its almost october

Can you believe it?  Incredible.  The summer absolutely flew by and now its almost October.  And I LOVE October.

I absolutely adore the cool crisp October mornings.  A little bit of dew on the ground, leaves turning slightly orange, smell of fresh fall air.  They are absolutely perfect.

October is the real beginning of football season.  When teams start their conference games instead of the weak and often boring beginning of the year games.  Its also OU Texas which is one of the greatest rivalries and storied games in college football.  And now I live only a couple miles away from all the action.

Its my birthday!  Yep, October 14th.  I will be 26 years old.  Wow...only 4 years from 30. gulp.  But I still love my birthday and I love getting together with friends to celebrate.



Primetime TV is back!  If you know me at all then you know I am obsessed with my tv shows.  And now they are all shiny and new and fun again.

Its less than 2 months until my wedding day.  2 months!  Yowza!  But I can't wait.

Ahh, how I am in love with October.

invitations are out

We are now less than 2 months away from our big day. I can't believe how close it is. I still have a million things to do but a calm about the entire event has swept over me. I am so ready to marry Chase and start our life together.

My parents did me a huge favor and addressed all of our invitations. My dad mostly did the addressing because he has beautiful architect handwriting that looks so good on my invites.

My Mom sent me a text last night letting me know that the invitations were in the mail. How exciting! One more thing to check off the list.

Plus the invitations are gorgeous, thanks to Liz, who designed them for us. So talented.

59 days and counting!

wine, wine and more wine

This weekend Chase and I, along with his Mom, went to Grapevine, TX for the annual GrapeFest event. The GrapeFest is the largest wine festival in the Southwest with hundreds of wineries present to showcase their stuff.

We bought tickets to the People's Choice Wine Tasting Classic, the largest consumer judged wine competition in the United States. We received souvenir wine glasses and tasted over 50 varieties of wine from vineyards all over. My favorite winery was Red Caboose out of Meridian, Texas. Their wine was delicious and they have a very cool Green certified winery. Chase and I are planning a trip to the winery soon.

It was a lot of fun...and I also got a delicious festival corn dog to top it all off!

Nothing better than good wine and festival food.

blogging from branson

This week I am in Branson for a speaking gig at the Missouri-Oklahoma Credit Union Expo.  While we are here we getting a chance to explore the city that is Branson, Missouri.  Wow!

I have never been to Branson before and I had no idea what kind of experience I was in for.  There is another "show" billboard every 50 feet and the strip looks like a mini Vegas.  Of course, this town closes down at about 7pm.

We will be out and about to experience more tomorrow.  And oh yea, that speaking gig.  "Social Networking is Here to Stay."  Wish me good luck!

And enjoy this place we found in town.

yes, this is a Segway track...you know, where you race your Segways

backyard project update

It has been awhile since I posted about our backyard project.  Mostly because after all the extremely hard work and money we put into it I wanted to just enjoy it and enjoy not having to think about "our ugly backyard."  Well, as of late, I am having to give it some thought again.

You see, we have been scorched down here in Texas

Our yard was beautiful, it was fantastic and green and beautiful. Our plants and flowers were blooming and had pops of color.  It was perfect.  That was in May/June, that was when the Texas summer was enjoyable and temperatures were topping out in the low 90s.  Well, that time has passed.  

Come July and into August the weekly forecast was all days in the triple digits.  Our newly planted grass in the backyard started turning brown and our plants started suffering from the hot heat and intense sun. 

The tomatoes have pretty much stopped producing anything.  The grass in the corner parts of our yard is pretty much dead.  We have awful brown remnants of plants in the beds.  Sad but true.

At this point, we aren't really sure what to do.  We got a ton of rain the past couple days, finally.  Hopefully that will help.

Here's to replanting and top-seeding in the early spring.

For now, lets look at the backyard from a few months back and remember.

our wedding website

One of the new traditions of the times are wedding websites.  Every engaged couple has them and there are about a billion wedding template websites where you can drop in your own pics and content and have a website in no time.

At first I didn't want to have a wedding website because I thought they were cheesy but then I decided it would be a fun way to showcase our special day and a nice little project for me to kick off the wedding planing.  I decided to not do a template because I hated all of them and how they all looked the exact same.  I decided to build my own simple site so it could look exactly the way I wanted it to and be different from all the others out there.

Its not fancy, its not uber web 2.0, its just simple and informational- our style.

homepage

some fun info about us

stuff about the wedding and info for our guests

I love how the site turned out.  It has some fun facts about Chase and I, some info about the wedding, our wedding party etc.

Go check it out for yourself!  www.hallieandchase.com

its football time in OKLAHOMA

That's right, tomorrow marks the first game of the 2010 University of Oklahoma football season!  I am SO excited.  I absolutely love college football and am a die-hard Sooner fan through and through.

This season should be a good one and so much fun to watch.  I will have my eyes glued to the TV for every single game.  I would even leave a party because the TV is too small to watch the game on.  Just ask my friend Kathleen.

Below is one of my favorite all-time intro videos that gets played at the stadium prior to all home games.  It gives me chills every single time I watch it.  It is the perfect way to get pumped up for the upcoming season.


2008 Gameday Intro # 1 from Oklahoma Football on Vimeo.

I am also loving this OU t-shirt from Tradition Eight.  I am ordering it today.

And last but not least, I am requesting that Chase install our flag poll on the front of our house so I can fly my OU flag on gameday.  (He went to OSU and is a Pokes fan, I will let him fly his flag occasionally.)

Boomer Sooner!  Go OU!

save the date

A couple weeks ago we sent out our Save the Dates.  I love them so much I wanted to share them with you.

My friend and bridesmaid, Liz, designed them (she also designed the invites which I will share later).  I knew I wanted something simple, different, not a stupid magnet (sorry if you did magnets) and something that had a calendar on it.

Liz took my list of wants/hates and hit it out of the ballpark.  Check them out for yourself.







Mark your calendars.