Soaking up sunshine

Last Saturday I was commissioned to take family pictures for a friend of mine. Hehe. See how I made taking pictures sound schmancy? Anywho, we met up in Newport Beach. I was there a little but early and snapped a few pictures with my phone. 

I will be taking a trip over the holidays to a place that actually has weather. In fact, right now there is snow! This California girl is going to freeze her ass off. I told my friend that I took pictures on my phone so that I have something to look at while I'm snowed in. Until then, I will be soaking up as much of this California sunshine as I can. Sigh.

Recording December

Once again I've decided to attempt documenting December. I say attempt because I've started this project every year for the past there years and have yet to finish one. Oops hehe.

Because of my inability to finish any of my holiday books, I have decided to shop my stash this year. Here are the beginnings of my holiday book kit.

I decided to go with holds, reds, greens and teals for my colors. Most of the paper I pull are from non-christmas lines. I also raided the Kelly Purkey December kit that I bought last year for the vellum, embellishments and cards. I'm excited to get started! Hopefully I will have some time this weekend.

The open concept

My office moved to a new office space with a new layout style: The open concept. It has gotten a lot of mixed reviews and drama was all over the place before the plan was even implemented.

How do I feel about it? Let's just say that I miss many of the aspects of my old office. Getting used to the new workspace has been fairly easy. Getting used to the interaction with people, however, is a whole different animal. I could sit here and complain about it, but I won't. Instead I will focus on the good parts:

It's clean and open
It's new and modern
The kitchen is usable
We have cable!
Our printer has been upgraded
It's bright
There is more interaction between different groups within the company

And there you have it.

Wordless Wednesday

Extended Birthday Extravaganza

My birthday was back in July, but I never got around to documenting it. So here we go! 

I turned 33 on July 20th of this year. Yep, seriously. About a month prior to my Birthday my Boyfriend told me that he had a surprise planned for me a week after my birthday.  I had several celebration dinners and lunches in on and around my birthday with friends and family. I took the Friday before my birthday off and spend the day with The Boyfriend at the OC Fair. That Saturday (my actual birthday) I had linner with friends at Gen. The Boyfriend's Mom took me out for dinner the following Thursday. Finally the Extended Birthday Extravaganza weekend arrived!

Phase 1: The Boyfriend surprised me with beautiful flowers with an ominous warning that this was "Phase 1" of my Extended Birthday Extravaganza...

  

Phase 2: Huntington Park and Library in Pasadena. I haven't been here since college and we had been talking about going since we met two years ago.

 

Phase 3: The Legends of Summer Tour at the Rose Bowl!!!!! Yep. My very first JT concert! I die. Awesome concert for sure. 

 

It was definitely a birthday to remember. My Boyfriend thinks of the best presents. It's 3 months later and I'm still giddy about it. hehe.

Changes

I have been quite inconsistent with my blogging. I miss this place, my corner of the internet, where I can word vomit all over the place, share my latest adventure, or just document me.  I have been silent over here the more that I have been active. You can tell based on the fact that up until 5 minutes ago, my "About Me" section references my BlackBerry (which I ditched a year ago) and doesn't reference the Boyfriend (whom I have been living with for the past two years). My life has changed quite a bit, but my blog has not. It's time to dust off the key board and be more active around here. I hope to visit here a lot more often. I may not be able to make up for lost time, but I can try to update this space a little more. 

Wordless Wednesday

Terrace Garden

I currently live in an apartment and dream of a day when I could have a yard and my own little mini garden. For now, I will have to settle for my little potted plant garden out on my balcony.

 

 

These pictures are from earlier in the spring, shortly after I planted or replanted everything into our new pots and hanging baskets. It SOOOO does not look the same...I will have to take a few updated pictures.

