This is the first year in a while most schools in Maryland are starting AFTER labor day, which, seems really shocking to me! Happy First Day of school for many of you and your littles! Hope it was grand (for you both)!
My niece begins her first day of FOURTH grade today. Fourth. How did this happen? When did this happen?! This kid is so smart and talented, I can’t wait to see what she does this year!
I had been contemplating asking my sister if she or my niece wanted a “First Day” sign when she asked me to do one (we tend to share the same brain sometimes). A chance to break out my years-old chalkboard paint? YES. Done. Let’s do it!
I knew there were a couple things I had to incorporate, like the color green which is Zoe’s favorite color. I added some curly brackets for some flair (one of my favorite things), but kept it rather simple and my sister gave me the freedom to sketch and try some different things out. This morning as I was driving into work I got a cute text message from my sister: my niece proudly holding her sign, ready to take fourth grade by storm. (So much so that she dragged my sister out of the house 15 minutes early!)
Good lord, how long has it been? Three years? Really? Yikes.
The world has changed a lot in three years, hasn’t it? My world is certainly different. I moved (again). I am a proud cat mom to two of the craziest furballs to ever walk this earth and are currently watching me type this. I got a new position at work. I got a new car and am so in love with it. I’ve dated a bit… and now am single lady. I became an aunt again and again. I’ve met some amazing new people. I started and am coming to a close on a Masters of Public Health degree. I bought a BIG girl couch after my “starter” couch died a very slow death. And a headboard, because nothing says “single girl living her best life” like a shimmery and very classy headboard.
And the crafting? Yeah, it’s still happening. At a much lower scale, but it’s happening and making a comeback.
So I don’t know if it’s just the introvert in me, the fact that I’m talking to people 10+ hours a day or that I haven’t had it in forever, but I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying my “alone time.” And before we go any further, please get your head out of the gutter because I’m referring to my quiet, humble abode.
Because Saturday’s are now for homemade breakfast and “New Girl” marathons.
Working in a hospital and having over half of my job include calling people, I am absolutely people-drained by the time I set foot onto the metro home. By the time I hit the threshold of my apartment, the shoes come off, I jump into some comfy clothes and I take a deep breath… because entering that door is entering serenity and I embrace that quiet like no other.
Also, given that Washington D.C. is a big swampland, it holds that humidity like crazy and I usually spend the first five minutes hanging out by the air conditioning; trying to cool-down after hanging out on a train with a bunch of strangers and no air conditioning what-so-ever. It’s a glorious smell if you know what I’m talking about and by glorious I mean horrendous. But again, I’m not complaining because my commuting time has been cut by two-thirds, it’s just a mere–and accurate–observation.
I haven’t gotten used to the extra time either: What do I do with myself? Do I do laundry? Do I work out? Do I do some unpacking? Or maybe just sit here and watch 10 episodes of “New Girl” because I can and no one can tell me not to? It’s a complicated game in the evenings.
The mornings have been amazing though. I’m still in shock and awe of having time to COOK breakfast in the morning and sit with a cup of coffee, or in the case of hot, summer days, a nice glass of ice-cold energy juice. I’ve even had time to curl my hair. I don’t even know you guys, it’s crazy.
Decorating was quick in the beginning and has since slowed. I’ve been sketching out what I want to do and then come back and go “Eh, no.” It’s rough. Instead of thinking so much about it, I’ve just been going for it: today I put up a bulletin board in my kitchen along with a housewarming gift from my brother and his girlfriend… because wine is everything and no one can tell me any different.
I love my new calendar printables that I found from Love vs Design (the jewel 2014 calendar) and my monthly calendar from Elli. Definitely check them out! Love vs Design has so many other templates for the year-long calendar, but this one just called out to me and the month design reminded me of my current blog layout. I knew I had to have it!
Despite my uncertainty with the decor, I do have some wall art ideas for the horizon and I can’t wait to share those with you!
If you can remember back a year, I pondered the conversation I would’ve had with my younger self in the essence of turning a quarter of a century. A month ago I turned the big 2-6.
My painting throne; seemed fitting, no? #superwholocked
Last year’s birthday was really hard for me for a number of reasons I’ve already discussed. But I have heard from numerous people that they too had a hard time turning 25. It’s kind of that “defining” moment of your young adult life: the one where you are out of college, trying to figure out what you’re doing with your life and trying not to break down in the process.
