Winter Wonderland

I've had quite a few people ask me if the snow has melted yet or what it is like, so I thought I would post an update. We haven't had any new snow for a couple of weeks now. But all the snow that we have received so far (probably 8-10 inches) is still here since we haven't been above freezing for a long time! The roads are completely clear thanks to the plows and the salt they put down that helps melt the snow and ice. There are huge piles of snow all along the roads and business entrances where the plows push all the snow to. And unfortunately, the snow along the roads is totally black and gross. The snow on the hills and unwalked areas is still really pretty and white - but it is covered in little animal tracks everywhere. hehe I've been seeing the bunnies a lot lately!

It's been a "mild" week which means we've actually gotten to 30 degrees. It's amazing how big of a difference you can feel when it gets to the 30s! But it still gets quite chilly when the sun goes down (around 4:30pm!)! And in case you were wondering, even on the single digit days I still saw the Salvation Army people ringing the bell outside the stores! I stopped by the grocery store today and the guy ringing the bell outside was doing some sort of little happy dance while he rang the bell to stay warm. :)

Today and one day last week - we got a frost overnight. Basically they said the moisture from the humidity and fog in the air basically forms a frost on everything. It wasn't very extreme this morning, but last week is was absolutely beautiful!!! Looking around - it was completely white everywhere! Michael was able to catch some pictures before he left for work, so here they are!

The Hills Are Alive.....

...with The Sound of Music!!!! :) (yes I sang that in my head as I typed it) Today, I got my Christmas present from Michael! He took me to see The Sound of Music in downtown St. Paul!! As most of you know, Michael is not a huge fan of musicals, so it was really a treat and fun gift that he took me to see one of my most favorite shows! Oh gosh, it was so good. It was all I could do to keep myself from singing along every song. I kept telling Michael "I wish our life was a musical!" On the way home Michael admitted that this was the best production he had ever seen! :) All the acting and singing were wonderful and the set was just beautiful!

After the show, we walked around the area called Rice Park which was right in front of the theater. They had it all decorated with tons of Christmas lights and decorations - it was just beautiful. We walked around and took pics for as long as we could take the 15 degree weather but it was just too much. So, we scurried back to the car with multiple numb body parts. Burr.

Entrance to the Ordway Theater in St. Paul

I don't know what bldg this is, but it looked pretty ;)

Michael with the Nutcracker

Me in front of the pretty park area all lit up

One of the huge lighted trees we saw

Michael with Charlie Brown & Snoopy :)

In front of the outdoor ice skating rink

Merry Christmas!

Fun with new friends

This past weekend we had a really great time with our new friends! Friday night, we had a birthday/pizza party for this guy named Robbie in our young adults group. The group is so nice and has totally welcomed us with open arms. We still get a few Texas jokes and questions, but overall they have treated us like they've always known us. I can't really describe to you how great of a feeling that is. When we got to Jim & Heather's house that night, everyone even hugged us hello! And if you know me, then you know I'm a big hugger. hehe :) After pizza and cake, we played Outburst and us girls lost to the boys! boo! In all seriousness, we just feel so thankful to have a great group to socialize with and share our faith with.

Then Saturday night, we went to Becky's house for a Christmas dinner with her, her new guy Brendan, her sister Stephanie, and Stephanie's fiance Kyle. Everyone was so nice! Dinner was super yummy and after we played Scene It. It was actually our first time to play that game and wouldn't you know the most competitive couple there (guess who) came in dead last. haha Oh well, it was another really fun night!

Well, now that I've eaten my bowl of ice cream while watching The Biggest Loser, it's time for bed! (haha) But here are a few pics from the dinner at Becky's:

Becky with her yummy homemade desserts

Me and Becky

Michael with Stephanie and Kyle

Another day, another snow!

Let me summarize the day for you.....I looked out the window this morning at 6:15am and it was snowing. I look out the window right now at 9:00 pm and it is STILL snowing! They predicted another 3-5 inches just for today, on top of the 5 1/2 inches we got over the weekend. I am guessing we are around the 4-5 inch mark just for today b/c it's snowed pretty hard all day long!

