Heaven is a Cake Ball

I was folding and putting away scrubs this weekend, and had to take a picture of this. Not because you haven't seen it before, but because it was one of those surreal moments where I realize we're not kids anymore, and we're not spending our days sleeping on the quad eating chicken tacos: No matter how many times I see that, it still weirds me out. And makes me proud. But still: weird.

Friday night, I went to a cake ball extravaganza with some girlfriends, and extravagant it was. I brought about 40 cakeballs, which was the smallest of the batches, and with 10 of us there...you can do the math to figure out how many we had to dip and decorate. So we had multiple stations set up:

And then laid plate after plate on various surfaces around the house:

I'm serious - SO MANY CAKEBALLS!

I was fortunately able to escape the night with only 20-30 cakeballs to bring home, which could have been much worse (100 cakeballs in my fridge? yikes). Not just because I made these particular ones myself, but because anything with peanut butter is genuinely my kryptonite, these little guys were my favourite. Cream cheese and peanut butter cakeballs covered in dark chocolate? Heaven!


Saturday morning, while we were digesting our magnificent pancakes-a-la-Nolan and just chatting on the couch, we decided to give these babies a try. My mom got us some ear candles, and I'd heard good things about them. Nolan flatly refused to stick a burning candle into his ear ("no way-how would I explain myself to my colleagues in the ER when I came in with severe burns"), so instead I offered to go first, while he helped. His job was to trim the ash every inch, and to make sure I didn't light myself on fire (hence the towel and awkward pose):

Overall? The warm smoke felt really nice, but I have to say that with it in just one ear, I got a little sea-sick :)

Also while we were chatting (post-ear candle, I believe), we finally decided on where to go for our vacation at the end of March! It was one of those things where we literally said, "We could go to the Grand Canyon? We've never been there...or Canada? But I don't know what we'd do there. Or a cruise?" And then we kind of arrived at, "....or we could go to Scotland and the UK." And that's where we landed. So we'll be going to Scotland (!!!), with hopefully a couple day trips to England and Ireland, for about 10 days. And it's coming up fast in just 6 weeks, YIKES! Needless to say, we immediately bought tickets to avoid skyrocketing rates. So we're official! YES.

Yesterday was so lovely. Nolan had it off, so we woke up late (7:30), ate breakfast and went to church. Then we came home and ate lunch and skyped with our friends in Scotland, and then went on a nice long bike ride through Menlo Park to Stanford, and around the campus. Such a sweet time, and reminded me of just how incredibly blessed and insanely lucky I am to have this man as my partner :) As we were biking around, we saw that our nutty neighbour (the one who had an 8-foot flying spider suspended over his front gate for Halloween, among other things) decorated for Valentine's Day, too. Or for the Grammy's last night? Both? You decide:


Tomorrow's Valentine's Day, so I most likely won't be posting since I have a hot date after work ;) So here's a little love!