Engagement Photos at The Standard in Downtown LA

This place was a must for our engagement photo shoot. Mike proposed to me at The Standard and the proposal wasn't the only surprise that night. Our families and friends were there to celebrate with us!

Anything other than this location would not do. This hotel is forever significant to us and so are these photos taken by our wedding photographer Heavenly Portraits.


CLICK HERE to see the photos on their blog












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Its Lovely to Meet You, Noah

Mike's little brother Steven and his wife Julie had their first baby August 1st. The photo above was taken a couple weeks before our new nephew was born. Julie was ready to go and Steven couldn't wait much longer to see their baby boy.


Hello, I'm new to the world... My name is Noah Steven Soto and I'm handsome.

Mommy likes her new little boy


There he is... the "Drunk Uncle". As we sat in the waiting room uncle Mike threw back the Bud Lights and repeatedly announced to the room "I'm the drunk uncle! Pounding beers in the waiting room, never been done!"

He's not much for children but he's taken a liking to Noah.

Now that we have a nephew to spoil, we get to buy him all kinds of cool clothes.


Recently, Noah found his tongue and aunt Trish got a few good shots of how much he enjoyed that tongue.


What a handsome boy! Put your tongue away Noah!









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The happiest place on my birthday

Disneyland was super fun! I had good company: Mike, Andy and Mary. I'm officially a Disneyland geek and apart of the funky pin-trading, lanyard wearing, face painting fan club! Thanks for the lanyard Andy and Mary! Thanks for reluctantly paying for my face painting Mike!

I got a nice big button that shows everyone its my birthday and everyone at the park wished me "Happy Birthday" all day! I was special.

Walking into the park. Mary is so excited and so are Mike and Andy, you can see the excitement in their faces!Thank you Andy and Mary for my lovely lanyard!

Mary and I, rockin' our lanyards!

Mike was almost eaten alive by the this hippo on the jungle cruise.

Face painting: the official birthday seal

Log ride at the end of the night.. Sure, why not freeze our butts off and then go out to eat at a fancy restaurant while my hair dye runs down my face.... Best birthday ever! I loved it!









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Will Blog For Food

It's been a while since we posted a new entry. A lot has been going on, I lost my job about 3 months ago, and Elaina lost her job. It's all good, the wedding planning continues and we've been keeping ourselves busy. You would think that not having jobs gives you a lot of free time but you can actually stay pretty busy. Not to metion, about 25% of our friends in are unemployeed as well becaue they too are in the architecture/graphics field.

We're going to continue our blogging as time goes on but with the wedding fast approaching there really won't be that much extra time. So if you see Elaina and I selling fruit on the street corner, hook us up and buy a bag!

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Wedding Party Taste Off

It’s been a while since our last entry, so here’s what’s been going on. As our wedding day approaches we wanted to have a night to where our entire wedding party could come together and really get to know one another. So Elaina and I decided that we should have a wine tasting party.

The rules were simple, each person/couple needed to bring one bottle of their favorite cabernet sauvignon and $5. Elaina and I would number and foil wrap each bottle then everyone would taste and vote on the bottle they liked the most. The person/couple that brought the winning bottle would receive everyone’s $5! All the while the wedding party would be interacting with each other and getting drunk at the same time.


Elaina and the other girls provided everyone with a badass spread. It really came in handy once the wine started settling in!



We had wine glasses laid out for everyone with their names on them. Elaina made the labels and it was my job to attach them to the glasses.


Here are most of the bottles, we ended up having about 16 bottles total!


Here are some early pictures while everyone was still bright eyed. Julie, Jakki, Kelsey, Marco, and the robot.


Andy, Mary, and Donna


Lisa and Corey


Leanne and Matt


Steven, Me, Jerry, and Vince


Marco, Edward, Kelsey, Chrischelle, Elaina, and Christine


The guys seemed to all have a gay moment, drinking wine with their arms intertwined!!! Andy, Jerry, Steven, Vince, Corey, and John.


John brought a bottle of Cab, but he also brought wine in a box. Not the best stuff in the world but it did the trick once we killed the other 14 bottles!


After all the votes were tallied, Andy and Mary brought the winning bottle!!!


Andy won, but ultimately lost because he was stuck wearing this shirt the rest of the night.


At some point Andy was dancing alone in the living room so Elaina joined him.


Here's a first, Vince smiling AND drinking beer. He even stayed out past 10pm!!!


Jerry moved on to beer after the wine. Then was kicking like David Lee Roth the rest of the night. He almost put his foot through my subwoofer while he pretended to kick imaginary EMO kids!


This pretty much sums up the night, good times for sure but we ALL pasted out. I think Elaina and I crashed about 4am.


If you want to view all the photos from the wine party, CLICK HERE.

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Start Your Engines!

This past weekend Elaina and I went to the Long Beach Grand Prix. I have been going pretty regularly for the past 10 years or so but this was Elaina’s first year. We made it a co-ed race weekend so it was Elaina and I, Jerry, Jakki, Matt and Leanne. My buddy Marshall from work hooked us up with free Saturday tickets. Can't beat $free.99!!!


We got there early because we wanted to get some decent seats. It was a warm day and we knew it was only going to get hotter. After the national anthem was sung, there was a fly over by this HUGE tanker jet thing. I don't know much about planes but this thing was BIG and they said that it was flying at 500' and at its slowest speed possible. It looked as if it was going to land right on the track.



First group shot, we're not burnt red yet and we're still smiling. (Me, Elaina, Matt, Leanne)



Someone should have told these four clowns that there's an auto race going on behind them! (Leanne, Matt, Jakki, Jerry)



Okay, NOW it's time to load on the sunblock. It was about 11am and already over 90 degrees without a cloud in sight. Jerry REALLY didn't want to get burnt! At least Matt had Leanne there to help him, Jakki and the rest of us just laughed at Jerry. He still has WAY more in his hands too!




After a couple of hours of sitting in the grand stands baking, the girls left us for ice cream! They even left the race track entirely and were wondering around downtown Long Beach. Elaina found herself this hat and then they eventually came back to find us burnt, drunk, and grumpy. Oh, they forgot OUR ice cream too. Nice!



We smuggled in a couple bottles of hard alcohol and some mixers. There was NO WAY we were gonna pay $10 a beer! Once the alcohol was gone though, we moved on to $10 beers, DAMN!



All in all it was a great day at the races. A little warm but nothing a lot of booze and some ice cream couldn't fix.








Oh yeah, the race was pretty good too. I think?













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