Working From Home Style, Week 2

Hi guys! I hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend. And here's to looking forward to only 4 days of work this week, yay!

I had another mostly-successful week with actually getting dressed 4 out of 5 days. Friday I slacked and didn't get ready until early evening to go out, and of course I was running late, so I didn't take a photo of my outfit.

And I must say, it's a good thing I turned this into a blog project, because I'm still feeling like I need a lot of motivation to get out of my PJs--it's just too easy to be a bum all day when nobody sees me. Of course, as I write this it's lunch time and I'm in the shorts and t-shirt I threw on after showering! But luckily I have a Meetup.com happy hour to go to tonight, so I'll definitely be getting dressed after posting this.

Monday:

Cardigan and shell: Target, Bermuda shorts: Gap, Heels: Michael Antonio

I had to wear my hair in a side pony tail, because the detailing on these heels remind me of ponies!

Tuesday:

 Top: Gap, Ruffled Skirt: Victoria's Secret, Heels: BCBG, Necklace: Old Navy

Wednesday:

 Top: H&M, Skirt: H&M, Studded Heels: Target, Necklace: NY&CO

 Thursday:

Top: Target, Knit Skirt: No idea, it's seriously 9 or 10 years old because I've had it since college, Kitten Heels: Target, Necklace: Old Navy (same necklace I wore last Friday)

And since you already know I missed Friday, that's it for last week's working from home outfits! I'm definitely starting to see a trend with the brands I've been wearing, I totally have my handful of "go to" stores that a lot of my clothes come from.

Do you have a lot of particular brands of clothes in your closet, or do you branch out and buy lots of different brands?

Partly Sunny Fabrics

The combo of yellow and grey is a color scheme that I love a lot, and it always reminds me of partly sunny skies, with rays of sun shining through pensive grey clouds. But I don't currently have any room of my house with these colors. However, these two fabrics that I just found on Fabric.com really make me want to change things up somewhere, just as an excuse to use them!

I envision this geometric pattern as floor length curtains on the sliding doors in our dining room:

How cute are the little bees and dragonflies?

And I'd use this striped fabric to upholster dining room chairs:

I'd probably pair these fabrics with a dark blackwood table, along the lines of this one, with clean lines, sleek, but not overly modern.

And then I'd pull the dark color of the table to the walls with dark frames, featuring bright yellow artwork.

I'm not sure this quite goes with the geometric curtains and striped chair pads, but I really dig this modern art piece for a yellow and grey room:

 I envision it coming together something like this:

(Hooray for Adobe Illustrator, my BFF!)

Or even better, something with a little more contrast, although the scaredy-pants perpetual renter in me gets both giddy and nervous at the thought of dark color on walls!

Alright, inspiration time over! Now to get back to what I got distracted from in the first place, looking for fabric to make new slipcovers for my living room couch and chairs. But I keep finding so many fun fabrics in colors other than the blues and greens I'm looking for!

Have you ever gotten lost in a fabric store (or on a fabric website), inspired by all the possibilities? And hope you all are having a great Memorial Day!

Backyard Turtles and Demon Geese

Oh my gosh, you guys! North Carolina just keeps getting better and better, especially for an animal lover like me!

I've been so good about scheduling my blog posts lately, that I haven't even had a chance to share these pics from almost two weeks ago. My husband and I woke up early on Saturday morning (a sure sign we're getting old, sigh!), and decided to go run all of our errands first thing, so we could concentrate on getting stuff done around the house in the afternoon.

Well guess what my husband spotted on our back patio as we were about to get into his car? Two little turtles! Which you probably never guessed, considering the title of this post!

Our cats were quite scared of the turtles, since I'm sure they'd never seen them before. This is only about the 3rd time I've even seen turtles in the wild myself. It was fun to watch how cautious the cats were too, especially since I knew the kitties probably couldn't hurt the turtles even if they tried--the turtle would just hide in it's shell.

(That's a  "WTF is that thing!?!" stance if I've ever seen it!)

