Seminar in D.C.

Last week I was on vacation which was totally nice! It was cut short due to a seminar for a new bracket system that we are using in the office. We left Thursday morning for the airport. We landed in Washington that afternoon and took a cab to the hotel. After settling in we went to Union Station and had dinner. It's HUGE!!! It has a mall and great food court in it. After we shopped and ate we took a night tour of the city and monuments. It was really georgeous to see all of the monuments lit up but I didn't get as good pictures as I would have liked. The next day we had seminar and then went out to dinner at West End Bistro. It is owned by renowned chef Eric Ripert. It was really good. The atmosphere wasn't too stuffy and the food was excellent. I wasn't feeling well afterwards so I walked back to the hotel and spent the rest of the night watching TLC. Of course the next day we had seminar again but it ended early and we ate lunch at Bread and Chocolate. It was good too. Afterwards we headed for a short walk into Georgetown. Oh my goodness that place was packed. There are tons of shops such as Kate Spade, Steve Madden, etc. We chose to go to Ben and Jerry's (ice cream) since we felt it was more in our price range. I found a cute little souvenier shop on one of the side streets and was able to find us all a T shirt. We headed back to catch a cab to the airport and were home a few hours later. I wish I'd had more time to sight see but I'm not complaining since the boss took care of all expenses. Here are some pics of my trip. Hope you enjoy.

We stayed at the Westin Grand
The view of 24th st from my room

The view of M st from my room

Union Station

Washington Monument

Does anyone know what this building is? I recognized it from high school history but can't remember what it is.

White house

back of Jefferson Memorial

front of Jefferson Memorial

Thomas Jefferson



These next few pics were taken at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. It had many statues and lots of verses engraved on the walls from FDR's speeches. Some of them really hit home to what our country is dealing with at the present time. Hope Obama takes a tour of this one soon and uses FDR's wisdom for leading our country.


The next two photos are from the Korean War Memorial. The feeling of seeing all the statues as if they were in combat was chilling. My pictures didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped but it was absolutely beautiful.


I made sure that I took plenty of pictures at the Lincoln Memorial. Bryce really has learned alot about the presidents and Lincoln is one of his favorites. Can you see the snow still on the ground... it was beautiful.


The last thing we saw was the WWII Marines Monument. It is outside Arlington National Cemetary which we didn't get to see :( but everything was just so breathtaking and humbling to see where our country has come and where it's headed.


Here is the Old Stone House in Georgetown. It was built in 1776 or so. It's the oldest building left standing in Georgetown. The last picture is of Gtown row houses. These houses cost upwards of 2-3 million to purchase. How rediculous is that. And I thought it was crazy to spend much more than 200k on one!

It's not as yellow as I thought

Ok so I got a little too anxious over the mustard walls. After finishing it and hanging my paintings and frame it looks great! I still need to get a hall table and lamp to go under the art, but it's really not as bright as I thought it would be. It's warming up on me. Heres a pic of the almost final project.

I'm just mad about saffron!!!

Although you can catch me singing around the house "I'm just mad about saffron, saffron's mad about me...they call me mellow yellow...etc." , that was not the inspiration for my new wall color on my foyer. At christmas my boss got us really nice rustic frames from Bridges Brothers. My frame has multicolored stripes on it. I have been needing a good excuse for taking down my wallpaper and painting in the foyer, so I decided to pull one of the colors from the frame and coordinate. Off to Home Depot I go to choose my perfect color and there I found Sahara Shade. The perfect tone of mustard, not too yellow and not too doo-dooish. I have been so excited about this until I opened the can and started rolling it out on the walls. OMG!!!! It's bright and very sunshiny! I hope that when I get my frame on the wall and my custom artwork that I painted (by the way you can go here http://www.crystalandcanvas.blogspot.com/ to see my other paintings) that my walls will not be so bright. The more I paint the sicker I get because Eric is a total hospital white kinda guy. He doesn't understand the need to add color to the wall because white is just fine. He also prefers vanilla over chocolate...what's wrong with him. Well anyway here are some progress pics. I will post the final outcome when I'm finished.

The color we chose was 2nd from the top.

The color we got was this!!!! Of course the paint is still slightly wet.

Mississippi Snow...in March!

We had tons of fun in the snow this morning. As always, Mississippi snow lasts long enough for everything to get wet and your house to get filthy, but it was fun anyway. We made out own version of Frosty this year, with a few changes. You know the song goes...corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. Well our snow man had bubba teeth mouth and a blue rock nose and two eyes made out of organic (and allergen free just in case) double chocolate brownie cookies. He looked a little evil by the time we got finished with him. Here are some pics for you to enjoy.