Daily Devotion

Recently I've started to really feel the pressure from over-commitment. I've always been busy, always over scheduled and can usually handle it. Cheerleading tryouts took place last week along with graduate school registration and deadlines for my paperwork to keep up my teaching license. I felt really overwhelmed and I ended up giving up my exercise time last week in order to get everything accomplished. I really enjoy working out and hate skipping workouts because I take on too much. Yesterday morning I woke up to find the following devotion:

"I am afflicted with the cultural plague of busy-ness. Trying to find time each ay to write, walk, meditate, or make art and work makes it painfully obvious how busy I am. While I would not call myself a workaholic, I do tend to keep moving and I keep busy. " -Disciplines: A Book of Daily Devotions 2010


The devotion continued on to talk about God's presence in our lives and even though we are busy we can still find him in all of our activities. The author continued to discuss that his biggest spiritual problem is forgetting. Forgetting that God is with him all of the time. I too think this is my greatest challenge. At the end of the devotion the author provides several questions to ponder. One being, "When has God crashed into your life?" Just by reading that day's devotion, God crashed into my life. I've decided to take time each morning to read and pray and slow down. I can continue to stay busy and feel renewed as long as I remember that God is always there. If I make a priority to spend time each day, I know that things will fall into place.

Starting Again

So I've decided that I'm not so good at this blogging thing but am still going to keep trying! Maybe one day it will stick! So let's start with this past weekend...

May marks graduation time and we had two graduations to celebrate over the weekend. On Saturday we went to a graduation party for our friend Ben. We had a great time catching up with friends we hadn't seen in a while.

Unfortunately on our way to Ben & Alice's, my phone got crushed. Concerned I would be without a phone for an entire two days, my wonderful father headed to the apple store only to find out that the phone was two weeks shy of my contract renewal date and could only be replaced at full price... yikes!

On Sunday, Jay and I packed up and headed to Winston-Salem to celebrate my little sister's graduation from Wake Forest. Still concerned about my phone, I spend the morning at the at&t store convincing the sales people to let me renew my contract early and get a new phone. Thank goodness it worked! Unfortunately my visit to the store was not in our plans for the graduation weekend itinerary and we ended up leaving Charlotte much later than expected (although, what's new? my middle name should be Late). We missed the first party of the weekend, Allie's HES major's reception, but made it in time to check into the hotel and meet my Grandpa and Susan. We hurried to get changed and freshen up and headed to Allie's house for a cookout. We had fun meeting Allie's boyfriend's sisters, drinking keg beer, and playing corn hole.

Next up on the list of events was her sorority party at the Graylyn Estate. We had a great time celebrating graduation with her sorority sisters and their families. They had a band and Allie and I had a great time dancing. I miss college!!!

The actual graduation took place on Monday morning. The weather was rainy and dreary and the graduation had to be moved inside for the first time since 1995. I'm not going to lie. The ceremony was long and boring. Good thing I had my new phone to keep me occupied :) After graduation ceremony we headed to yet another party. This was for all of the Wake Forest athletes. We had fun meeting Allie's athletic/academic advisor and touring her study hall area (her second home). The weather cleared up for just a bit and we were able to take some cap and gown pics.

After the party we headed to Allie's house to start packing her things.


A celebratory dinner with our family and Ryan's finished out an awesome graduation weekend. Jay and I were exhausted and happy to return to Charlotte.

love love love

I've been using Picasa (free from google) to manage and edit all of my pictures. This morning, 30 minutes before leaving for Asheboro to visit with his family for mother's day, Jay informs me that he needs a picture of us printed for him to take with him. ta da- picasa. I could easily choose the picture and sync it with cvs' online photo ordering and it will be ready for him to pick up on his way, all before the coffee was done! Ya for technology! Anyhow more pics to come from our mother's day celebrations :) Happy Mother's Day!

Trying out the *NEW* old camera!

Sophie & Boomer Pics plus a few of my handyman painting the new trim around the garage doors. I <3 Saturdays.

