this story.  Julie is currently living in Paris and can’t make it back to the fair anymore.  Now Paris may have fabulous museums, buildings, pastries, and the Eiffel tower….BUT does it have a giant Cowboy welcoming you (RIP Big Tex), or any heart clogging fried fill in the blank that you can imagine?? I think not.

So I decided Julie needed a little taste of the fair all the way from Paris.  The following are pics from Julie’s night at the fair!  (Note: I did get some strange looks from people wondering what the heck I was doing, but I didn’t care. It was totally worth it!)  

First stop. Fletcher’s corn dog.  (this is accurate as to what she would’ve wanted to do immediately!)

On to some Texas Tater Twisters.

Fried brownies.

giant sausage.

corn on the cob.

can’t forget caramel apples!   Now that Julie has eaten her way through the fair, it was on to the midway for rides and funhouses…

First stop: Haunted House….

complete with creepy clowns.

at our fav funhouse, with J-Lo. 

Julie riding solo. 

Chinese lantern festival

become a butterfly.

NO TOUCHING! 

make friends w/ a squirrel.

One more treat before leaving.

Little did Julie know, she would be one of the last people to get a pic with Big Tex before he met his demise the following morning.  (Again, RIP big guy)

She may or may not have eaten an entire bag of cotton candy when she got home…

then slipped into a sugar coma and went to bed.   The End.  

My friends not knowing how to spell the word “tornadoes”.  I’ve seen it spelled “tornados” and even worse, “tornado’s” multiple times today.  Did we learn nothing from the Dan Quayle “Potatoe” incident of ‘92?!  

While I’m on the subject, when are people over the age of, let’s say 14, going to learn the proper use of “they’re”, “their” and “there” as well as “you’re” and “your”??

(Also, I do realize that I speak like a teenage girl quite often using abbreviations, but I promise I do know how to spell and use proper grammar…most of the time!)

Ok, I’m done with my grammar rant of the day… 

I’m 30, and I love Taylor Swift.  There, I said it. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way….

I’ve gone to see Taylor twice in the past month.  I first saw her in Dallas at Cowboys stadium a month ago.  I went to that show with my friend, who by the way is male, also my age and I think he may even like Taylor more than I do!!  It def felt like we were the oldest people at the show that weren’t accompanied by small children though! I have also never seen so many sundress/ boots combos in my life.  The show was the night of OU/TX so each of us had done a lot of day drinking beforehand (which is always great when you’re going to be around a bunch of kids…) My friend was so hyped up that he would turn to the kids around us and yell “YEAHHH TAYLOR SWIFT!!” at them…sadly they just looked back at him like he was crazy instead of joining in on his excitement!  

Each city TSwift plays, she’s been covering a song by an artist from that town. In Dallas, she covered “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley.  She also brought out B.o.B. to duet “Airplanes” which was awesome! I was a little bummed at the Houston show b/c she didn’t do any cover and her guest appearance was Nelly, who I’m not the biggest fan of. They did a duet of “Just a Dream”.  I would’ve much rather heard them do “Country Grammar” but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Here are some of the pics I took at the two shows.  I’ll post videos at a later time as I’ve been having trouble uploading them, so I give up for the night!

Singing in a Cowboys Jersey!

TSwizzle & Nelly

I had one of the most amazing meals ever in Paris…

There is this restaurant that my friends had been wanting to try for awhile so they made reservations in advance for when I was visiting.  The restaurant is called Spring and is run by a 33 year old American chef from Chicago, Daniel Rose. It is about 75€ per person, seven-course prix fixe menu. Spring is tiny and seats only 28. The kitchen is open and you can see the chefs preparing your food right near you.  

Now I was a little hesitant when I heard it was prix fixe b/c I am a little bit of a picky eater. I will usually try anything, but there are a couple things I just simply do not like. For example: tomatoes, mushrooms, olives and a couple other things. I figured I would be fine and surely they wouldn’t serve everything I don’t like…

The open kitchen was literally right behind our table and the chefs would even take turns serving us. (including Daniel himself)

First came out spanish mussels, which were ah. ma. zing.

Next came mushroom stuffed ravioli with some sort of mushroom from some part of France. (I stopped listening at mushroom). At this point in the meal, I already thought “oh great, one thing I hate is already here”. I decided to try it anyway and it turns out I don’t hate mushrooms in France. This dish was so good!

Then came tomato salad with trout tempura and raw trout with I think burnt leek flakes. I attempted to try a tomato, but just as I thought tomatoes taste the same no matter where you are. I couldn’t eat them, but the trout was great! 

The four of us enjoying dinner & wine!

This was the main course. Veal sweetbreads. Now I had never heard of sweetbreads before and I wasn’t sure I had heard the chef correctly when he said what it was, so I said to Julie, “did he say sweetbreads or sweet bres? huh? what did he say??” Julie basically ignored me and was just like “mmhmm”. I was still confused and not quite sure what he said so I asked Kyle the same thing and he was like “yeah sweetbreads, its just a french way of cooking.” I left it alone and didn’t say anything again.  

