there's always next year

happy halloween! work and teeth pain may have put a damper on any attempt to get wild and crazy tonight, but i still support any and all festivities, which is why i carried my little tuckus to the byrd the other night when i got word that dressing up was going on. if i can't partake in much of the halloween spirit, i will still watch while others do, all while sippin on a pumpkin milkshake. et voila, my ladies in all their costumed glory. total babez.

punkin

i am a fan of most holidays, and typically i partake in a bit of the halloween festivities; dressing up, candy consumption, etc. but this year work has taken over, and as for this recent root canal, the throbbing pain is warding off any kinds of sugar intake. so in an attempt to keep up at least a little of my holiday spirit, i am trying to figure out a 'mini' costume for work tomorrow. mini meaning that technically i'm not allowed to wear a costume at work but i think if i fly under the radar, work and i can reach a happy medium. but if all else fails, i do have some cobweb tights i can throw on, but i'm seriously brainstorming for ideas. help!

well, if i had this here little hat there would really be no issues.

Do the Monster Mash!

Yes, I'm looking around me and have realized that it's that time of year I hold so dear. It's Halloween time in the office right now, and let's review what's awesome and not so awesome about it all.

The Good:
-Other people bringing in cupcakes to share. Bonus points for Halloween sprinkles.
-Cutting your hair or facial hair to enhance your costume.
-Little kids coming in all dressed up to "haunt" our workplace! (Mel, you might disagree with me)
-Group costumes. You can't all dress the same, but you can each dress as a character in a larger group (the Peanuts gang, KISS, the Pink Ladies).
-If not done in genuine good-natured fun or unintentional bad taste, gender-bending costumes. I have to admit, I like having the chance to dress in a 3-piece suit and top hat.
-Halloween sweaters. If you can't bring yourself to dress up, you can at least put on a black sweater that has a puffy paint pumpkin on it.
-Wearing a hat that resembles something while dressing normal. I don't know why, but there's a girl in the office who's wearing slacks, a blouse and cardigan, and an enormous watermelon hat, and it is cracking me up.

The Bad:
-Work-related costumes (costumes another person can't figure out unless he/she knows internal information). Kinda boring, really.
-Sexy costumes. Just not down with the nasty twist put on so many outfits. The exception to the rule is if it's something completely ridiculous, like a scandalously dressed bee keeper.

The Home that Spite Built

I'll be heading up to Boston for a quick visit in a couple days, and while I was doing research on what sites to see, I came upon the Skinny House which apparently falls under the category of a spite house (a house actually built with the intention to piss someone off). Once I saw that, I instantly fell down the internet rabbit hole and found that there are numerous cute but mean-spirited houses out there, such as:
the Spite House of Arlington, Virginia,

the Montlake Spite House of Seattle,

and the Alameda Spite House (via the lensfare).

Now for a pick-me-up, let's just look at these beautiful Tumbleweed homes that slightly resemble spite houses but really are just eco-friendly and lovely.





You can just feel the love pouring out of these homes.

goosepimples

i feel like i'm doing a lot more fall prep than is really necessary, but i'm a fiend for jackets, coats, and outerwear of all sorts. so a month or so ago i decided to pick myself up a winter coat for the far off season, et voila

i knew i wanted to stray from any peacoats or leather motorcycle jackets, and hit the leaf covered ground running in something funner than my usual winter attire. so with a little navajo print here, a little fur trimmed hood there, and you have what i'll be living in all season long.

pictures via melinda via surprise visit, post-delicious meal via comfort

proud purchase of the week

if i were being boring and honest, i would say my proud purchase of the week was the rotisserie chicken i had last night for dinner. but i probably shouldn't be proud of my food consumption, so in the number 2 spot is my new fall lipstick, nars red lizard. it's deeper and more subtle than my other red, and i especially like the description on sephora.com, "semi-matte full powered red." full powered! i am so ready for fall.

so is betty d.

hibernation

i want to live in a waffle pocket and eat my way out.

Proud Purchase of the Week

This weekend was a beautiful weekend to spend in Colonial Williamsburg. Sure, I had been there as a kid field-tripping, but this time around, I had my friend, a native Williamsburgian, to give me the tour. That meant cheese shops, farmers' markets, and drinking rum and eating welsh rare-bit while listening to a man in tights play the hurdy gurdy. It also meant a trip to the Scotland House (apparently known as "the bonniest shop in America") where I promptly fell in love with a tweed cape. Being a real Scottish cape made by someone in Scotland using Scottish fabric, it was not surprisingly very expensive. So how did I remedy this? Not by buying or stealing it, but by deciding to attempt to make my own. So the proud purchase is not the cape, but the cape pattern above that will usher in a new phase in my life. My cape phase. I imagine everything that occurs when I wear it will somehow be much more dramatic, epic, and interesting, and for some reason Nina Simone will be playing nonstop in the background.

