proud sister

The first three photos are from our way from the airport to the hotel on Thursday. I tried to snap some quick skyline photos from the car on this beautiful blue sky day. The fourth photo is what it looked like from our hotel about two hours after the graduation on Friday. Crazy! I mean, I've been crying about wanting snow since December but this made me a little weary that we wouldn't be able to pick up/drop off my brother at the base throughout the weekend, or that we'd get stuck at the airport. Thankfully, the weather cleared up, the weekend went by flawlessly with lots of brother time, and we got home completely on schedule.

So now that we're back it can totally snow whenever it wants. ;)

Here are a few photos from the graduation..

The first two photos are of my brother's division. It was strange seeing him all dressed up and disciplined. So weird. He's doing really well and I'm super proud of him. :)


Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you all have lovely plans with friends or loved ones!

post fest

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I survived festing once again. When PBR is the only beverage in sight, most of the food is of the "fast" variety, and you're required to stand for hours at a time either watching a band or waiting to watch a band, it's easy to see why survival might be hard. Anyway, I won't go into too much detail but it was a good time. We stayed with Charlie's brother who lives in Gainesville while he goes to school and he showed us a good time outside of fest activities. For example, I got to hold a kinkajou! If you're like me and you wouldn't know what a kinkajou was unless it was hanging from your shirt, allow me to show you..

The absolute softest, fuzziest, thing I've ever held in my life. He was such a little climber! I had to keep plucking him from the back of my shirt and pull him back to the front, where he tried in vain to get a bite of my fest bracelets. I wanted to take him home with me so bad.

Speaking of fest bracelets, I had to get a photo of how ridiculous the accumulation was before we tore them all off..

I'm pretty sure we had more last year, but there were WAY too many people there this year since it was an anniversary show so it was very hard to get into different venues between shows. But that allowed us some time to do some other things so it ended up working out alright.

For one, we got to watch the Union/Dynamo playoffs at Stubbies and Steins, our favorite bar in Gainesville. We weren't too pleased with the outcome, but at least we got to watch it all go down. Stubbies has a huge variety of different beers and amazing German food. It's an awesome break from PBR and fast food.

As you can see, no crappy lite beers there! ;)

But anyway, the reason you are probably here right now. If you entered the giveaway, that is. I didn't get in until after 10pm last night and I did randomly generate a winner but I was way too tired to do a proper post. So here it is, without further ado, the winner of my very first giveaway!


Sarah B. of Yes Teacher! Congrats! I will send you an email later today to discuss the details so I can come up with a good Moleskine package for you. :)

Thank you so much to everyone who entered. You made my one year blogiversary a super happy one. Since I had so much fun with this, I'll definitely be doing more in the future. I'd say it was a good first experience. And thank you to all the other readers and friends who have come along over the past year. You are the main reason I keep my little piece of the internet up and running.

Happy November! Hope your month is starting off well! :)

catch you on the flip side

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Just wanted to pop in real quick and let you know I'll be in the sky in the a.m. tomorrow, headed to Florida for The Fest. What fest? THE Fest. Nobody believes me when I tell them that's what it's called. Anywho, Charlie and I went last year and this year is the big 10th anniversary show and quite possibly that last time that all situations will align correctly to allow us to go. So we go.

Just wanted to fill you in since I'm in the middle of a giveaway here on the blog. And because while I do have an iphone now, lord knows if I'll be savvy enough to use the social media properly and stay in touch with the world. I'm still doing things like accidentally favoriting random tweets about nothing when using Twitter on my phone cause I swipe and hit random things like a toddler with no dexterity. I get really paranoid I'll accidentally retweet something totally inappropriate and then I'll have to get rid of my Twitter and die. And now you know what goes on in my brain.

So since I'll be gone for the weekend I decided I might as well keep the giveaway open until Sunday at midnight EST. I'll come back Monday night and post the winner. So that's what's happening there. Now I need to sleep because morning comes waaaaaaaaaayy early tomorrow and I'm clearly in ramble mode from all the tired I'm feeling.

Have a great weekend, keep entering the giveaway, and I'll see you Monday. :)

mount gretna

Before we left Gretna on Sunday, I ran around the house and snapped some quick photos of the finer details of the place that just knocked my socks off. I figured if anyone would appreciate this kind of stuff it'd be this little blogging community right here. :)

It's a little photo heavy so I'm gonna keep it text light and just show you the little treasures hidden all over this house.