Unbeknownst to me, the three of them were hoping I wasn’t going to ask and they were all giving each other looks when I was asking questions and trying to just move on past it. They couldn’t believe I bought the whole “its just a french way of cooking” line.  They end up telling me the whole story at the end of meal how they didn’t want me to know ahead of time what it was or for sure I wouldn’t have tried it.  Then it is revealed to me that sweetbreads are the throat gland of a calf. They were right. If I had been told ahead of time, I prob wouldn’t have wanted to try it, but yet again, it was delicious. 

cheese course before dessert.

1st dessert was blueberries with some kind of lemon sorbet and meringue. 

The main dessert course was a fig crumble, which was SO good. (I must start cooking with fig!) The lady at the table next to us thought it was so good that she was aggressively scraping the bowl in a very loud and obnoxious way. We thought she was going to start licking the bowl next!

Maygan was very excited!

Of course I had to reenact the crazy lady next to us once she had left!

I thought dessert course was over with the fig, but then this chocolate mousse came out.

Just when we were so full we couldn’t possibly eat anything else, they serve us these tiny little lemon pies and coconut puffs, which Julie and Maygan kept seeing them being served to other tables and were hoping we would also be served the “little donuts”. 

To put in perspective just how tiny these pies were!

Us with Daniel Rose after dinner!

We all had such a great night!  One thing I love about Europe is that going out to dinner is an event in itself.  You spend hours eating at the restaurant and drinking wine and no one is trying to rush you out the door to turn tables. After dinner, we were all so full so that we just decided to walk around Paris which was wonderful! (and good idea to burn off all the food and wine we consumed!)

Well it’s taken me a month, but I am finally writing my first post about my trip…

I went to Paris to visit Julie, my best friend from high school, who moved over there back in March. It just so happens that two more of my friends, Kyle & Maygan, moved to Paris at the same time.  For it being my first time visiting the city, it was so nice to have friends that live there, speak the language and already knew all the places to go besides the normal touristy stuff. We had so much fun and I took over a thousand pictures so here are just some highlights from the trip! 

Amazing!

Love the little hipster kid in his skinny jeans and chucks. Adorbs!

People really do just carry around baguettes everywhere. 

Notre Dame…

love.

Christmas card? 

At the George V hotel.  We spent a day cafe/bar hopping!

Only 25 euro/drink…. needless to say we only stayed for one round!

Julie spotted this and we couldn’t resist getting a pic of the newlyweds! Cuteness!

picnic at Versailles.

Sainte Chapelle was breathtaking. 

Julie and I at the Pompidou. The views from up there were amazing!

I had such a wonderful trip and I already want to go back!!  I’ll get around to posting a real album soon as well as posts about London.  Thanks Julie, Maygan & Kyle for showing me the best time!! 

So all the travel and weather changes have finally caught up with me.  Having a cold when it’s still in the 90’s here just doesn’t feel right! I stayed home from work today which hopefully will give me time to go through the 1500+ pics I took and get some of the good ones posted as well as a couple stories…

I get to Intercontinental, check in for my flight, drop my baggage off, was issued a boarding pass and headed to security like normal. I wait in the 30 min security line and of course the man in front of me has never showered in his life, he smells so bad. It’s finally my turn to show my passport and go through security. The TSA guy looks at me strange and starts asking me all these questions. “you’re traveling alone?” “this isn’t a round trip ticket?” then he says “the name on your passport doesnt match the name on your boarding pass.” I was like oh no!!! The Air France lady issued me some lady name Caroline’s boarding pass. Just great. Had to go all the way back to the ticket counter and get it fixed and go back through security. Good thing I got here 2 hours early. All is fine now and I’m off to Paris! Here’s to hoping the rest of the journey goes well!

Ok so I know I’m late to the party, but I just saw Crazy, Stupid Love last night. Can we just take a moment and bask in the hotness that is Ryan Gosling.  I’ve been a big fan of his for awhile but I don’t remember him being in this kind of shape back in the Notebook days.

Seriously, beautiful.

One of my fav parts of the movie was when Jacob (Gosling) is teaching Cal (Carell) how to dress.  He tells him to “be better than the gap”.  

So great!

Many guys need to take that advice. Most of my guy friends are just plain lazy when it comes to getting dressed. (not all of you!) I know it’s simply because they just don’t care. They throw on a typical striped button up, jeans, tennis shoes or cowboy boots and head out for the night.

 “Are you in a fraternity? Are you Steve Jobs, the billionaire CEO of Apple? No? Then you have no reason to wear New Balance shoes. Ever!” 

Guys, please invest in a pair of dress shoes. It does make a difference. We notice shoes. Actually, women notice a man who dresses well overall. You don’t have to dress crazy or trendy and it’s actually not that expensive to dress well. All we’re asking is for you to put a little bit of effort into what you wear. These guys I’m talking about are also the guys that sit around at the bar talking shit about what girls are wearing and making fun of the latest trends.  You have no room to talk if you don’t know how to dress yourself!  If you already dress well then next to think about is “manscaping”… eyebrows, nails, hair. All very important, but that’s an entirely different post. Until then, here are some inexpensive outfits from H&M that look nice. 

I finally joined the cool kids and got a tumblr.  I have a feeling this blog is going to be a lot of randomness. I’ll prob give you my insights on tv shows & movies, books, football, dating (or lack there of), baking, and my travels.  Oh, and I may throw in the occasional Potter posts from time to time….