lately

lately, i've been thinking a lot about the fact that seasonal depression is a real thing. ;) haha. i'm not going to drone on and on, but i think maybe my funk was more than just a funk. but things are looking up, especially since the groundhog saw his shadow. spring is soon! and i'm staying busy, which helps.

i made a quick collage of things that have been happening lately that i don't think i blogged about? or instagrammed (mostly), so i'll share them for posterity's sake.

1. it's been so cold lately that i had to buy a furry hooded puffy coat. dramatic. usually my peacoats get me through just fine, since i layer like crazy, but not for a little bit there. my southern blood, i guess. also can we just talk about the fact that i didn't edit that picture at all and it's really scary? haha, really scary! man.
2. that's our new bathroom floor! it's so pretty. and the tile on the walls is pink. ;) i'm kinda obsessed and i think austin is kinda over my obsession. i take pictures in there like everyday, for no reason.
3. i finally hung the prints we got in nashville at hatch show print in our kitchen. i'm not sure why i never hung them in our old apartment, but it just didn't feel right. i was saving them. what a dork.
4. becca gave me this print for christmas, and i love it. it's such a sweet sentiment. also the frame was hidden under our couch at our old place, so it was unearthed when we moved.. i love it.
5. i caught a pretty awful stomach bug on sunday night, and this was a picture i took when i got to work on monday afternoon.. after 2 spotty hours of sleep. :( rough times. i only just recovered fully like, late last night.. and i can seriously tell how much weight i lost just by getting dressed. ugh. i never get stomach bugs like that, and i know i was a dramatic baby about it. glad i got the sweetest boy and sister to take care of me. :)
6. avery and i had a really good naptime this week. this is one of my favorite pictures ever, guys.

so, now that we're officially moved in and unpacked, i realized that i have a sewing room! for the first time ever. :) if that isn't reason enough to find out what's wrong with my sewing machine, i don't know what is. also, i want to make a quilt from this fabric sooo badly. and i'm really feeling like i COULD. especially since i know austin's mom would be willing to help me. :) so, i'm going to go in there today and look at the machine.. wish me luck!

what are you up to these days? <3

super 70s

since these pictures, i have gotten a haircut.. in case you were wondering.

i found this dress a million years ago at the goodwill, but then it got buried under all of my dirty clothes and i totally forgot about it. actually, i think i found it the same day that i found my boy scouts shirt. ;)

i'm pretty sure i didn't think that my face was in this picture.. but it's kind of hilarious.

then, when we finally washed it and i re-rediscovered it, i realized that it was more of a tunic length than the cute summer dress length i had assumed. which is weird. dresses are neeever too short for me. but this one is. so i just went dramatically 70s with my look, which i liked a lot. i'm not totally sure how else i'll ever be able to style this, but we'll see! i love it. besides the length, it fits perfectly.

this was the first outfit that i wore in 2013. :) on this day, i met up with one of my best friends from college, jeff, and his (new!!!) fiancé (you may remember jeff from my halloween post). i had never met her before, and he's never ever in town anymore, so it was pretty nice to get to have grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee with them. after that, austin and i got to see our new house!! we'll be moving in february and i. can't. wait. i'm already dreaming about moving around furniture and wall art and everything. eep. this year kinda rules already.

necklace: thrifted in high school
cardigan: pacsun
dress: vintage
leggings: ae
socks: ae
boots: frye

how has the first week of 2013 been for you?

christmas is all around us

i don't think i've ever been this excited for thanksgiving and christmas in my entire life. this past weekend, austin and i upgraded our past 2 foot tall christmas tree to a 4.5 foot one and picked up our stockings!! we haven't had any since we moved out of our parents' houses, and decided that this was the year. i have to be honest, i just don't really like christmas decor.. so for me to love some cheap little tj maxx stockings and this baby christmas tree is a huge deal. i think it really shows how into the holidays i am all of a sudden. i've been shopping since september (and actually prematurely gave out some of the presents already..), so i wanted to display some of the christmas presents i've wrapped under the tree, too. we've never been able to do that before!

this thanksgiving, austin and i will be making three stops. we're so lucky that none of our family events have overlapped (yet). i can't wait to see everybody all in one day! i've had my outfit picked out for weeks. ;)

then, after a day of eating and relaxing with three families, i get to work my favorite day of the year: black friday! ae is doing 40% off the entire store (i'm allowed to say since they've already announced it, haha) and i. can't. wait. at all! customers on black friday are always really fun, and i think the horror stories actually only apply to department stores and walmarts. ;)

basically, being excited is a lot of fun. <3

little spots at home that i love

since making the decision to move out of our house in the near future, i've fallen even more in love with it than i ever was. that always seems to be the way that things go, right?