Trying out the *new* old camera!

Sometimes its the little, err um big things....

Today has been a GREAT Friday. For one, its spring break for grad school and I get to enjoy a project/homework free weekend. Next, after the most boring faculty religion in service, I enjoyed a lunch of champagne and hibachi with my favorite teacher friends. I came home to find two brand new garage doors installed at my house. Now this might now sound super exciting to you but Jay and I cannot contain ourselves. Our old garage doors were original to the house build in 1966, a yucky blue color (the same color as our shutters, which are on the replacement list also), wooden and rotting. They were old, heavy, and MANUALLY operated! We have a huge garage but never parked in it due to the annoying garage doors. We now have pretty white garage doors with electric openers. I sat in my car in amazement pressing the button putting the door up and down. Bliss. Now I just have to practice not wrecking my car into the side of the garage. My Dad suggested the bumpers that people with babies put on their brick fireplaces. I might just look into that idea :)



Friday concluded with my parents taking me out to dinner while Jay hung out with some college friends. I enjoyed the BEST peanut butter ice cream from Lorenzo's Pizza in Ballentyne. It's peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter and caramel swirls and chunks of peanut butter cookie dough. YUM! Jay and I decided to hang out at home tonight and prepare for our "cornhole day party" tomorrow and Sara's birthday dinner tomorrow night. Hope your Friday was as good as ours!

Catching up

Soooo its definitely been a long time since I've blogged so I thought I would do a quick update of our lives since returning from vacation last November!

November

I turned 25 and celebrated at Press Wine Bar with the girls, my mom, and my aunt who flew in from Texas. We had a great time over a few bottles of wine!

December

Busy as always! We hosted our first Christmas in our new house. Jay's Mom and Grandparents came and stayed with us for a few days. My sister's both spent the night on Christmas Eve and we even slept in the basement on an air mattresses for old time's sake :) We had a great time celebrating together with our families.

New Years

We celebrated the new year with friends and family with a night out uptown. We had fun with everyone but decided that we're pretty much over the going out thing and are planning to host our own party next year!

January

The new year has brought about much craziness in our home. During the peak of the cheerleading competition season I decided to take on my first semester of graduate school by taking on 6 hours of classes. Needless to say, school and work are pretty much consuming my life! I didn't realize how time consuming it would be. I'm thankful that I have an AMAZING husband who keeps our house clean (dusted and vacuumed!). After shrinking a few of my dry clean only sweaters, he has learned how to do laundry and now even knows which jeans get dried and which need to be hung! It's so nice to come home and all the chores are done!

We also enjoyed our first snow in our new house. Sophie, our Wheaten Terrier, is so funny in the snow. She tries to attack it while eating it at the same time. Unfortunately, during the first snow she got loose while I was taking her out in Jay's snow boots and my bathrobe. Our neighbors got a good laugh watching me chase her around the neighborhood.


We had hoped to get away together for some skiing at SnowShoe but unfortunatley that didn't happen as most of our weekends were spent out of town at cheerleading competitions. While Jay spent time with his family, I did manage to sneak in a quick girls ski trip with Mary Clare and Kathryn. Unfortunately, the wind chill was 4 degrees and we FROZE... Here we are doing the only thing we could to endure the cold!


Determined to keep our new years resolutions of spending more time together and exercrising, we did take up a new hobby together. spin class. We've been pretty faithful about attending 5:30am spin sessions at the Y and would love to start training for the Breakaway to the Beach Ride for MS in September, a 100 mile ride that starts in Charlotte and ends in Myrtle Beach. We'll keep you posted!

February

Another busy month. I think the highlight of the month was getting out of the house to see Valentine's Day. While I've been busy with school and work, Jay has enjoyed his management role at Norfolk Southern. His employees work four 10 hour shifts and they all get to enjoy Fridays off. Jay's been great by spending his time off improving our house. My favorite new improvement is the installation of new doors in our upstairs hallway. Finally the original hollow wood color doors of the 1960s are gone! Jay's also gotten very good at making "real" fires. After growing up with gas logs, this took us some time getting used to but we love it! We've enjoyed making smores in the fireplace.

