My favorite Christmas recipe/Rivalry Weekend!

With Thanksgiving comes Rivalry week in college football! I was able to watch the Auburn-Alabama game on Friday (Go Auburn!) as well as Boise State-Nevada. Both were great games to watch. As y'all know, my Florida Gators play the Florida State Seminoles during the rivalry week...

Obviously, I am NOT a fan of Florida State Noles...or the ending to the season they gave my Gators...
I still believe in the orange and blue! In all kinds of weather we all stick together for F-L-O-R-I-D-A! Go Gators! At least we are still bowl eligible...I just hope Coach Urbs gets it together for next season...maybe with a different quarterback? Just sayin'

In better news, my Mississippi State Dawgs played Ole Miss (known as TSUN-That School Up North in Starkville) at the Egg Bowl. This year the game was in Oxford.

And the Dawgs shut down Ole Miss!!

DAN THE MAN!! (It's b/c he used to be a Gator :) haha )

Hey Ole Miss! We just beat the hell outta you! :)

Mississippi State is also Bowl Bound this season!

And now for one of my all-time favorite holiday recipes:

Tollhouse Pie!

Ingredients:

9" deep dish pie shell

2 eggs

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup butter (=1.5 sticks, softened)

1 cup (or more!) Nestle toll house semi sweet morsels

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees

Beat the eggs until foamy

Add flour, sugar, brown sugar, and butter. Beat.

Stir in the chocolate chips, and pour into the pie shell

Bake 55-60 minutes

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream!

We store the pie in the refrigerator

Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving y'all! Be safe and enjoy time with your family and friends!

I colored my hair/need some advice!

I've been highlighting my hair for about 4 years now. My hair is naturally dark brown and it needed something to make it less mousy. After 4 years of highlighting, this past summer I decided to dye it brown. HUGE mistake, especially because I dyed it myself. So after I realized that was a huge error in my judgement, I had my hairdresser highlight my hair to get it back to blonde. However, since I dyed my hair, the blonde was more yellow than a pretty blonde color.

Before: Very yellow. Especially weird when I have a reddish skin tone. Not good.

After: My hairdresser added a LOT of lowlight to my hair to make it darker, and left some blonde in it so it would have some dimension. After the color chills out a little and is less yellow, I'll probably highlight again in the spring. Thoughts?

Also-I need some advice. I really need a diet/exercise program that works. I used to be a track/cross country runner but college and grad school has led to oh...about 60 pounds. I need a program that can be worked into a busy lifestyle. I don't mind working out at all, I just don't have that much time during the week. Any advice would be SOOOO appreciated.

Thanks girls!

A Shutterfly Christmas!

Hey everyone! Shutterfly has a great offer for bloggers right now! They are offering 50 free holiday cards for bloggers who let everyone know about their holiday collection! I am thrilled about this because my friends and I in Mississippi thought it would be fun to take a holiday picture and send it home to our families! They have tons of card designs and I already picked out which one we should use! The preview I saved came out great!

I just loved this design. I thought it was so sweet.

You can also get gift tags made! I love Rudolph so I thought this one was cute!

They also have a ton of products you could give as Christmas gifts. I loved the photo books and calendars.

I am so excited to get our Christmas cards! I know our families will just love them! Make sure you check out the details HERE soon so you can take advantage of these great holiday cards!

Color Spash iPhone App makes my day!

My friend George downloaded the Color Splash App on his iPhone! It basically takes your color picture, turns it black and white, then you color in the part you want to appear color. I was able to send him some of my pictures and look how they turned out:

Davis Wade Stadium-Mississippi State

Me at the Swamp in Gainesville

Group of cowbells with mine colored

All colored!

My favorite picture of MC, Liza and I!

Our tailgating group!

Sunglasses!

Didn't he do a great job?! I wish BlackBerry had an app like this! :)

Salt Lake City/Sorry for my Absence!

I have been such an awful blogger lately! After being away for almost a week in Salt Lake City, I came back to piles and piles of work on top of the piles I had left here!

I have 2 exams to make up, homework, grading, research, another conference, an interview...so basically no sleep. This is pretty much how I feel:

I hope y'all understand I'm trying! :) I still try and keep up with your posts every night.

So last Sunday we left for Salt Lake City. The 4 grad students in my group (me, Zach, Erick, and Ersan) drove to Jackson together to catch our flight. Due to mechanical issues/Delta sucking as usual, we got split up. Erick and Ersan went ahead to Salt Lake City through Dallas (instead of Memphis like we were supposed to...they had presentations first thing Monday) and Zach and I got sent to Atlanta overnight. At least Delta gave us some sweet hotel rooms and upgraded us to first class! We had to get up by 5 to get back to the airport for our 7 am flight...which means we got up at 3 am SLC time...
Our view of the mountains from the airplane.

