Busy Bee

As always, I've neglected the one piece of the internet that I love so dearly. Too many of my blog posts start out like this, unfortunately. We moved houses at the end of May and have been ridiculously busy since then. Traveling back and forth, setting up the house to make it feel like a home, searching for jobs, dealing with car troubles and Pippa troubles (the latter of which is, thankfully, over with and our little girl is feeling much better).

This isn't to say I haven't had the time to do a quick update now and then, I just got out of the swing of things and it's been difficult to get back in. It makes me much sadder than it probably makes you, my lovely readers. I won't promise I'm back to blogging every week, but I'm definitely stepping up my game. I have an exciting plan for my tiny plot in internet city, and feel like I have to put in more effort to accomplish my goals.  This is purposefully vague.

In lieu of an actual post, I'm going to give you some of my favorite house related Instagrams. I'm calling them HouseGrams... Just go with me on this.

1) Pippa packed up and ready to go (with a fresh haircut to boot)! 2) Taylor and our new (rented) place. 3) The most gigantic bathroom mirror and the duck collection. 4) The closet I could live in. 5) Taylor's side of the room and how we spent a week watching Spartacus. 6) A new kitchen for new food -whipped cream!

It's a very happy home. I walked around for the first few weeks saying "You know, I really love (insert random point here) about the house." Everything from the giant closet to the gas stove, the big backyard to the little frogs that inhabit it. The house has good energy and I've found elderflowers in the backyard, a sign that the fairies are near. We also have a gorgeous crepe myrtle and a "pond" where turtles swim, but mosquitoes like crazy. I'm going to plant some mosquito repelling plants out there soon to see if that helps. It's been busy, but we're really enjoying ourselves and I'm loving having an empty canvas to decorate. Also, the designers of this house were genius -the lighting is wonderful! See, just one more thing to add to my I-Love-This-House List.

Possibly an outfit post soon? I have one that needs to be edited from a couple weeks  ago. We'll see. XOXO.

Why Hello / Telegrams from Tuesday

     Fancy meeting you here. Why you ask? Because once again my little internet home has been a bit neglected. That's what happens when your 21st birthday and Spring Break are two weekends apart I suppose. I'll be updating on those exciting events probably Friday, but for now I'm just stopping by to leave a late Telegram from Tuesday and say that I will start blogging more again, pinky promise. This week has already been busy and I'm dealing with a bit of post-Disney depression, if you will, so I'm kind of looking forward to a weekend with just me and Pippa and my laptop. 

     That being said, I'm going to miss Taylor a whole bunch. He and his rugby team won their last two games, making them USA Southeastern DIII Champions! or something like that. I can't get all of those fancy-schmancy titles right. He's heading to Virginia for the Eastern semifinal something-or-others on Friday (go donate here!) so I'll be catching up on some Disney posts and a few outfit posts, maybe even a craft or two. So here's a bit of prettiness and some wise words from Mr. Walt Disney to accompany it.

"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained."

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them."

"Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings."

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

"When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do."

     After being at Disney again this break, Walt's words ring even louder in my ears -he was such a visionary and a dreamer. I can't wait to share more Disney photographs with you. XO.

Spring Break Fever

     Just a little drop in to say hello. I've been slacking on the posts this week -midterms and packing and tracking down my school refund money took up quite a bit of time.
Taylor is off in Alabama kicking some rugby butt this weekend and Pip and I headed to my relatives. We're leaving little Miss here with Grandma while we go to Disney, the longest we'll have ever been without her, but she loves getting to see her puppy siblings so I know she'll be fine.
     Bright and early tomorrow morning, my Aunt and Uncle and I are heading to Walt Disney World! And then after his game tomorrow, Taylor will be meeting us at the Animal Kingdom Lodge for three exciting days at the parks. I'm excited excited excited. And did I mention excited? So here's a picture of Pippa trying to drink my free birthday Venti Starbucks frap as we started our Spring Break. Hopefully I'll have a bit of time to update soon. XO.

Easy Peasy Pretty Pair

     Yay! I am finally doing a for real craft post! Inspired by this and this on A Beautiful Mess, I was so excited about this one. I dragged Taylor to the store the other day with visions of the loveliness that would soon reside over our bed, and I'm so happy with the finished product. It took me the entire afternoon, but I was also doing laundry and waiting on my birthday flowers to arrive, so I was taking longer than I could have. I totally think you should make one for yourself -if you're against the lovey-dovey stuff, then how about just you or an adorable pet?

