3 years ago + a book

First, I want to say thank you thank you for the happy birthday wishes! :) I did have a great birthday, going out with some friends and having drinks, laughs, and a little dancing. Even the people who couldn't go out still want to celebrate at a later date, sort of extending the birth-day into a birth-month and I am a-okay with that. ;)

3o Days Hath November..

Day 5. Three Years Ago Today

(I kid you not when I say this is the only photo of myself I could find from fall 2008. My photos from that year seem to stop around February, when I had bleached blonde hair. I dyed my hair by May so I would've had dark hair like in this photo. Evidently this was not a year I wanted to remember.)

Upon counting back and realizing this was 2008 I kind of got a strange feeling. 2008 was a fairly crap year for me. Some of it was downright terrible and stressful, some of it was pretty good. To say that my life has vastly improved since then would be an understatement. But by November of that year, things were were certainly looking up.

A day before, I had just turned 21, which is always exciting. For me it was a little downplayed because I'm the second oldest of my friends and the next person in line to turn 21 didn't do so for a few months. So my roommate (who was a year older) and I went out and had a small celebration and I made my first purchase at a state store, where I did not get carded of course. Thinking about that also makes me feel weird because that roommate and I suffered from some irreconcilable differences and stopped talking to each other a few months before we moved out of our house. Awkward..

While thinking back to three years ago made me feel a little icky, it also made me extremely happy about where my life is at today. I have an amazing relationship, I only have friends who are a positive force in my life, and I have a new direction career-wise that is super exciting. I am a much happier me now than I was this time three years ago. :)


Day 6. A Book I am Reading


On a less serious note, I am currently reading Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon. If you read the summer reading post, you may remember that I read a book by her over the summer and absolutely loved it. I also mentioned that I love finding authors with more than one hit so I decided to read another one of her books since the last one had me up at night reading page after page, despite how creeped out I was. I just started this one but I have high hopes for a similarly shocking and enthralling experience.

Hope everyone had a great weekend! :)

24

That's how old I am today. Oh good gracious I am feeling old. I actually have a lot to do today to get ready for some festivities tonight so I'm just going to post day 4 of 30 Days Hath November today. Not just because I'm busy. But because I feel like the topic is totally appropriate for my birthday.

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Day 4. A Friend I Adore

Honestly, my best friend in the whole wide world happens to be my guy but I talk about us a lot on here. ;) Today I wanted to introduce you to someone who has been my best friend since birth. My cousin Liz and I jokingly refer to ourselves as twins. We even have each other programmed into our phones as "Twin". :) We were actually supposed to be due a month apart but I was very late and she was a little early and we ended up being born exactly one week apart. Her birthday is next Friday, which just happens to be 11/11/11. Crazy.

Even though there's a river between us, she has been the closest thing I have ever had to a sister. We couldn't have been more opposite growing up though. She has a dark Italian complexion and I looked very German with my blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. She was really into soccer and softball while I was a dancer. She's now about 5'4" while I'm 5'10". It was funny though, when I dyed my hair brown at the end of high school, how much more we suddenly looked related. This is my favorite photo of us that my other cousin took where we look eerily similar. :)

Me + my "twin" circa 2006

Now that I've introduced you to that wonderful lady, I've got some cleaning to do! I'm going to crank up the Sinatra Pandora station and get movin'. ;)

Have a great weekend!

30 days hath november

I read about 30 Days Hath November on Angie's blog and it looked like fun so I thought I'd join in! It was started by Desiree of So Fawned so pop on over there to check out the list of challenges and link up if you want to join in! Much like Angie said, I usually crap out of these 30 days challenges after a while but I think I can do this one. I just like things like this that help us get to know each other better. Even random or quirky things! I'm just going to include each challenge at the bottom of my posts because they're just little snippets and shouldn't add too much reading, since I'm wordy enough as it is. I'm just looking out for you guys. ;)

But since I need to catch up, today's post is just going to be days 1-3. So here you go.


Day 1. A self portrait.

This is one of my most recent photos I've taken of myself since I haven't showered yet and have no motivation to go take a photo right now. ;)


Day 2. Three inspirational quotes.

“We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”
- I've seen this attributed to Dr. Suess but most people list it as "unknown" so I can't say for sure who it is by. But it's genius.

"There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for."
-Dead Poets Society

“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower


Day 3. Something I never leave the house without.

My phone. Must be connected to ALL THE THINGS.


That's all for now. Let me know if you're doing this too!

november thoughts

  {snippets from last November's posts}

I cannot believe it is already November. My fall classes are almost over. I graduate in about a year. I turn 24 *gasp*. Christmas season is coming in full force via commercials and emails and I haven't even put away my bats and ghosts yet! There's a lot to do, a lot to prepare for, and a lot to celebrate. So in the spirit of a new month and an ending year, I have a few goals I'm setting for myself. There are only five but they are kind of big deal goals to me. Either because of the time they will take or because it's something new.

1. Begin working towards the flexibility I had when I was a dancer.
I officially started this today now that I'm back home from Florida and well rested. I'm trying to accomplish regaining my flexibility by doing a series of back stretches, hamstring stretches, and getting back into doing yoga regularly again. After the stretches today my legs feel like pain jelly. We'll see what tomorrow brings. Look forward to some amusing before photos at some point. They will be my motivation to get to the after. X)

2. Crochet something wearable for the cold weather.
I crocheted a hat last year but I want to crochet something like a sweater or leg warmers. Ideally it would be a sweater, but if that's too hard, leg warmers it is!

3. Make a squash soup with my food processor.
I just got a beautiful KitchenAid food processor that I can't wait to use. I want to spin some golden fall vegetables into a warm thick soup before they're gone!

4. Have an awesome birthday.
My birthday is this Friday and I have no idea what I'm going to do for it. As long as I'm around people I love I'll be happy. But good food should be involved. Most definitely. :)

5. Get Christmas items in the shop.
This one has been burdening me all year. I need to get on the season-ahead game because I tend to have a problem thinking about the next season so by the time I come up with ideas for the current one, it's too late start marketing and selling them. I think I'm on track now. I'm not stuck anymore or overly inspired so if get my butt in gear, I can do this.

I'll update on each one of these as I go along but that's a good summary I think.

What are your goals for this month, or even for the end of the year?

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! :)