ANNIVERSARY

Welp, here I am, much later than usual back to my blogging home. The move with our friends was as seamless as it could have been (considering we dealt with apartments on the 3rd and 2nd floors), but the husbands would probably beg to differ on the work load. Talk about body aches! For them, I mean. :(

Have any of you ever been to east Texas? Oh my gosh, I've never seen the part of this state so GREEN!! They live in a such pretty oasis. :)

Other news:

I almost forgot that Clay's and my anniversary was coming up after the move, but boy did that guy surprise me! He whisked me away from muling over my steamy stovetop full of food, told me to pack a bag with a swimsuit, one nice dress and a change of clothes, and didn't tell me where we were headed until we got to the JW Marriot Resort & Spa. GUYS. Dare I say I haven't felt this relaxed since our honeymoon? This man that I luckily live with is a winner.

If you're ever in San Antonio and want to feel truly spoiled, go to this resort. These people are amazing. They upgrade your room when they find out it's your anniversary, offer free celebratory dessert, send food from the restaurants up to your room just so you can have a taste sample, write handwritten thank you cards...the works. It sounds like I'm their marketing person the way I'm gushing.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel a bit like aged wine when I realize that I blinked, and all of a sudden two years of marriage is behind us. This man makes me laugh until my belly hurts (everyday), gives me huge bear hugs daily, prays with me every morning, cooks for me, and loves me unconditionally.

I have no idea how it started, but he's called me "Panda" for years now. Most likely because I look like this on any given day as I work, eat, and sleep.

Hope you all have had a great week so far!

SHRIMP FRIED RICE

Hey guys! My sweet friend taught me how to make some of THE BEST shrimp fried rice that's quick and easy, and I finally took the time to get it ready and share it with y'all.

Oh, and guess what? The same friend and her husband (who is my husband's best friend since the 5th grade) are moving today, so we're going to be on our way to help them tonight. We're going from San Antonio, to Midland (their old home), to Longview (their new home), and back to San Antonio from today until either Sunday or Monday. Whew, we have a loooot of driving ahead of us. I can't wait though, because words can't describe how much I love this couple.

Back to deliciousness.

Are you interested in the delicacy of shrimp fried rice?? I am, for sure.

Here's how ya do this:

Looks amazing, huh? It's so easy, too. Trust.

First things first, if you don't know the easy way to make rice (the stove takes way too long, folks), this tutorial is almost the exact way I make mine. The only differences are these:

1. I fill my rice with water and stick my hand down in the pot and swish the rice around to clean it better, then I used a plate (or something flat) to drain the water out of the rice.
2. I use 1 cup of water for every 1 cup of rice because I use a type of Jasmine rice that gets soggy if you use too much water. I just realized that my husband and I already gobbled up most of the rice and don't have the bag anymore, but the name is New Crop Jasmine Rice, I think. I buy mine at a Chinese oriental market in town.

Once you master cooking rice and become the rice pro that I know you're going to be, gather the following ingredients after you have your cooked rice waiting to be transformed into fried rice.

FYI, this is what chili crisp looks like:

This particular brand is amazing, and I made my friend personally pick it out at the oriental market for me.

Now--let's DO this!

Wahla! :)

I have a new piece of art I want to share, but unfortunately since we'll be lugging furniture across Texas, I think it'll have to wait until next week. It's this piece...

Oh! And since I'll be missing you guys tomorrow, here's two songs that I can't seem to get enough of. I've heard the first one years ago and used to have it as a happily annoying ringtone, and then I heard the other song while watching a tennis video. I thought the beginning was super nerdy, but when the guy started singing, I just fell in love.

Doesn't the first song's video make you giggle? Well...maybe I do because I used to play tennis since I was 13 until I was about 18. I'm all excited for tennis again because the hubs and I have been playing here and there lately. Unbelievably, we aren't spending every waking second chasing after balls.

Happy weekend, pretties! See you next week.

NYC: PART 5

I figured it's time to wrap up our trip from New York...umm, and I realized yesterday that I never completely finished posting the final shots from San Francisco absolutely forever ago. That'll be on the to-do list, won't it?

Here are shots that were mostly from the West Village. Such a pretty place.

Okay, well technically, these two photos are not in the West Village. These are:

Imagine a boy hollering at a girl leaning backwards in the crosswalk trying to snap pictures of plants against buildings. Yes, that was the sight of my poor husband trying to round up his wife.

