In the bedroom....

Man, today was one of those days. One of those days that can only be rectified by amazing Japanese food and cold beer. On normal days, I come home and sit on the couch and catch up on a couple emails, check Facebook, and start to figure out dinner, laundry, and the next day. Today I just came home, grabbed my MacBook and sat on the bed in our LOVELY bedroom.

See, our bedroom wasn't always lovely. When I bought this house, the walls were beige. I foolishly picked out a heinous blue for the walls that I swore I would love till the day I died. I actually only ended up loving it for a month or two, and then I just sort of tried to avoid looking at it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I picked out the paint color for the bathroom. We bought about a gallon more than we needed, and Kevin suggested that maybe we'd paint the bedroom the same color. Genius! We did it - painted the trim a nice crisp white, and did the same gray on the walls. I decided I had to share the results...there are no before pictures. Suffice to say it was a scary sky blue, and the trim needed to be painted BADLY.

Okay so it's not 100% done. I need to tweak the window situation a little. 

Dresser with gorgeous smoky gray on the walls, and one of my paintings.

Additional dresser shot. The birthday card is from my first birthday as a married lady. Kevin wrote a lovely note to me in it, and I will probably display that card forever. 

After giving it a lot of thought, I finally settled on what artwork I wanted for over our bedside tables - framed printed copies of our wedding vows to each other! Kevin's vows to me are over my side of the bed, and my vows to him are over his side of the bed. Just a little something to remind us of our love for each other, and of the promises we've made to each other. One of the things he promised me in his vows was to support me through all of life's difficulties - man did he ever come through this week! 

Our pretty bedding, an awesome wedding present from my cousins!

The bouquet I carried during our wedding, along with a little porcelain cat I swiped from my mom a jillion years ago, all nestled around one of my favorite pictures of my Papa...

My home-made silhouettes - our little family portrait wall. More to come once I figure out what goes on the wall to the left...

Wedding vows....

Fave Five...

I like to make lists. I like to make lists at work. I like to cross things off from lists. It's pretty fun, you have to admit. Between you and me, sometimes I put things on there that I've already completed, just for the pure satisfaction of feeling like I accomplished more. Don't tell anybody. It'll be our little secret. Here's a list of things I'm really digging right now....

Essie's "Turquoise and Caicos". I cut my nails nice and short, and painted this over a layer of OPI's "Dear Diary", and finished it off with two thick coats of clear lacquer. I feel fancy. It looks like I went to the salon, except usually when I go to get a professional manicure, the little Korean lady who does them usually cuts one of my cuticles too short, and it hurts, and then I vow to never go back (until I do). All the joy of a fresh looking manicure, without the knife-wielding Korean lady attacking my poor innocent cuticles like a jungle explorer chopping through bamboo with a machete. And it's turquoise. I love turquoise. 

This water bottle. You fill it, and as you sip, it filters the water for you! Brilliant! And perfect, since it seems like the Brita jug in the fridge at works mysteriously ends up there completely empty at the exact moment that I'm super thirsty. I ordered mine from our Amazon Prime account, and it arrives Monday! Plus, it's supposedly spill proof, which is really excellent, because I tend to fall over my own feet. True story. 

If I could just magically create an outfit out of thin air, this would be my perfect date night outfit. Casual. Crazy. It's got red glasses. It's a winner. I'd wear this out on Saturday night to see the Hunger Games with my awesome husband. 

This Carrot Ginger Elixir from Shutterbean is delicious, and I swear it helped me get over whatever crazy insane stomach bug/cold/who knows what that I had the other day. Seriously. Try it. Go do it right now. 

KT Tape! Kevin and I have been using this stuff (he's got what we think is paroneal tendonitis, and I have posterior shinsplints) for the past few weeks as we do our couch to 5k training, and so far so good! I will say, though, that once we ran out of our original roll, we bought the KT Tape PRO next, and it seems like it has more staying power, especially when you want to wear it for a few days and not have it fall off after you get out of the shower. 

xoxo have a great weekend!

ps: check out my husband's blog. He's a genius, and he wrote an awesome blog post on how he used C# programming to make our thermostat fancy and automated. It's okay if the actual code part confuses you. It confused me too. Just focus on the concept :)

Shades of Grey....

If I were in elementary school, I'd be all ready to write my "Things I did this weekend" essay.