It was a really fun, relaxing weekend. I'm curious to see this place in the summer. We stayed right next to a lake which is probably amazing in the summer. Tune in tomorrow to see my haul from the "crap store" which I couldn't be more excited about. :)

Have a good week!

kutztown

Whew! Last week was a busy one. I went to Kutztown with my family on Tuesday, me and Charlie's five year anniversary was on Thursday, and my mom's birthday was on Friday. We haven't totally celebrated our five years yet since it fell on a Thursday and this weekend was busy but we at least wanted to spend Thursday night together so we were with each other on the actual date. We'll celebrate for real on an upcoming weekend and do a bunch of our favorite things to celebrate a pretty decent milestone. I also have a fun gift in the works that I'll share later!


The Kutztown Folk Festival is something I've been going to with my family for a few years now. It's a fun little Pennsylvania Dutch fest where they have a bunch of German food, crafters, music, and a farmer's market.

There's some pretty talented crafters there but I like to go for the antique section. I would be stoked to walk out of that place with everything in sight. There are amazing finds for a steal! There's everything from antique tools, dishes, and furniture, to vintage packaging, cameras, and jewelry.

This year I picked up a vintage blue glass ball jar for myself. It was the only one there and I've been wanting to get my hands on one for a while.



As part of a housewarming gift, I got Charlie this vintage movie camera to go with his ever-growing vintage camera collection. I was so happy when I saw this one there because I knew he didn't have a movie one yet. 15 bucks. Mega score.


It's from 1956 and seems to be in perfect working condition so hopefully we can find some film for it and have some fun!


It has all of the original paperwork in the box and lens caps and everything. The woman who sells these takes amazing care of her things. All the original packaging is pretty immaculate for being almost 60 years old.


We picked up some jams and preserves at the farmer's market and I spied a stack of packaged honeycombs and had to grab one. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet but I was fascinated by it and will find some sort of use for it. Any suggestions? I've actually seen a recipe or two that called for a honeycomb, but can I find them now? Of course not.


My mom also grabbed a jar of honey and asked the guy if it was local. I laughed a little, having a flashback of the restaurant scene in Portlandia. :)


Other than that I've been helping Charlie get his new place together which is coming along nicely. We hung some artwork last night and it's looking cozier by the minute. Hope everyone's summer is going well. Who knew it was July already?! Jeeez.

miami

Oh life. I tell ya. I had planned to post this on Monday but I forgot it was Memorial Day so I spent a good portion of the day in the kitchen making some bbq-accompanying sides. Then it was relax time. Both Tuesday and Wednesday (the hottest days of May EVER) I spent in second and third grade classrooms getting my last few observation hours in. I'm taking a summer semester class so I was still required to do 20 hours of classroom observation, despite the fact that everyone is pretty much reviewing for exams, cleaning up, having tons of days off, etc. But we did get out early yesterday for the heat. That was good considering there is no AC whatsoever in that school.

Anywho, with all that, catching up on 6 small papers, and attending my own classes, that left little room for blogging. So here I am, sharing some vacation photos from Miami, trying to get back on track.

I picked out my favorites to leave big and grouped together some small ones because I know it can be boring looking at other people's vacation photos. I'll probably upload the full size ones to my Flickr at some point so if you guys are into celebrity mansions and view-from-a-boat pictures you can check em out without me bombarding you on here. ;)

Here are a few from the hotel room. We stayed at the Fountainebleau which was amazing. They have such a great selection of restaurants. I was stuffed every night from the most amazing food ever. The beach was great of course, as I am a beach girl at heart, despite the fact that I hide under umbrellas coated in spf 75 these days. :)

Loving that warm, teal water.

The only hitch was that it was Urban Weekend or Week or something. Which meant Lil Wayne and Drake were performing at the clubs in the hotel. Which sounds all good and fine until the clientele changes from scarce resort goers, to a more spring break like bunch that crowds every bar, beach chair, and pool side area, and has raging parties in the hotel room next door to yours until 4am. *insert death stare here* But if you can put all that behind you, it was still an amazing vacation. You just had to make the best of it.

So we went on a tour!

We stopped in Little Havana which was beautiful. The houses were so colorful and this little gift shop (above) had this Cuban coffee that was better than any coffee I have ever tasted. We were taken there specifically to try the coffee. Now that's my kinda tour!

