Spring Bucket List OKC Style

In honor of Spring, it is finally time to get out of the house and do things in the community!


I always love when Susannah over at Simple Moments Stick posts her seasonal bucket lists.  Hers are usually much more extensive than this, but considering we're already one month into Spring and our schedules really only allows us to do fun things on the weekends, a list of five is probably the only attainable goal.  

1.  Visit the OSU-OKC Farmer's Market.
Since we've lived in OKC, I still have not been to the Farmer's Market.  I've always heard good things, and I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some fresh eggs.  Plus it just sounds fun!

2.  Dig for rose rocks near Lake Thunderbird.

We've hunted rose rocks before, but the location we chose last time just had small ones that were not developed well.  I'd like to try another area where the larger rocks form.

3.  Feed the turtles at Martin Park.
I always enjoy Martin Park, a wildlife refuge tucked away in north OKC.  It is especially fun in the Spring and Summer because you can take your shoes off and walk through the rocky stream.  In the warmer months are also when all the turtles are out, and if you bring cat or dog food you can feed them.

4.  Visit H&8th (stands for Hudson & 8th street) and get food from food trucks.
This one is just a Spring/Summer thing to do.  Once a month they block off the roads near Hudson and 8th Street and open it up for pedestrians, a band, and all the city's food trucks.  The local shops in that area stay open late, and you can walk around with a beer and try all kinds of interesting truck cuisine.  You're pretty much a hermit if you live around here and don't go at least once.

5.  Play mini-golf with friends.
We've been meaning to play mini-golf with my old roomie and her hubby, and we really need to make it happen soon!  Plus, mini-golf is just fun!

What's on your Spring bucket list?

Birthday Party Extravoganza

If you follow me on Instagram, you've probably already seen some of our pictures from New Orleans last weekend.  Keep your eye out for posts on our trip there soon.

While Tyler and I have wanted to visit NOLA together for a while, the drive is really just too far to take for just a couple days of vacation and then to come back.  But we also had another reason for making a trip to Louisiana, and when we found out about it we knew we could turn two trips into one.

For years, various parties have been hosted for various reasons in Shreveport (where my Uncle Bob and Aunt Chris are from).  A couple years ago we just went down for my Uncle Bob's 80th birthday, and this year it was Aunt Chris' 80th, my grandma's 70th, and various other birthdays in the family that were celebrated at one event.

My grandma with a picture of my mom and dad.

Aunt Chris on her 80th

My cousin made all 5 cakes for each birthday!  She's pretty talented, and all the cakes were really unique.

My grandma's cake.

Aunt Chris' cake.

 This side of my family is really big, so Tyler always gets to meet someone new to talk to.  This time he talked to some of my cousins that he hasn't met yet, and revisited with some other family.

My parents at the party.  The party was held in the conference room of a casino/hotel in Bossier City, and lunch was catered in the conference room across the hall.  

Anyone notice how similar my dad's and Tyler's shirts are?  We thought it was funny that they were unintentionally twinkies.

 Aunt Chris' "80" balloons, and Grandma's bouquet of flowers for the table.  Each birthday person got their own set of flowers to take home that were unique from the other bouquets.

This is my Uncle Bob, Aunt Chris' husband and my grandpa's uncle by blood and brother by adoption.  Since my grandpa was adopted by his grandparents, it sometimes makes family relations confusing.  That and, there's just so many of us that we'd probably get confused anyway.

My dad with my little cousin.  Many years ago at Christmas, he gave her the nickname "Evelyn."  She was pretty young, and it hurt her feelings a little bit because Evelyn was not her name.  To make up for it, her mom told her to start calling my dad "George."  About seven years later, the Evelyn/George feud still lives on.

This shindig began about 1:00 in the afternoon, and ended at 7:00.  Since Shreveport is sort of the mini-vegas of the south, all the adults went and wandered all three floors of the casino that is connected to the hotel.  Tyler and I don't really enjoy gambling, because it is a gamble, but I put in $2 to one game so that I could get a free cocktail from the waitress and ended up with $24 back from the same game, so that was the extent of our gambling experience.

After everybody left, we stood out front to take some pictures by the grand fountain in the front of the casino.