Luckily, Michael and I chose to carpool to work today b/c we knew what the forecast held - and boy was it a good decision. Not all the roads got plowed - plus the snow just kept coming too fast. None of the roads we drove home on were plowed, so it was a very messy and slow ride home. But Michael drove really safe and we made it home safe and sound!

And being the big kids we are, we had to walk to go eat dinner somewhere, just so we would have an excuse to go out in it. We are still in the amazed phase where we can't believe we live somewhere that is getting so much snow! We are really trying to appreciate and take advantage of the fact that we get to have a snowy winter for once (even though it's still Fall technically!). And would you believe they are calling for another couple of inches on Thursday and then more this weekend???! :D

Anyways, we just walked to the restaurant just next to our apartment complex, but down the street just a bit. Some of the pics aren't very easy to see us in b/c the snow is still coming down pretty hard! (And if I'm making wierd faces in any of the pics, it is because it was freaking cold and the snow was blowing into my eyes making me flinch.) haha

In the restaurant "parking lot"

Showing how deep the snow is - my feet are somewhere under all the snow!

Michael jumping feet first

Deep snow in front of our apartment

Entrance to our apartment building

Pretty pines in front of our apartment

Side courtyard entrance to our building - you can see where the sidewalk once was

First Snow!

We just had our first MN Winter Storm! The news said Eden Prairie got 5.5 inches! It is so beautiful and we've had such a fun day experiencing our first winter snow!

We got up around 8:45 this morning and it literally has snowed all day long...some heavy, some light, big flakes, tiny flakes, and some occasional sleet. We stayed in for a while and then just couldn't take it anymore. We just had to go outside and enjoy it! We walked around our apartment building to the back side where we weren't all that visible and then made some snow angels. :) hehe Michael attempted to make the bottom of a snow man but the snow was just too fluffy to roll into a ball.

Later in the afternoon I began to make some cookies and realized I didn't have enough sugar. So we bundled back up and walked to the dollar store that is in front of our apartment complex. Then tonight for dinner, we walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. It was SO fun to walk through the crunchy snow. I know we won't always feel this excited for this kind of weather, but our first time in it has been really exciting. :)

We took tons of pictures, so here are some that show the progression of it all:

The view when we woke up - looking off our balcony

Around noon time

Around 2 or so

After the snow plough trucks came through parts of the parking lot

Trees across the street - good pic of the snow coming down!

Michael starting the snow angel

An angel in disguise ;)

Me getting to wear my snow boots for the first time (thanks Mom!)

On our walk around the apartment building; to the right is the parking lot of the bowling alley

Nighttime shot with no flash - it is still super light outside b/c of all the snow

Neat pic with the flash that only shows the nighttime snow

Chilly Week

Well we have officially had our first cold week in MN...Burr.

Tuesday morning as I was getting ready for work, Michael called me into the living room where he was standing in front of our thermometer (that has a unit outside to measure the temperature) with the local weather on tv and says "This thing says it's 7 outside." ?? We both stared at it for a while trying to figure out why there wasn't another digit in front of the 7. Then we accepted the reality, and we just started laughing with a panicked look on our faces. haha

It's actually bearable as long as the wind isn't blowing. We went out last night to the church to meet with our young adults group, and afterwards we were helping some people load stuff in their car and this huge gust of wind came. One of the girls yelled "Why do we live here?!?!?!" I yelled back "I don't know!!!!" :) When we got home, the local weather said the wind chill was -1. Yep, that would explain it. So basically 2 out of the 4 nights of this week I have gone on last minute sweater shopping trips. But it has been fun to wear my new scarf and gloves! hehe

And to prove how cold it is…..we have sliding glass doors in our living room. Well there is condensation on the inside of one of the doors just from the heater and stuff. Well the condensation is freezing now (INSIDE our apartment) b/c even though it is 68 inside our apartment, the door that the condensation is on is just THAT cold! Yikes.