Currents

Time: 10:46 AM
Location: My office
Listening to: Mumblings of a closed door conversation happening between my bosses in the next office
Drinking:  Hazelnut Iced Coffee from McDo
Eating: nada
Feeling: incredibly exhausted from the Fair on Sunday...yes I know its Wednesday and yes I still feel hung over and no I didn't even drink.
Thinking: Office politics sucks
Wanting: Time to stop for a little bit so I can catch up on sleep
Needing:Some craft time
Loving: The progress that is being made on the crochet quilt I'm making

* Currents is inspired by Tina

Crochet Machine

So I have this craft problem. I start a project and part way through I'm inspired to do something else and so I start another project. It's crafting ADD. And I completely own up to it. :)

One of many projects I've started is knitting a blanket. This one is one that I've been working on for over a year. I started it with the intention of having a sofa blanket to snuggle in when I watch a movie. I was convinced by the Boyfriend to turn it into a bed spread. We have a king sized bed. doh! To this day I am still knitting those squares. I've probably bought a couple hundred dollars worth of yarn and I'm sure by the time I finish it will be at least $500 worth of yarn. No wonder these suckers are so expensive.

Of course while I've been working on this blanket, I've also been crocheting other blankets: Baby Blankets. These ones take me forever to finish too with all the other stuff I gots going on, but at least I finish them! This is one that I made for Baby Angelica:

I'm sure I will be knitting something else before I ever finish the bed spread. Any of you have the same craft ADD problem as me? Any fun crochet patterns to share?

Vinyl Collection

Hello there. Long time no blog. I know it's me. I am seriously slacking here in this space. If only it was just as easy to blog from my phone as it is to instagram! Ah wells. Hopefully a few more posts and I will get back to it.

One of many things I've been doing lately has been collecting records. Late last year, Mitch and I had talked about starting one up. I have always wanted to start one and he has fond memories of his dad's record collection growing up. So for Christmas we bought ourselves this lovely old school looking radio/record/cd/cassette player. We also purchased a few records from a record store in LA.

 

We bought a few records online and I picked up a box of records from my parents' garage and slowly our collection grew to fill one cube of our Expedit shelf.

Then we started going to various Good Will and Salvation Army stores in Orange and LA counties. After going to over a dozen stores, we found that the Salvation Army stores in Long Beach and Norwalk has the best selections. Our parameters for buying records were pretty loose, as long as we heard of someone or some song on the record, and the record was is good shape, we bought it. Of course our collection quickly grew.

 

Then we found out about some estate sales in our weekly Penny Saver. The first Estate Sale we went to was in Newport Beach. By the time we got there, there were only a few 78s and one 45 of the Chipmunks Christmas Song. That's when we learned that we need to go early. Our next estate sale was in San Juan Capistrano. We bought a few good things there and thought that since we were in the area, we would go down to The Old Barn Antique Mall. Here is our loot from that haul:

Our largest garage/estate sale haul was from Laguna Beach. We scored over 150 records for $300. Some notables included a Bruce Springsteen box set, several Robert Plants, Toto, and Joe Walsh.

We also hit up a few local record stores and picked up a bunch of records in their bargain bins.  Creme Tangerine is a cool spot and Port of Sound has a large selection and a massive bargain bin. They also have the plastic covers and paper sleeves for protecting all our finds.

With all those records we thought we hit the jackpot, until one day this happened:

 

Hidden away in the back corner of the Salvation Army in Norwalk were these two records. Up until this point, we had not seen a single Beatles or Rolling Stones record in any garage sale or thrift store. We did see a Meet the Beatles at an Antique store that looked like someone had used it to slide down their driveway and the cover looked like it had been in the washing machine. She was trying to sell that to us for $20! These two records we found at the Salvation Army were in good condition and even played well.

With our growing collection, we filled up one Expedite shelf pretty quickly and ended up getting another shelf so we didn't have boxes in our living room. We also bought a new turn table for $10 at a garage sale and hooked it up to my stereo. Our old record player was recently sold on Craigslist.

 

Speaking of Craigslist, we also made some pretty good deals on there. We were able to get a nice lot of Elvis for $50 and we scored the White Album and Help in another lot for $15. One of our best and last of the HUGE lot purchases was a over 300 records for $150. It was from a DJ who was moving and wanted to get rid of a bunch of stuff. There was a nice mix of music and after storing through it, we ended up keeping the Rap, R&B, Reggae, and about half of the rock and country music. We plan on selling the other half, along with duplicates and other records that we bought that we didn't end up liking.

