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Thanks to all my amazing friends and family, I had a perfect birthday celebration this weekend.

(That's Erik in there..)

Katie Get Ur Gun

Last weekend, Ian and I met up with some of his friends to go shooting. There is a place way out in Ramona, up this giant steep dirt road, in the middle of no where, that is a "park" that people can go to and practice/play with their guns. We hadn't realized what a torturous drive it'd be to get there.. my poor little civic... I was seriously almost having a heart attack the whole way up. But that's another story.

It was a lot of fun for a first time! It was pretty crazy how powerful these things are. Even the hand guns punch back pretty dang hard. It was cool to try different guns out but after you've shot them each a couple times, it looses a lot of it's thrill. I was over it pretty quickly but the boys enjoyed having target competitions and what not.

I won't bother trying to label these pictures. I couldn't tell you the names of these guns to save my life. I know there's a shotgun or three, a pistol, a baby gun, a big scary fancy gun, big scary gun on legs, and old gun.

I like this shot cause it looks like he's gearing up to do some serious damage.

This is the target they set up down a ways...

And then they decided to compete from this postion!?! Yeah, boys will be boys.

Mah Man

*Pretend I posted this in December, since that’s when I wrote it. It just took me 3.86794 months to get my act together and add pictures.*

So, about mah man. I mean, ya he’s always saved lives but now he gets to pull bodies (and pets) from burning buildings and extract people from smashed up vehicles. And he gets to do it looking like this:

So serious…

For the cat in the tree, he probably wouldn’t need the mask:

Just a ladder

Isn’t he hunky?

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Mah man is a smokin’ hot firefighter now *hardy-har-har* with the City of Santee. I got to go to his little graduation where they put on a demonstration of what they’d learned in the academy. I was really glad I was able to see it all because I couldn’t really imagine what he was going through in the weeks before. He said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Harder than USMC boot camp.

Anywho, after the demo, the new guys got “stuff” to make them official after the City Clerk had them take an oath.

We got a tour of the training station, the trucks, etc. Lastly, the resident firefighters got up on the roof with big buckets of water, had the newbies pose for a picture down below and drenched them. Poor skinny guys were freezing their tails off after:

Ian wasn’t thrilled about starting this job. He was comfortable doing the paramedic thing and having to be a probationary firefighter now for the next year isn’t very exciting. But now that he’s gotten through the worst of it, he seems to have a better take on it. There is a huge sense of pride and commerodery amongst the guys (and one gal I believe). I know he’s going to do well and enjoy his new work family! I’m really happy for him.

**Update** Now that he’s been there for a few months, he’s getting ready for his first big test in April. It’s 2 days long with both written and practical skills portions. He’s pretty nervous but I know he’ll do great because he makes time to study in between hours of video-gaming. Dork.

Family Fun

A couple weeks ago we had my parents over for dinner, along with Ian's mom and stepdad. Ian smoked his best tri-tip yet, and I prepared a few other delights to go along with it. Pioneer Woman recipes of course!

Mom and I:

Clint, Dad and Leslie, Ian's mom:

Ian and Brett, his stepdad:

Ian, Brett, Clint:

RE: MEAT

Ian prepared a rub using a recipe I found for East of Santa Maria Tri-tip . This guy's blog is a good one for manly man food. I love the name -- Patio Daddio BBQ =)

RE: BAKED BEANS

I made these once before and they were ok. The next day, though, they were GREAT! Something about the refrigerating, and sitting overnight just did wonders. Therefore, Ian requested that these be made a day ahead and re-heated prior to the big reveal. It was perfect. He so smart! For PW's bacon topped bean goodness, click here for the recipe and step-by-step instructions.

RE: BREAD

I'd been wanting to try PW's Buttered Rosemary Rolls for a while. Unfortunately, these didn't quite work out for me. I have a feeling it was user error of some sort and I will try again some time. I believe there is still potential here.

RE: SALAD

Just a simple caesar, our fave.

The spread:

And after dinner we scarfed down Girl Scout cookies and played some poker!

Brewery Tour

We decided to nix the tour part and just do the tasting. What? That's the best part and why not save money while enjoying the comforts of home? So way back in that funny month of August, for Ian's best friend Steve's birthday, we had a small get together at the house and put on our own brewery tour, O'Connor style.

Being the thorough planner that I am, I researched beer tasting to it's fullest to discover very specific foods that should be served in order to cleanse the palette between brews. BUT, since it was not really about me was it, Ian insisted that we have chips and salsa and even said I should make homemade salsa. Excusame? Was this an order? Ok, roasted tomato salsa recipe search, here I go.. sounds easy. Oh wait, one jalapeno with seeds does not sound like enough...he wants that + one serrano with seeds. Holy guacamole! So bossy...

I decided to throw it all on the grill (tomatoes, garlic, onion and spicy thingy-mo-bobs). Squeezed the seeds and excess juice out of the tomatoes after I was done (very gracefully of course. ok, not really), put it all into the food processor with cilantro and lime. Viola. Salsa that quite is tasty but WAY WAY WAY too spicy to have for a beer tasting.

Sorry, tangent.

Where was I? Ok, so Ian picked up 6 different beers...relatively common ones because he thought it'd be fun to see if people could blindly guess what they were. This was round one. My tongue was burning from the salsa. After round one, we got the names of all six, then he mixed up the order and we tasted them all again, seeing if we could match them up once more. It was quite fun. See the little beer mats I made? We each had a mat and a cup for each beer. MMM, beer. My favorite was the Pete's Strawberry Ale... There was one that was just flat out disgusting but luckily it was the b-day boy's fave. So it was a good time!

It was also b-day boy's girlfriend's birthday so I made her a cake, strawberry by request.

Ian and Steve:

Dorky boys later on:

I want to do a wine and cheese party next!!