Let's just say when I moved into my house about 2 1/2 years ago, I thought it would be super cool to paint the bathroom this crazy blue color. Needless to say, I regretted it within a couple of months, and have been thinking ever since about how nice it would be to give the bathroom a sophisticated makeover. Over the course of the past week, our bathroom has gone from a scary blue, with trim that desperately needed to be painted, hardware that needed to be updated, and a big scary set of glass shower doors that were begging to be ripped out....

Here's the after pictures....I'm so excited!

We went with a nice Martha Stewart color for the walls called 'Zinc' - it's a little darker in person than it looks here...

Believe it or not, this shelf was a nice 1970's avocado green until yesterday. It belonged to my dad when he was in high school, and has holes punched in the back of it so he could run wires to his speaker system. 

Brand new shower curtain from Target - you can't really see it in this picture, but it has little flecks of metallic silver all over it. Love it! You can see the fancy new shower head we got peeking up over the shower curtain....

Fancy new rainwater shower head (with a hand-held for giving the dog a bath!)

It's weird to take pictures of your toilet....so I took a picture of what's above the toilet. Pretty scented candles, and a black and white print of Paris that I swiped from our own kitchen...

With the paint being pretty masculine, I wanted to go with something a little more feminine. Pretty vintage inspired glass door pulls for the closet doors and cabinets!

Pretty little vintage inspired drawer pulls....

More of the vintage style glass pulls (I'm a teeny bit obsessed)

A view looking toward the bedroom (and Ruby taking a little nap)

I LOVE the Neptune and Mermaid prints I found for the bathroom! The colors stand out so nicely against the crisp white mat ($16 frames courtesy of the clearance section of Target!)

Mermaids!

I can't get over how cheap these frames were....I just like how they stand out against the dark grey walls....

Keepin' it organized on the bathroom counter! 

So excited that this project is nearing completion! Just a couple of shelves to put up, a few paint touch-ups, and we'll be good to go! Yay for a new bathroom!

For a girl...

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and give myself some advice. Just to tell myself things that I know now. Things that would have made things WAY easier....

1. The cool kids aren't really cooler than you. They're just more confident. They have bad things in their life, too. Their parents are divorced, they have doubts about themselves. Some of them are bad at math just like you are. Just keep your head down, focus on getting good grades and being a good friend to the people who don't care if you're not popular. 
2. You don't need all the boys to think you're pretty. You just need ONE boy to think you're BEAUTIFUL. 
3. Some girls will get boobs WAY sooner than you, and you'll be mortified when it's time to change for gym. Quit worrying about it and develop confidence. The boobs will come later on their own. 
4. Don't let people tell you you're bad at math. If you think you're bad at it, it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
5. Enjoy eating whatever the heck you want while you're a teenager. Go to the store immediately and get a McCain Deep & Delicious cake and eat the whole thing with two big frosty glasses of milk. You're welcome. 
6. Keep running track & field through high school. There will be a day when you wish you hadn't stopped running. 
7. If you're not happy being single, you'll never be happy in a relationship. Get your own life first, then share it. I really wish I'd known this earlier. I think I finally figured this out a few months before I met Kevin. I think I felt like at my age, I was supposed to be headed toward getting married, so I compromised and ignored the nagging feeling that I was in the wrong relationship. Once I ended that one, and got my own life, my own interests, started going out into the world and making new friends and having new experiences, I really was happy with just me. Shortly after that, I met Kevin, and the rest is history. 
8. It will all be okay. I recall freaking out about something or another every week through adolescence. I don't remember what any of the actual things were that I was freaking out about. Moral of the story: most of what you're freaking out about won't matter in a week, let alone 10 years. 

So what advice do you wish you could give your younger self? Leave me a comment below - I'd love to know!

Sometimes....

Sometimes I don't blog regularly. Maybe I should change the name of my blog to "Ruby Sometimes", or "Ruby Periodically When Diana's Not Too Tired".

Sometimes work is CRAZY, and sometimes it's not. I love it when it's busy and HATE when it's slow. 

Sometimes I just have a HUGE overwhelming urge to make and eat a whole giant mixing bowl of chocolate Jello pudding, fresh from the cold cold fridge. It just tastes to me like velvet would taste. Sometimes I imagine sprinkling fresh raspberries on top, along with a nice big dollop of Cool Whip. Usually at that point I wish I actually HAD fresh raspberries and cool whip on hand. I never do. I should keep them on hand for just such an emergency. They should be in the fridge in a glass box with a hammer that says "break in case of emergency". 

