Monday, August 23, 2010

Waco Weekend

First- I would like to announce that our wedding pictures are posted on our photographer's blog here: www.lovelyunion.net and we love them!

And now, on to the Waco Weekend story :)

Lan and I took our first ever Texas road trip last weekend to see our good friends Ashlyn and Matt Matthews. A little background for those of you who don't know Ashlyn and Matt. Ashlyn and I have known each other since freshman year through Chi O, and this past year, we grew even closer as we planned our weddings together! Ashlyn and I got engaged and married exactly one week apart! We like to think that we're wedding twins, since we had a lot of the same ideas and are basically the same person :) She and Matt got married at the end of June and have been in Waco a couple of weeks. They moved there so Ashlyn could go to law school at Baylor. She started last Wednesday, and I know that she will do very well!

Okay... so here's the weekend recap.


Friday-

We left Houston around 5 (a little later than we'd hoped, but it only took us 3 hours to get to Waco). On the drive, I noticed how beautiful Texas is ("Texas isn't ugly." - Lan) and how many ranches there are in Texas ("There are a lot of ranches here" - Me ; "Yeah, we're in Texas." - Lan). Anyway, it was a very pretty drive and we got to pass through College Station, home of Texas A & M (the MSU of Texas :) ).

This was awaiting us when we got to Waco:

Not surprisingly, everything at Ashlyn's apartment was super cute, including this really cute table setting :)

Friday night was pretty chill. Matt and Ashlyn made dinner and we watched TV and played on our phones :) We downloaded an outrageous number of Apps. It was awesome.


Saturday-

We'd been pretty set on visiting the Dr. Pepper Museum for a while (Dr. Pepper is Lan's drink of choice), and, low and behold, last weekend was the one weekend a year that the Dr. Pepper Museum lets people in for free! Go figure. We were pretty happy about that, not just because it was free and they gave out Chic Fil A gift certificates, but also because the Museum wasn't worth the $7 they charge you for normal entry. We had a good time anyway.

Arriving at the Dr. Pepper Museum. Yeah, that's Mary Pepper in the background.


Matt and Ashlyn posing beside the creepy wax figure that tells you the history of Dr. Pepper.


Me and Lan posing in front of the Dr. Pepper delivery truck.


I'm pretty sure this guy thought I was crazy, but I felt the need to document this. This is us trying a pure cane sugar Dr. Pepper. He made it right in front of us. Old school soda shop style. Yeah, I know, very cool.


After the Dr. Pepper museum, we headed over to Baylor to get Ashlyn some law school books and take the driving tour! The campus was beautiful (but not as beautiful as MSU's campus...) and we saw the Baylor bears (sort of). Apparently it was too hot for bears to be out and about, so they were hiding in the caves in their habitat and you couldn't really see them. Oh well. Maybe next time. Here are some photo highlights of Baylor...


Me with Lan in the very fancy Baylor bookstore.


Oh, you know, just the Baylor parking garage.


The science building/castle.


The bear habitat, sans bears. They were hiding in the cool of the caves.

We did lunch at Chic Fil A (we had to cash in our gift certificates) and finished out the evening with Chuy's and Sherlock Holmes. It was a good day :)


Sunday -

We went to church at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church. Which, apparently, is where all the college students in Waco attend church. It was packed out, and interesting, but we enjoyed it. After church, we drove by Waco's very own castle (cool!) and ate lunch at McAlister's. It was nice to eat at a restaurant that we had back in Starkville! We also passed by a Mazzio's Pizza (which I'm pretty sure we'll visit if we ever go back to Waco).


So, that's our weekend in a nutshell :) We had fun and are so glad that Matt and Ashlyn moved to Texas! Yay!!! We can't wait for you guys to visit us in Houston.

Love from Houston!
-Lan and Jennifer

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Mallory Gets Hitched

I hereby dedicate this post to my beautiful friend Mallory. Mallory and I go wayyyyy back. We went through youth group at Starkville First Methodist together and had lots of fun times. I have always kind of thought of Mallory as a tension releaser. She always makes you laugh and is one of the most practical, honest, and open people I know. She got married last Saturday in Starkville. She has had her heart set on getting married at the Rose Garden for some time now, and though many were skeptical about her choice (outdoors in August?), the weather was nice and everything was so beautiful! So, Mallory, thanks for being my friend and I wish you many, many years of happiness with Daniel!



Walking down the aisle. She walked a really long way, I was impressed because her heels were high!



Look how happy she is!!



This part was sweet :)



I really like this picture because they both look really happy.



Katye looks unsure but I'm not really sure why.. She's being escorted by our really good high school friend and engineer extraordinaire, Ian.



Raysha was also making a funny face. Her fiance was sitting right behind us so that may have had something to do with it. I'm thinking she wasn't happy to be slightly taller than Jacob :) but that's okay because she looked like a Barbie.



This is us at the reception. It was at her parents' house and it was really fun!



Me and my former roomie, Sarah, who I love and miss very much! She has plans to come visit for the MSU v. Houston game (yay!).



I couldn't leave out the picture we took :)


I'm trying to make posts at least once a week, so be looking for one next week! On the agenda for this weekend- I'm finally getting a new phone (which is lucky because my current phone only holds charge for about 10 minutes of phone calls) and we are having a lazy weekend at home (which we are excited about after 2 weekends of traveling!).

Love from Houston!



Thursday, August 5, 2010

Update!

It's been really busy around the Holloway household this week. As many of you know, we had to make an emergency family trip back to Mississippi last weekend. We got back home around 9ish Sunday night and I started work bright and early on Monday.

I like the job so far, though I feel that I don't really have a feel for it yet. I've been doing a lot of training, and I think I will like it more when I get to work on my own some. I can't believe I've almost been there a week! My job in a nutshell-- I'll be filling orders for direct mail. Basically, we have marketing folks that sell direct mail and email to car dealerships. The dealer picks out templates for these things, and my job is to go in and customize the template to fit the dealer in question. Hopefully next week I'll have more to report.

Other fun things we did this week-- date night. You all know how much I adore Olive Garden, and Lan and I went yesterday. Much to our dismay, our favorite item, Manicotti Formaggio was removed from the menu (apparently they weren't selling enough). Luckily for us, they replaced it with a similar item. Some sort of Lasagna rolls (I'm a sucker for filled pasta). They were yummy! After dinner, we went to Dillards and bought our canisters! Finally! Date night = success.

Sorry this post was so scattered. Like I said, crazy week! I hope to be more diligent in blog updates in the future. On the agenda for this weekend-- Mississippi weddings!