25 was an interesting year for me, but overall, it was pretty damn fantastic. I can gladly count the bad times on one hand and that’s pretty much it. But it takes many more hands to count my blessings and great things that happened to me. To name a few: I did my first 5k, sewed a full cosplay gown, made and solidified some great friends, got to go to the Pentagon for a work event, really came into my own and built my confidence 10 fold, started to make future plans, took and trumped the GRE, lost 50 lbs, embraced my nerdiness, got to watch one of my great friends marry the love of her life and got to see my favorite childhood boy band in concert… I mean honestly, it was bloody brilliant.
Wino heaven.
I started 26 with the only way I know how: getting crafty! If you’ve been following me (lack of posts and all) you know how hard it has been for me recently to find time to breathe, let alone let out my crafty side. It’s definitely something I feel I’m missing in my life right now and my sister came along in the nick of time to save the day! She got us reservations to a “Sip and Paint” in our hometown!
I’ve been dying to do one if these! I have my own canvases that I’ve gotten to do little with as of late (except for this Mother’s Day gift) and was excited to get creative! It was actually the head honchos in my work life that told me I need to follow along and document the progress as we progressed in our bottle of wine… so let’s see how we progressed!
Step in painting: 1
Wine consumed: ~2 sips
Drawing the basics: hill and sun (although, I like to think of mine more as a moon, you’ll see why later). Then we had to do a quick white base around the moon and sky.
Step in painting: 2
Wine consumed: ~half a glass
My sky was less swirly than most people’s…
Michelle’s turned out really cool… here she is mid-painting!
Step in painting: 3 & 4
Wine consumed: Full glass
My painting is already feeling the alcohol, clearly. Step 3 involved painting over the moon and then doing the hills, complete with shading. That was a little more difficult thanks to the wine. 😉 I had to break out a protein bar after realizing I hadn’t really eaten anything!
Step in painting: 5
Wine consumed: Working on my second glass
Probably not the best idea to try and do such intricate work after drinking, but luckily they had a template for this one. I started with the template and realized it was not working so well, so I just eye-balled it and hoped for the best… and then kicked back another glass in my “Heather don’t care” attitude. 😉
Step in painting: 6 & 7
Wine consumed: Finishing the bottle
So to close out our whimsical paintings, we added some swirls and dots (which I liked to think were fairies – or maybe that’s just me watching so much “Once Upon a Time”).
And so completed our paintings 🙂
Michelle and I with our finished products!
The top was what the painting was supposed to look like; the bottom was mine with an unexpected second piece of plate art. 😛
This was one of the neatest things to do! We had such a blast creating our masterpieces and seeing how everyone’s paintings differed in the end.
I highly recommend this activity for girls night or even date night! We saw a few couples who had fun creating some masterpieces.
Have you done a “Sip and Paint” sort of night? What kind of painting did you do?
So. Last week I forced myself to the gym after work. This has been the hardest thing for me to master with moving offices, so much so that I eventually cancelled my membership. Unfortunately for me, I cancelled too late and had to take January as my last month and pay for the month-to-month dues… stupid, but that’s the life of a gym goer. But it’s been way too difficult to arrange driving an extra hour a day (already on top of about 4 hours total of commuting daily) to the gym which should only take about 20 minutes to get to from my office. I know I should. I know it’s important to do. But it’s just not happening right now. Before it was on my way home/to work… now it’s completely out-of-the-way and is making me quite sad, because I really did enjoy it.
Another unfortunate aspect is that it’s JANUARY. Welcome to the month of every resolutioner in all of creation who will eventually drop out after the first two months but are super motivated for a few weeks and spend most of their gym visit taking hours on machines because they’re still not sure how to work them… I can say this because I was, in fact, one of them last year. (Reminder: I was insanely cliché and signed up for my membership at 6:00 pm on December 31st, 2012. Yeah. That was me.) Needless to say, I’ve been trying to avoid the gym like the plague.