Of course, knowing me, I shoved my camera at my husband, and had to get in on the checking-out-the-turtles-fun!

(I named this one Raphael--he was totally the bad boy of the two! TMNT, anyone? And great, now the TMNT song is gonna be stuck in my head all day!)

(Don't worry, I totally washed my hands after touching it!)

My sister, who used to have a pet tortoise, said she thinks they looked like Eastern Box Turtles. Look at it's cute little claws!

This is one of my favorite pictures, because it makes my kitty look so brave. But in reality, it's a miracle I snapped this photo because it's the only time he got closer than about three feet to it. He dashed up, sniffed it for a second, then darted away!

I think the turtles are braver than my cats, this one walked right up to my husband and checked out his sandals.

Off into the bushes. I keep looking on the patio every morning since to see them again, but so far no luck.

And on another note, did you know geese are scary as hell?

The day after we saw the turtles, we went on a hike at a park with a big lake near our house. The Yelp reviews of the park said there were cute ducks and geese, and recommended bringing some bread or crackers to feed them. This was not good advice.

I brought about 6 slices of bread, and at the end of our hike, I went down a side path to the lake where a bunch of geese were. I started casually breaking off small pieces of bread and throwing them towards the geese as they all made a beeline for me. And they're fast suckers! Before I knew it, one was barreling down on me, only about 10 feet away, HISSING AND DROOLING, with murder in his eyes and about 20 more geese on his heels.

OMG, I wigged out, and threw the rest of the slices of bread behind me as I ran screeching back up to the boardwalk area, while my husband just shook his head at me. But dude, I didn't know they were gonna be demon geese! From far away, up above them on the boardwalk, they look all sweet and cute.

Or at least that's what they want you to believe.

Next time, I'm just sticking to the turtles!

I Love Lamp

Remember when I mentioned a while back that we have an ugly entry way light above our foyer, but we have to use it because we need more light in our living room?

No? Well, to refresh your memory, this is the ugly entry way light that we've been keeping on, because it shines into the living room, where we've got some lighting issues.

I won't bore you again with all the details of how difficult it was to come up with a furniture configuration in our living room, but basically, the cheap-o Ikea floor lamps (you know the ones, white plastic scoop top with silver base) were too big to place next to our former-entertainment-center-turned-corner-shelf-units, which was the only good place to put lights at that end of the room. So I stole our nicer and smaller blue ceramic shade Ikea lights from our bedroom.

I actually rather like the lights here, it's a little more interesting than just sticking lamps in the corners of the room (not that that was an option here), and they fit the blue and green color scheme. But man, how badly do I want to paint our walls a bright sage green, so there would be more contrast between our furniture and the walls!

Actually, while we're looking at this above picture, I'll call out a few things. Obvs the newspaper squares are just placeholders for future pictures. And I'm planning to paint the trim and top of my gecko aquarium white, so it will be a little less in-your-face, even though it's kinda in-your-face already, being in the living room. What can I say, I love my pets! Oh, also, I'm still trying to decide if I want to put the glass doors on the corner shelving units. I feel like when they were part of the entertainment center it gave off a really polished look (and with the frosted edges on the glass doors, it matches our glass top coffee table). But now that they're in the corners, I don't want the shelves to start looking like china cabinets, which I fear adding the glass doors might do. But without the glass doors, I think I need bigger decorative pieces on the shelves than I've got now. Yes, big problems I've got, haha!

So anyways, back to lamps. Lamps at the other side of the room , that is, now that we've covered this side of the room.

As I mentioned, everything was super dim on the other side of the living room, unless we had the ugly foyer light on. So on our trip to IKEA a few weeks back, I picked up a $20 lamp shade and a $3.99 lamp cord kit, and finally got around to putting it up!

And I'm a bad little blogger because I didn't take "before lamp" photos. But I'll simulate them with the lamp turned off, so you can see just how dim it was on the other side of our living room, with no new lamp, and with the ugly foyer light turned off.

