yummy and healthy? Inconceivable!

Yesterday was the healthiest day I've had in a long time. I am sore and hungry today, but all for good reasons.

I ate breakfast, which I never do. 
Ok, I drank a yogurt drink and ate a tangerine - but that counts!

I had a salad for lunch even if it was from a food truck
Cast Iron has salads! Who knew? I might have to opt for the Notorious P.I.G. next time (3 kinds of pork on a burger), but the jerk chicken salad was damn good.

I took TWO exercise classes
O2 is the new ESAC I guess? A few ladies I work with go, and they offer a number of classes along with their regular gym equipment. I need someone telling me what to do so I tried out a barre class followed by body pump. Barre is like a yoga/ballet/aerobic combo, and body pump is lunges/squats/push ups/all the other fun stuff... with weights. It was HARD, but GOOD. Today I am sore all over, but it's a good sore. I'd really like to be healthier, so I'll consider this a step in the right direction.

I cooked a gluten free and vegan dinner that was delicious. 
I found this recipe in a magazine and wanted to try it out and it was a total success! All the separate parts seemed super strange to me as I was putting it together, but man oh man - this recipe is a keeper. Martha Stewart wins again, and this one is getting added to the recipe book.

You can find the recipe here: Quinoa Bowl with Tahini Dressing

I used a whole cucumber and a whole avocado, and it was enough for two big dinner portions and two small lunch portions.


Now I just need to keep this healthy train going...

projects Projects PROJECTS

Sunday funday! My version of fun this weekend is doing stuff that I've been putting off for days, weeks, and embarrasing-to-admit even months. Am I going to get it all done today? Hell no. My goal is to assess where I am, what remains left to go done, and either table that sucker or take the bull by the horns. One problem is actually fitting this stuff in between everyday life things, and the other problem is.. me :)

House Projects

There are too many to list ranging from HUGE to tiny. I'm trying to remind myself to write them down when i think of them and dissect them later. 

Front Yard

We painted the front door, and with some major help from our parents, we cleaned up the yard, planted some flowers, and added some curb appeal. The plan is to keep our plants alive and growing, and replace the pine straw with mulch. Also need to seal the wood on the front porch, and I am chomping at the bit for patio furniture but haven't found the right set that meets our wants and our budget.

Back Yard

Unlike the front, the backyard is our pups domain. The last quarter of it was full of brush and bush-like greenery, but when our fence got installed, it lost all resemblance to an intentional gardening choice and looked like weeds. Again, thanks to some major help from parents we cleaned everything out to a blank slate. Unfortunately, weeds are persistent buggers and have found their way back. So this time, we need to clean it out again, lay grass seed, and protect it with pine-straw. Also want take up the sod and pour gravel by our A/C unit and grill and figure our storage for our yard tools. Long-term we want to think about a shed, staining or sealing our fence, and a paved patio area or a path to the driveway, but for right now we have bigger and less expensive fish to fry.

Office Nook

This one is in progress. I love having our desk and computer in our living space. Eventually, yes, we want an office, but for our lifestyle right now its so much better than a eat-in kitchen. Plus, we have the island and barstools for that! The big to-do for this area was figuring out storage. We decided on a low-profile leaning bookshelf we could put storage boxes and the printer on, and opted for white so it matched the nearby kitchen, and could easily get moved somewhere later if we change our minds. Now we wait till it arrives...

Artwork

Uggghhhh... I hate admitting to this one. Without restraint my house would look like a gallery wall everywhere - art and pictures hanging on every foot of every wall. i'm slowly learning the art of restraint. One problem is, we've accumulated such an eclectic collection that nothing really goes together. I'm not aiming for matchy-matchy, but putting our robots painted on wood next to our arabic calligraphy is just weird. I am dying to get art on our walls, but am struggling where to put things, so this one will probably always be a work in progress, and I'm constantly on the prowl for frames, prints, and art I like. 

Art-sy Projects
Some of the ideas that come to light.

