Saturday, May 28, 2011

Achievements

I've been pretty busy the last couple weeks...hence the not particularly details blog posts and this wont probably wont be much different since I'm planning to get back to cleaning and laundry as soon as I finish this.

This week I:

* Made a tiny cake for my friend's belated birthday dinner
* Approved the invitation proofs for the wedding
* Reserved a photo booth for the wedding
* Set up a blog for my cakes and filled it with photos and blurbs about my baking experience

AND

*insurance shopped. (while this achievement is not quite completed yet, I think I know what direction we're headed)

This along with my regular work and work out schedule. Oh, and I made a facebook group for my mark. store. You should "like" it.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Saturday, May 21, 2011

In honor of the apocalypse

Lately I've been keeping myself pretty busy. I'm trying to get more involved in Mark. again and I'm really happy about it because a) I feel like Mark. is really stepping up their game. I've seen a huge quality improvement and they're really trying to appeal to a broader demographic instead of just teens and college students, b) I get awesome discounts on all this new higher quality stuff catered to my demographic, and c) it gives me an opportunity to get in touch with a really good friend of mine who I haven't spent much time with lately.
So, if anyone who reads this is interested in checking out some totally awesome makeup, clothing and accessories, let me know. I can get you a magalog and some free samples. :)

I've also
been trying to dedicate myself more to my at home cake business. The last two weekends, I have had some wonderful opportunities to challenge myself and create cakes using at least one method I'd never used before.
Last weekend I made fresh whipped cream and iced the entire cake with it. It tasted like a giant strawberry shortcake and was one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. (Tim and I share the cake tops when I even out the tops of the cakes)
This weekend I was asked to make a cake that was half red and half white with red filling. The red filling was easy peasy, but I had a much harder time with making half the cake red than I thought I would. Plus I challenged myself into doing this with fondant, so I had to dye half of it red. It turned out pretty nicely, if I may say so.


And finally, today we finally had our hopefully last meeting with the woman who is doing our wedding invitations. We just had a 20 minute meeting today to go over exactly what we wanted on what kind of paper since at the end of our last meeting, we weren't sure what the company would actually be able to do. She's going to email my mom and I the proof sometime during the coming week so that I we can approve it and order the invitations. Tomorrow Tim and I have to go bug my parents to get the actual number of people we will be inviting so we can see how many invitations we'll need.
Not excited about that. There's too much drama in guest list making.

Supposedly The Rapture has happened. I guess not a lot of people were worthy or going straight to heaven since I haven't noticed anyone missing yet - nor have I noticed any fire and brimstone lurking about. I hope everyone has a pleasant post-apocalyptic weekend?

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

4 Months!

We're getting married in 4 months!

This makes me think I should be more focused on the little things.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Yay! Productivity!

So, it would seem that in order to have a day of "getting sh*t done", I need to take a day off work.

I stayed at my parents' last night to dog sit, so today I am taking care of some things that are easier to do from their house as well as a few things at home!

1: Wash my car.

Didn't take any before pictures of this because it was gross...and I didn't think of it.
Yesterday my big sister told me that when she saw my car outside, she was tempted to write "wash me" on it. While my car was dirty, it didn't exactly have the layer of grossness required to legibly write "wash me", unless you somehow managed to write in the dog saliva on the inside of the back windows.
I scrubbed (and even Windexed parts of) my car to near perfect cleanliness. The paint needs some touch ups and wax, but those are not in the cards anytime soon. Well, maybe the wax.

I hoped to get back outside and vacuum out all the dog hair in the back seat, but since it got pretty hot today and I didn't want to stay at my parents well into the evening, this will have to wait until another day.