They are predicting our first snow for this weekend. They said 3-6 inches in possible. We are so hoping it snows! Plus, it would be super fun b/c we would actually be at home and be able to watch it all day! We shall see!

And a HAPPY Thanksgiving It Was!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! Let me begin by saying.....Ahhhhhhhh.........TEXAS! Boy, did it feel GOOD to be back in the Lone Star State! :) I didn't realize just how much I missed it! Our flights and travel were great with no problems, and no bad waits...thank goodness!

We made it to my parents house about 6:15 Wed night! We played some of the closest spades games ever! So fun! :) Thursday, we headed to my Gpa's house for Tgiving with the Eckel family. It was so fun to see all the extended family and catch up with everyone. GP even sent some more homemade blueberry jam back with us! :) We had a delicious meal and of course played a game that I managed to be the first one to lose at. argh. My cousins lent me a couple of sympathy chips, but I still lost. haha ;)

Friday, my sister Kat and her family came in and spent the weekend with us at my parents house. It rained and was cold the whole weekend, so we just stayed in, played some games, and most of all enjoyed visiting with each other, laughing, and hanging out. It's those simple things I miss the most when I'm away. :*) Kat and Jim honored us by asking us to be Godparents for our new nephew Luke who will be arriving in February! Jacob, my 2 yr old nephew, was my little buddy all weekend. He loves his aunt "Lyla" and gave me lots of kisses and hugs! He loved to follow me around and help out with what I was doing. One morning while I was getting ready, he even used some of Uncle Michael's hair gel to fix his hair like Uncle Michael. :) (of course he had a big clump of dried gel in one spot of his head the rest of the day, but it was still cute, hehe.)

Sat night Carrie, my best friend from high school, came over and we got to catch up for a while. It was so fun to see her! So as you can see, our time in TX was just wonderful. We wished we would have been able to see my sister Kristina and her family in Houston, as well as Michael's family in Temple, but we are looking forward to Christmas where we will get to see them all!

Getting ready for the big meal at GP's!

Michael cracking some nuts with GP

Jim, Michael and Dad watching the Aggies whip up on t.u. WHOOP!!

Me and Carrie

Jacob and his pumpkin face :)

Katherine, me and Mom

Michael and Dad enjoying some time outside

Me and my little buddy

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michael and I will leave Wednesday morning to fly home to Texas for Thanksgiving! We will be spending Thanksgiving with my family in Kilogre this year- we are SO very excited and are anxious to go home! We're a bit nervous to brave the Thanksgiving airport crowds for the first time, but it will be worth it!

We just wanted to take a second to wish you all a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving! We will be remembering you all in our prayers so that you may have safe travels and wonderful times with your families and friends.

And given the theme of the holiday, I figured it was only appropriate to share my "thankful" list with you:

I'm SO thankful for:

-Having God in my life and being amazed and reminded every day by how blessed I am and how much God loves me.
-My amazing husband that I am blessed to spend my life with. I never imagined someone could fill my heart with so much love and joy and always find a way to put a smile on my face.
-Our families: the most wonderful people in the world that have loved us unconditionally and made who we are today.
-Our friends, both new and old: So many fun times with you all, each person so unique and wonderful in their own way.
-Our country we live in and the freedoms we have
-The opportunity and experience of living in MN - a time of new experiences
-Our jobs & all the stress that comes with them :)
-Our health - the ability to see, hear, walk and talk
-Our experiences in life, our travels, etc.
-Our challenges & struggles b/c we are given opportunities to grow from those times
-Our home, our clothing, always having food to eat and a warm bed to sleep in

I could go on and on! We are all so very blessed and please know that we miss you all very much.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Zajicek's!