While I was changing my camera settings, a guy started talking to Tyler and told him that he lost $1,000 that night gambling....which is why we don't really gamble much.  My personal belief is that if you are going to gamble, you should count the amount you decide to spend as "fun" money.  If you make more, good for you, but if you lose what you had then you stop there and you had your fun for the night.  I'm just glad my "fun" money was only like $5 and not more.

Tyler and I in front of the fountain.  

Birthday parties in our family feel more like family reunions, it is always fun to see family again.  One of my aunts commented on how it is sad that some of us who just live 2-3 hours away have to drive 6 hours every couple years to spend time together.  I guess busy schedules just get in the way too often.

What are birthday parties and reunions like in your family?

Our First Wedding Anniversary - Part II

I meant to post part-two of our first anniversary celebrations a little earlier...considering our first anniversary was over two months ago now!  Oops!

Well, here it is!  In case you've forgotten, our anniversary celebrations part-one consisted of a little road trip to the area where we got married.

For the later part of the same evening, we went to a local restaurant, Vast, in the top two floors of our city's tallest building, Devon Energy.  One thing I didn't expect about this experience was that the elevators rise so quickly that my ears were popping!

The building's interior is made up of many Oklahoma materials such as limestone and decorated with intricate rocks and fossils.  

This fountain flows so softly that it just looks like glass.

I love these reflections!

This fossil is probably about five feet across!

Needless to say, Tyler loved it.

The interior of the restaurant.  It was a bit awkward to take many pictures inside the restaurant, so I just have a few inside the restaurant.  We unfortunately weren't placed near the window, so getting pictures overlooking the city were even harder and more awkward.

This is the only picture we took in the restaurant.  It was awkward taking the picture in there since the restaurant was so fancy, so it is kind of a bad one!

I enjoyed the Native Amber-Brined Chicken Breast.  It was yummy!

During our honeymoon in New Mexico, we picked up a bottle of wine to save for our first anniversary!  We celebrated by visiting the Davis area and eating at Vast for our one year on Saturday, which was actually May 17th.  But our true one-year anniversary was May 18th.  We saved our bottle of wine for Sunday so we could extend the celebration through the weekend! 

 We were pretty happy with the wine we picked up!

Thanks, super strong hubby, for opening the wine bottle.  It wasn't exactly playing fair.

(We were opening the wine outside in fear that we'd spill it everywhere trying to get it open).

I do believe that it was the first time we've used our wine glasses from our wedding shower and the cork puller that we got from the pottery barn coupon that was also in one of our wedding gifts!  

To anyone reading this who got us those gifts, we loved using them for the first time!  Now that they're broken out, maybe they'll see the light of day more often!

We planned our first anniversary to be more extravagant than any future ones (we'll probably never spend that much on a meal in the future), but it was definitely worth it to celebrate our first year of marriage!  

What did you do for your first anniversary?  What have you done for subsequent anniversaries?

Our First Wedding Anniversary - Part I

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary (which was a little over one month ago in mid-May), Tyler and I took a little tour to the part of the state where we got hitched!

Our first stop was in Sulphur, Oklahoma.  There is a nice state park there with some trails, streams, and generally pretty scenery.

On our way, we stopped by the bakery that made our wedding cake and got some tasty treats:  I got a cookie and icing sandwich, and Tyler got a brownie.  They were DELICious!

Then we went to the Chickasaw National Recreation Area's nature center to visit some turtles, fish, snakes, lizards and other animals native to the area.

Isn't this frog too cute?

We did a little more walking around at Bromide hill around the cliff overlook.

The next stop was back to Davis, Oklahoma just across the road from where we got married.  We ate lunch at the famous Arbuckle Fried Pie shop, and then walked across the street and up the driveway toward our wedding venue.

It was a long driveway, and there was no way of knowing if someone was using the lodge that day, but we decided to walk over the hill and see.

When we got over the hill, it looked like a boy scout troop or someone with a lot of kids who were there.  We decided to not invade their privacy, take a little picture of us by the pond near our venue and walk back.

Just down the road from the fried pie shop and our venue is a scenic overlook to see over the Turner Falls area, which is a little park with springs and swimming areas that many Oklahoma families visit throughout the summer.

I thought this tree was interesting how it grows out of the area where the plate is shooting up into the air.

The last leg of this portion of our anniversary celebration involved me forcing Tyler to pull over to the side of the road and pick me wildflowers!  (Specifically my favorite, Indian Paintbrushes.)