We drove through Coral Gables which was this gorgeous area where a lot of the house are made of coral (bottom left) and the streets are all lined with these crazy tangled up trees (top left) where the roots grow down from the top to reach the ground and form more tangles. Apparently these only grow in a few tropical regions so I thought they were worthy of a photo. We passed by a playhouse (bottom right) where they were doing an Alfred Hitchcock show which I thought was fun. And then we moved on to the boat portion of the tour where I saw a cruise ship in person for the first time (top right). Cruise ships are bigger monstrosities than I ever imagined. It was a little scary getting so close to it! (That tiny bridge below it has cars on it. You can't even see them! Huge, I tell ya.)

Above are various celebrity mansions from Star Island. This was pretty much the main feature of the boat tour. We went all around, learning which mansion belonged to which star and how much they cost. I couldn't tell you who any of these belong to because celebrity stuff is not something I really care about, but they were cool looking so I took some photos anyway. ;)

This one seemed pretty worthy of my attention though so it gets it's own special spot.


This is the Scarface mansion where those final crazy scenes were shot. I thought that was pretty interesting to see. The only other one that really grabbed my attention was Al Capone's old mansion. I didn't get a shot of it though because there was a two story little plain looking house in front of it where his armed guards apparently stayed, so it didn't make a great photo.

So that is my vacation in a tiny little nutshell. I feel like summer has officially started. Swimming in a crystal clear ocean will do that to you. How are you enjoying (or staying out of) this crazy hot weather? We actually have some relief here today which is pretty nice. Hope your week is going well!

christmastime

This weekend I was away in Atlantic City, and apparently the elves were busy at work while I was gone. When I came home, all the decorations were in place and the every window was outlined in a rainbow of bulbs. I'm actually glad to be home for Christmas for the first time in four years. In the past, I was only home on the weekends, if that, and I felt like I really missed out on things. I usually didn't even come home from school until the 23rd of December because finals always had me at my wit's end. Which is why it never failed that I always came home with some illness due to lack of sleep, improper nutrition, and plenty of stress.




I'm glad to be here for it all this year, and have decided to share photos of just a few things for now. Things that have been around for longer than I can remember. Things that were passed down from grandparents and have a permanent fixture in my memory.

Some of my favorite decorations are my family's Christmas stockings. My great-aunt knitted them for the entire family, so all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles, have the exact same stockings. They are all personalized with everyone's names and are added as new members are married or born into the family.




One thing about traditions though is that people have to keep them going or they just fade out. Concerned about this, I asked my grandmom if anyone was planning on carrying out the family stocking business. She talked to her sister-in-law and found out that none of her children or grandchildren had been interested in taking this on. She was very excited that I was interested in keeping it going and offered me the pattern she used. I gladly accepted and have made it my mission to perfect it so I can take over since she can't knit so much anymore due to arthritis.




Unfortunately, they are knitted. And if you've been with me for a while, you know how I feel about knitting. I do know how to knit, I just don't prefer it. So I added this to my 101 things in 1001 days list in hopes of practicing before the next family member is added.




The next thing on the list of Christmas fun is marathon cookie baking. I picked up Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookie magazine and found a few new ones to add to the list of things to try. I have very high baking ambitions this year. :)



I hope everyone had a great weekend. I had a great time celebrating a friend's birthday on friday and going to Atlantic City on Saturday. We kicked off Charlie's mom's birthday by going shopping at this mall on the boardwalk. They had a lot of crazy expensive stores in there which made for fun window shopping but not too much buying.

His mom bought me this really nice sweater in White House Black Market. Having two sons, I think she likes to be able to do girly things with someone, like having a daughter. I'm happy to fill that position :). It's always good when you get along well with your SO's parents.




The sweater is black and white with cute little silver buttons down the side. It's got a little sparkle woven into it which would make it perfect for a holiday event.




After shopping and lunch, Charlie and I checked into our room and took a nap until dinner. We are old. We all met up later for dinner and ate at this really nice restaurant inside the Borgata, where we stayed. We celebrated with champagne and steaks and good conversation. Afterward, we went into the casino for a little bit. I'm a noob at casino-going so I kept it simple and played video poker. I won $70 so I was happy :). We then went to the Water Club lounge which was so pretty. The atmosphere in there was just so relaxing. We had more drinks accompanied by a lot of funny stories.