The West Village is made up of such cute neighborhoods. I used to ache to live in the big city, but I think this Texas girl has become much too spoiled with a lot of spacious homes to roam in compared to the smaller square footage of New York homes.

This day, we were on our way to meet a friend that my husband hasn't seen since...the sixth grade, I think?? It was adorable to see the two reunite and recollect stories from sixth grade mishaps.

I didn't get a shot of the place we went to eat, which was called Tartine. I highly recommend it, if you're in the area! We were squished outside at a little table where the chairs were about to tumble off of a small ledge of concrete. The food made it worth being squashed. :)

New York, we'll see you again sometime!

OKLAHOMA

My thoughts and prayers are going out to everyone affected by the devastating tornado that hit Oklahoma.

Once again, I'm amazed by the human spirit and the helping hands and courage. My heart swelled when I heard about the teachers who used their own bodies to cover up their students as the tornado relentlessly ripped through an elementary school, the husband that also used his body to shield his wife in a home, and the elderly lady that tried to hold on to her dog as best she could while taking shelter in her bathroom, but lost in the storm. The woman found her sweet schnauzer under the rubble of her once-standing home while she was being interviewed, and to say I was touched is an understatement.

I'm thinking about you all and realizing again how precious life really is.

Here's to calm skies and joy in the future.

MY DARKER SIDE

Hey guys!

First off, sorry for the total lazy lack of posting on Friday. :(

Onto other news, this weekend was spent with my sweet in-laws and my husband, and we all ate outside a lot in the heat of the San Antonio sun (which I actually enjoyed, despite my inability to keep from sweating) and acted like total tourists. We toured the San Antonio Missions (gorgeous!), went window shopping--I'm thrilled that I finally was able to keep myself from lurching towards objects and instantly buying them, tried tons of different food, and of course moseyed along the River Walk.

Here's a little something that's unfinished, but I just wanted to share. It's a reflection of this, if you might recall.

I can't help but pair it with one of my favorite pair of heels. Raaawwr! <I'll stop being tacky in a minute. Wait. That's a lie, because I'm about to hurl myself into the pillows with my Subway sandwich in my left hand and an oversized Root Beer in the other and watch Game of Thrones with my husband and dog.

Did I mention that we were part of a heated debate revolving around Game of Thrones when we were at a dinner party with friends over the weekend as well? Yes, that happened. AND we had two females pull actual Game of Thrones books out of their purses. Which I (and the men) thought was awesome, but I guess will never be cool enough to begin doing. I don't even have any book in my purse for that matter. Probably better start doing that...

This is probably the "darkest" that I'm capable of, anyway.

Ciao!

BACK AT IT

Hey guys! I thought I would have time for a couple of posts when I needed to take a short trip back home, but of course that didn't go as planned. This is what I was up to:

I love that my parents live close to my aunt and uncle...they eat together all the time, so it was a treat to be with everyone and feast on home-cooked Filipino food. This was my fast shot on the phone trying to capture the storm clouds while I was sitting in the backseat of the car on the way to my aunt and uncle's house.

I always lug around things to do, in hopes that I'll actually get to them, but I usually don't when I go home. This time made it almost impossible because there were so many celebrations up in the air. :) Not a bad problem to have, if you ask me.

This is my parents on their honeymoon in 1982...I think in San Antonio if I'm correct! It's funny that my husband and I now live in San Antonio and probably accidentally stood in the exact area when they're having their picture snapped.

Anyway, here I am, back in San Antonio! Hopefully that means more regular posting to come...

What have you pretties been up to this week?

HAPPY (LATE) MOTHER''S DAY

Hope you all had a wonderful Mother's Day, pretty mamas.

For those of you that have a very difficult time with this time of year, please know that you're included as well, as this post says.

Lots of love from me to you, my dears.

AN UPDATE

I can't stop wiggling out of excitement. Two reasons why:

1. I'm heading over to this hole-in-the-wall place to gobble up the best enchiladas in town in seriously less than twenty minutes (I feel like I could eat an elephant at the moment), and
2. I'm almost finished with this painting that I had wanted to create for such a long time:

It's still really rough and the edges of the human form have little white specks of canvas showing through, but I thought it'd be fun to share anyway.

