Four Day Weekend!

We've had a great weekend here in the Joseph household.  Matt had a four day weekend due to Veteran's Day and we definitely took advantage of it!  We decided to take a last minute trip up to Boulder on Thursday.  The University of Colorado Boulder is Matt's first choice for pursuing his MBA and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to check out both the town and the university.  Thankfully, the staff in the business school was able to accommodate our short notice request and Matt was able to meet with the Director of Admissions as well as sit in on a finance class and meet some current MBA students.  The campus really is quite pretty and has a bit of a different feel than Mizzou.  Boulder itself is absolutely gorgeous and so close to the mountains!!  We met up with one of my old friends from high school who has lived in Boulder for the last six years and had lunch at The Sink, which is where most of the locals go (it's the equivalent to Columbia's Heidelberg).  I could definitely see us living in Boulder, or right outside of it, and there's even a hospital I'd love to work at.  Matt submitted his application tonight (yay!!) so keep your fingers crossed for him!!  We forgot to take pictures with our camera (oops!) so here are a couple from the web:

An aerial view of the campus

The Koelbel Building, home of the Leed's School of Business
where Matt will hopefully spend most of his time next year!

The mascot is a buffalo named Ralphie.

Friday was my 27th birthday (11/11/11!!) and it was so great to be able to celebrate with Matt for the first time in three years!  Last year he was in Iraq and the year before that he was at NTC in California.  We spent the day just relaxing and took Cooper to the dog park.  My gift from him was a pair of boots that I had been wanting and that I just love!  Matt made dinner reservations for us at The Pepper Tree, a fancy restaurant here in the Springs as well as baked me a cake (rainbow party sprinkle cake with rainbow party chip icing...my absolute favorite!!).  It was a great birthday full of well wishes from loved ones, but the best part really was just having Matt home to celebrate with. :)

My awesome new boots!!

And Matt :)

Today was another relaxing day: we spent the morning doing a little bit of shopping and running some errands and the afternoon was full of football...way to go Mizzou, beating Texas!  I thought we'd share the delicious dinner we made tonight: crispy chicken with creamy Italian sauce and pasta.  I found the recipe via Pinterest, which happens to be my new obsession.  It's basically like a virtual pinboard where you can "pin" things you find online under different categories like recipes, craft projects, style inspiration, basically anything you want!  It's a great way to find new recipes and we've been trying out a lot of them lately.  You can find tonight's recipe here.

The cooking process

The final product!

It turned out really well and was very tasty!  We used angel hair pasta because we had some at home that we wanted to finish off but next time we'll use the bowtie pasta as I think it would work better.  Also, the pasta sauce was pretty heavy so next time we'll try to tweak that so it's a bit lighter.  Other than that, we'd definitely recommend it!!

And, since this post has gotten a bit long, I'll wrap it up with a gratuitous picture of Cooper dog because he's  just that cute. :)

I had to hold a treat in front of him to get a picture and this
still was the best I could get. :)