March

Jay turned 25 on March 9th. He was able to spend the entire weekend with his family in Asheboro and I was able to escape my graduate school group project for a few hours and spend one night with him in Asheboro. Jay is just like a kid on his birthday and he makes me laugh. His favorite gifts were his new cell phone and blueray player (his list sounds a lot like my middle school kids!). He has been playing on his phone ever since and has stopped telling me to get off of mine :) A highlight of the month has been our decision to get netflix. Jay, the avid movie watcher, is in heaven. His first blueray disk came in this week and he was so excited to show me the "amazing life-like" picture.

Both of my sisters were on Spring Break last week and my Mom surprised us with a girls long weekend cruise to the Bahamas. We were lucky to spend one night docked at the port in the Bahamas and able to enjoy an entire day at the Atlantis Resort. Even though the weather was cloudy, we had such a fun time playing on the waterslides. We will definitely have to return for a longer stay.

Looking Forward

We've get a lot of fun and exciting things coming up. I'm competing in my first sprint triathlon at the end of March and training for a half-marathon in April. Jay is getting ready to take the GMAT and hopes to begin graduate school in the spring. We've got some great vacations planned in the next few months and are just enjoying spending time together with our pups. Check back for updates!

Verana Day Four 11.1.09

Good morning! I know we're a little behind in blogging. Having too much fun! We'll try to catch you up quickly before we head to breakfast. After breakfast we're going in to stay at hotel lagunita and we doubt we'll have internet access. So you probably won't here from us until we arrive in PV.

So anyhow, Day Four:

We woke up early and enjoyed our tea and juice. They bring it up every morning before you wake up. We then got our suits on and went to breakfast. I had the a bagel with cream cheese and lox while Jay ate maple walnut pancakes. We also split our favorite dish, the breakfast tacos. YUM! After breakfast we went up to get all of our hiking stuff and went into town. It was a 45 minute walk to get there but we had fun along the way.

We walked through the town to the waterfalls, which were very impressive! Jay didn't want to get in but was glad he did the end. The water was chilly (Jay says 45 degrees, I say 68...) but it was fun nevertheless.

After the waterfalls we continued through the village and onto the beach. Along the way we saw all of the children getting out of school. They all have to wear uniforms here, plaid pants for boys and dresses for girls. It was interesting to see a middle school aged girls wearing a hollister hoodie over her uniform. Another girl was carrying a Hannah Montana bookbag. Funny how americanized a small fishing village has become!

We layed on the beach in our favorite chairs at Chico's restaurant. Jay had the yummy fish tacos for lunch and I wasn't super hungry. I began reading twilight, and I am now hooked... After a few hours at the beach we began the hike back to Verana. Its long and uphill. We hiked straight to the pool and dove in! After swimming a bit we went to the room to get showered. At 6pm we had a couples massage. It was great and very relaxing.

No time to finish anymore. Must eat. See you soon!

Love,
Jay and Anni

Verana Day 3

Hello! Sorry no blog yesterday, the internet was down for most of the day. We're getting ready for a hike into the village but we wanted to update you all on yesterday's adventures. We'll post pictures from yesterday when we get back this afternoon.

We slept in a little and went down to the restaurant for breakfast. Two couples were checking out and so there were only three couples here yesterday. We pretty much have the resort to ourselves! Along with our new friends, Rachel and Max, we took the Verana boat into the village for the day. The hike to the village beach takes about an hour but its only 2 minutes across the bay by boat.

Once in the village we went to visit or next hotel, Lagunita. The pool there is amazing, sort of like a natural infinity pool overlooking the bay. Our room there is definitely not 5 star but I think we'll be ok. After viewing the hotel we walked along the beach. A man with an iguana came by and placed it in Jay's hands while I snapped a picture. Later did we find out that each picture was $3. Fun fun. We warned the other Verana guests to stay away from iguana man.