(Gotta love the messy coffee table with glasses, chapstick, catnip, computer and other randomness. Sorry, cleaning for you guys would be way too much work!)

(See why I said I wanted to make new slipcovers? Store bought ones just always look sloppy since they're one size fits all)

And now, with the lamp on, it's so much brighter!

Hooray lamp! I really love the look of the lamp shade too (and the $20 price tag!). It's a subtle, neutral color, so doesn't draw too much unneeded attention to that corner (since really, a floor lamp would have been better, but there's no room for one behind the chairs, and I didn't have a 3rd matching blue lamp anyway).

Here's a closer look at the lamp:

Now, it can be a little awkward to have a wire coming down the wall when doing a hanging lamp, since we can't exactly drill into the ceiling in a rental. But I found a good way to at least attach the cord as close and straight as possible in the corner, with Command non-permanent hooks from the hardware store. I used the ones meant for Christmas lights, although apparently they make ones for bigger cords too, although I haven't found those in stores yet.

I just stuck the little hooks to the wall as far in the corner as possible, all the way down to the ground, let it sit for the recommended hour, then attached my lamp's cord to the hooks with small pieces of white twist ties.

This also worked great to transition the cord from the ceiling, over our crown moulding, to the wall.

Being in our living room with actually enough light at that end of the room makes me so happy! I really DO love lamp (I hope y'all get that movie reference)! And good riddence to the need for the ugly foyer light. Except when we're waiting for the pizza delivery guy, that is!

Is anyone else obsessed with brightly lit rooms? And how cool are those non-permanent wall hooks, have you tried those out yet? I'm planning on getting a bunch more for hanging pictures!

Happy BBAD Day!

{Picture stolen from KJPugs!}

Happy Blog Buddy Appreciation Day to everyone! (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, go read about it here and enter KJ's contest)

So...I'd had another post scheduled for today, but I'm going to delay it until tomorrow, so I can show some love to my blog friends in honor of today's holiday!

But in thinking about who to give shout outs to (several other bloggers have only called out a couple of their blog friends), I had a really hard time. I mean, I subscribe to almost 200 blogs, and at least half of those are ones that I consider my "must reads". So I'm going to be a little long-winded here in the number of blogs I love, and break them down by the categories I have them in my reader.

Blog Love: Friends

This is probably one of my smallest blog categories, but it's full of people I know in real life. I won't link to most, since there's some that aren't meant for public consumption (friend's baby blogs for their families), but I will call out two that I love.

Wander in Delight - About my DOC rockstar's new life in New Zealand. I love reading about her adventures discovering a new country, and seeing how gorgeous it is down there.

High Heels City Streets - My blog friend Kim's brand new blog. You might remember her old blog The Perpetual Party Planner, which is where I "met" her. I'd started following her blog forever ago, then we met in person at a Weddingbee local meetup, followed by some bonding over happy hours. She and her husband even came to my wedding, and I was honored to attend her wedding in October. And now she just started her new blog this week, which I'm sure is going to be fabulous!

Blog Love: Favorite Wedding Blogs

This is one category that I probably need to reorganize, since hardly anyone updates anymore (they're all married now!). But there is one notable newlywed who still writes a bit about wedding planning, and she just got her wedding planner certification. I need to move her to my newlywed's category: Bicoastal Bride

Blog Love: Newlywed Blogs

This is my second biggest reader category, and there are way to many bloggers to all mention! So I'll just select a few to list in alphabetical order here, but if you're a newlywed and I've commented on your blog, know that I love you too!

A Leap Begins - Love Emily's no-nonsense attitude

GatorTales - I've got a blog crush on Hannah, I just feel like I really know her so well through her writing, and I'm mad jealous of all her traveling she's done!