I was thinking it would be cool to have one or two palm leaves peeking out from the left corner of the canvas and barely overlapping my sister's arm, but Clay begs to differ and thinks it's good to go as is.

Any thoughts on the leaf dilemma? Such horrible problems, I know...

LITTLE CARDS

Hello! So yesterday, I actually painting like I promised myself I would. Cannot WAIT to show you a sneak very soon. :)

Meanwhile, I've had it in my mind to send tiny gifts to a friend and her sweet little girl since February, and I finally found a box and made little cards to accompany the gifts. Now if only I can find a way to drag myself to the post office...

By the way, this plant leaf amazes me. It's held onto life since it was part of this bouquet all the way in the middle of March. It's a trooper.

OVER THE WEEKEND

Wow, we dove into this weekend and didn't stop exploring until the very end. I never realized San Antonio has a gorgeous gem called San Pedro Springs Park that's tucked away in the center of the city. I can't wait to swim there when it gets hot enough...actually, I wonder if people even swim there any more? At the very least, I'm excited to pack up a few tubes of paint and some brushes and get to work on a new painting with the view of the water in front of me.

We also found a pretty lake to go fishing at. You're only allowed to catch fish that are over 18 inches long, and they're feisty to say the least. Xena freaked out uncontrollably and wanted to swim in the cold water, and after coaxing from fellow fisherman, we let her go off in the water, snorting, shivering, and paddling. Of course, she managed to grab somebody's catch and shake it like a rag doll, and I tried to catch her in the water like an overprotective helicopter mom. I didn't see the line from a pitched tent, tripped mid-run, flew through the air like and eagle, and then dove face-first into the dirt. Embarrassing,  you ask? Yes. Painful? Definitely. I asked my husband if it hurt when he was hit in football as a high schooler, and he answered "yes" in a way that states the obvious about the pain of a contact sport.

I suppose, I tell myself, this must be what it's like to play football.

Anyway, more photos of that to come. Not me in the dirt, of course. I just have shots of uneventful things that seem to make my dog lose her cool, like the gentle lapping of waves.

Here are details of San Pedro, however. Xena was acting much more lady-like here:

My husband laughs when I excitedly yell, "We are explorers of the new world!!" Oh well. I DO feel like an explorer in places like this.

That sun in combination with the palms and water make my knees weak.

Beautiful patterns danced around us in the perfect temperatures.

I'll have to show you expansive shots of the springs. It's so big! I wanted to jump right in.

...like this girl did!

Xena tried to make a jump for it also. Go figure.

It's quite the little paradise, no?

Did you go and explore things over the weekend?

MAST

Oooh, Friday! I've been waiting for you!

Last night already felt like the weekend. The weather was taking turns with storms, heat, and super cold air, and I decided to stay bundled up in the house almost the entire day.

When my husband got back from work, we decided to get lazy and pick up Subway sandwiches for dinner, then we curled in bed with the dog and watched Cloud Atlas. I had wanted to see it for a pretty long time now, and besides being a little bit confused at the beginning of the movie, we really ended up liking it.

My husband will most likely want to quietly strangle me for revealing this, but we usually like to take out one night a week to eat Subway in bed while watching Downton Abbey...but since it's not out, we haven't been doing that as often.

Anyway. It's been AGES since I've done art with a story (with a soundtrack included), so I'm excited to show you a piece that I had been frustrating me to no end since snow was on the ground. I would take it out of the closet, rework it, stick my tongue out in disgust, and put it back on the shelf. Today, when I was about to add blush colors and rework it once again, I stepped back and realized that I think it's finally reached its stopping point. It's now happily placed on the wall in our living room, and I couldn't love it more.

This one's called Mast. Listen to Pi's Lullaby to get a better feel for it.

Sophie squinted at the muddy canvas that was sitting less than one foot away from her rounded face, eye-level. In frustrated motions, her toes kicked up the sand under her squeaky, unstable chair holding her tiny, feminine frame.

Sophie’s annoyance was reaching its height as she squeezed the last of the white tube of paint onto the canvas when an old, wrinkled brown hand touched her sunburned shoulder. Turning around, Sophie looked into the deep brown, hooded eyes of the old woman.

The woman motioned at the canvas, shuffling closer to the smooth splatters in her hunched and slow movements.