We arrived late, tired, and...
...COLD! It was only about 35 degrees in SLC! As soon as I realized how cold it was I started layering on clothes from my suitcase haha! Think Sanka from Cool Runnings when he arrives in Calgary :)

Monday and Tuesday were spent at the conference, listening to the presentations and also having some great lunches and suppers while we were out there.
I also got to see Caitlin all week! She and her husband moved to Oklahoma at the end of October for his next part of Air Force training so I hadn't been able to see her in a few weeks! I missed her!
Where the conference was held.

Wednesday our advisor let us have the day to see Salt Lake City. We ate lunch at California Pizza Kitchen
Our desserts!

Saw the Temple City

The lab group in front of one of the big Temples...from left: Zach, me, Caitlin, Erick, and Ersan on the bottom
Caitlin and I in front of the Temple
Christmas decorations!

We saw an organ recital in the Tabernacle.
And did some shopping! I just loved being able to go to J Crew and Ann Taylor Loft!

Later that night we had our Wednesday night tradition of Italian food and ended the meal with Sambuca! (It's gross but part of the tradition...)
From left: Erick, Ersan, Zach, me, Caitlin, my advisor Dr. Walters, and her advisor from Clemson Dr. Hirt

Have a great week y'all! I'll try harder to be more consistent with posting! :)

Adventure out West!

Tomorrow I'm headed here:

Salt Lake City, Utah!

For this:

National American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting

(my dad calls it the nerd convention)

I've never been to Salt Lake City so I'm really excited to see the mountains and maybe even do something like snow tubing or some shopping!

Have any of y'all gone to SLC? Any suggestions for me?

My posting for the next week may be kind of sporadic (kind of like this entire semester haha) but I will try and post a couple of times and take lots of pictures!

I got a Tumblr!

I've seen lots of people on Twitter with Tumblrs!

Let me know if you have one! I'd love to follow you!

To follow me click here: Miss Ashley on Tumblr

Weekend Recap!

Gameday weekend and Halloween! Friday after working at school MC, George, Matt, Kevin and I set up the tailgate then went to supper at The Grill in Starkville (Liza had to work). They have the best cheese sticks! Then Matt, George and I went to my house and carved pumpkins!

Matt and George discussing the different hues of oranges of our pumpkins.

Cleaning out the guts

Poor pumpkins

The Carving Queen haha. Btw excuse my outfit. I was cold and we were getting pumpkin guts all over us.

Liza made it just in time to see the finished products!

From left: Matt's "Beat Kentucky" pumpkin, my cowbell pumpkin, and my Bully pumpkin

Here they are again, but showing the other side of the cowbell pumpkin- MSU and paws

After Matt, Liza, and George left I baked for the tailgate and called it a night. Tailgate started bright and early at 8 am!

It was FREEZING at 8 am when we got out there. Pretty chilly fall day in Northeast MS!

Here are the pumpkins at the tailgate! Bully is dressed up like a ghost!

As y'all know, my fabulous Florida Gators had a big game Saturday vs. Georgia. Here I am cheering on the Gators from Starkville!

Girls at the tailgate

Matt and Liza

We were able to hang out, watch some football on the TV, and grill before we headed into the stadium! When I went into the stadium, the FL-GA game was 21-7. I had to rely on my phone to keep me up to date with the score! I about had a heart attack when it was 31-31 with 0:37 left on the clock! God must have known the Gators needed a win really bad! 34-31 GATORS!!! So proud for my orange and blue!!

Here's a video of our stadium at MS State before the game! You might be able to hear me talking! I hope my voice isn't as annoying as it sounds on the video!...but then again, no one sounds like themselves on video!

Pictures from inside the stadium!

3 Girls

Matt and Liza

George!

After an intense game with some horrible play calling, MS State got a 24-17 win over Kentucky. Go DAWGS!!! 7-2 so far this season!! I'm so proud that MS State is finally having a great season!

After the game we headed back out to the tailgate to make smores and watch some more football before heading home. It was so cold out! Hope y'all had a great Halloween weekend!

Also as a comment from my post about cowbells and respecting traditions: I am in no way comparing the noise from a cowbell to a vocal cheer like Roll Tide or Pig Sooie. I know how loud cowbells can get, especially when you're not used to them (I had to get used to them too-remember I was a Gator first). It was just a post about respecting traditions. I was not comparing the noise factors.