Baseball Danny

Keeping with last year's birthday baseball vacation, we celebrated Dan's birthday this year with a baseball themed birthday party! Dan rented a baseball field for the evening, and our (male) friends suited up to hit some balls, catch some balls, throw some balls, run after balls...you know, all the things you do with baseballs if you aren't playing an actual game. It was a beautiful evening, and it felt so cool to be under the lights. We had pizza, baseball decorated cupcakes and a little cheering squad rooting them on. Here are some pictures of the night!

Some classic baseball card poses for you. Collect all four:

More poses...plus, some pictures of craft services (that would be me) and our cheering squad. (I think little CJ has a future in the pros).

What baseball night doesn't end with a few races? Oh wait, none. But when it's your birthday, and you love a good 50-yard dash, that is what ends up happening.

Happy Birthday, Dan! It was a good one!

See all pictures from the night here!

Mom

Can't wait to see my mom in just a few weeks. 10 months is too long to go without seeing your mommy.

Love you, mom!

My Favorite Breakfast

When it comes to breakfast, I like to keep things same old, same old. Bowl of cereal on the weekdays, and eggs or pancakes on the weekends. It's been like that for years.

A recent addition to the standard menu is homemade granola with plain yogurt. This is my go-to recipe. Instead of the dried fruit the recipe calls for, I like to top my granola with fresh berries. I've been making a batch of it nearly every week (it makes the house smell amazing!), and it has really become my favorite breakfast of all time. Seriously.

P.S. As you can see from my blog redesign and this post, I am definitely putting my new Photoshop skills to use! I kind of can't get over how much I learned from Blogshop (I wrote about the experience here).  Blogshop and Photoshop are giving away Photoshop CS6 to one lucky winner. I am in it to win it, and this blog post is my entry to the Blogshop Photoshop contest. 

Wish me luck!

Dan's 33rd Birthday

So it is that time of year again in the Team Squeen household...birthday season. 

Dan woke up to some fresh and tasty old-fashioned donuts at his bedside. In case that wasn't enough birthday sweets, I made him some brownies to take with him to work. In the UK, you are supposed to bring in treats to the office when it's your birthday. Dan insisted his be of the homemade variety. His coworkers said he was lucky to have such a nice wife :) 

Dan spent his birthday at a baseball game with some friends on Friday night which he said was loads of fun. On Saturday, I cooked him up a lasagna dinner and gave him his present: a gift certificate for bass lessons. In the next few weeks, I am expecting a little less air guitar and a little more real guitar in this house.

The Dan celebration continues next week. Yeah, this guy is also getting a birthday party. He is awfully lucky, isn't he?

(Oh yes! Everyday Ham looks different! I am playing around with a new look and feel. I expect I will be switching it up a bit until I find a design I like. Don't mind me.)

I did it!

This weekend, I did a two-day Photoshop class for bloggers called Blogshop. It is run by two girls including one of my favorite bloggers, Bri Emery, who writes DesignLoveFest. 

I have been wanting to do this class for like two years now (these girls travel all over the world doing these things). My blog looks like it's straight out of 2007 and definitely needs help.

In a cool white studio filled with super chic women, I drank a mimosa and learned all kinds of Photoshop tricks and techniques like making a banner, creating a mood board, softening wrinkles, and all those kinds of things bloggers should know about. We got a goody bag filled with cute cards from minted.com, fake tattoos, a striped iPhone case, a jewelry tray and bkr water bottles. Plus, we got to meet Joy Cho, blogger extraordinaire, who just wrote a book on the subject. (We got one of those, too). She was very pretty.

With this animated gif I created all by myself (which doesn't seem to work in all browsers), I think I have a real chance to go viral. What this means is that Everyday Ham has almost made the big time. (almost!) It's everything I've always imagined, but more.

Everyday Beach?

Pretty cool coincidence: Our friend Julien's work transferred him out here to Southern California, and now he lives 45 minutes north of us in Malibu. On Saturday, we drove up there for an overnight visit, which was some of the best fun I have had in a long time. Julien is a pretty funny guy, we enjoy his friends and best of all, he lives in a rustic place on top of a hill in the middle of gorgeous nowhere....that just happens to be a 10 minute drive to the beach. It's pretty great.

We spent the day playing on the beach:

 Dan redeems himself by taking a better picture of me.

Ever the modest one, Julien shows off his guns.

We played lots of games including a petanque tournament, which is sort of like bocce. Dan and I came in last, but I was surprisingly good at it. Then Dan and Julien began juggling the heavy balls, and one clonked on Julien's nose, breaking it for the 14th time in his life. He didn't seem all that bothered. That's Julien for you.

We drove up the PCH to this cliff to watch the sunset.

 We couldn't see the sun, but the view was still pretty dope.

Eva and her sister, who was visiting from France. It was pretty cold by that point!

 Julien telling Dan about all the colors in a sunset.

True Malibu love.

We headed back to Julien's pad.  We ate a whole lot of food: a delicious dinner prepared by Hoa and Julien and dessert by moi. We sat under the (many) stars, listened to the crickets and drank wine until we were too tired to keep our eyes open anymore.

 View from Julien's place: the morning after. Yes, that is the ocean over there.

We headed back early the next day because I was hosting Ladies' Club, which is a monthly get-together of the girls in our circle of friends out here. Every month, we have a different activity planned by the host, and being that I am the only one who lives on the west side of town, I planned a beach day. We had a small contingent of us (Suze, Emily, Sandy and June) come down to Santa Monica to eat some Bay Cities Italian sandwiches, dip our toes in the water, suntan and catch up.

 Suze, Sandy and June

This weekend kind of rocked. I mean, I felt like I was on vacation the whole time, but no, this is basically my life now. I can live with that!

Labor Day Weekend

Friday: Kayleen came to town, so we gathered up Valerie, Tim, Julien (who moved to Malibu this summer!), Hoa and Eva for some unlimited garlic knots and ginormous platters of pasta at C+O.

Saturday:

Yvonne: Hey Dan, can you take a picture of me for the blog?

Dan: Sure, I'll take the most unflattering picture of you that's ever existed.

Yvonne: Right on!

We went to our beach for a few hours, and I looked that good.

Sunday: Henry and Susan stopped by our place en route to LAX. They were about to embark on a four week vacation to Italy. (Retirement sure sounds awful.) We show them the Venice boardwalk; in return, Henry hung up our kitchen lamp.

Monday: Dan and I biked from our place to the Ballona Wetlands, one of the top birdwatching joints in town. (Did I tell you I got a bike? I love it!)

Afterwards, we drove to the Valley to celebrate Ara's (belated) birthday with some Mexican food and frozen yogurt.

It's really a shame we had to go back to work on Tuesday.