“Aah-pee,” the woman whispered with a toothless grin, smiling at Sophie.

“I’m sorry, I don’t underst—“

“Aaaah-pee,” the woman said again, taking Sophie’s hands, dragging them along the canvas and then placing them on Sophie’s chest. The old woman smiled, removing her old hands from Sophie’s, which remained over her heart.  Blowing a small kiss by touching her weathered lips with two fingers, the woman turned from Sophie and the painting and went on her way.

Months later, while staring at the dried paint on the canvas in the light of her living room, Sophie realized what the old woman meant. Happy. Sights and emotions like this truly did make her happy, and it was worth every try after try.  

NYC: PART 4

Today I'm sharing one of the biggest highlights of our trip. Being a bona fide art fart, I was more than enthusiastic to get to finally see the Museum of Modern Art and see famous paintings in person that I had only read about in books since I was in the 7th grade.

You can't really begin to imagine my excitement when we realized that we could get in for free if we just waited less than half and hour in a line wrapping around numerous buildings near the MOMA. We arrived at 4:00 PM, just in time to be told about this exciting news happening at 4:30 PM. I imagined the wait would have been longer, so while we were in line, I saw a Starbucks and thought it'd be nice to enjoy a cinnamon dulce latte while standing in line.

Problem was, right when I ordered the drink, my husband called and let me know the line had already lurched its way up around an entire building, rounding the block. So of course, I pretty much grabbed a man behind me, practically screaming if he liked cinnamon dulce lattes. Startled, he nodded. I blurted out, "Okay-great-my-name's-Danielle-and-you-can-have-it!!!" Yes. It did sound like a yelled-out run-on sentence.

I dashed back toward my hubs, who was only a few feet away from the museum entrance by this point.

With our free tickets in our hands, this is what we saw:

Technically, this is actually what we saw before we found out about the free tickets. I don't know if the MOMA does it all the time, but we got those babies at no cost at 4:30 PM on a Friday.

While the guy was asking about tickets, I ventured a few feet away looking backwards from the main desk and took photos like a tourist. My husband was a little uneasy about his photo-fanatic wife snapping away in a museum, but it turned out they totally allow it. :) No flash, people.

Okay. HERE is where we started to see stuff after the freebee:

That man in the window almost tricked me for a piece of art, until he moved and somewhat scared me. I think we ended up taking shots of each other. Now that I think about it....we didn't venture over to those stairs. Dang it.

We didn't have time to explore this courtyard, either. We had a show to see at 8:00 that night ("Lucky Guy" with Tom Hanks) that was offered by a friend, so we were kinda hasty.

We did slow down for the architectural things, though.

And we slowed our pace for the 5th floor, where the masters' works were located.

Embarrassingly, tears started to swell up in my eyes when I saw this Monet in person. I'm not sure why...I guess it felt so real to see it in person, and it's like I could feel the emotion in his pieces. Maybe I was affected like that because his style is a type that I absolutely adore.

...along with this style!

And van Gogh's style, in addition to his words that he wrote to his brother.

This was another piece that I've adored from afar in books.

We got through the museum in less than a couple of hours, which is extraordinary for me, considering I spent 2+ hours in ONE ROOM during the Andy Warhol exhibit in Little Rock, Arkansas. My sister, who was with me at that time, was bored to death, to say the least.

I know we missed out on other great museums that New York has to offer, but someday we'll get to those also. The MOMA, in my opinion, is a must-see.

Have you ever been to the MOMA??

NYC: PART 3

I somehow forgot how famous the New York Public Library is. My husband joked that if a girl says, "Oh! This is where Carrie almost got married," she's probably high-maintenance...or something like that.

Of course, that was immediately after I blurted out the same phrase when I saw the inside of the building.

Unfortunately, all my inside photos turned out dark and sad (the above one doesn't even really cut it), so let's focus on the more than beautiful exterior.

I couldn't believe how massive everything was, from the doors, to the light fixtures, the stairs, and all. 

And those details! They were impeccable. 

Don't you want to reach out and run your fingers on the intricacies? Being a goody two shoes, I didn't. I think I'm always afraid someone will yell at me if I try. Or maybe that's because my inner artist self knows it's a no-no to touch originals or ancient things. 

If you're a bookworm, or you just want to know more about the library, here's a little bit of reading. :)