Supplies: Five (or more/less) colors of scrapbook paper, one piece of white poster board, photo of choice (printed out of course), embroidery thread, ribbon, paper doilies, decent-sized frame, gold paint pen, needle, glue stick, scissors, and a measuring tape.

One: Print out your favorite photograph and take your scissors to it. Make sure it's an image that can be easily cut out, nothing with crazy backgrounds and confusing lines -it just makes the whole process easier. Cut allll the way around it (and in the middle if there are parts like mine between the arms, where the background of the photo shows through).

Two: Cut out your piece of poster board so it will fit into the frame.
Three: Snip out equilateral triangles from your scrapbook paper. Mine were 2.5in. on each side but you could do bigger or smaller depending on the frame size. I ended up with about seven of the colorful pieces and fourteen of the neutral and it was just enough. You could also add more colors, less colors, use paint swatches instead, the possibilities are kind of endless.
Four: Place those triangles in a pretty pattern on your poster board. Make sure you like the layout before you glue anything down and try to keep the triangles as close together and straight as possible. Glue, and then trim around the edges.

Five: Figure out where you want your doily and photo placed, and then glue those down as well. I liked mine with one doily as a sort of halo effect, but you could certainly add more. It could be cute to do two different images and then halo them both; get creative!

Six: Once everything is glued into place, thread your needle with a length about twice as long as the area you want to cover. So for mine, I doubled the length around the doily section that was showing and then used that much thread, and it worked perfectly. Another tip is to poke your holes where you want them, first, giving you a guideline to follow. Then go about your sewing. I just did a simple backstitch on mine but you could always get fancier.
Warning here: Be careful! The paper and the doily are way more fragile than fabric, so go slow and don't pull too tightly. I managed to feel really dumb and ripped part of my doily, oops! Luckily you can't really see it once it's framed, but you have been warned.

Seven: Embellishing time! Glue a pretty ribbon across the top and add some lyrics with a gold pen (mine are from "Birds of a Feather" by The Civil Wars!) Another mistake I made for you that you can avoid -don't write too close to the edges, as the frame will end up covering some of your words up.

Eight: Frame it and hang it on the wall! Bonus points if you cut out extra hearts to place around it. Triple bonus points if you make your bed for the sole purpose of photographing it! And if your puppy hides under the bed all day because you're busy crafting, then you win automatically.

      I really hope you enjoyed this because I've got a few more crafty things up my sleeve. Go forth and create, my beautiful readers! XO.

Week Seven of the "52 Dates of 2012"

Walk around San Marco in the daytime and get ice cream.

He called me a "Hipster" for taking a picture of my feet like this...

     Taylor and I went after my Friday morning class to eat at Black Bean and get ice cream at Peterbrooke in San Marco. It's the cutest part of town, with shops and yummy food in the middle of pretty historic houses (I promised we would live somewhere equally adorable one day). To Taylor's complete dismay, Black Bean had closed down, so we ate at The Loop instead. Delicious, but not really the Cuban flavors we craved. Despite our little misfortune, we had such a nice date. I uncovered my amazing book find at the San Marco Bookstore. We shared Taylor's terrific banana pudding ice cream and I bought myself a White Chocolate Mocha at Starbuck's because I was frigid after walking around for so long. I didn't take many pictures, but we vowed to go back on a less rainy and chilly day and explore some more.

Sad. You can even see Taylor in all of his dismay in the reflection.

See this post for more flowers and book love!

I really like brick walls. There's just something so romantic about them.

     Actually, I didn't take any real pictures at all of Mr. Taylor... oops! Ah well, another day. This one is short and sweet, as I'm not feeling great this morning and we have a million and one errands to get done. I'm trying to get better at blogging on a schedule, so hopefully if all goes well you shall have a few more posts to enjoy this week. Have a practically perfect Sunday! XO.

Week Six of the "52 Dates of 2012"

Visit the MOSH Planetarium. 