2: Paint my grandma's old mirror

I don't remember how long ago, my grandma gave me this awesome old mirror to put up in my bedroom. It's gold and doesn't really go with anything, but I like to have a kind of funky design aesthetic, so I put it up.
Almost 2 years ago, I officially moved out of my parent's house, so it was time to get pretty much everything out of there. I didn't have a place for the mirror at the time, so it stayed (I still have a lot of stuff in my old closet still too).
Last October, Tim and I bought our own place and we've been in a pretty constant state of mild renovation ever since. The living room was the biggest project since it took over a month and forced us to use the dining room for all things "living". 
It's still a work in progress, but we're onto minor details now, like the mirror. ;)
We were talking about putting a mirror up on the wall facing the front doors, and maybe adding some hooks to the wall there in case we needed to hang something. After a few trips to Target, Home Goods and Tuesday Morning with no luck, my mom proposed that we use the old gold mirror from my room and just paint it white.
She gave us the idea probably about a month ago, and today around 11am, I finally go to it.
Taping newspaper down to protect the glass was a paint in the arse. It's harder than taping for regular painting, because how are you gonna go back in with spray paint and touch it up? So I spent a good half hour to 45 mins just taping the damn thing.
After that, it was pretty smooth sailing. I discovered that you should give detailed pieces a good once-over for large chunks of fuzz and dust before you start painting, but that took about 10 minutes to remedy and I was back on track. Then over the next hour, I'd go back out and do another coat or some touch ups here and there, and then (like magic) it was done.
After I took off the newspaper, I noticed that I hadn't done a perfect job projecting the glass from the spray paint, so I had to go in with an exacto knife and carefully scrape the white off the mirror.
And then I packed it in the car and took it home to hang. :)

Taping down the newspaper.
 
Panda helped
First coat of paint
White paint on the mirror :(
Happily in place
3: Put up the tie-back knobs

A couple weeks ago, I found these cute butterfly knobs for $2.99 each at Anthropologie. I've been meaning to put them up this whole time, but we didn't have the right screws and we didn't have tie-backs yet anyway.
Last weekend we finally got around to picking up some tie-backs and the right screws, so I decided now was the time to get these things up! It took a whole 15 minutes to do all three of them...and they're all the same, so you don't need the whole process.
Here are some pictures:


And - because I realized I'd forgotten most of what happened in the seventh installment of Harry Potter as I walked in to the movie theatre for 7; part 1, I also read a handful of pages from HP7 while laying out by the pool. It was lovely.

Happy Weekend!

Monday, May 2, 2011

Official Photographer Blog


Our photographers posted images from our engagement shoot on their blog this weekend. You can click here to see the rest of their post. :)

Sunday, May 1, 2011

No Progress Photos = Sadface

Before we moved, Tim and I ordered P90X and decided that we would start as soon as we were settled into our new place.
The first night we stayed here was Halloween night - and after a few weeks of making this place livable, Thanksgiving (and Thanksgiving food) was here. We started our workout plan anyway, did the P90X system for 2 weeks...and then went pretty much back to our normal lives.
The holidays were upon us and we didn't have any real schedule to work with. There was a lot of shopping, a lot of eating, a lot of fixing the house, and a lot of being "too tired" to do anything else.

We talked about working out a lot, but hardly ever got off our butts to do it. Finally, March rolled around and, with two weeks ahead of us with which to get in shape for engagement pictures, I felt the fire light under my ass.  Tim got a gym membership, and since the dog was home by herself most of the day, I decided to resume P90X.
In a mere moment, I made decision to not take progress photos - a decision that now, approximately 60 days later, I am regretting. (I didn't take them when we started working out in December either)

After 60 days of working out a minimum of 1 hour 5 days a week, some days I feel massively different/better and some days I question if I've really made any progress as all. I really believe that if I could look and see exactly where I was in terms of fitness 60 days ago, I'd feel differently, but because I didn't feel like taking pictures all those weeks ago, I can't. And that's all there is too it.

Friday was one of my bad days. I looked in the mirror and wondered why I even bother to continue working out if I'm not making any progress. It's very discouraging.

The truth is that I have made a ton of progress. Every time I look at my arms and can see how different they are. Every time I grab my legs to stretch, I am surprised at how toned they are. Even my butt is different.
The discouraging part comes from this: I still wear the same size clothes. The pants that were tight when I started in March are still tight...because I'm not losing weight. I'm gaining muscle tone (I think)...and I'm getting the impression it's a lot harder to see results around the midsection, because my core is sooo much stronger, and looks a little different, but it's not nearly the difference I'm seeing in my arms and legs.

That's all for now.