Heart on Homestead - Jessica is so sweet, and always full of fun adventures, and I love the pics of her dog Bodie

KJ Pugs - Naked showers, she loves pugs, and her stories never fail to crack. me. up! If only she lived closer, she's definitely a blog friend I wish I could meet in real life

The Luckiest in Love - My wedding date twin, enjoying newlywed life

Wish Fulfillment Everyday - Layla is so inspiring, and a fabulous writer to boot. I can't stop reading her posts, they're so full of raw emotion. Here's to a speedy recovery Layla (see the Operation Layla badge on my side bar if you don't know what I mean)

Blog Love: Weddingbees

Ah, Weddingbee. The site that started my blogging passion about two years ago! To this day I still skim the blog every day, even though I'm almost a year past my own wedding. I love keeping up with my fellow bee's plans though! Being a part of this community has meant the world to me. Every single one of these ladies is full of fun and creativity, and are honest, genuine people. I've met quite a few of them in person now, and we always have a blast. 

On top of Weddingbee itself, I also subscribe to all of the Bee's post-wedding blogs (I have a pretty comprehensive link list on my link tab if anyone is interested). There's definitely way too many Bee blogs that I read to list all here though, so I'm just going to give a blanket shout out to all my Bee ladies! All of their blogs are wonderful, so full of inspiration, and there's something for everyone, depending on where you are in your own life. I big puffy heart all of you guys!

So there you have it, my blog love fest for the year, in honor of BBAD! Are you participating by showing your love for your blogger friends too?

Working From Home Style

So, I'm not a fashion blogger. Nor do I intend on becoming one.

But as I mentioned here, I really need some motivation to figure out my outfits now that I work from home. My old work clothes that I used to wear into the office are just too formal for me now, but I need to wear something other than my PJs all day to feel normal, even though it's the easy choice.

So I thought if I turned this into a blog project for a few weeks, I'd be motivated to put together cute outfits, and then actually put them on, because of course, I need pictures for said blog project.

Here's week one, which I already failed at on one of the days. But it's definitely better than PJs!

Monday:

Top: Gap, Capris: Victoria's Secret, Heels: Michael Antonio, Necklace: NY&Co

Tuesday:

Top: I think maybe it's from JCPenny's (I've had it for years), Skirt: Victoria's Secret, Kitten Heels: Target, Bracelets: Forever 21

Wednesday:

You can tell I didn't spend much time on pictures today, I forgot to adjust my white balance, and only took a couple of shots, all with very similar poses. ANTM, I am not!

Top: Ruffled Polo from Old Navy, Bermuda Shorts: Gap, Pink and Brown Heels: Steve Madden, Belt: Target

Thursday: Fail Day

Today I didn't make it into an actual outfit, unfortunately. I had a conference call early in the day with the European team that I had to prep for, and it threw my whole schedule off. So instead of getting up, checking to see if I have any urgent emails, then working out, showering and getting dressed, I just worked all morning, and didn't even have a chance to shower until just before dinner. Which means I just pulled on wrinkled shorts and a t-shirt. Sigh!

So instead of an outfit picture for today, here is Hailey, looking particularly cranky and judgmental about my poor showing for Thursday.

Friday:

Jacket: Banana Republic, Top: Old Navy, Skirt: Old Navy (hooray for pockets!), Heels: Nine West, Necklace: Old Navy

You probably noticed I wore a lot of Old Navy stuff this week. That's because I just bought some new things from there, to beef up my casual clothes wardrobe (since I normally err on the side of being overdressed, instead of underdressed, I didn't have anywhere near the number of casual clothes as I do business-ish clothes). But I'm working on it, and am going to try out combining some of my old, more formal, clothes with some casual pieces, to hopefully get the work from home/weekend style I'm looking for.

Tell me, do you usually err on the side of being overdressed, or are you more a fan of casual looks?

Don't Cha Wanna Know Our New Address?

Since I've been back on the subject of moving-related things this week (sorry!), I thought I'd take a moment to share some cute little "We've Moved" postcards that I made.

I spend a whole 20 minutes on these, since I opted to take advantage of Vistaprint's 100 free postcards promo they've been running (I just had to pay for shipping). Way better than spending 20 minutes on the design in Illustrator and then a couple more hours printing and cutting them out!

