You Throw Like a Girl

I was not blessed with much coordination. I can't ever throw things where I intend for them to go and catching something--forget it! I am always throwing Nuts' toys into walls, Ty's head, and onto the other couch by accident. We have a dimmer light switch in our living room. Below the dimmer is a push button to turn the light completely off. The other day I threw one of his stuffed toys and hit the button and turned off the lights. I couldn't do that on purpose if I tried a million times.

Tonight I was not so lucky. I was standing near that same light switch and throwing his toy down the hallway. Well, I was getting tired of playing so I threw it really, really hard. I wanted it to go all the way down the hall and into our bedroom so that it would take him longer to come back. (And maybe wear him down a little.) So I threw it really, really hard and right as my hand was coming down from the throw, SMACK, right into the sharp corner of the wall. I, of course, screamed pretty loud. It wasn't so much out of pain as it was a cry for attention. I wanted Ty to come running out of his black hole (I mean office) and dote on me. I told him I thought it was broken and then I realized that I could bend it. Drama Queen! Ty doted on me long enough to get me an ice pack and some ibuprofen. I guess I should be pretty happy with that--it is finals week and I will survive!

I am typing this pretty slowly and alternately icing my thumb. It's cut and swollen. OUCH!

And Nuts successfully retrieved his toy and is trying to eat the ice pack. Wonderful! He gets so hyped up on rainy days, because he doesn't get to spend much time outside. He hates getting wet. Ah the hazards of throwing like a girl!

Waiting on my doorstep...

This purse should be waiting on my doorstep when I get home. Yay! I have a navy purse pretty similar to this but it is really worn out. I was so happy when J.Crew came out with it in navy. I ordered it on the handy dandy red phone in NYC. Tote style purses are my fave. It's so easy to reach in and out of it while never having to remove it from your shoulder. Plus you can stuff just about anything into them. Its going to be the perfect summer bag!

I'm eyeing this dress for some of the more casual weddings that I will be attending this summer. I love the color and the sweetheart neckline. The strap is optional and I would wear it strapless. Looks like I will be making a trip to the mall this weekend. I just hope that color looks good against my pale, ice cold skin. (I may or may not be a vampire.) hehe!

New York, New York

{Warning: LONG POST} I don't even know where to begin with this post. New York City is a place that I have wanted to visit ever since reading about Stacey from the Babysitter's Club books. haha! I was so excited to find out that the conference that I was attending would be in NYC. I started recruiting my mom to go with me--it didn't take much convincing. We had such a good time. The conference was great and I learned a lot. In between every conference meeting I jam packed our time with sightseeing. I didn't want to overwhelm you all with pictures, so I made these picture grids in Picasa. Its such a great feature! {You can click on the pics to make them bigger.}

We stayed at the Marriott Marquis Times Square.

From Left to Right: Top row: View of the Hudson from my hotel room; Times Square all lit up at night.

From L to R: Bottom Row: Times Square early one morning; View from my hotel room.

Day 1

Started off with some excitement the night before. My direct flight was cancelled and we had to reschedule for the crack of dawn, not kidding. A 6 a.m. flight! But hey we made it!

1. The Chrysler Bldg.

2. The NYC Public Library

3. Bryant Park at night

4. John's Pizzeria--YUMMY!

Day 2

It was a cool, rainy, foggy day but that didn't stop us from exploring. We set out to find Kee's Chocolates in Soho. Fantastic chocolates! I had the Thai Chili, Dark Choc. Truffle, and Lavender. We stumbled upon MarieBelle and had hot chocolate. I heard that Oprah is a fan.

1. Kee's Chocolates 2. Bldg. in Soho 3&4. MarieBelle and its Cocoa Bar.

We went to Canal Street. It was so much fun and scary to be sneaking into back rooms. I bought a bracelet and some sunglasses on Canal Street. You will see the glasses below. I always buy really big glasses that do not fit my narrow head and then never wear them again. I think that is going to be the case with these. Let me get back on track...

After Canal Street we headed to Century 21, a huge discount department store. I am not a digger and it was too big and overwhelming for me to really shop. I did get Ty a nice, lavendar tie and a bow tie! I can't wait for him to wear the bow tie. He is going to have to google how to tie it first. haha! Across the street from Century 21 is where the World Trade Center stood. It was a very sombering thing to see.

From Century 21 we went to lunch at Les Halles. It is a restaurant co-owned by Anthony Bourdain. He is the host of the Travel Channel's No Reservations.

From there we headed to the Staten Island Ferry. We got to see the Brooklyn Bridge, the dowtown skyline, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island all aboard a free ferry ride.