That night when we returned home, we prepared to finish our anniversary celebration by eating dinner at a local restaurant called Vast, which is in the top two floors of the tallest skyscraper in Oklahoma City.  

Visit part-two of our first anniversary celebrations!

Family Quarts Digging Trip (Arkansas II)

This is the second part to our Arkansas trip that I posted about last time!  In the post prior to this one, I talked about our trip from Oklahoma City to Arkansas, camping along the way at Mt. Nebo State Park, and some beautiful Oklahoma skies.  

The main point of the trip was to meet some of Tyler's family members for a fun weekend of hunting quartz by day and relaxation by night.

We arrived Friday evening to a quaint VRBO home in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.  Everyone got settled in and chatted until bedtime.  Most of us went to bed early, because we planned to get up and be at the Ron Coleman Mine by opening.

As you may remember from our camping trip the day before, Arkansas and Oklahoma were experiencing some pretty wet conditions that weekend - and Saturday morning was no exception.

The basic idea of these "mines" are that the dirt that comes out of an actual underground mine is dumped here and quartz diggers come sort through the piles looking for the perfect crystals.  

This was the basic scene:

Tyler's grandpa is a pro-rock-and-crystal-digger, so just a couple hours in his crystal bag was nearly full!

All things are a serious matter for Tyler when he's digging.

This ain't fun and games, y'all.  It's serious business.

Tyler's grandma was finding some pretty great crystals herself!  She's another pro!  (But who isn't a pro when it comes to Tyler's family?)

Tyler examining a clump to see if there are any crystal formations inside.  He always looks for the big one.

No matter what age you are, digging can take its toll on your back.  You're constantly bent over digging with your shovel and sorting through the clumps of dirt.  And as you may have noticed, this is no clean and tidy affair - especially on a rainy day.

Sometimes the staff would use the backhoe and turn over the piles to make it easier to find things.  

The nice part about rainy days are the ease of finding puddles to wash crystals off with.  Sometimes you just aren't sure what you've found until you clean it up.

This is my second pair of soaked shoes for the weekend.  Thank goodness for flip flops, since I wouldn't have had anything else dry!

Despite being somewhat miserable to be wet, you can still appreciate how pretty the rain and fog are over the Arkansas hills.

My father-in-law and Tyler's Aunt did quite a bit of walking on the dirt mounds.  The rain uncovered many of the crystals toward the top of the pile, so they were already washed off and visible without having to dig for them.  

(Pardon the water smudges.  I knew I wanted to take pictures, but didn't want to have a water damaged phone, so I kept it in a ziplock baggy.)

My mother-in-law also looked for some pretty quartz rocks on top of the mounds.  She was hoping to find some nice yard rocks since they were planning to enlarge their flower/rock beds to help conserve water in lieu of watering grass.

These were her dream pieces, but they were too large to carry and put in the car to take home.  We took pictures just to admire them anyway.

We got back to the gift shop, and ate some lunch on the front porch before heading home!

We saw this super beautiful moth while we were waiting to go home!

We had to put towels over the seats, take our shoes off, and I even had to tie plastic sacks around my feet because we were so muddy by the time we left!

These are our muddy selfies.

With my sister-in-law, (and Tyler's bunny ears).

 This small little plate of quartz was my favorite find!  It cleaned up quite nice!

 This is one of my other favorites that I found, just a small little cluster.

My pile of cyrstals:  

Tyler's pile of crystals:

I'm glad I waited to post this, because Tyler just informed me yesterday that the crystals I found were "better big pieces" than his.  I love it when he says romantic things like that (even if it takes him one month to admit it!)

The little vacation home the family stayed in was cute as well.  It was right off the bay of the lake, and the best part about was a screened in porch area off the side of the dining area.

I somewhat adored the backs of these chairs - simple but unique.

The home also had a neat two-toned vaulted wooden ceiling, and a stone asymmetrical fireplace.  

Some older homes just have nice character...those were the nicer characteristics!

Another great aspect of this rental was that they also had two kayaks that we could enjoy during our stay!  One evening I went out with Tyler to explore the lake, and the next evening I went with Kelsey, as pictured below.

The weekend went by quickly, but we had a great time camping, digging for crystals, and spending time with family! What adventures have you gone on this spring and summer?