Early Turkey Dinner with the Bruggerheads

This weekend we went to Des Moines to see Jared & Amber! Jared got a free turkey from work, so we decided to try out Jared's turkey fryer and have ourselves an early Tgiving dinner. We were totally grown ups, yes. :)

J & M did great frying the turkey! They injected it with some Tony C's creole butter and fried it in peanut oil. YUM-O!! Amber prepared some delicious sides: stuffing, cranberries, rolls, etc and topped it off with a yummy pumpkin pie! It was such a fun night and obviously just delicious! :)

The highlight of Saturday afternoon was a trip to the mall in West Des Moines. What is so special about going to the mall you ask? Well it was because we got to eat lunch at CHICK-FIL-A!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my, it has never tasted SOOOOOOOO good. For those that didn't know, Michael and I had a slight obsession with CFA in Texas. We would eat there every Saturday in Humble and then I would go at least once with my work buddies during the week. Then we had to quit cold turkey b/c MN has not been blessed with this franchise yet. So, we ate our little hearts out; I think I only chewed about 3 bites of mine. ;)

And as usual, we topped the weekend off with lots of great conversation with J&A and some good ol' spades playing with our favorite spades buddies. It makes me laugh every time we play because we all end up doing some goofy dance around the table or one person is always breaking out in song the whole time. haha Thanks J&A for a great weekend!

The chefs getting ready!

Good bye Mr. Turkey!

The after pic! YUM!

Ready for a feast!

"It's really coming down!"

...those were my words Friday when I looked out the window at work and saw beautiful huge snowflakes falling down everywhere. I got lots of laughs when I exclaimed "Wow! It's really coming down!" They all said "Oh Kyla, just wait." Michael and I both tried to capture pics with our cell phones but it didn't stick for too long. It sure was pretty and peaceful though.

Several mornings last week, it got down to the low 20s and on my way to work I noticed that the ponds and lakes sure did look wierd. Um yeah, it was because they were frozen. I guess I only expected puddles and little bodies of water to freeze, not the larger ponds too! I actually surprised myself today when I saw the week forecast and thought to myself it was going to be a pretty mild week b/c it's only getting into the low 40s.

We had another lazy weekend, but it was nice and relaxing. In fact, today we went and bought a new digital camera, finally! So we will try to capture some good pics soon so we can post some!

Last night we went out to dinner with Becky and then her and I went to the movies and saw American Gangster. Um yeah....you would have thought I would have learned my lesson after seeing The Departed and not knowing what that horrible movie was going to be about. But apparently not. I really like both Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe as actors, but frankly I'm just not comfortable spending 3 hours of my life watching detailed drug scenes and people getting blown up. It made for some quite horrific dreams last night. Becky and I agreed we should probably do a bit more research on movies instead of just choosing the one with the most convenient time. ;)

Aside from that, we are looking forward to doing dinner with our young adults group tomorrow night. Then this coming weekend, we will head down to Des Moines to see Jared & Amber! THEN....it will be time to go back to Texas for Thanksgiving. Everytime we talk about it, one of us ends up doing a happy dance of some sort.....hahaha......(you think I'm kidding, but i'm not!)

Young Adults Group

Well, we finally seized the opportunity to join the young adults group at our church tonight. We were both quite nervous and found ourselves trying to talk ourselves out of going all day long. But once again, we put ourselves out there and God made it worth our while. :) We had a really great time and met some really nice people. It was a pretty small group but it was kind of nice b/c it allowed us the chance to visit with people more.

The group is made up of singles and lots of young couples between the ages of 21 and 39. They meet just about once a week...they do social events, theology nights (like tonight) and service activities for the community. We already got invited to a Thanksgiving dinner this weekend and I have a girls night on Monday to go out to eat with the girls of the group.

In addition to the social aspect of it, it was nice to have a group to share our faith with and an opportunity to discuss and grow in our faith. We had a leader who is one of the faith formation teachers in the church and we discussed the difference between Dogma and Doctrine in the Catholic Church. It was definitely challenging and lead to some deep conversations...so it was good!