So here they are! Sorry for the blurs, but I know the internet doesn't need to know our address!

 

Now I just need to find the time to write a little personalized note on these, address them and send them out! Which is a whole lot less fun than actually designing them, but oh well! I'm sure our family and friends will appreciate getting an update on our new address AND a cute postcard in the mail!

How have you let your relatives and friends know about your new address after moving? I know, an email probably would have been a lot easier...

P.S. In case you're curious about how I made the outline of the United States with the pattern inside, I found a clip art outline online from here, downloaded it and copied it into Adobe Illustrator (usually in the clip art organizer you can right-click on an image, select copy, and then paste it into Illustrator). I then ungrouped the image (there was some other junk in the clip art other than just the outline), deleted the other junk, created a copy of the outline and increased the outline stroke width on the copy, placed the first US outline on top of my pattern, created a clipping mask, and then placed the copy of the outline on top of the masked image (since when you create a clipping mask, it hides the top layer used to make the mask). And that was a mouthful. And totally not the technical terms, since I only know what I've taught myself to do in Illustrator. This probably only makes sense if you have Illustrator, but I thought I'd put it out there in case anyone was wondering!

Cross Country Drive Timelapse Videos: The Vids!

Alright, now that you know how we took pictures every 30 seconds on our cross country drive, it's time to share the timelapse videos I made!

Day 1:



And if you're at work and can't view this now, a few of the highlights are some Joshua Trees in Arizona:



And at the end of the video, at about 2 minutes, 5 seconds, you see us paused on the side of the road for a few frames...yeah, that would be my husband being pulled over for speeding. Luckily he got off with just a warning; the cop was more interested at looking at our camera set up and hearing about this little project!

Unfortunately, not long after this incident, our first cigarette lighter power adapter decided to die on us, so the first day's video is cut short. I'm kinda bummed about it too, because the sunset that night as we were driving near the grand canyon was amazing. I did snap a few photos with my other little camera though, and that night we found a Radio Shack to get a new power adapter for the next day.

Day 2:



The clouds the morning of our second day driving were amazing. This day's video just might be my favorite because of it!

We drove through all of New Mexico this day, and while there were a few neat rock formations, mostly it was a pretty boring state, from the highway at least.

The top part of Texas that we crossed was even more boring, and so flat and feature-less that our camera had a hard time focusing on anything and skipped a few pictures. I took this out the window with our other camera to show just how flat it was.

But our dash-mounted camera did manage to focus long enough to get a shot of what is apparently (according to the signs along the highway and this website) the largest cross in North America, a ways outside Amarillo, TX.

Day 3:



Day 3 was our longest day in the car by far, because we'd decided the previous night that we were up for pushing a little further than we'd planned, so we would get to North Carolina a little earlier the following day.

Unfortunately we got stuck for quite a while in a back up outside of Little Rock, which you can see clearly in the video because we were behind this yellow truck for what felt like forever.

I was also excited to see an armadillo next to the road when we were stopped (I'd never seen one before), but then I realized it was dead, so I won't share that picture! But we finally made it to Tennessee that day, and got to cross over the Mississippi river for the first time.

We'd started this day at about 4:30 in the morning, and didn't make it to the hotel until after 9pm, so it was a really long day. The last photos before I turned the camera off were looking a little blurry because of the low light, and we were starting to feel blurry too!

Day 4:



Our last day in the car (thank goodness!)!

The day started off a little rainy and grey in Tennessee, but by the time we reached the gorgeous mountains in western North Carolina, the sun was starting to come out.

And we also got some fun shots going through tunnels in the mountains.

This is the shortest of the videos, and when you finally reach the last frame, you can see the side of our new house, and the stairs going up to our back deck. We were so glad to finally make it, after about 45 hours in the car over 4 days!

This was such a fun little project, and it was definitely something I plan on trying again in the future, especially now that I have the timelapse controller. I just need to think up something else to try it on!