Wedding Album
Brad and I got married in January 2015, and I have yet to make a wedding album. Our wedding was beautiful! It deserves an album. I wanted something I could add in our invites and other odds-and-ends I saved from our wedding, so I opted for more of a scrap-book style photo album (KINSHO Photo Journal). For the most part its just going to contain pictures, but I wanted the freedom to add more if I wanted. I also opted to print our photos before I narrowed them down as I thought it would be fun to go through them in person and relive everything again. Now I am stuck with the daunting task of picking ~200 photos out of ~2000 photos, and am slightly regretting my decision. There are piles of photos EVERYWHERE. I'm in the sorting phase.

Recipe Book
I like to cook, but unlike my talented husband, I need a cookbook, ingredients, and a plan to make something worth eating. Without those, you are pretty much guaranteed a meal of spaghetti and roasted brussels sprouts (even though in my defense, its damn good!). The idea of this was to collect recipes I've tried, made successfully, and liked, so that when it comes to grocery-buying-time, I have a book of stuff we like, and can easily flip through and create a list of stuff I need to get. Relatively easy - yes. Unfortunately I got this idea in my head that I wanted to hand-write every recipe and of course, make the whole thing pretty. My plan is to table 'pretty' for now and focus on just collecting winner recipes. I can always go back later as of right now, I have clear paper protectors I'm just showing recipes into.

The Blog
Puh-lease. I'll just say its not being updated as much as I'd planned.

Perpetual Calendar
I wanted to end on a good note, so here is a project I actually finished! I'm a bit of a calendar junky. I have about four I maintain regularly digitally, two of which also get written down in a planner along with my constant to-do list (I'm dipping my toes into bullet journaling). If 6 calendars wasn't enough, I missed having a visual at home of trips, events, etc. - so I made one! We wipe it clean every month, and my sweet husband got me chalk markers which work a infinitely better than the original plan of dry-erase. I still want to paint the matting blue or find a smaller frame (again, think pretty), but for the most part, I'm filing this under 'Done'.

a-door-able

I've been wanting a bright front door ever since we got into the whole buying-a-house thing. I coveted the bright doors around the neighborhood and online, and talked about it enough to spurn a colorful door gift for our anniversary. Kind of like the gallery wall the ratio of talking about it to actually doing it was absurd. Brad gets to hear all my hair-brained plans over and over and over again. Good man.

The hardest part was picking a color.

The process started in early February, when we made a few stops by Home Depot and Lowe's to pick up other house-related stuff and ended up picking up paint swatches. Other than 'bright' and 'bold' we pretty much liked every possible color.

I'm a sucker for orange, but in South Carolina it's a hard color to disassociate with Clemson. We liked yellow, but it was hard finding a color we both liked that didn't remind Brad of baby poop. We ending up grabbing a whole bunch of reds, greens, teals, and blues and headed home.

Stage 1 was simply covering our fridge in swatches. Seeing the colors side by side and day after day really helped us decide what colors were keepers. Every day or two one of us would veto a color and take it down, until we were left with a reasonable amount to tape on the front door.

Stage 2 was looking at the colors on the door during different times of the day. Even though we liked a single color on a swatch the best, we decided to put the whole range up there just to get an idea of what a wee light or a wee darker would look like, and it helped! Some of the colors we thought were front-runners ended up being too dark or even too bright one we imagined the entire door with it.

Brad's Buckeye roots shouted scarlet, and I was loving the middle teal, but we both loved the green and ended up grabbing that swatch and going to grab paint. the green on the left was the one we liked the best (Exquisite Emerald), but after the door test, we thought it was too dark. However, we weren't entirely sold on the one of the right either (Shamrock Green).

Stage 3 ended up being buying a paint color we hadn't vetted. Oh well. We ended up going with Sherwin Williams's Kilkenny Green, which seemed to be a good in-between option. It was a beautiful weekend and we'd waited long enough so we went ahead and bought a can rather than go through the the whole swatch rig-a-ma-roo again.

