Fast Food Cupcakes

I saw this super cute idea on the Bakerella blog, mine aren't anywhere near as nice and yummy looking as her's are but still kind of cute. The 'bun' is a cupcake the 'hamburger patty' is a brownie and the lettuce and tomato/ketchup is colored icing. For the first time making them, not too bad, super cute dessert for a BBQ though.

Tent Rocks

Dan had a day off this week and we had heard about a place called Tent Rocks. I had never heard of it in all the years I've lived here. But it's only about an hours drive NW of Albuquerque so we decided it would be a nice day trip. Julie is also in town visiting this week and when I told her we were going, she wanted to go too. So we all went. It was great weather not real hot. And it was a really nice monument. The rocks are shaped like tent, hints where the name came from. They were formed that way from a mix of volcanic eruptions and floods flowing through the area. So here are some pictures from it. The kids loved the many lizards and bug we encountered along the way, I think more than the rocks. Logan did great and walked the whole way except a steep, slippery part of the trail.

Here's Logan beginning the hike.

There were lots of cacti blooming.

Here's the four kiddos all together, Sarah, Andrew, Logan and Elizabeth.

Sarah and Logan holding hands while walking the trail.

Some scenic shots......

Dan and Logan.

Dinosaurs and Disney

Busy week last week. Dan's parents were here to visit for the week. We went to the Natural History Museum and a Disney Train made a stop in ABQ over the weekend. More about that later.

Here we are at the museum. Logan did great at the museum. He didn't care for the 'dark' parts of the museum (the volcano or caves) but he liked looking at all the bones.

I took a picture of this before Logan erased it. It's his first word that HE wrote. I wrote the one on the left and he copied me on the right. He can almost do his name, the G is hard for him right now, but we'll keep practicing.

So onto the Disney Train. It was in ABQ Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We went bright and early Saturday morning. Dan had hoped Mickey would be there to greet people. But no sign of Mickey. But the reason the train was in town was because it was promoting Disney's new Holiday Movie The Christmas Carol. For more information on the movie or to see a map of where it's going you can click here. It will end in NYC on Nov 1, so there's still plenty of time to see it. And it's FREE! The train uses all state of the art digital technology to make the movie and it gave us a look behind the scenes of how they did it.

Walking to the front of the train for the tour.

Here's the first car. It was the costume car. Some of the actual costumes used in the movie and in the glass cases were some original Charles Dickens work.

The next car was the concept art car. Where we saw pictures of how artist made the different scenes.
Here's a shot of all the concept art pictures. They were in digital frames so the images kept changing.

Here's a close up of one of them.

The next car was the 3-D models for the movie. Here's Fred house.

Scrooges office.

The next car (which I didn't get a picture of) was of the digital suit that the actors wore to and their actions were stored as digital information. Then we moved onto this car where we saw how they used that action to create the movie.

Then there was an interactive car where you could play a 'quiz' like game about the movie. And they had different screens that you could 'morph' your face into a character from the movie. We didn't do that though.

Here's Logan enjoying the quizzes. He liked pushing the buttons on the screen.

Here we are in the last car, they had a fireplace and some final art images from the movie.
So we could see how everything came together.

Close up of one of the final art scenes.

The engine, of course.

There was a preview for the movie after the tour but the noises from the outside scared Logan so we waited outside, while Dan and his parents saw the preview.

So that was our week.

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