Well, in attempt to get back on track and beat out this holiday weight gain, I went. I kept my gym bag sitting out at work as a reminder to myself that I was going to go. I had to go. And if I didn’t, I knew the guilt of not following through would keep me up all night. Well, something else decided to keep me up all night…
It started out like any other normal gym trip: Stop by the ladies room, fill up my water bottle, grab some towels and head downstairs to the cardio floor. I was doing pretty good: good stretching and hydration left me feeling loose and ready, I was going at a decent pace, had my music up as high as it could go without disturbing those around me-when out of the corner of my eye I noticed people running around behind me. I glanced to see panicked faces and people running up and down the stair case, employees bolting down as fast as they could. Naturally I stopped to see what all the fuss was when I noticed the gentleman behind me getting CPR after going into cardiac arrest.
Knowing there was really nothing I could do now that everyone had already jumped to help out (calling 911 was covered, medics called, employees notified and defibrillator gained) I froze. Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened and honestly the first time (only about three years ago) sparked my reboot for wanting to lose weight again. But this time seemed different. We were all in a place where this wasn’t expected, where people were going to get healthy. And I know he was doing well with it, I had seen him before and knew a bit of his story. Maybe that’s what it was too, maybe the fact I at least knew who he was shook me a little bit more.
Eventually they closed down the floor and sent us all upstairs. We all were a bit shaken and you could tell who had been downstairs versus the ones that had already been working hard upstairs: we all had that ashen “what the hell just happened?” face.
It’s insanely sad that these situations are the ones that have to smack sense back into me. I made a doctor’s appointment the next day and check ups for three others. I panicked in my own health status: on my way but still not good enough. Still not at that point where I don’t worry at every turn and question my every move. It’s neurotic, I know, but I want to live a long and healthy life. I want to get married and have children. The children thing didn’t really spark a whole lot of concern until my trainer brought up that those who are overweight have a much harder time conceiving. Crap.
But I don’t want to scare people into thinking that it’s a lost cause; that even by getting healthy you could still find yourself in a situation like this and that exercising doesn’t help. Because that’s not my point. My point is that if anything has kicked me into high-gear it’s this experience. Oh, also and to get re-certified for CPR. Because I felt utterly helpless that I couldn’t help, thank goodness there were folks there that knew CPR and could start before the medics arrived. That’s something my bosses nodded in complete agreement with when I told them about it the next day.
So. I’d like to start sharing with you a few of my favorite healthy habits periodically. I’m hoping through sharing these, I’ll keep myself a bit more accountable and give some of you some new workouts, recipes, etc that you can do to spruce up your life routine! These workouts are also great to use when you’re not able to get to a gym and for days like this when it is just far too cold (and snowy) to do anything outside.
The first is a workout by Tracy Anderson that I found online a few years ago from the Fitlbr community on Tumblr. I can’t remember exactly which blogger I found it from (I think it was from Liz of onetwentyfive or Johanna at myquirkylife), but I found it to be a fantastic five-minute workout for my arms! No weights, just your own resistance! For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tracy Anderson, she is the personal trainer to a lot of celebrities, most notably for Gwyneth Paltrow. She is big with using your own body to get strong and lose weight and working multiple muscle groups at once to give you the best results in a short amount of time.
So enjoy and let me know how you liked it! If if nothing else, check out the two bloggers above! I’ve been following them since my first go at this game! Very big inspirations!
You can follow my fitness journey through my Instagram: heyheyheatherk!
In conjunction with my last blog post, I’d like to get back on board with blogging. I feel like I can zen when I can express my life through this little piece of heaven. And I promise, craftiness will be returning! I have a few things I’d like to accomplish in the near future and with all of these snow days, I might just be able to do so!
So sending many hugs to all of you out there and make sure you pass them on! Because you never know… you just never know.
No, I am not dead. No, I have not been sent into the Witness Protection Program and thus why I have not posted in a while…
Life has become more of a roller coaster in the past six months, more so than I ever imagined. I unfortunately have not had any time to do much of anything besides sleep; even my workouts have suffered. They’ve changed my position at work a bit and it’s kept be busy beyond belief. Not only that, we’ve changed offices and now I’m commuting an extra hour a day. And in order to get a parking spot, I have to leave at the crack of dawn.
On top of all this, we’ve had a few family health issues in the past few months that have kept me on my toes more so than usual.