I felt a bit nervous because the group is already pretty established, so I wasn't sure how open they would be to two new people. But they were very glad we were there and talked a lot about how they feel they are ready to start growing the group a lot more. So I think this group will be really good for us here!


*Oh, side note: We did get some snow flurries on Monday! They didn't stick of course but it was fun to see them blowing all around. :)

Date Night

Friday night, Michael and I had a fun date! We started the night with dinner at a restaurant called Bonfire. It was really yummy and neat to go some place new. It is located on Grand Avenue in St. Paul which is a really neat little street in downtown St. Paul with lots of unique restaurants and good shopping!

Then after dinner, we went to the 10:00 show of the Jeff Dunham "Spark of Insanity Tour" show! Jeff Dunham is a comedian/ventriloquist that we saw on Comedy Central. We're not normally into comedy acts, but he is so funny! And with the puppets he uses and stuff, they each have such a different personality and the jokes are hilarious. It was super crowded and a really fun audience. So, we had a really great evening and it was nice to do something sort of different!

Tomorrow, Michael heads to Wichita for an overnight trip. Luckily, he'll be back Tuesday night but he has to leave here tomorrow at 4:30am to head to the airport so he's not too thrilled about that. :P Then Wednesday night, we are going to the Young Adults group at our church, so hopefully that will present a new opportunity for us to get involved at church and to meet new people!

It's still supposed to be pretty cold this week with a chance of some snow flurries. We went shopping for some more clothes for Michael today, so slowly but surely we are getting prepared!

The BURR is coming!

Well, as I look into the 7 day forecast, I see our first chance at snow flurries in Minnesota!
There is a chance of snow next Monday-Wednesday with highs in the mid to upper 30's and lows in the low 20's and upper teens! Burr!

I actually feel a little excited to see some snow for once! Although Michael is scheduled to go to Wichita Monday & Tuesday, so he just might miss our first snow! :( Oh well, it's not like it will be the only time we'll see it this year!

Is it really only the beginning of November? Oh goodness... stay tuned, it's going to be an interesting winter!

Fun with Amber!

Amber got in around 5:00 Friday evening. It was so great to see her and catch up after so many years! And although it had been over 3 years since we had seen each other, as soon as she got in the car, it was like I just saw her yesterday! And then of course, she told me I had to let go of hugging her so long b/c I was blocking traffic at the airport. haha :) Quick background...Amber and I met at A&M. She was overassigned to our dorm room our first year at A&M. So we were roommates for about 3 weeks. Then, with her as a journalism major and me having a PR minor, we had a couple of classes together and the rest is history. :)

Saturday, we took Amber to Sever's Corn Maze and Fall Festival! It is the largest corn maze in the U.S. and in addition to the maze, they had a hay bale maze, petting zoo with really neat animals, camel rides with the roaring camel (he sounded like a dinosaur), little jazz band, and were temped with lots of yummy fair food that was certainly not on our Weight Watchers diet. :) We did good in the maze. Well we did good if Michael led by the map. Amber and I led our trio in a few circles when we led. :)

That afternoon, Amber and I went for a car ride for some sightseeing of the Twin Cities. The tour turned out to be a bit longer than planned. It wasn't entirely my fault. If Mpls would make roads that made sense then I wouldn't have to get lost for 45 minutes. ;) Anyways, we found a really neat area in St. Paul that I had never seen before. We headed over to Cargill and after a few minutes of convincing Amber the geese on the lawn wouldn't get her, she got to see the pretty grounds. :) Then that night we went out to dinner and enjoyed just talking and laughing together.

We wrapped up Sunday with a little bit of shopping and then it was time to head back to the airport. We are so glad Amber was able to come and had such a wonderful time seeing her! I miss you Amb!

Me and Amber in the corn maze!

Amber leading us through the maze.

Aerial view of the corn maze when it was green!

Amber feeding the kangaroo in the petting zoo area.

Me with the Ze-Donk.

Michael and his buddy. :)

Blues/Jazz band.

Later in the day, Amb and I went to Mpls Sculpture Gardens.