gettin' it on!

10 days 6 hours and 37 minutes (I made the hours and minutes up, okay?...) until I get to have sex again!!! Yoohooo! (Davey's mom's dinner call, of course)

hahah...felt like I had to say this. Who else is going to say something outrageous like that on here?? It's why you all love me...hehe

But anyway, more importantly than that even, I get to see MARY, ALISON, AND WHITNEY!! in 4 days...count 'em, 4 days!! I am so excited to be reunited with part of our little group and only wish that we could all be together :( We will do it up in style though in honor of y'all! Ellyn, I especially wish you were going to be there and not in danger in Cairo :( Can we get a supper club update on your situation?

Went to Asheville this weekend with mom and Keeley and it was lots of fun. Kim was being her usually crazy self and Keeley and I just laughed at her. The weekend would not have been complete without mom forcing me to do a photoshoot on the bed in our hotel room, trying to get some nice cleavage shots to send to Davey at boot camp.....unbelievable. Oh, you would like to see that you say? Well here you go...

So ridiculous. I may or may not send it....
So, we went to see the Biltmore and it was my first time there. That house was unbelievable! Have any of you been there? It's amazing. I felt like I was on a dream version of House Hunters (y'all know that's my favorite TV show, thanks HGTV!). The library was probably my favorite room and rivaled the magnificence of the library in Beauty and the Beast (yes, the Disney animated movie), mostly because it actually exists. You better believe that multiple times during the tour I said "ahhhh! This is like Beauty and the Beast"

Us in front of the Biltmore

Me in the Lobby of our very nice hotel- Mom did girl's weekend right! Plus, I'm sporting my new skinny jeans..I'm trying to stay with the trends y'all! Alpal, you can give me some professional pointers on how to rock these when I come visit.

So that's about all I have right now. I have a lot of things in the works- moving to Monterey, finding a house, getting some work lined up out there, finding out more about Davey's job and training- but have no official news to share at this time. So I'll hold off until then! Just know that I love you all and miss you all quite a lot. Stay safe everybody (Ellyn) and warm (Becca)!

P.S. Shout out to Anna Caroline who has hooked me up with Callie, her wedding photographer. Callie lived in Monterey while her husband attended DLI and has been helping me with house hunting, finding jobs, and telling me all about the area. She has even handed me a couple of nanny jobs on a silver platter, which is ridiculous! I already have nanny work in Monterey through May! You're the best AC.

spring time! wait what?

hello beautiful ladies...

i am working on a blog with the summary of my life for the past 2-3 months...but thought i would share this...

it is a BEAUTIFUL day here! feels like spring... it's 71 degrees (sorry becca and anyone else who is cold)...just seemed appropriate to post after the weather report from becca.

this is just an invitation or more a display of why you should come visit.

love!

will be posting soon.

miss. each. one. of you!

it's how cold?

-3 degrees cold. and the feel like? -23 degrees. at least the high is 14 today!.. it is, as they say in sweden, a stand between your pants day.

eheu. i live in the northeast.

but i just wanted to say hello before i go walk to work! i'll blog more later.

love you all.

maybe i broke the blog

(the picture is of cairo at dusk after i climbed up a minaret in the oldest mosque in cairo over christmas break! whooo.)

with my rancorous new year's eve blog, but i'm breaking the silence. ladies! let's get back on this thing. things in egypt are rolling along. my job is super busy right now. i'm basically doing two people's jobs right now, but such is life. it's actually chilly here and i'm wishing i had more coats to choose from. i need to go shopping. this is turning into a stream of consciousness blog. i'm going to go with it. the next four months are going to lovely with visitor's in ole cairo. february brings tyler and amber from saudi to visit. i really couldn't be more excited about seeing my brother and sister-in-law. it's been a long 5 months with no family time for the echols. and you all know how obsessed we are with each other. plus, i think tyler's been especially homesick so it'll be good for him too. march brings julia on her spring break from nyu. that's also been a long 5 months of no julia-ellyn time so i know it'll be good. i think she might go into shock in egypt, but hopefully she'll enjoy herself. i know she will. april is robyn from singapore and aaron from baton rouge. i'm so excited to have two of my friends coming at the same time from different places and during my birthday! what a sweet birthday present. and then last (but CERTAINLY not least) becca and alison in may. i am SO AMPED to have you 2 grace cairo with your lovely faces. it'll be sex and the city 3: cairo. just kidding. but seriously, let's take the city by storm. other than that, i'm just about to start arabic classes again for the semester. i'm excited about starting with a new teacher and a new schedule that'll hopefully be more conducive to me not hating my life. the old schedule was just too exhausting week in and week out and really took the fun out of it. additionally, we've started actually hanging out with some legit egyptian friends so conversation practice has been more frequent and more fun. it's nuts to think that i've lived here for almost 5 months. what a crazy but awesome time it's been. it's definitely been harder than i thought, but has also taught me a lot about myself and what i want to do in the next year or so. i'm hoping to end up in D.C. and looking at jobs at the moment. it's hard to try and apply/plan for jobs this early out, but i want to keep some options open. i really miss all of you dearly and cherish any time i get to skype/vid gchat with y'all so hit me up!