Then we prepped. We decided to keep the door on the hinges mostly because it was easier, and decided to leave the frame around the window white, reasoning that we could always paint it green later, but it would be harder to take the green off.

Stage 4: Tape, newspaper, mimosa, cute helpers, repeat.

Stage 5: PAINT! Minor heart attack and major doubt with the first coat. It was streaky. It was green. It was bright.

Thankfully, coats 2 and 3 made a major dent in the streaks, and I was in love. We pealed off the paint, and posed for action shots.

Exhibit A: Brad opening the door. 

Then we dressed that baby up! Brad put the hardware back on and after a day of drying, we got to see it against our white house.  My next quick obsession was getting a wreath, and I found a few selection on Etsy, which I got through twigs4u. I loved her selection of natural wreaths and great prices.

So without further ado...

TA-DA! What do you think??

Anniversary Numero Uno

Brad and I have been married for ONE WHOLE YEAR! Well, a year and 20 days now.

We met up downtown celebrating the new year in the wee hours of January 1st, 2010, and Brad swept my hair out of my eyes for the very first time. I was smitten, eloquently telling him, "I'm a mess." 

Brad replied, "I'm a mess, too" and it was pretty much perfect. We went on our first date 2 days later.

We got married on January 17, 2015 in the Dominican Republic, and last month we celebrated our first anniversary. We had talked about a low-key weekend in a cabin somewhere with just us and the pups, but after looking around we decided to just have a stay-cation in the new house. The general theme was enjoy each other, enjoy our home, enjoy our pups, and of course, spoil ourselves rotten. 

In brief: we succeeded! We picked our favorite foods and spent the weekend doing everything we love.

We got each other 'paper' themed gifts - 

For Brad, a watercolor map of Charleston (I want to get a Park Circle one down the road)' in a funky frame and another photo/quote combination with a line from one of Brad's favorite songs (that he said at our wedding).

For me, Brad got cards with painted doors (we've been trying to decide on a color for ours) which are a-door-able (see what he did there?) and a with clever twist on 'paper', a shredder I've had my eyes on!

Always remember there was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name

 - Avett Brothers

On Sunday evening for our actual anniversary night we headed over to the Obstinate Daughter on Sullivan's Island and had an amazing dinner - we'll be going back. The oysters, beets, octopus, gnocchi, tagliatelle, bread pudding were are amazing, but man, I think the farro/roasted brussel sprout combination was our favorite. Overall, an amazing weekend and everything we had hoped for. 

Happy anniversary my love, and cheers to many more years, and for better or worse, many more cheesy photos.

3 months later...

...and we are in our house! It has been a WHIRLWIND, and I told myself plenty of times, "I should really get back to this blogging thing I wanted to try..." but somehow never got around to actually doing it. Well, now I'm back! And a lot of happened in the meantime.

Closing was thankfully uneventful. It rained cats and dogs the week leading up to the closing, so the exterior of the house was behind. The crew was still doing punch-out stuff during our final walk through, and even after we officially signed the paperwork, but our builder was really responsive and had workers out non-stop until everything was done. Whew! We closed on a Friday, and moved in the very next day - we were ready to get out of our rental as soon as possible. 

Us in front of the new house! You'll notice a few exterior items missing paint, and a cleaning lady walking out the front door... maybe we should have timed it better?

After the move in. Stuff. EVERYWHERE. 

The countdown begins: 4 Days to Close

We close in four days.

FOUR DAYS.

Blows my mind. Our builder and his crew is knocking is out out though, everytime we go by the house there is something new, big or small, and all is amazing to us. It makes me a wee nervous on much needs to be done before we are good to go and ready to move in status, but our builder is confident which helps dramatically. 

Bathroom vanities and tops are in. Our builder accidentally ordered the same white cabinets we had in our kitchen, but caught the mistake and switched it to the dark brown like we wanted. I'm really glad we went for a contrast, and love the way it looks.

The upstairs bedrooms are all painted "Sea Salt" by Sherwin Williams. It's a soft greenish gray that changes a lot with the light, but is still neutral enough to match everything we have. 