     This week and last week got a little messed up. We were supposed to do something else Week Five but switched it with "Eat at Maggiano's". Week Six started as "Go to the zoo", but with the frigid cold front that came through Jacksonville, we decided last minute to re-pick a date. The Museum of Science and History (MOSH) is so great, especially when you want something warm yet exciting to do. They're open 7 days a week, so Sunday early afternoon we headed downtown to see what it was all about.

      We arrived, purchased our Planetarium show tickets to see "Black Holes" at 3pm, and started wandering the first floor. There, we saw live animals, replicas of sea creatures, inside the human body, and where our water comes from, along with a dinosaur!

     We headed  up to the second floor and explored the hands-on learning section. Taylor especially loved the physics and music ones, and I liked looking through all of the microscopes. It was close to 3pm by that point, so we walked over to the Planetarium to present our tickets and get seated. You can imagine our sadness when we discovered that a private party had booked the entire Planetarium for a show about sea life, and the front desk people hadn't known when they sold us our tickets. It turned out for the better in the end though, because they gave us complimentary tickets to come back to the museum another day and see the Black Hole show at another time. Don't you love when things work like that? It always pays to be calm and grateful.

Thank you wonderful MOSH staff! This kind of made our day.

     The free time slot in our afternoon allowed us to take a look around the history sections, which explored Jacksonville and North Florida in particular. It was so fascinating, it's always exciting to learn new things about the place you live I think. The Victorian and Mid-Century sections were my very favorite, I kept asking Taylor "Can I just live here, please?"

So cute! I wanted to move right in. Why yes, I'll take that pink telephone please. Of course I'll have that bar on wheels in the corner. What do you mean I'm not allowed to jump over the glass and start moving my clothes into the closet?

This skirt needed to parseltongue its way out of the glass and get into my closet. The strawberries! The flowers and leaves! The creamy color!  It was just perfection.

     Taylor's favorite part was seeing the owls hoot and move their big eyes in the ecology section. I loved the above mentioned lifestyles of the late 1800's and mid 1900's. After a long day of venturing through the MOSH, we were both hungry and needed to get home to our puppy. We ended a lovely Sunday with another trip to Maggiano's as an early Valentine's dinner (so delicious) and snuggling up to watch the Grammy's and stay warm. We haven't chosen this weeks date yet, but he's got a home game and won't be traveling all weekend so it should be a good one. XO.

P.S. This also crosses off a 21 Before 21 list item! Yay!

Weekend Recap Wednesday

     Once again I went on a blogging binge and then got busy. Go figure. The reason for this busyness was well warranted- a weekend away with Miss Pippa and then playing catch-up once I got home. So here I am, playing catch-up on this little blog as well, my dears. This past weekend, Taylor headed out of town for a rugby game and I headed to my relative's for a mini-vacation. I drove over Friday, we trekked to the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire on Saturday and spent Sunday together on the 10-Acre Woods (what I like to call their property). Another post should be flying in shortly about just the Faire, so stay tuned!

Giving kisses before we get on the road! She had a Vet appointment before we could take off, so Taylor was kind and took these pictures for me.

Wearing Leopard in honor of my great-grandmother, Memire's birthday.

Pssst! Pippa is driving! Don't tell the puppy police that she hasn't gotten her license, though.

Playing with her second-cousin and her brother, Bandit. Yes, Bella was pushing her in the stroller.

Good morning! Trying to drink her mommy's coffee on Sunday.

Learning to slide. Wheeeee!

Learning to swing. Not very enthused about this one...

Princess riding her trike around. Pip was kind of scared of this.

Bella decided it was a much better idea to push Pippa in the wagon. Also, as I was taking this picture I forgot the word for that red thing with wheels that you pull. Leave it to the three year old to remind me of "wagon".

Making Valentine's with my Grandma KDK and the kiddos to send to the soldiers in my step-dad's office. All of the cards say "To: Our Heroes".

     More to come as soon as I can re-save all of the Faire pictures to their correct locations. XO.

Sometimes I'm Scholarly

     Our date last week was joyful- we stopped at Starbucks for a cafe mocha and a frappuccino for the boy and then drove to a park to stargaze. With our new-found astronomy knowledge thanks to our lab, we located Orion, the Pleiades, and others that I forget because, well honestly, it was really cold and we had Miss Pip with us. I would have loved to have actually taken pictures, but again, it was really cold. And dark. And did I mention it was cold? We snuggled for a bit and then headed home to chose this weeks date: Visit the Cummer Museum and Gardens! Except now we may have to reschedule because this week has gotten quite busy. I'd like to be able to make a picture-heavy, thoughtful post for every date, but sometimes life just gets in the way. (But isn't this what it's all about? Making sure we have such a wonderful time in real life, together?)