All this record collecting brought me to tears at one point. It's an expensive hobby if you aren't careful or selective about your purchases. We found that while record stores do have the selection and quality but the prices can be higher in some cases. I was surprised that stuff from the Beatles is readily available and are not as pricy as I would have thought. We were told its because the market is saturated with Beatles records, and that with a little looking, you could find some good deals (like our Rubber Soul, White Album, and Help finds above)

Mitch and I made the decision to stop buying records until we have listened to every record we currently own, or until we find a house to store our collect. That lasted about a week. We still have made visits to the Salvation Army where we found these Led Zeppelin Records for less than $3.00 each...

 

Last Sunday we went to the Antique Market at the Great Park and brought home another 30 records. So much for our record buying freeze. We are definitely much more selective, but we still have not stopped. 

No more fancy declarations of no more records. We have two Expedit shelves almost full of records, along with three other boxes and a crate tucked away in various parts of our living room.  We have to rather large and full boxes on our balcony that are filled with records to be sold. I'm hoping we can get a nice amount for those and recoup some of our costs. Who thinks that we are just going to use that money to buy even more records? *sigh*

Sammie and Bhoo

These little guys are Sammie and Bhoo (pronounced boo). They live at my parents house. They came to live there when one of my Mom's friends had a dog who have birth to a litter of pups and asked if we wanted one. They came over with two cute little fir balls to choose from. A caramel colored one and a black one with white "socks". They we're so cute that we couldn't pick just one, so we agreed that Sammie would be my mom and dad's dog and Bhoo would be mine. Because of where I lived, I could not have a dog, so Bhoo primarily stayed with Sammie at my parents' house and I visited every day and on weekends with the plan that one day when I became a grown up, I would take him to live with me in my own house.

Life happened and I now live in an apartment 30 minutes away. I wanted to take Bhoo with me, apartment living won't be fun for him and he is so used to being with Sammie that it would be hard on them both. So at my parents these two stay.


And while it would be fun to have all the animals play together, there just isn't enough space. So until we have a house with a yard, I will just have to make do with this strange creature:

 

 (Bubba the Cat) 

Golden Rule

While it is always important to practice the golden rule and treat others the way you would want to be treated, you can't have any expectations that those others would treat you the same way.

If I treated people the way I've been treated by some people lately, man oh man....would there be some serious fights.

Sometimes it's just better to let it pass and not let it get to you. some people will never change. And no, I am not noodling out.

Eating those veggies

Eating more fruits and vegetables is one of my goals this year, however eating salads all the time does not sound fun or realistic to me. Although, if they were taco salads then maybe....jk.

We had originally came across The Loving Hut on accident. We were on our way to Home Goods with plans to go to a Mexican Restaurant that we heard was good on the way there. The Boyfriend had never had vegan food before, but at the time was starting his health kick and was game to try it. It was pretty good, which exception of the mild "funny" feeling after. We chalked that up to it being "too healthy" and our bodies being confused.

Last night the Boyfriend and I ate dinner at there for the third time. Yes, I am a fan :) I had the Tangy Orange:

The Boyfriend had the clay pot. (picture to follow one day) It is very flavorful and I think he found his "go-to" meal. Overall its a really good place to eat. The food is really tasty and you don't miss the meat one bit. Realistically, I do not think I could be a full blown vegan, or even a vegetarian, but its a nice healthy substitute for when you want something warm, filling, and full of protein.

 

And the Oscar goes to...

Several years back I had a co-worker how made it a point competition to see all the Oscar nominated films prior to the awards shows. And when I say "all" and mean all the films showcased during the awards show. If it was nominated and the movie was accessible in the theater or through netflix, then she was seeing it. I joined in on the fun a couple of years, but I never made it to all the best picture nominated films, let alone best documentary feature. Then I got over it and just stuck to chick flicks and the occasional animated movie at the dollar theater.