Then we went to the East Village, near NYU and ate at Pommes Frites. YUMMY--belgian fries with dipping sauces. (Mom and I chose pesto mayo, sweet chili, and parmesan peppercorn.) We had to race back to get to the welcome session of the conference and then I met up with Bama Belle.

Day 3

Day 3 started off nice and early. Mom and I headed to Rockefeller Center to check everything out. It was so nice to be out and about without a lot of people around.

1. GMA show

2. Cooking portion of the GMA show--Wolfgang Puck was on.

3. Rockefeller Center

4. SAKS!

One of the sponsors of the conference took several of us to lunch at Sardi's. It was so neat to see all of the caricature drawings. After a few more meetings, Mom and I headed to 5th Ave. to window shop. Ah, Bergdorf's--gorgeous! Then off to Sak's to try on a lot of jeans--no such luck! I also introduced my mom to Anthropologie. Love that store!

1. Lucille Ball caricature

2. FAO piano

3. FAO Giant jelly bean soldier

4. Brooke Shields caricature at Sardi's

Day 4

Lots and lots of meetings followed by a trip to Central Park, back to Bryant Park (too bad it wasn't during fashion week), Junior's restaurant, and Mamma Mia! It was a gorgeous day.

1. Central park Turtle Pond--view from the Belvedere Castle

2. Central Park

3. Central Park

4. Belvedere Castle

1. Bryant Park Grille

2. Bryant Park

3. Bryant Park with the NYC Public Library in the background

4. Bryant Park: look at all those people enjoying the great weather!

1. &2. Bryant Park (You know I can't resist pretty flowers!)

3. & 4. Central Park West (backtrack with me.)

Mamma Mia!

I haven't seen the movie--heard it was awful. The musical is GREAT! After the show we went to the only revolving restaurant in NYC, located at the top of our hotel. It was nice to see the city from that high up. No pics, though. They didn't turn out good through 2 layers of glass.

Day 5

Our last day to see the sites. We started out in the West Village.

1. & 2. Little Marc Jacobs photo shoot. Photos for moms and kiddos in the park. They were still setting everything up or I would have had my picture taken. haha!

3. The best tomato soup ever at Cafeteria. SO GOOD!

4. Cafeteria

Touring the West Village was all about seeing the Sex and the City sites for me.

1. Carrie Bradshaw's apartment

2. Me on the steps of Carrie Bradshaw's apt.

3. & 4. Perry Street (the street of Carrie Bradshaw's apt.)

I told ya'll that today was all about SATC. We went to the famed Magnolia Bakery for cupcakes. They were oh so yummy. The perfect sugary, buttercream frosting--very similar to my Nanny's. I also had some great, fresh squeezed lemonade.

We walked around the West Village and ended up in Chelsea at a street fair. We went into several cute boutiques and then decided it was getting hot and it was time to head back to the hotel for a while. But the subway ride revived me and we ended up at the shops at Colombus Circle. We bought some magazines and headed to Central Park to read. We sat on this huge rock surrounded by half of thepeople in the city. I'm not kidding. It was a gorgeous day and everyone was out enjoying it.

These pictures are of my view from where we sat in Central Park. I also enjoyed my other cupcake. The too huge sunglasses made an appearance. haha!

After Central Park, we headed back to Times Square. It was CROWDED! We stopped in a few stores and then headed to the hotel to relax and figure out what to do for dinner. We ended up eating hot dogs and pretzels from a street vendor. For dessert we headed to Pinkberry. It was so good. They serve frozen yogurt with all kinds of toppings. I had strawberries and cap'n crunch. Oh so delish! Then it was time to pack up. We had to be up at 3:30 AM to catch our flight home. NYC is a very unique, magical place. But now I need a beach vacation to recover. :)

My First Bloggie Meet-up

Bama Belle and I had a chance to meet in NYC! It was so much fun! This is the first bloggie friend that I have gotten to meet in person. We were also going to meet up with Milltini and B is for Brown, but both got stuck at work. :(
My conference was at a hotel in Times Square so Bama Belle met me in the area. We had dessert at the Bouchon Bakery. It was very yummy, but the company was even better than the food. It was like catching up with an old friend. Bama Belle and I had been e-mailing back and forth for a while. She is my personal travel agent. I visited her hometown in Alabama and she gave me lots of good tips and of course gave me lots of tips for NYC. She even bought a tie onesie for her new nephew, who is so adorable!
It was great to finally meet her in person. She is such a warm, friendly, and truly genuine person! Bama Belle even walked me back to my hotel. So sweet!

I will post pictures from my trip sometime this week. I took a lot and it is taking me a while to sort through them. Now it's time to catch up on work in the office and sort through my conference materials. Just another manic Monday!

And We're Off...