     Anyway, I wanted to post a link to another blog I'm contributing to for my Placing American Lit class. Our focus is on ecocritism and the environment in, as the book title so perfectly says "environmental writing since Thoreau." My first post is about our Week Three date! Click here! Go forth and read! The other authors are all students and their work is nicely done. Hope you find this interesting and informational. Here's a picture of Pippa to make you smile in case you think ecocritism sounds boring:

One ear sticks straight up, but the other hasn't popped up yet!

Now to finally make dinner... XO.

Week Three of the "52 Dates of 2012"

Find a pretty park in the city.

Friendship Park, Jacksonville, FL. The colorful pipes are what run the fountain, which was among the largest and tallest fountains in the world when it was built in 1965.

      I woke up this morning, so comfortable in my bed, to Taylor telling me how beautiful a day it was. A beautiful day for the park, he told me, sunny and warm. Our third date was an easy one. Find a park, go to it, enjoy. To my great surprise, he had already picked out a park by the time I awoke (and also fed the puppy and took her out, how lucky am I?). After a delicious sausage pinwheel breakfast, we headed out to the downtown area. The fountain has recently been redone, and is known for its amazing light show at night. It was extremely blustery and had gotten cloudy by the time we arrived, but was wonderful nonetheless. 

Juan Ponce De Leon, looking quite regal.

Making wishes in the fountain. Yeah... that's my wishing face.

I think these signs are absolutely brilliant. I've always wanted to visit every single one on a coastal road trip one day. (Also, Jacksonville was called Cowford?! Haha.)

This dress is perfect, except when you're down by the river and it's windier than the Hundred Acre Woods and there are other people around... This, my dears, is the reason I always wear cute underwear.

     We ended our date with a trip to Whole Foods and my-oh-my is ours massive. It's the biggest one I've ever been to at least, and even Taylor admitted he liked it. Taylor and I had tuna Greek salads for dinner and I bought blood oranges for dessert. I've never had them, but they just look so thrilling. He's downstairs watching the Giants game right now, so I've got to go either congratulate or console him with blood oranges and leftover cupcakes. We'll choose our next weeks date later tonight. XO.

Week Two of the "52 Dates of 2012"

Build a fort and read stories with a flashlight. 

Cuddling and reading Child of Faerie, Child of Earth

     Our second weekend of Twenty-Twelve and our first date jar pick was a success! We had some tea for breakfast, looked at English Major Armadillo memes, and then commenced the fort building. We read poems and a story and just cuddled for a little bit. A very nice Sunday morning, if I do say so myself.
     Pippa even joined us and cuddled, then proceeded to eat our Date Jar after we had picked out next weeks date.

Date jar and Miss Pippa

Next week!

     Next week (Week Three): Find a pretty park in the city. We may use our astronomy assignment/date on Saturday as this one, since we'll be going out to the middle of nowhere for a dark sky observation. We haven't decided yet, but I'm excited either way.
     Also, slightly unrelated, we made an ah-may-zing meal last night. Pesto pasta with fresh baguette and lemon parsley tilapia. It was... so good, I can't even describe how good it was in words. Maybe just "mmmmm" and "yummmm" and "Oh my gosh I'm so full but I want more!" Definitely something we're going to put on our menu again and again.

So delicious!

     I (only sort of) apologize for making you drool. I can't top it tonight, so we may just be eating soup and cereal and normal college kid food tonight. We're also going to go out and see Beauty and the Beast 3D in theaters tonight (!) and I cannot wait. I've been singing all day today. That's after watching football though, which is coming on in a bit. All in all, it's a really good Sunday, and we have tomorrow off, too! XO.

The 52 Dates of 2012

Once upon a time, there lived a girl (me) and a boy (Taylor). They did a lot together, were rarely separated really, and liked spending time with each other, but they began making the same date night choices every week. Let's go to [insert restaurant we've been to a hundred times here], watch some TV, and then go to bed. Sounds good? Alright.