i hope you're doing well wherever you are. i miss yo faces like whoa.

love. love. love.

you win new year's eve. you win.

oh my. it's been too long. and i've been avoiding posting about my new year's eve for a lot of reasons. but i've decided it's time. unfortunately there are few pictures of the evening (thank god) but i'll try and paint you a picture with words. new year's eve in cairo eludes most of the population here in terms of the way we normally celebrate it, but the wealthier, more western cairenes know what they're doing. covers for clubs in cairo on NYE run anywhere from 200 LE to 1700 LE ($40-$300) and obviously since we make a little over that last figure in a month, the club scene was not really one we wanted to get into. enter: our friend sherif.

sherif is a recent AUC grad who volunteers with marnie at the desert development center where she works and has since worked his way into our group of friends. he's wonderful. studied at UCLA and Harvard and a pretty westernized guy, but also just lovely and a great host for us. so sherif had some friends that wanted to party and we wanted to party so we combined forces and decided to throw a house party on our terrace. there was booze and drinking games and like 10 of us partying, but it was kind of going slow and by 1am the girls (these 2 american girls sherif brought who sucked) and this other guy wanted to go dancing. by that time, we were all at the point of being easily convinced. so they left and sherif volunteered to drive the rest of us to meet up with them.

we piled 6 of us in a mercedes sedan, uncomfortably at best, and headed out. that in itself was ridiculous, but marnie's cousin was visiting as well and bless his nineteen year old heart decided he had to pee the minute we got onto a bridge and couldn't hold it. to avoid the panic attack that was coming quickly we encouraged him to get out of the car in the middle of the bridge and pee into the nile. he opted for the side of the road and we spent a good ten minutes giggling fiercely as bill ran across traffic and peed behind a tree. ridiculous.

finally, we were informed we weren't going to a club after all, but to the girls apartment in a neighborhood like 10 minutes from where we live. which was obviously ridiculous that we had even left our apts if we were just going to go to someone else's, but whatever. so we get to the girls apartment and proceed to have a raucous dance party on their patio the size of a small bathroom.

at 4am, mama ellyn decided it was time to pull the plug on everyone and we proceeded to get a cab back to zamalek and sing top 40 hits to the cab driver the whole way home. when we arrived at the apt i gave the driver way more money than was necessary and then got into a fight with him in arabic about the price. i will say this, alcohol improves my arabic immensely.

i know that doesn't do nearly enough justice to explain the night and it probably sounds less insane than it was. but believe you me, i spent the ENTIRE next day on my couch in pajamas nursing a whiteny-esque hangover. terrible.

needless to say, i was exhausted this sunday at work and needed another 2 days to fully get the wind back in my sails. i'm not proud of how nutty it was, i'm just kind of impressed that cairo has brought out a party-side of me none of us have ever seen. maybe its the fact that every day is a struggle here and when you get the chance to let loose it kind of over takes you? not sure. but if any of you make it over here, you'll get a first hand lesson in surviving cairo, and then maybe this will make sense.

i love you guys. happy 2011.

The Horn, The Horn, It Sounds So Forlorn

Ladies,

It has been too long since I've posted. Our holiday was really enjoyable, mostly because Andrew didn't have to work since he's on a school schedule! woohoo. The end of my semester was crazy busy so the break was much needed and enjoyed. We began with a trip to Thomasville for Manning & Lindley's wedding. T-ville was rather charming and we stayed in the kick-A "pond house" out in horse-country. The woman who owns it runs an antique store so everything in it was at least 100 years old (minus the microwave)--it was unreal. pictures don't do it justice.

Without further ado, our Christmas break in pictures:

Since we were already half-way to Tampa, we went and stayed at the Don Cesar resort to celebrate our 1 year. It was kind of ridiculously ritzy and we felt a little out of place, but nevertheless, we lived it up...ordered room service, visited the hotel bar, got snacks from the in-room fridge...all things i've never done before, of course. Oh, and did I mention the hotel was massive and bright pink? Just my style.