to be honest, decorating this space was never important to me at all. mostly because we lived with someone else, and i wasn't interested in dealing with all of that, but also because i knew we'd be leaving after a year. but lately i've been throwing stuff up for the heck of it, and really getting excited about making it a home. even if it's just temporary.

becca always sends me these really random and gorgeous pieces of art, and whether they're postcard collages, prints of angela chase, drawings of john cusack, or a color palette from a school assignment, i try to give them the respect they deserve. this little guy is perfect on my bedside windowsill. it's usually the first thing i see in the morning. thanks, b!

amanda and i made these bat chandeliers last week and i love when i walk past our record room and it catches my eye. ;) i especially love the little ghosties that i added. i only wish it was easier to photograph!

this is another idea that i stole from heidi kinney (she's my serious blogger crush these days, if you haven't noticed yet), but i wasn't ready for the real flowers and we're pretty sure our neighbor doesn't like us decorating the porch. at the risk of sounding tacky, i kinda wanna leave these little cuties out year-round <3<3.

<3

this cute boy/house situation

austin dressed up for our anniversary dinner, so naturally i made him take a couple of awkward self timer pictures in our super dark house post-dinner. i had to! he looked so handsome.

we're about to move out of this little house, and we don't have many pictures of it or of us from this year, for that matter. earlier this year, when our roommate moved out, i was kinda nervous.. we had been living together, but sam was kind of a nice buffer in case anything got real intense. but really, sam moving out was awesome for the two of us! yeah! we've been able to create a cohesive living together schedule, we've only gotten way closer, and we've learned so much more about each other. and all of that happened here, so this house will always hold an extra special spot in my heart. sometimes i wish we could stay. :(

...but i really just need a puppy. ;)

i'm only a little bummed about my weird tight-lipped smile! i promise i was the happiest girl. :) <3

just a picture of some flowers

today, i came home to some flowers. they were really pretty, and i know they won't last forever.. so i took some pictures. i didn't even have to edit them.

austin and i haven't gotten to spend much quality time together lately, and, for a couple of days, things were a little bit tense. living with someone is a pretty serious thing.. something i'm not sure i realized when we made the leap. relationships are hard enough as it is, and we probably weren't 100% ready. we've really grown into it, though, and i love my roommate/boyfriend/best friend situation. :) i can't stress enough how proud of our relationship i am, and how perfectly we round each other out. this is even more obvious in the not great times than it is in the good.

even if sometimes we get a little mad and confused and hurt, i always know we're gonna get through it alright, and i'm so glad we get to go through this together, good times and bad.

<3

radio silence

source (the first page of huckleberry finn)

this week seemed endless, and even after we got power back, i just didn't have time for the internet!

things i've been up to lately:

i finally saw moonrise kingdom! it was incredible and everything everyone says it is and so of course i immediately started coveting a poster! but, since i probably won't get my hands on one.. this seems like a good substitution. :) also, i favorited like a million of her other posters. i'm always trying to find a classy alternative to austin's movie poster collection, haha.
related: a cup of jo posted this list of wes anderson's best tv commercials this week. i had fun watching them this morning. :)

bekuh made a huge button factory announcement last week! we're SO excited about these necklaces. i have one, and i covet the 7-feathered one. <3

i've been REALLY wanting some more tattoos lately. i'm trying to plan out the rest of mine pretty specifically so i can end up with gorgeous pieces working together, like both of these girls. i sorta want the second girl's finger tattoo right now! so cute. :)

my new job rules. it's a lot harder, a lot more fun, and just an overall better situation than my last. i get two days off like a normal person! everything's just awesome.

austin and i have been talking more and more about a puppy coming into our lives once we move. i'm allergic to kitties, or else we'd have one of those lil guys by now. my dream is really to own a couple of bunnies and a pup, but austin hates bunnies. :( but! a puppy! in our lives! in october! this is big.

i finished a book, the great house, and started another margaret atwood book, oryx and crake. this one is set in the same world as the year of the flood, which i finished a few weeks ago, so i'm excited to be immersed in it again.

i'm excited to catch up on all the blogs i've missed this last week, now that things are calming down. see you guys soon <3

the night the world almost ended

i don't know if you've heard about friday night's storm in virginia (you may have because of this), but it really threw off my life these past 5 days.