My Mom and I should be up in the sky when this post is published. We are on our way to NYC!! I'm so excited! I bought these luggage tags at Hobby Lobby, printed our monograms on vellum, and put it all in place. I love the bright, spring colors.

My mom and I have the same middle name and before I got married we had the exact same initials.

I will not be blogging the rest of this week. I'm sure I will have lots and lots of pictures to share next week!

Weekend Recap

I had a great weekend! On Friday I returned to my natural color. I had forgotten how light my hair was. I e-mailed this picture to my hair stylist to remind her of what my natural color looked. I hadn't been my natural color since August of last year.

This is how it turned out. Pretty similar. It actually looks a little lighter than this in person. My stylist had to completely strip out the red and then put a color on it. And this is the only picture I took of myself all weekend. Stripping color out of you hair can really damage it, so I went 3 days without washing it. That is a record for me. I also bought some hot oil treatments to help with the damage. So ignore the the side bun. haha!

Gardening in skinny jeans tucked into rain boots is a must. HAHA! Just Kidding!

Ty, Chesley and I tried a new mexican restaurant Friday night. It was no bueno. We will not be visiting it again. I love mexican food, but I will stick with my fave places from now on.

Saturday was spent cleaning, running errands with Ches, and gardening with the hubs. We planted a japanese red maple a few weeks ago. It was exactly a week before we got the unexpected 10 inches of snow. It did not survive. Luckily, Home Depot has a great return policy on all of their plants. We picked up a new tree and some flowers for my flower pots. We also visited a nursery to pick up 2 peony bushes. Peonies are my favorite flowers. I picked out a light pink and a bright pink one (of course). I also bought some jasmine. I love the way it smells. I didn't have a chance to take a picture of the front yard with all the new plants. We just finished it yesterday evening. I did take pics of the flowers I put in my pots. The ranunculus in the picture above and the petunias in the pic below.

Good Reads

I love to read, but lately I only seem to do it when I am travelling a lot. I cannot sit on an airplane without having a book to read. I have made several trips to the library this year. I love going to the library and browsing for books. I find so many good ones. Unfortunately, I will only allow myself to check out 2 at a time. If I check out more than that I never get them all read by the due date and I always forget to renew them online, so I end up with a fine.
So I have started taking pics of the books that I like with my phone. This way I remember the ones that I want to go back and get later. I also love it when other blogs give book recommendations. I always write the name of the book down, so that I can remember to check it out/buy it later.

Here are some of the books that I have read lately. Click on the name of the book to read a description--It will take you to the amazon page for it.

I read The Devil in the Junior League on my trip to Alabama.

I loved this book: Schooled by Anisha Lakhani.

Schooled reminded me a lot of The Nanny Diaries, which I also loved, so I checked this out from the library on CD and listened to it on my last recruitment road trip. (Don't judge the book based on the movie.)

I have never read a Jane Austen novel before. I always liked the idea of reading one. I tried a few times in high school, but could never get into them. I love all the movies based on her books, so I decided to give this book a try. I love being transported back into another era. Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.

Mojito Maven actually blogged about this book. I went online to the library's website to reserve the book and there was a 5 week wait on it. I figured it must be really good! I am about halfway through it and I really like it.

Bitter is the New Black

Schooled was my favorite out of this bunch of books. I'm hoping she has written other books. I'm off to search for that right now....

The B-I-B-L-E

The hubs just loves it when I take his picture!

Ty bought me a new bible for Easter. My old one was falling apart. The pages had come apart from the binding and half of the pages would fall out. I wasn't even taking it to church, because I was afraid it would fall apart and I would lose some pages.

Ty wanted me to pick it out myself. I knew what I wanted when I went to pick it out: small size, but not too small; no crazy color or design. Of course, I didn't stick with that. This is the bible I went with.

I saw it at Border's and loved the size and the way it was set up inside. I liked the color, but thought it might be too much for a bible. I got online later to search for one this size but in different colors. I couldn't find anything else that I liked, so we ordered this one. (from amazon. For some reason I order everything from amazon.) It should come in tomorrow. I'm very excited!

Quiche Lorraine

Blogger and I have some issues. I started this post yesterday with the intentions of finishing it later, but somehow it was published. It certainly wasn't because I accidentally hit publish. :)

Last Friday night I rented Twilight and made Ty watch it with me. He actually liked it! Gasp!

It made me want to reread all the books. We went to Borders on Saturday night and I was going to buy the first book. (I borrowed the 1st one from a friend.) But they only had it in hardback. I don't like hardback books. They aren't as easy to tote around in my purse. They don't bend very easily. And I hate the sleeve. I always take them off while I am reading the book. I know you guys are thinking, "Why don't you just buy the book at Wal-Mart?" Well, Wal-Mart is only selling the book in the small paperback size with a scene from the movie on the front. Its ugly and I don't like the small size. I'm just a little particular! Most people I know like hard back books better. Am I the only weird one out there that prefers paperback??