Update: got the wool! check it out...

sugartown

well, i made these rocky road brownie muffins a while back, but i say better late than never! they were really tasty considering i'm a huge fan of most things marshmallow, but also especially rich, so for a group of people i totally recommend this recipe. but if it's a party of 2 (i.e., my humble abode), share the wealth around, because they are slap-yo-mamma sweet. overall the recipe was a success, with no tweaks or adjustments necessary, though the bf thought that topping a brownie with more chocolate chips was maybe a bit too much chocolate in one muffin cup. i thought it was good nonetheless, but i also eat nutella with a spoon.

to serif or not to serif

Okay, so this blog post won't really be about that. It's really just a quick blurb about fun with fonts. I suppose the idea to write about this really came from me looking at a resume which was full of great content but with which I took the liberty of reformatting. I'm not a typographer in the slightest, but I do think there's a lot that one can take from a font. Emotions can be tapped into and interest can be peaked when people start using size, spacing, and fonts as mediums to use when trying to get a certain point across (haha, you won't see me doing that here!). The point can be a demand to be taken seriously or just a subtle wink to show that the person behind the writing is playful or good-natured. I'm sure most people by now have watched the documentary Helvetica, or heard about the controversy over the Ikea's switch from Helvetica to Verdana, but have you seen i love typography's Fontometer?! Read the article and then play around with the clever device. Then perhaps forget all of that and just admire this beard font:

(via Craftzine, via someone else, via another person...)

yum yums

after a long hiatus of generally staying out of the kitchen, as of late i'm making something of a comeback to cooking. but after several casserole dishes come and gone, i thought i'd move on to something that at least contained some meat, so last night i tried my hand at adobo, a particular comfort food of mine. i'm always weary about cooking filipino food, because if it goes awry i feel like a total failure ( i have less attachments to cakes or cookies), so after calling my parents a thousand times for specific instructions ("so i know it says brown the chicken, but mine is turning yellow?"), i let the dish simmer and i just walked away. or stood there and watched it simmer for twenty minutes, whatever. but after the blood, sweat, and tears

success! success in the form of chicken dotted with peppercorns!

follow the link to the recipe. it's simple and seemed to be pretty true to how my parents cook it. hooray!

Do the Damn Thing

And by that, I mean I should post about some old sweater projects of mine. If you're knitting-savvy, you can check out the details at my Ravelry site (one day I'll write about the deep gratitude and admiration my heart holds for those clever gals who came up with the idea of Ravelry). I knit these two several years ago, and while I adore them both, I do need to start putting waist shaping in to avoid looking frumpalicious. It's funny that I say this cause I'm seaming together a new sweater right now and it also has no midsection definition. When will I ever learn? Next time, always next time.

Whenever I choose a new knitting project, I have to be certain I'm not knitting it solely because I just love the strangeness of a project idea or because I'm interested only in the challenge a demanding pattern would present. Then I have to be honest with myself about the possibility of me actually wearing the end product. Not taking this last bit into account has led to disastrous results and waste of yarn, time, and knuckle movement as are evidenced by the horrid poncho project of '04 or the dowdy cabled/bobbled hoodie that haunts my closet and inflicts guilt on me every time I clean my closet only to find it shoved to the back and purposefully forgotten about. I dub that one my monster of Frankenstein hoodie.

proud purchase of the week

although the title may seem self-explanatory, the "proud purchase" installment will discuss the one purchase out of several made during the week that i am most proud to have broken my piggybank for. just like choosing a favorite child; it's a difficult choice, but you know the real answer.

i consider sundays as part of the new week since my work insists it is, so although this may seem a bit premature considering i have the whole week left to make my proud purchase, i have faith in this one. it's music again, but less 1960's mad men, and more pop punk noisy youth. i bought the wavves album on itunes, and so far i really really like it. it's all gritty and dirty and stinky and poppy and you can't really even make out the lyrics but that's what i like. it's just something that plays loud and fast and i can kinda scream out the lyrics without anyone ever knowing if i'm getting it right or wrong.


week of october 4 : wavves self titled album

proud purchase of the week

although the title may seem self-explanatory, the "proud purchase" installment will discuss the one purchase out of several made during the week that i am most proud to have broken my piggybank for. just like choosing a favorite child; it's a difficult choice, but you know the real answer.

as i near the end of this week and dip my toes into the beginning of october, i make my most proud purchase of the week this late thursday night.

as daily as i take my vitamins and drink coffee in the morning, i also watch a post-work episode of mad men via boxset, and it's undeniable that the show shifts the way i dress when it's on loop; collared shirts, trousers, and a red lip (a little don, a little betty). and along with my attire change, i've been listening to swanky oldies on repeat. so after a bit of tip tapping on the web doing very serious research, lo and behold i discover there's not one, but two mad men soundtracks out filled with all sorts of things i want to listen to. or as the itunes reviewer 'oh babz' remarked, "perfect and sexy." here's some bits from the perfect and sexy tracklist:

1. on the street where you live / vic damone
2. volare / the mcguire sisters
3. lipstick / david carbonara
4. p.s. i love you / bobby vinton
8. manhattan / ella fitzgerald (personal fave)

week of september 27 : mad men, vol. 1 soundtrack