Sometimes I go to websites that have cute clothes, and I put EVERYTHING I want in the cart, and then at the end I just close the whole thing without buying anything. It's my equivalent of window shopping, without actually having to go to the mall. I don't like the mall because of those aggressive sales people who work at the kiosks that sell weird things like fake hair extensions, and electronic cigarettes, and bejeweled cell phone cases that instantly make your phone three times thicker once you put it on. 

Sometimes I just like to talk to my mom. Even if it's just for a minute on the way home. 

Sometimes I wish we lived with the characters from "New Girl". Zooey Deschanel is adorkable, and I love that. 

Sometimes I have CRAZY dreams. I had a dream last week that my coworkers showed up in my office carrying their dogs, telling me that they were giving me their dogs to keep since they were too busy. Crazy. Last night I had a crazy dream that Kevin and I were house hunting (what?) and somehow we ended up looking at what was quite possibly the most awesome apartment in Oakville (Ontario, where I am from). Except the whole place was decorated all dark and masculine with leather and dark walls and stuff. But in my dream I was psyched about painting the whole place shades of pale aqua and light gray. I was going to plant marigolds and basil on the balcony. Also I was going to find two cute chaise lounge chairs to sit opposite each other facing in opposite directions so Kev and I could chill out but be facing each other. I'm not sure what the dream meant. 

Also in the dream there was a baby nursery decorated with boy colors, but the closet was full of pink baby clothes. Maybe that means our future child will have gender confusion issues. I don't really know. 

Sometimes I realize that I'm scared of making pie crust. Joy the Baker makes it seem so easy, but I think she's just a pie crust Jedi who makes everything look easy. 

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Diana

Mom knows best....really....

I look a lot like my mom. A lot like my mom. People just know that I'm her daughter, even people who don't actually know me. It's crazy.

My mom just never gets tired. We're different that way. She just keeps going like some crazy person who never runs out of energy, while I prefer to mix productivity with little breaks to check twitter, and stand in front of the open fridge and eat things before getting back to work.

Last week was a breaking point for me. I love love love our little home, but the kitchen was making me want to pull my hair out and scream incomprehensibly. It was a disorganized mess. I had moved in without having very much stuff to put in the cabinets, but slowly over time with the addition of some of Kevin's stuff, plus what we got from wedding registries, our cabinets began to burst with disorganized junk. It was so bad that I just about stopped using Tupperware, because all my containers and lids were mismatched and piled up haphazardly in the cavernous cabinet next to the dishwasher, and if you opened the door even just a LITTLE bit, everything would fall out, and I'd just get angry and sad and throw everything back in and jam the door shut in a cloud of frustration.

I was blorft about my kitchen. Blorft is a Tina Fey word. It basically means that you're completely overwhelmed, but are proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum. Blorft. I dare you to use it in a sentence tomorrow.

Then I remembered. My mom's kitchen is always TOTALLY organized. Plus, she's one of those weird people who actually like to organize messes. For some reason, I'm good at organizing messes at work, but terrible at doing it at home.

So I called her. She came over. From 10am till about 3pm we went through our kitchen and organized the heck out of it. At one point I was sitting looking totally freaked out on the step stool in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by a pile of mismatched/broken/gross Tupperware containers, and a shockingly large collection of travel mugs that were either broken, had no lids, or leaked like crazy when you put liquid in them. PLUS, I had sent Kevin to the store to get things for our dinner with friends that night, and insisted that he bring me home a big bag of walnuts so I could make walnut orange Gorgonzola salad. Turns out I had like 6 bags of walnuts. I also had an absolutely obscene amount of chocolate chips. Do you like chocolate chips? Do you need any chocolate chips? Because I have about a trillion of them. Also I seem to be a powdered sugar hoarder. I had about four bags. There are chocolate chip cookies in my future.

Needless to say, the kitchen is super clean now. And I seriously couldn't have done it without my mom. I told Kevin after she left that if I had even attempted it by myself, I would have pulled everything out of the cabinets, crumbled under the massive overwhelming feeling of what a gross person I am, and walked out of the kitchen to go cry on the couch. My mom is just that cool for helping me all day. So much so, that I can almost overlook the fact that she seemed to be having a crazy amount of fun doing it.