Now to the reason for this post: QUICHE LORRAINE

I had never made a quiche before. I read several recipes online and combined a lot of them to come up with this. I thought it was delish! Although next time I think I will try to make my own pie crust or buy a different brand. I think I bought Great Value--It was my only option at Wal-Mart.

INGREDIENTS:
1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch single crust pie
6 slices bacon {I used turkey bacon and I umped it to 8 slices.}
1 onion, sliced {completely optional in my opinion}
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/3 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

{I happened to have some fresh spinach leaves in the fridge that was about to go bad, so I threw some of it in as well.}
1 1/2 cups shredded Swiss cheese
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C). Line pastry shell with foil. Bake in oven for 8 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 5 minutes, or until crust is set and dry. Remove from oven and turn down temperature to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).

In a large skillet, cook bacon until crisp. Drain and reserve 2 tablespoons of drippings. Crumble the bacon and set aside. Cook onion in skillet with reserved drippings; cook until onion is tender and then drain.

In a large bowl, mix together milk, salt, cayenne pepper, nutmeg and eggs. Stir in bacon, spinach and onion. In a separate bowl, toss cheese and flour together, then add to egg mixture. Be sure to mix well. Pour egg mixture into pie crust. {When I poured the egg mixture into the pie crust I got worried it would boil over so I put it on a baking sheet before putting it in the oven.}

Bake in preheated oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until knife inserted in center of quiche comes out clean. I would recommend covering the edge of crust with foil while baking to prevent burning or overbrowning. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.

We ate it for leftovers the next night and it was just as good! And we aren't big leftovers fans.

Enjoy!

Craft Party

A month or two ago Chesley sent me an e-mail with some pics of a few feather headbands that she found on Etsy. I replied telling her which ones I liked and that we could make them ourselves. I saw a really cute one at Urban Outfitters when I was in Lawrence, KS, but couldn't bring myself to pay $24 for a feather headband. I looked it over and decided that if I really wanted one that I could probably make it.


{It was brought to my attention the other day that some of you might think I am spelling Chesley's name wrong. Its not Chelsey--its CHESS-LEE. That's my best phonetic spelling! We met in college and she is my bestest friend in the whole wide world. She entertains me while Ty is studying. I just wanted to clear that up. I also have a lot of new people reading my blog, so I wanted to explain who she is.} Back to our craft party....

I was originally going to do a tutorial on how to make them, but I came across this great tutorial on BurdaStyle and decided to just link to it.

C and I spent around $10 total. That is $5 each for 2 headbands a piece. We bought the feathers and tacky glue at Michaels, the felt at JoAnn's, and the headbands from Target. I used one headband that I already had.

The first headband was easy to make because these feathers were already attached to a tear-drop shaped piece of felt.
It basically blends in with my hair.
We bought a pack of feathers for this headband and had to arrange and glue them onto the felt ourselves.



I doubted that we could make the peacock feathers work when C bought them. They turned out so cute! I wish I would have bought some. She is going to wrap some black ribbon around the headband toward the bottom to
cover up the stick part of the feathers.

This was a very easy craft project! We had a lot of fun making them! Now, if I only knew what I could wear a feather headband with....

Spring Fest

Can ya'll tell that Spring is my favorite season?!? Saturday Ty and I attended an event put on by our city's garden club. There were lots of different vendors and nurseries with booths set up. One of our local shelters had their mobile shelter set up with the cutest dogs ever. Ty wouldn't let me have a puppy--he's so mean! haha! I don't know what I would actually do with another dog, but they were so cute!

The weather was so nice. I think it was only 55 degrees, but the sun was shining and for once there was no wind. It was a perfect day. The park was packed with people.

The azaleas were in full bloom!

Some poor passerby was asked to take our picture. Ty loves it when I do this! {that was a very sarcastic comment.}

Luckily for Ty he has long arms and can sometimes snap a good pic of us himself.

There were so many little kids in their Easter outfits getting their pictures taken. There was even a bridal portrait session going on.

It was a busy day for photographers!

I'm glad we enjoyed the weather on Saturday, because Easter Sunday was COLD and rainy. I tried to get a pic of Ty and I in our Easter outfits, but my camera's self-timer did not want to cooperate. And the only place that was tall enough for the camera to sit on was the mantle. It didn't make for the best background. Oh well!
We did not try to match our outfits, it just turned out this way. Besides that if we were trying to match I hope we would do a better job than this! :) These greens kinda clash!