We continued down the beach and surveyed the scene. We decided to walk back towards the hotel to a restaurant called Chicos. They had these really cool lounge chairs that had screens to shield your face from the sun. Take that wrinkles! Rachel, Max, Jay and I layed out for a good three hours and drank mucho cervasas. At $2 a beer this was a steal compared to the resort prices. Rachel had a spa appointment in the afternoon so we headed back to enjoy the rest of the day at the Verana pool!

We swam for awhile then went back to the Palapa to get ready for dinner. Dinner last night was just ok. The executive chef had his day off. You wouldn't beleive the things I'm trying! Stuffed chile peppers anyone? After dinner we toured all of the other rooms at the resort. They are all sooooo unique. I think we made a good choice with the Palapa. We went back down to the bar for a nightcap and then everyone retired back to their rooms as we were exhausted from the sun!

We after the day in Yelapa today, we are going come back to the resort for a couples massage! Can't wait! Hope everyone is doing great! Don't forget to email us or comment on the blog!

Love,
Jay and Anni

Verana Day 2

 







Today we woke up to the most amazing view.








I went up to the library to sit in the sun and read before breakfast while Jay slept. Around 10:30 we headed down to the restaurant for breakfast. We had the BEST breakfast tacos and fresh fruit. After breakfast we went back to the room and I read while Jay went back to sleep. He is really taking this relaxing things seriously! Around 3:00 we went up to the poolside restaurant for lunch. We had the best shrimp ceviche followed by thai beef salad. We finished with kiwi sorbet.


After lunch we decided to hit the pool. Our margaritas were made with local moonshine... and they definitely tasted like it :0 We enjoyed laying around and planning our day tomorrow. We tested out the waterproof camera and it was a success! Here are several pics from the pool.








We're going to head to dinner in a few. Another guest went fishing today and caught a huge mahi-mahi. The chef has been slowly grilling it all day. Yum! After dinner we've talked with some other guests about heading in to the "dance" club in town to hang out with all the locals. Its supposed to be really fun however its a 45 minutes hike to get there! We'll see :) Hope your having fun! WE ARE!

First Day at Verana

Looks like we are able to get wi-fi. We couldn't connect yesterday so we'll see how this goes. Loading pictures may be a problem…









Let me start with yesterday's activities. Our flights were great, on time, and on continental airlines they still serve meals. We arrived at the PV airport at 2:00 and waited in the immigration line. Everyone had to take a turn standing in front of this lady who had a weird camera looking device... turns out it was a thermometer and they weren't letting people with fevers enter the country (H1N1). Luckily we were 98.6 :).





Next we passed through customs and headed to find some $$ and a taxi. We stopped at the ATM machine to get our pesos and negotiated a fare to drive us to Boca De Tomatlion. The taxi ride was scary but we made it here alive! We arrived at Boca De Tomatilon, which means mouth of the river, at 3:45. Our boat didn’t leave for Verana until 4:00 so we sat down at a little restaurant on the pier and had yummy nachos and coronas.
















While in Boca we watched several water taxis pull up to get supplies. It was cool how much local product is used in everything around here. It is extremely difficult for cars to get around here so building materials are brought over by boat. The Verana water taxi pulled up to the pier and the driver came to get us and carried our bags to the boat. We met Rachel and Max from Sacramento, who are also on they’re way to Verana. The ride to Verana was amazing. The scenery is beautiful and in addition, we save dolphins, a whale, and a flying fish. Not bad for the first hour of our trip :)












We arrived at Verana and were greated by our host and several mules. Our luggage was strapped to the mules and we begun the 15 minutes hike up to Verana. I thought we were in good shape, evidently not. We were definitely out of breath at the top. We were greated by Coco, the resort manager, with snacks, a cocktail, and cold towels for our neck. She showed us around the property and up to our rooms.