My mom is the best. There's a lot that I just couldn't do without her, and I'd be a hot mess if she wasn't my mama....

On the bright side, everything is TOTALLY organized now. Kevin and I are even looking around to price out brand new cabinets and counters for the kitchen (eek!) and even though this project won't happen right away, I'm VERY excited about it.

Beyond The Pale...

I should start by saying that while I do enjoy Jim Gaffigan's stand-up Beyond The Pale, that's not what this is about. This is about skin, people. Take care of your skin!

I've always been very fair-skinned, and I sustained a few bad sunburns as a kid. I was probably 12 or 13 when my Nana took me to the Clinique counter for the first time, and bought me my first skincare products. Was I a little young for it? Maybe. But I'm so thankful that she did that! I'll never forget the crisp clean smell of the yellow Clinique bar soap, all nestled in its little green container. Or the sharp smell of the cleansers and toners in the tall sleek bottles. I remember the nice lady helping us at the Clinique counter telling me "you have such pretty pale skin, you have to take good care of it and make sure it's healthy".

I really took that to heart. I had seen people at the beach slathering oil all over their bronzed skin and just soaking up the rays, and I knew that wasn't for me. It didn't take me very long to realize that I just didn't have that kind of skin. I had the type of skin that you covered up, and applied generous amounts of gentle sunblock to. I'm an SPF 80 kind of girl. I started using Olay SPF 30 anti-aging cream when I was 15. I'm not messin' around here, folks.

So I thought I'd share a little about my skin care regimen, for those of you who are looking to give your skin a little TLC!

1. Cleanse! I can't say this enough. Leaving your makeup on when you go to bed isn't good. I'm not always a good follower of this rule, but it's important! Your skin needs to breathe while you rest. I'm a big fan of baby wipes to remove makeup (I buy the Target UP&UP brand, and they work great.) and the good ole fashioned yellow bar of Clinique soap.  
2. Oil can be good! I promise. If you have oily skin, it might be a little trickier to find the perfect balance, but it's a lifesaver for me! In the winter, the cranking furnace just makes me feel like a raisin. On days like that, I like to squeeze a little Jojoba Oil onto a cotton ball and just gently swipe it onto my dry areas before bed. I usually sleep with an old towel over my pillowcase so I don't get my pillow all oily. That's bad news.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Tea Tree Oil! I buy these amazing little Tea Tree Oil cleansing discs at Trader Joe's (I also get my Jojoba there). They're small, but packed with TTO, and they feel REALLY good when you use them as a follow up to your morning face wash. I feel like the texture of the discs really smooths out my skin, and handles any redness or splotchy areas.
   
   
   
   
   
4. SUNSCREEN. I use sunscreen EVERY day. I typically use a really great Neutrogena  SPF15 version for everyday, and I apply it to my face right before my makeup. I also use a generous amount on my neck, chest, and on the backs of my hands. Basically any area where you see an older woman get age spots. If I'm headed out somewhere in the summer where I know I'll be in the sun, I'll put on a good layer of  SPF 80, and bring the bottle with me for later applications. I'm way too fair to take any chances with sunburns that could mean skin cancer later.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Baking Soda? Yep! Baking soda! There's a big mason jar of it on my bathroom counter. It's super useful. If I'm feeling like I have rough patches on my skin, I just mix a paste of about 3 parts baking soda and 1 part warm water (just enough that you can use it like a scrub). Just be careful that you don't scrub TOO hard - you just need to rub it in gentle circles, and the baking soda will do the rest. I always feel like my skin GLOWS after I use it. You can also sprinkle some on top of the toothpaste on your toothbrush for a whitening boost while you brush, and use it as a gentle cleaner for the sink if it's looking a little gross. Very multi-purpose!
   
   
   
   
   
6. Sunglasses! They're not just to look cool. I'm always very conscious that going outside (even when it's not super sunny out) tends to make me squint a little from the brightness. I almost always have one or two pairs of sunglasses in my purse, just in case. No need to get those crinkly eye wrinkles before it's time. 
7. Humidifier! It's the middle of winter, it's cold and windy outside, and inside it's all dry and warm. Not ideal for your skin. We have a great humidifier that I keep on low most nights while we sleep. I feel like I get less problem areas when there's a good level of humidity in the house.

 Take care of your skin. Love it. Put nice things on it, and it will look good until you're old :)