Then we visited Becca, Nathan and the kids for a couple of days...

We also went to the aquarium with Hace & Sally...

My two Christmas gifts from AT:

- some sweet grandma slippers

- my DUVET from anthro...shout out to Alpal for getting him the hook-up

Then we were off to NYC...Christmas with the Terrells was really fun, but we def overstayed our welcome...We were so antsy to leave after 9 days. Joseph & Whitney came up for New Years and we spent it with our good friend from high school Brandon Harris who lives up there now.

Sorry for the long post...love you and miss you all very much. Whit, selfishly, I'm so sad that you aren't moving back here anymore :(. Everyone, post more pics from holidaazee. lerve youu gals!!

p.s. I think i'm coming up to DC with anna , tatum and grace...last i heard anyway. I'll let y'all know!

hot tub time machine.

Hi my beautiful friends!

I hope you all had a great Christmas and a wonderful New Years. I am glad that you all just hung out on New Years and were low key, DC girls, cause that's the best! Y'all know Wanda never has a problem staying in on the couch watching bad tv...for hours. But, alas, I actually did something this year and it was fun! In an effort to avoid getting depressed and sad on my first New Years in 5 years without Davey, I got proactive and made plans and bought a ticket to the New Years party at the Adventure Science Center. Yes, the children's science museum. Unfortunately (but fortunately for the exhibits) we were not allowed to go into any of the really cool areas, which is understandable since drunk people and delicate objects don't mix well. It was an open bar and lots of people were there. They had a dance floor and a DJ and they were giving out free "space walk" rides (how that goes better with drunk people, I am not sure). I went with Bracey and Carter as my dates, but there were some others girls there that I knew too. Overall is was a success! Here are some pictures...




Now to the title of my blog post. Tomorrow marks 3 weeks since I've seen Davey and the reality of his absence has really begun to set in this last week. I'm not exactly realllyyy sad yet, but am beginning to get a little bit lonely and miss him in waves, especially when I'm doing something that I wish he were there for. But overall what's gotten me this past week is that I am basically living my single life all over again and it's weirding me out!

I feel a little bit like I'm in an alternate universe and that I turned the dial back a few years. I mean, at this moment I'm sitting here at my parents' house, eating cereal in my bed, staying up too late on the computer doing absolutely nothing, etc. etc. Pretty much I have immediately regressed back to my former self. This is probably a pretty unique opportunity to have as a married woman, since you don't usually completely separate from your husband like this unless you're divorced. I must say that my first impression of this new re-singleness is making me feel 2 things...1) Grateful for this opportunity to see how much I have enjoyed being married to Davey and spending time with him this past 1 1/2 and 2) Tired, because I am going to bed so late because I can't stop playing on the computer!! It's terrible. Really, it is.

Well that's all for now. I'm so looking forward to seeing you DC girls so soon!! Whoop. You 3 are single-handedly getting me through January...no pressure! Also, I posted a new blog about Davey's time at boot camp on my page if you want to check it out! Since he left I've been able to talk to him 2 times for about 35 minutes each, which has been nice.

Love you all!

New yEar neW yOu!

Ladiesssss, hey.

So Christmas break is coming to a close.  I was back in Nashville for a bit, one of my cousins got married so we went to North Carolina, and now I'm back up in DC.  We celebrated New Years in perfectly lazy fashion- cooking dinner, lasagna, salad, champagne, and chocolate oat bars- and stayed in watching bad tv and just hanging out.  [Sidenote: what on earth compelled the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block to start performing together?]  I'm posting the chocolate oat bars recipe because I've made them twice now and they're de.ricious.  Whit found the recipe- props to her:

• 1 cup butter or 1 cup margarine, softened
• 2 tablespoons butter or 2 tablespoons margarine, softened
• 2 cups brown sugar, firmly packed
• 2 large eggs
• 4 teaspoons vanilla extract (divided)
• 3 cups quick oats
• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt (divided)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. In a mixing bowl, cream 1 cup butter and brown sugar.  Beat in eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla.  Combine the oats, flour, 1 teaspoon salt and baking soda; stir into creamed mixture.
2. Press two-thirds of oat mixture into a greased 15 x 10-inch baking pan.
3. In a saucepan, combine milk, chocolate chips and remaining butter and salt.  Cook and stir over low heat until chocolate is melted.  Remove from the heat; stir in remaining vanilla.
   Spread over crust.
   Sprinkle with remaining oat mixture.
4. Bake at 350° for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
   
   
   
   
   I love you all and miss you guys so much!  XOXOXOXO...hehe.Mary