on friday night, i was closing the registers at work when the power started flickering. it went out like 7 times before i could get everything wrapped up for the night and we could leave. as we were walking out, we noticed how many people were still in the mall.. sitting in huddles, mostly in hallways. it didn't sound like it was raining, so i asked someone i semi-knew, and they said it was really windy? like.. ok. windy. so the part-time employee that was with me, jordan, and i carried on our merry way to the doors so that we could leave. a security guard had to help me open the door because the wind was pushing so hard (should've been a sign..). come to find out, the security guards weren't supposed to let anyone leave the mall at all that night (until after the storm). but he HELPED us out. :( cool, dude.

it WAS windy, but i have this thing where i'd prefer to be headed home and get hurt than sitting somewhere waiting something out and get hurt. does that make sense? whatever. i got turned around about 8 times trying to get out of the mall area, because so many trees had fallen, and firetrucks had completely blocked intersections. this probably should've deterred me, but i mean.. i wanted to get home. i didn't pass a single traffic light that was still on, i saw torn and bent signs on the interstate (torn metal signs?!?!!??!), i saw a traffic light fall on a car, i saw power lines and trees fall right before i would've been up under them, and there are lil scratches on both sides of my car where i had to come right up next to fallen branches in order to pass through somewhere. i even had to drive in people's yards to get home at one point.

once i got home, there was a dark street, and this:

easily the best goodwill purchase to date.. it's the only reason we had any light!

scaredest, sweatiest, brattiest girl right thurr

we had no idea how long the outage would last or who had power (both of our phones were dead, too). our house was already in the 100s temperature-wise, and i was still shaky about my trip home, so we turned in early.

the next day, i opened at work and found out that the power outage seemed to have hit about half of our town. some people's flickered, others lost power for a couple of hours, and others, like us, were hearing things like 4-6 days until power comes back up. complete and total first world problem, but this is the hottest it's been in virginia for years.. and we live in the upstairs portion of our house. we ended up pulling our roommate's mattress into the tiny downstairs foyer we walk into (it seemed to be about 20 degrees cooler) and hung out down there when it got too dark, which made life more bareable.

we spent a lot of time the past 4 days (mostly 100 degree weather + virginia humidity) on our front porch, reading books day and night:

you guys - the misery is actually not posed. ;)

anyway, i started my new job on monday, unable to shower (hence the bandanna.. that has become a staple, ugh). BUT!!!!

today, austin texted me to let me know that the power had returned. my house feels like pure luxury. like i feel spoiled now. it's awesome. i got home pretty late, and my downstairs neighbor said, "please go inside and feel how heavenly it is." haha! needless to say, we're super appreciative of how quickly the power companies worked.

the only thing i'm still a little bitter about is how much food we're having to throw away and how much money i've spent on cold drinks/warm food this week. but now i know how much worse it could be.

i'm worried this storm is not a one-off happening, and we'll see another this summer. this was a pretty big lesson to me, so i think i'll handle it better, but i hope next time i don't have to drive through it..

<3

redecorating

since our roommate moved out, austin and i are living completely, actually on our own for the first time ever. lately, that's just meant that we're incredibly lazy and leaving our shoes and belongings in rooms that used to be shared with other people.. but i'm hoping to change that.

source

i've never actually been able to pinpoint my own personal interior design style, but something really clicked when i saw rachel's dining room tour. we don't have a dining room (nor do we really have a need for one), but i think i can use inspiration from this throughout my house.

i have some serious plans for the personal photographs and pretty prints from etsy in our room to be spread throughout the house. i'm mostly just excited to start scheming, because we'll probably be leaving this house when our lease runs out in a few months, and i'll get a fresh new start.

1. penmanship pillow/ settle down
2. custom doily blanket/ willow
3. salt and pepper shakers/ anchor
4. shooting target/ jack rabbit
5. coasters/ bear rug
6. custom painted record/ lyrics
7. vegan antlers/ i haven't actually decided on colors!

i've already started a tiny collection of home-goods-i-gotta-have on etsy, and as you can see, my taste is sort of all over the place. but i'm hoping it'll all come together somehow.. eep.

are there any incredible room tours that i need to see? i generally avoided them, so it's like this whole new world has opened up. <3

sweet little things like these

today, i noticed my doc martens sitting next to austin's and i had to take a picture. as cheesy as it sounds, i got little butterflies in my stomach. things like this are like love notes to my sentimental heart.

our living together was accidental and sort of unwanted, but it has become one of the most important aspects of my life. he is truly my very best friend, and i can't imagine getting through any day without getting to share every thought, serious or otherwise, with him.

i have to admit, though, that it resonated when one of my favorite people on twitter wrote that living with her boyfriend had made them too weird to hang out with other people. anyone else know how that feels? ;)

<3