The downstairs and hall are painted "Light French Gray" by Sherwin Williams. We compared all the grays our builder offered and opted for this one. I was nervous that we had made the wrong choice at some points, but now getting to see it on the walls I absolutely love it. It's neutral enough to match our eclectic collection of art and furniture, rich enough to make the trim look amazing (if I do say so myself),  but not too dark to make the room cavernous. Woo hoo!

One thing that took us by surprise was the sheer size of the island. It was framed out before, but has a huge overhang that you can see here, and is truly massive and amazing. I can't wait to cook on this sucker. 

Brad showed me a picture he took of a test stain of our floors and I swooned, and subsequently asked to ogle it multiple times throughout the day. Like the paint, at times I doubted our wood stain, but man alive, seeing it in person made all the difference. 

The downside of wood staining? You can't walk on the floors. I'm pretty impatient, and have a terrible insistent desire to touch wet paint/caulk/stain, so the tape X was definitely necessary. Smart builders. 

The upside of wood staining? It's freaking GORGEOUS. Can you hug floors? I want to try. The floors have been drying (and un-walked upon) all weekend, so I can't wait to trample them and run all over the house this afternoon. It's been a few a days!

So what's left?

• Toilets installed
• Downstairs pedestal sink
• All plumbing fixtures
• Mirrors in bathrooms
• Grout around the tub
• Front shutters 
• Water treated porch
• Painted porch
• Painted crawl space/foundation
• Finish concrete on driveway and back landing
• Sod & landscaping
• Kitchen appliances
• Kitchen backsplash 
• Wire racks in closets and pantry
• Carpet installed
• Quarter inch rounds installed on the floors

Look at all my [stuff]

The post title comes from the movie Spring Breakers, it's terrible, but I still want to quote it... a lot.

We have hardwood floors!

They have installed cabinets!

We have a tin roof above the porch!

They finished the cabinets!

We have a built in bar! (they must know us well)

We have most of a driveway!

We have TILE!

Clockwise from top left: master shower, guest shower downstairs, guest shower upstairs, master floor, guest floor. 

Because I love it so much - we have another view of the master bathroom!

We have fixtures and a ridiculously huge air conditioner!

We have a porch!

And we are so freaking close to having a house. FIVE DAYS TO CLOSE. 

Keep your fingers crossed for us, please.

Side Note about Spring Breakers: I don't recommend the movie, at least not because its a good movie, but I have told people to watch it because it is so ridiculous it is entertaining. You can blame me later. This particular quote? James Franco. Cornrows. Grill. Dark tanning oil. 

Go Dawgs!

Disclaimer: I am a horrible football fan. Horrible. But a fan nonetheless. 

Our friends Mitchell and Rebecca had an extra ticket to Georgia vs. Mizzou, and through some magic ended up with 2 extra tickets and asked us to join them!

Brad and I have been trying to play it very low key with the whole buying-a-house thing, trying to save money in anticipation of the many, many expenses to come, but this was one we couldn't turn down. Brad said that when he told me about us possibly going my face lit up with excitement - sign of a good time!

The only college football game I have ever been to was a UVA game where I had been in the states for 3 months and barely understood football. Granted, I still don't understand everything, but I at least understand what a first down is now - progress! Living in Georgia for years turned me into a Georgia fan, and marrying a Buckeye turned me into a Ohio State fan, but I think I can cheer for both since they are in different conferences. Right? Maybe? I like to think so.

Anyway, we drove up to Athens, GA Friday night for the Saturday game. Athens is an amazing college town and I've had an insane amount of fun every time I've come. Fun-enough-to-hurt-the-next-day-fun. I blame Sam for the most part :)

Us at the tailgate.

The game was at 8:30 at night and Mitchell was determined to start tailgating at 9 in the morning, but we managed to talk him into pushing it back a couple hours. None of us thought we'd make the game with a 12 hour tailgate beforehand!