The property is amazing. I can’t describe it in words so hopefully the pictures will convey how spectacular it is. We are situated on top of a mountain, surrounded by jungle, looking over the bay. The view is indescribable. Verana is very tranquil and relaxing. Check out the video at the bottom of the page to see the room. I'll post more videos of the rest of the resort later!
















Our luggage arrived in our room and we unpacked. We weren’t sure what to do next. This place doesn’t really have a lot to do. The point is to really relax. We ended up laying around in the lounge chairs and soaking it all in. Around 6:45 we showered and got ready for dinner. The shower is completely outdoors and the temperature outside was somewhere in the low seventies, needless to say, I was freezing! There is no humidity so getting ready was pleasant.





We headed down to the bar for drinks and to socialize with the other guests. The bar area was a lot of fun and it was nice to meet everyone. There are only eight couples staying at the resort and two leave today (Saturday) and no one else checks in until Monday. We were served appetizers, not really sure what they were but we ate them and they were delicious. Manny, our server announced it was time for dinner and we all took our seats. The tables are all set for two so we threw them for a loop when we decided to eat with Rachel and Max. They told us that most of the time guests don’t really interact that much. Once seated we were served mahi mahi and tuna shashimi (sushi). Yum! We ended up having a delicious dinner of steak and potatoes in a red wine reduction. Delicious!!! Key lime pie was served for dinner and Jay was in heaven!





After dinner we hung out around the bar with our new friends as well as another couple and most of the hotel staff. We had fun hearing all of their stories about the resort and Yelapa (the town we’re staying in). After a few drinks we headed back up to our room. I had the best sleep ever! The weather was perfect and almost chilly and the view this morning was incredible.





I’m going to wake Jay up now and head to breakfast. More later!

It's 1:48 and we're going to bed!

We're finally all packed! We're heading to the airport at 5:30am (after 4 hours of sleep). Here are few pics taken with our *new* camera!

Our Itinerary is set! (Finally!)

Yay! I just finished booking all of our hotel reservations, stopping the paper and mail, getting an international cell phone plan, and booking our zipline tour! Here's our itinerary:

Friday Nov 6-
We'll begin making our trip to PV :) Once we arrive in PV, we'll take a taxi from the airport to Boca De Tomatlan. From there we'll board our boat and head to the first resort, VERANA . We should arrive at the resort around 5:00pm.

Flight CO2343: Departs Charlotte @ 7:55am. Lands in Houston @ 9:43am.
Flight CO1838: Departs Houston @ 11:35am. Lands in PV @ 2:14pm.


Saturday Nov 7-
Verana

Sunday Nov 8-
Verana

Monday Nov 9-
Verana

Tuesday Nov 10- (Bo's Birthday!)
Verana

Wednesday Nov 11- (Big Jay's Birthday!)
We'll switch hotels today. We're going to head into the town of Yelapa (around the bay from Verana) and stay at Hotel Lagunita.

Thursday Nov 12-
Hotel Lagunita

Friday Nov 13-
We're planning to take the 7:30am water taxi back to PV today. We're going to land at the beach at Rosita's Hotel and walk a few blocks to our hotel, Villa Premiere.
At 11:30am we're going to take a cab to the Vallarta Marina and meet up with our Outdoor Adventure zipline tour! We're going to be boating, hiking, atving, ziplining, and repelling.











Saturday Nov 14-
Villa Premiere


Sunday Nov 15-
Sadly we'll be leaving Mexico today :(

Flight: CO1582: Departs PV @ 9:00am. Lands in Houston @ 11:21am
Flight: CO3048: Departs Houston @ 12:50. Lands in Charlotte @ 4:07

Getting ready for Mexico!

Welcome to our blog, we're using this as a way to help us remember all of the fun we have while on vacations! After our last two trips we've realized the we pretty much forget all of the fun details and want to use this blog as an "online scrapbook".

We're now only four days from our trip! Can't wait to be somewhere warm and away from everything! Check back for updates!