Date Night

Friday marked the first of our "Date Nights". We have decided to implement these to give ourselves an excuse to get dressed up and go out. We thought that would be fun. We're unsure of how often these "Date Nights" will occur but we'd like to do them at least twice a month.
Our first "Date Night" began with dinner at Macaroni Grill.

-Brandon pulls aside Jess' computer and begins to type...-

Jess looked fantastic. She got all dressed up in this gorgeous slate color "greek dress" that she got at Banana Republic a week earlier. Her make-up was A++ and we were ready to hit the town. When we got to Macaroni grill the first thing that was said to us was "wow, you look so lovely,whats the occasion?" (hostess speaking to jess) They wanted to know if we were coming from some sort of special grownup dressy event. Little did they know,.. they WERE the event. We pulled out our camera as we ate dinner and took a few pictures, I think people thought we were a little weird, but we get that alot. They sat us at the closest table to the front that we could get to. It was seriously like ... " please follow me to your sea__ , BLAM! here you are, enjoy... "
Usually I get stuck in the back, where no one can see me,.. cause I look shabby,.. But this time, I was lucky enough to have Jess with me, so front row we go. After a delicious Chicken Parmesan and drawing all over our table with crayons we headed for our next destination, the Gaylord Hotel.
For anyone who lives locally within the Dallas area, I would have to fully recommend attending one of the many events held at the gaylord hotel in Grapevine, TX. We chose to attend a summer festival held at the Gaylord and boy was it festivally. When we first walked in to the HUGE indoor atrium we saw a golden cowboy sitting on a bench. A few people seemed to glance at it as they passed by, others seemed to take photographs of it. This cowboy was no ordinary statue my dear blog reading friends (you three know who you are..) it was a real person spraypainted all gold and he was freaky. Its one of those thing where you wanna go take a pic of him, but you dont, cause he is a real person, but you do cause its weird, but you dont cause other people are taking pics of him then leaving dollar bills in his coat pocket and YOU dont have any of those bills and you dont want to look like a cheap-o, but then again you want to cause.,... its just weird. So we did.
They had alot of things to entertain. They had Jugglers, Balloon Animal Blower-Uppers who like to check out other peoples fiances and tell them that marriage isnt happy, and they had a cool Arial Acrobats program too. It ran about 20 mins but starred one of the oddest looking characters ive ever seen. He wasnt very large but he was so muscley, he could provide shade from the sun for all of Africa under his amazingly chizzled rock hard abs. Totally showed me up in front of my beautiful date (dang..). Jess got a pink flower from Mr balloon man. We decided I needed a bumble bee balloon so we could make more flowers.

We wanted something manly for me to carry around. Everyone already had swords so either due to a lack of creativity or simply because cartoon looking bumble bees really are the second most manly thing next to a sword, we got the bee. We skipped the fireworks cause we would have to wait another half hour, it was hot outside, and it was almost 10pm, our designated time for "Titan Quest" game night we had scheduled with Cory.
The first "date night" was a great success as anytime spent together honestly is. We look forward to more "date nights" and the opportunities and experiences we will enjoy with one another.

Change in Plans

So there's been a slight adjustment in Brandon's and my plans for the next few months. Brandon had some small issues that arose preventing him from making the move to Florida possible this semester. He was set to attend Embry Riddle Aeronautical University on Monday but in light of recent events he will be there for the spring semester instead. But all is not lost for this semester. Quite the contrary in fact. Brandon is set to take a few courses at Northlake College that will transfer to Embry Riddle so he's not behind at all. He'll be where he's supposed to be come the spring semester. Plus he'll be saving like $15,000 in tuition and living expenses! How awesome is that?! Now he can plan everything he needs to for January. He has plenty of time to get everything set up. His car is in the shop due to an accident that occurred over the weekend. With his impending trip to Florida he didn't know how he was going to get his car to him but now with Florida being four months away he doesn't have to worry about it. Problem solved. So Brandon and I are going to stick around in Texas for awhile. He got his job back that he had last semester. As for me, I'm going to look into doing something with this degree I have thats been lying around collecting dust. It's going to be a tight squeeze with all of us packed into the Needs home but Brandon and I couldn't be more appreciative.

Our Adventure

Things were going so great with Brandon in New York that I just couldn't let him go back to Texas without me. So when I could finally go we checked the flights and decided that the only way we could get out was to get to Philadelphia somehow. Seeing as to how it was 4 hours away we weren't really sure how we were going to pull that off. Philadelphia seemed like a sure thing and since all the flights out of the nearest airports were full we decided to buy train tickets to Philly. Seemed simple enough.. and it was. We woke up at 5 and hopped the train which we took to another train where we took a cab to the airport. All things were going smoothly until I said "hey babe our adventure's almost over" and the next thing we knew two of the later flights were canceled and all the people from those flights were filling up the open seats on the ones we were listed for. Never ever fly standby. Ever.


So we waited around for a while to see if we could get out but it wasn't happening. Without panicking we discussed our options. We ended up finding a place to stay and woke up early the next morning to get to the airport for some mystery flight that was supposed to fly out all the people from the previous nights canceled flights. To our disappointment there was no such flight. So there we were at 3 o'clock in the morning stuck in the airport again. Only this time things didn't look good for us at all. We went through security and then found a place to sit down. Feeling hungry we grabbed some food and checked out the flights. They looked terrible. I looked at Brandon and said "we're not getting out today and it won't be any better tomorrow. Is there anywhere near here we can fly out of?" He told me about an airport his parents had mentioned and we checked it out. It was in Washington DC, 3 hours away! We looked at the flights and they looked great. But knowing how way gives into way we knew what could happen if we pursued this. We weighed our options but decided in the end that this was the best option. If we stayed in Philly, there was a good chance that we wouldn't be getting out for days and this was our only chance to possibly get out that day. We looked at rental cars with no avail so we checked out once again, train tickets. We had to make our decision quick.


We bought the tickets and boarded a train to the train station where we took two subway cars and a bus to the airport. We made it to the airport with just about enough time to make the flight we were aiming for. We hurried and made it through security just to get stuck waiting for a shuttle to take us to our gate. Once the shuttle doors opened we rushed through toward our gate just to find some passengers from another flight trying to get on this one. They had priority over us and would most likely take our seats. That was it. After two days of ups and downs and running around all over the place, trains and buses, taxi's, and subways...we needed to get on this flight or I was going to fall apart. The next flight looked good for us to get out but it was 4 hours later and we were both exhausted. Luckily we got on, we grabbed the last two seats and finally were headed to the place we had intended to arrive a day earlier.

"The truely happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery of a detour."- anon

About Us

We met through Brandon's sister Kristi. She worked with me at Kohl's and said she had this awesome brother that I just had to meet. Having heard this several times before from various other co-workers I didn't put too much thought into it. Upon my return to work from vacation I walked into the break room and saw a bunch of people crowded around a table with Kristi at the center of the group. Everyone looked up and laughed and said that they had something for me. It was the strangest email I had ever encountered. After I read it, I read it again. I brought it with me behind the service desk and kept it open and whenever I didn't have a customer I'd read it again. The email was from Brandon. The email was so crazy random and hilarious I knew that I just had to run home and respond to it so we could start talking. Well we became internet pen pals and he invited me to this ball and when we met it was as if we had known each other forever. A month later I found myself flying out to Texas (first time flying) to be with someone I had only met twice. It was a lot of fun, we just meshed so well. Fast forward a year and a half of long distance relationship and multiple flights back and forth and here we are.