Two thousand & Twelve is going to be a year of magic, of love and newness, and of changing my ways to better myself. I want to relish in the delight that a new year brings, look at things from a different view, change my habits up and discover wonder around every corner. And because I'm selfish and need someone to hold my hand along the way and because I really love Taylor, I've involved him in some of this.

Introducing: The 52 Dates of 2012

The idea came to me from a few places. Firstly, I've been doing my own goal-like lists the last few years, and Taylor has loved helping me cross of 21 Before 21 items. Secondly, I was super inspired by Elsie at A Beautiful Mess and her 12 Dates of Christmas. I love the idea of pre-planned dates and the excitement of randomly selecting one. I tweaked it a bit so it would last all year, one date a week. Some of them are silly and simple (Write letters to our future selves), some of them are a little more involved (Order the fanciest drinks off the menu at dinner), and still some are things that we would normally do but are simply making them special (Go to the beach and take Pippa).

Taylor came up with 26 and I came up with 26, and I typed them up, cut them out, and placed them in a leftover mason jar I had from Christmas crafting. Every Sunday night, we're going to choose one date to have over the week. We've also made rules, like if it's expensive and we're broke or if we can't do it that week for some reason, we can put it back and choose again. The point isn't to be strict about it, it's to explore our town and our hobbies in a new and invigorating way that keeps us in love and keeps us from saying "I'm bored, what should we do?"
For our first weeks pick (!) I let Taylor do the jar pulling, since I had just finished cutting (and let me tell you, cutting out 52 little strips of paper is a lot more time consuming than you would think). The winner for this week is:

Build a fort and read stories with a flashlight! Ding ding ding! 
I'm really enthusiastic about this little project right now and hope that I can blog about quite a few of them. I've got class in a little bit and need to tire out Miss Pippa, so until next time my loves, XO.

21 Before 21 Update!

There are 102 days until my 21st birthday! I've been patiently awaiting it and slowwwwly marking off items on my 21 Before 21 list. Even Taylor is getting excited, as he's been helping me with almost every one. I thought I'd give you guys a quick update about the few I've accomplished so far/the few I'm working on...

Buy and play an ukulele: It's in the mail! It's in the mail! It's in the mail! And I'm so excited I can barely type it! I ordered it the other evening, it's a Lanikai LU-11 I purchased through Amazon after much research. It should be arriving any minute, so if I quit typing and put up a half written blog, you'll know why!

She's here! Now what to name her.. and how to play?

Have a picnic: Taylor had the idea for us to accomplish this the other day! It was my reward for getting our room cleaned, so after a long weekend indoors we trekked to UNF. Our campus is wonderful as it has a 300+ acre wildlife sanctuary and tons of walking trails, it's really beautiful. We just so happened to go during a Sunday LARPing meeting, and much giggling ensued about their costumes and fake weapons. Taylor's a big nerd and does some LARPing of his own, but apparently his is "cooler" than theirs. I suppose there are rules to these things that I don't know... We munched on sandwiches of chicken salad and yummy crackers, an apple and a pear, and cookies for dessert! Taylor drank tea and I drank lemonade. It was a lovely day.

Making chicken salad sandwiches.

Giggling over various funny things.

Go to NYC: Our tickets are purchased and we're on our way the 21st of December! I am so enamored with everything NYC right now, just the sight of the Big Apple makes me swell with glee. I've been planning every little detail, down to what I will pack and how I will dress and where we will go. Winter Break cannot come soon enough.

Unrelated, I know. This is actually us at Taylor's grandfathers wedding, but it was too cute not to add!

Perfect one dinner recipe: Well, I've cheated a little on this one. I haven't "perfected" anything really fancy, but I've worked really hard on learning to master my basic culinary skills and can sure make good sandwiches and cookies! I've also got chili down and I'm pretty good at tilapia.

These were the BEST sandwiches I've ever made. It was just a grilled ham and cheese, but oh were they good.

Eat a yummy banana split: Ohh this was one of the most delicious! Taylor and I went to Friendly's and had the cutest waiter ever. We discussed life and our "old age" and watched young high school kids get excited in the booth next to us. Wonderful date that I can't wait to do again.

Mmmm yummy!

And that is all my loves! I still have quite a few to go, but the pleasure I've gotten in achieving these few is absolutely amazing. My ukulele JUST arrived so I'll be off teaching myself how to play. XO!