This year The Boyfriend has decided that he wants to see all the Oscar nominated films. I was game since we are regular movie goers I figured that we would have seen quite a few films that would be nominated. Instead of seeing all the films, The Boyfriend has limited it to the following categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Directing, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Screen Play. We're doing pretty good on the movie front (what we have seen is in bold below)

*UPDATED 1/19

Here are the Nominees:

Best Picture
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Lincoln
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Amour
Django Unchained
Argo

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Denzel Washington, Flight

Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables

Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

Best Actress
Naomi Watts, The Impossible 

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook 

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour 

Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Supporting Actor

Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Alan Arkin, Argo
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Best Supporting Actress

Sally Field, Lincoln

Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Amy Adams, The Master

Best Director

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Michael Haneke, Amour

Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Original Screenplay
John Gatins, Flight
Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Michael Haneke, Amour
Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom

Best Adapted Screenplay

Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Chris Terrio, Argo
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
David Magee, Life of Pi

On Friday we are going to see Les Miserables. We have Beasts of the Southern Wild from NetFlix, and Amour will be shown at a near by theater soon. Not much left to see from our chosen categories. There are a few documentaries that I'm interested in seeing, and of course there is that whole animated category that I did not see a single movie from....maybe later, without the Boyfriend. :)

Who wants to have an Oscar viewing party??

(For a full list of the 2013 Nominees, go here)

Currents*

Time: 11.50 AM
Location: My office
Listening to: Maroon 5 Channel on Pandora
Drinking:  Finishing off the Mocha I made this morning and debating on if I want to sneak a soda from the work fridge.
Eating: Teriyaki Chicken with steamed broccoli
Feeling: Frustrated by certain people's attitude
Thinking: Nachos  
Wanting: Nachos
Needing: Nachos
Loving: Nachos

And just like that I am feeling loads better and made myself laugh a little bit...haha.

* Currents is inspired by Tina

Resolutions - 13 in 2013

Its a new year and time for some resolutions. This is a random mix of 13 things I want to accomplish in 2013.

1. Focus on my One Little Word.
2. Do Project Life 2013 (Actually do it this time, not just buy the stuff and let is sit on my bookshelf like I did last year.)
3. Finish a quilt.(there is a crochet bedspread that I'm working on, this will be the year that I finish)
4. Watch 10 movies from AFI's 100 Greatest American Movies of all Time that I have never seen before. (I've seen quite a few of them already and would like to finish the entire list before they issue a revised one!)
5. Pray regularly.
6. Complete a 30 day challenge. (I'm not sure of what yet, maybe give something up for 30 days, do something for 30 days)
7. Bake something from scratch.
8. The Color Run (I will not be running mind you, just walking and maybe some skipping and a little bit of twirling)
9. Give up Eat more Fruits & Vegetables
10. Document (whether its blogging, journaling, scrapbooking, or project lifing, I want to document my life so that one day, my kids could see it and think "wow my mom was cool and had cool hair and clothes and lots of fun when she was young" hehe)
11. Let go (its not easy, I hold on to a lot of extra hurt feelings, anger, and insecurities. I'm better than how I was, but no where near where I want to be)
12. Try a new recipe every month.
13. Be punctual (I am notoriously late. all. the. time. I hate it. Its rude.)

I've very excited for this new year. Week 1 has been FANTASTIC so far. :)

One Little Word...

Every year towards the end of December, discussions pop up regarding One Little Word and every year I think, This will be THE year I participate! I hem and haw and browse through words for something that inspires me. I usually settle on a word, never feeling like it was The One, which results in me abandoning the project shortly after.

Until this year. There has been a word that keeps popping up in my mind lately. That word is THRIVE.

Definition of THRIVE

1 : to grow vigorously : flourish

2 : to gain in wealth or possessions : prosper

3 : to progress toward or realize a goal despite or because of circumstances —often used with on <thrives on conflict>

 (From Merriam-Webster.com) 

 I can't remember when I stumbled across this word, but its been hanging around me for weeks. Thriving is so much more than growing, flourshing, and accomplishing, its doing so regardless of life's circumstances. For me it's rising above the drama, negativity, and pain caused by others. Its even overcoming my own self-doubts and pushing past my comfort zone. I don't want to just Be, I want to Thrive, and 2013 is the year that it happens. 

 

Hello 2013

Would you believe that I have several blog posts in the works that I hope to complete and post soon? No? Why not?

2013 - time for the annual blog reboot and declaration of resolutions! Only this time I will not blog fail in the first week. Oh wait. It is the first week and the last time I posted was almost 2 months ago...hrm. I mean Starting NOW!

Be back later. I promise. :)