The spot was stellar. A friend of theirs works for a restaurant opening soon in Athens, tans the location has a back yard area with picnic tables, electricity, and real bathrooms. REAL BATHROOMS. Also, it's hard to see, and I wish I'd taken a better picture, but over on the left is the old Georgia scoreboard, which was a fitting setting for the tailgate. 

I think we ate fried chicken all weekend long. No joke: chicken biscuits for breakfast, chicken tenders for lunch, and late night chicken for dinner. Georgia fans love them some chicken. Not complaining, it was delicious, but it was a lot of chicken.

The whole group! A few folks from college, and people Mitchell grew up with. All good people. 

Mind. Blown. We made the game (victory!) and I think I had a big ole shit-eating grin on my face the entire time. The crowd, the excitement, the huge red and black stadium, just about everything made me smile. For someone who can barely call herself a football fan I was blown away and enthralled. 

Photo op! Thanks to this lovely man who made this weekend possible. Thank you, you handsome devil.

Oh yeah! To cap it all off, Georgia won!!!!

Go Dawgs!

Frothy Beard

Beer Fridays continue!

As I mentioned before, our friend TJ is really the inspiration behind us hitting up a local brewery every Friday. He lives in Chicago but has family down here and visits fairly frequently. We've been saving Frothy Beard for when he came back next, and it was worth the wait. 

The location is a little bit of a pain to get to, especially since we went right after work. Its in North Charleston up on Ashley Phosphate, so we battled traffic, stopped trains, and bad drivers to get there, but thankfully were ready for a cold brew once we arrived. 

TJ, Brad, and I saying CHEERS!

They had five while we were there: Andale (Pale Ale w/ jalapeno), Cucumber Thyme (American Wheat), Hip Cannon (Double IPA), Great White Wit (Wit), and Smokey the Ambear (Amber). 

I'm a sucker for a herb-y bear so the Wit and the Cucumber Thyme was perfect for a hot day, but we bought a bottle of the Hip Cannon to take home because it was YUMMY.

TJ was headed downtown for night 2/3 of Umphrey's McGee (he's a HUGE fan) so we meandered downtown to Revelry for round 2. We love the environment at Revelry, and we were really impressed with their food too, but Frothy Beard's beer definitely won out. 

So, cheers! What are you drinking?

Mac Off

We bought tickets to the Mac and Cheese festival this year. Yes, my dreams have come true, and there is entire festival dedicated to macaroni and cheese. Plus they have beer? Plus the weather is gorgeous? Plus my handsome husband is my date? I was a happy Happy HAPPY camper.

And then we got there. Whomp whomp.

Ok, I can't be too much of a debbie downer, but as good as Charleston is about throwing amazing food events, they are not so good at organizing them. There was about 10 different lines to get into the event, all with different purposes, and no signage. All the lines spilled into the street, with shuttles trying to get past, people yelling, and inevitably cutting in line. Our only saving grace was that we had printed out tickets beforehand so once we found the right line (third try!) we were ushered to the front and let in. 

Another line for over-21 bracelets, another line for food & beverage tickets, another line for a much needed cold beer, and we finally made it to the first mac and cheese line. And only 45 minutes later we had our first taste! It was a bitter 45 minutes for us, but not gonna lie, we were in the Crave line, and it was GOOD and thankfully worth the wait. Perfectly al dente spiral paste, in a cheesy delicious sauce, topped with Parmesan, for $1. We got three. 

I'm very torn about this event in general. The weather was perfect, the offerings were great, and the mac and cheese was oh-so-delicious, but the lines made everything painful. 

Here is a general shot of the crowd.

We were able to try 3 different mac and cheese samples, which were all delicious and hard to beat at $1 each, but we definitely spent the majority of our time just waiting in line. Granted, the silver lining is that people are pretty amazing. We struck up a number of conversations, met a few Buckeye fans, and Brad even got pulled aside for a cheers to the Buckeys. Man, I love this city. 

I did fall head over heels over a local vendor who makes Charleston prints, so I bought a few cards and a 8x10 Charleston print of the Ravenel bridge that I have big plans for in the house once we move in... Hooray!