Basically life has changed… a lot and continues to do so. To say I’m exhausted is an understatement. Any chance I can sit and just be is like heaven on earth. But with all of this chaotic change, came parts of my life that had to take a back seat for a while. This blog of mine, unfortunately, was one of them. Crafting was one of them. My etsy shop was another. My social life took another nose dive and I say a huge ‘thank you’ to my friends who have understood my chaos and haven’t disowned me for it! Fortunately for me and unfortunately for them, most are going through similar life situations.
The past few weeks have caused me to do a lot of thinking: where I’m going, what I want to do, etc. Obviously, new years will do that to you. It’s the hot thing: resolutions and all that. But with the changes going on at work and the changes going on at home, I’ve forced myself to take another look at everything and see what changes I need to make in order to feel normal again.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy through all of this. I have to say I’m VERY proud of myself and how I’ve handled all of this change. If you had put last year’s me in this year’s situation, I’m not sure that girl would have made it through. I was in a bad place last year personally; I was surrounded by bad juju and a bad support system and made the decision that 2013 would be the year to change all of that. And I did: I am incredibly calm about everything. Stressed, yes, but calm. And happy. Quite happy. One of those contented happinesses that are quite rare, especially in D.C.
2013, however, was quite a challenge for me because it was a huge year of finding myself. It was kind of the first year in a long time I actually learned/had the chance to be myself, to be me and not let myself get influenced by so many others. That, i’ve discovered, is a bit of a personality flaw of mine… partially blamed on being a Pisces. We tend to do that: to absorb the feelings of others and place that burden on ourself in addition to absorbing others personalities and making them our own… which, if you aren’t careful can be more harm than good. But I’ve done a lot of amazing things this year like losing 50 lbs for instance. Sometimes I forget how big of a feat that is, huge even. I lost a whole elementary schooler! Once upon a time, I lost quite a lot more and I’ve struggled with that this year only because it’s taken me much longer to do so this time than last time. But I’ve had to keep in mind that I had a much different situation last time and just need to continue to adapt. This time I’ve been building a lot more muscle. That I know. That I can tell. And it feels amazing. 🙂 Along with the weight loss, I took on a new position at work, reignited old friendships, made some new ones, challenged myself personally and tried to do something that scared me more often than not, sewed a satin gown, made some decisions on my future including finally taking the GRE’s, among many other things…
This year already is bringing more new and exciting things! I’m in the process of making some major plans for September, of which, I don’t want to jinx until they are final so you’ll just have to wait on those. I’m doing a short product presentation on one of our webinars at work in a few weeks (kind of freaking out about it, but still excited!) and working on a major project at work that will be launching in a few months (again, so excited!). Trying to get back some social aspects of my life and have resolved to do at least one or two outings with friends a month. That probably sounds so lame, but baby steps, y’all, baby steps.
So there we have it and here we go. 2013 was an interesting year, great, but interesting. 2014 is going to be amazing.
I can’t wait.
I hope everyone had a great holiday and a happy new year! May 2014 bring you happiness and joy in whatever you do! And may you all remain healthy!
Yes. I’m alive. Please know I haven’t forgotten about you little bloggy blog of mine! It has been quite some time and in between work-outs, trying to keep up with my shop, working and trying to keep my social life at least a little bit afloat, I’ve spent the remainder of my time asleep. And these hours are very few and far between. So weekends, the free moments I have, oh you better believe I am snug in my bed, blissfully napping.
Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten that days only have 24 hours in them and have had none left over to just sit. I miss sitting. And staring off into oblivion. And it’s my favorite time of year to do so… I need to find time to do that. Outside in a pair of jeans, a warm sweater, a hot cider and my thoughts. Doesn’t that sound glorious?
But I’m glad to get a chance and touch base with my blogging world. I feel like we need to sit down on a cafe terrace, sip lattes and talk about the weather, our families and Bethenny Frankle’s new talk show (God she’s hysterical, I adore her) and Tamra Judge’s wedding (GORGEOUS!).
In the meantime, let me share my biggest feat to date… or at least what feels like it to me.
I sewed a gown.
*pause for reaction*
Yes, I said gown. Remember last year’s Comic Con that I slacked and never put up pictures from like I promised? Yeah, so that happened again. But the shirt wasn’t enough this year, I had to kick it up a notch. So to Cosplay City we went. I did. I cosplayed. I wore a costume. And walked around downtown Baltimore. Like the ridiculously awesome fool I am. That happened. This is real life right here.
*knock, knock, knock* “Heather?”