On Sunday, we came back home and I decorated the Christmas tree with my family while Elf played in the background. Then I went to Charlie's to watch the season finale of Boardwalk Empire (so good). I'm gonna miss it until season 2 starts. That's the first show I've actually made it a point to keep up with in a while. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, watch it.

I hope everyone else had a great weekend! How's your Christmas prep going?

a short one

This is gonna be a short one today because I have lots to do before this weekend. I'm going to Atlantic City tomorrow with Charlie for his mom's birthday. His parents will be there the whole weekend, taking in shows and everything, and then we head down tomorrow for dinner and fun. We come back Sunday morning because Charlie has to put in some extra time and work on Sunday.

Does anyone else watch Boardwalk Empire? That has become our show. If you have HBO and don't watch it, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's based in Atlantic City during the prohibition era. Amazing clothes, great music, and a storyline that keeps you on your toes!




In other news, I finished my scarf finally and I love it. It gave me a good idea of how long it'll take me to make them if I want to put them in my shop. This one took me longer than it should have because I ran out of yarn and had to wait to get more and then Thanksgiving happened so I took a huge break. If I did it straight through it would've taken two days. And that's with reasonable breaks and life stuff happening.

Speaking of the shop, I finally have a goal date for getting that up. January 2011. I started typing up a list of things I wanted to accomplish business-wise, and then I started adding some personal goals. As this list started to grow, I remembered the whole "101 things in 1001" days thing that I have seen on many blogs before. So now my list has some immediate goals, like get the shop up and running and brand tenpenny splendid, and some more long term goals, like finish my master's degree. These are all things I should be able to accomplish in the 2.75 years that is 1001 days.

I kept it realistic because, while I would love to travel to Europe or renovate my dream kitchen, these things aren't likely to happen within the next three years. I'm already excited to start my next list when the time comes because it will be a whole new phase of my life. I think this will be a good thing and help me remember and reach my goals that are important to me. I'll officially start January 1, 2011 and share it here on my blog so I have a place to keep track of it.

Have any of you done this? I'd be curious to know how it helped you stick with things that may have otherwise been forgotten or pushed aside.

I don't know if this counts as a "short one" anymore, but that was my intention. :)

Have a good weekend!

the fest part deux

So I kind of failed at the whole picture taking thing. I brought my camera everywhere with me but after a few pictures and two videos my battery died. This wouldn't have been a problem had I packed the right charger. When I went to grab it I realized something wasn't quite right. It was the charger for my DS. Oops. I also don't have those whole five pictures I took of one band because I don't have my camera on me at the moment but I'll probably put them up later this week.

Anywho, the band I did get pictures of was Larry and His Flask. They were the opening band after registration and played poolside at the Holiday Inn. I hadn't heard of them until then but they were amazing. If you can somehow picture a bluegrass-folky-punk band, that's them. I've never seen such a variety of instruments. There was a guitar, drums, a banjo, a mandolin, an upright bass, and then two of them would switch to horns. So good. I got their 7 inch to add to my sloooowly growing vinyl collection.

We also managed to find out about one of the secret shows that was behind an empty warehouse. Apparently these secret shows happen each night but you have to somehow be in the know. We got a tip from a guy we were talking to in a German bar which is officially my favorite place in Gainesville. It's called Stubbies and Steins and was a nice place to rest between shows and get some good German food and a beer that was not a PBR. They had a huge selection too. So after the tip and hunting down a bit more info we managed to get to this warehouse for a 2am show. We left after Paint It Black and I am very glad because the cops came and broke it up shortly after. Not that anyone got in trouble, but it would have been hell competing with that whole mob scene for a cab.

Overall it was a great weekend with great music but it was sooo tiring. My legs were killing me after all the standing and I was just generally beat. It was fun but I'm glad to be back, even though the temperature was a shock. It was sunny and warm the whole weekend in Florida and by the time we got off the plane in Philadelphia I had two sweaters on. I'm glad though because I love fall for all that it is, cold and everything. Now it's my birthday week so there should be some fun stuff coming up! So that's my recap for the past five days. Now I have lots of stuff to catch up on!

the fest

I'm packing pretty much as I write this, but I just wanted to stop in and say that I will be gone for about five days. The boyfriend and I are headed to Gainesville, Fl for The Fest. If you don't know what it's about, check it out! The pic below is linked. If you do know, maybe you'll be there! We're flying out there tomorrow morning and coming back on Tuesday so I'll be back then, hopefully with some photos.



Happy Halloween!