i know, i know

it's been a while.
this is the post after a while.

i have to admit, i haven't been doing anything terribly exciting. working. singing. we're moving tomorrow, so i've been packing. i hope this will be the smoothest move of my life. our current apartment is only 320 square feet, so we can't fit that much in it. so...yeah. almost everything is in boxes. we only have the kitchen, bathroom and a little bit of clothes/misceallaneous from the bedroom. tonight, everything gets packed up or taken apart. then we start moving at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

in any case, i wanted to point you to two sites i have found recently that I think are kind of cool.

go here

So, this site is cool if you're like me and like categorizing things. It's basically an online way to keep track of your closet. You have different areas that you can input pictures of your clothes into: tops, bottoms, jeans, outerwear, etc. They have a searchable database of clothing, but if you can't find it (because you're like me, and everything you own is like, 20 gazillion years old or on super-sale when you buy it, and no longer available online,) you can also just upload it from your phone/computer/whatevs. You can also follow profiles of people you know (or just like the style of,) define your style on your profile, make wishlists, etc.
Then, once you've built up your "closet," you say what you wore on a specific days, for specific things. You can have different outfits for work, the gym, going out to dinner, etc. all in one day. And for adding things to your closet, and choosing your outfits, you get points. And then they do giveaways! I actually won a cool pair of vintage Hugo Boss sunglasses back when it was in Beta, so this shizz is real, y'all! They aren't just pulling your leg.
FINALLY (I feel like I'm writing a middle school paper here, y'all,) it gives you stats of things in your closets. Want to know how many times you've worn purple this month? What your top brands are (as if you didn't know already, HAH!)? What your typical color pallet is? It also compares it to the "average" stylitics user.

 

 (check out how I have more items, but they cost less. That's because I'm a cheap-o!)

That's cool, right? Yeah...I thought so, too.

Any number two, is based off an idea called the 'endless closet.'

 

This was originally an Australian website that did so well that they moved it to the US to try it out here. Basically, it's a place to trade dresses (they plan to open it up to other clothing items, if it does well enough.) Have a dress you don't want? Just want a new dress, but don't have money to spend on it? This is good for that!

You list the dresses that you have worn and never want to wear again (too many posh parties, huh? fancy fancy...) and you get 'buttons' for it. The buttons are your ticket to other dresses that people feel equally as 'get it away from me as soon as possible' about, as you assign your dresses (or the website suggests an amount, based on how much you paid originally) a number of worth in buttons. You can buy buttons, but you also get buttons from adding your own dresses, so you don't ever have to actually pay any money, if you so desire. (Except shipping. You pay to ship stuff. But then, if you order things, other people pay to ship it. So it works out.)

The thing that I love about this website is that it can only get better the more people that use it. Instead of feeling like I want to be exclusive, and one of the few people on the site, I want EVERYONE to be on it! Cause ladies, let's be real here: I don't have money for new dresses for each occasion. And even if I did, not having to spend it is so much better an option. Then I can buy jewlery! Or, you know...food?

(this is a dress I want, but I have to find some other things to list before I can afford it. 

But I just kind of LOVE it, okay?)

So that's that! I'm moving, go check out those websites.

I'm also getting another VoxBox in May, which I'm excited about. And I've started using big-girl makeup (Tarte, specifically) and I freakin' love it. And I wash my face with Aveda and my body with VitaBath. It's like I'm a real person with real money or something.

Fancy.

you only meant well, well of course you did

Soo....we don't have internet at home and it is driving me BONKERS.

We don't have cable, either, but that's not as horrible. (Nate might disagree with that statement.)

It's doubly frustrating, because we have a dedicated rep for the building from our cable company. Nate called him a couple times last week, when we decided we were actually moving, and he got back to him on Thursday or so. He said he'd been on vacation, but he was back now and he could just come and turn the cable on in the new apartment on Friday or Saturday. That way, we wouldn't need to set up an appointment to do so.

Well, we moved the TV up last thing on Friday before going to bed, plugged it in and nope! No cable. Ok, maybe he just hadn't gotten to it yet. But then we tried Saturday night and Sunday, and it didn't work then, either. We even plugged in the modem to the jack in the bedroom, to make sure it wasn't just that the jack in the living room wasn't working, but alas -- still no dice. So Nate has called him a couple times, leaving messages and has gotten absolutely no response. It's like he's disappeared off the face of the earth. And we'd really like to have him come and do it, because technically we get more channels than we pay for. Technically.

(If you ask me, $30 a month for basic cable channels that don't include things like Food Network and HGTV is a bit ridiculous, anyway. We get 11 channels with our digital tuner, as it is! If I didn't want to pay for cable we just...wouldn't pay for cable and would suffice ourselves with watching TV from the internet for $15 bucks a month and Hell's Kitchen, Master Chef and reruns of HIMYM. I mean, really. It's more than we pay for electricity, and that is kind of a necessity.)

In any case, it means I can't upload the photos from our scavenger hunt, so I haven't been able to do a post for it yet.

It also means we've been watching the news. Like real people. last night, I learned that the only place that legalized gay marriage in the state of Washington so far is a Native American reservation. At least one party has to be in the tribe to get married there.

Fascinating? Eh. Informative, yes.

Then again, it is Fox News. Blech.

In other news, our new bedroom is tiny and I am incapable of walking around the bed without hurting myself. But, this was also true when we had plenty of space to walk around the bed. I'm kind of accident prone. Check out my bruises.

Also, ignore the my ghostly legs. I'm actually a vampire.

extra bright

This past weekend was slightly insane on our parts, mostly because we decided to move and do a race in about two and a half days time. But it was fun. And now I'm exhausted.

I left work early on Friday to go home and pack boxes so that we could start moving once Nate got home from work and we got the keys. I have to admit, I didn't do as much packing as I should have, but I got some stuff packed up, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Heh.

We met our apartment manager, did a walkthrough and everything was good. We managed to get most of our clothes, all the living room furniture except the coffee table and some little things that I had stuffed into boxes earlier that afternoon upstairs by about 9:30/10pm. At that point, we decided it was time for bed.

Saturday was awesome. Nate, Liz (my sister) and I did our Treasure Hunt (I'll do a dedicated post later,) and then afterwards decided to meet up with my friend Jess, which eventually led to going to her house to steal play with her new kitten and jam out on some Rockband. I am horrible at drums and ok at guitar (as long as it's on easy mode,) but Liz and I rocked out some vocals on Misery Business, among other things. Then it was Thai for dinner and crash into bed, after being accosted by a man making kissing sounds on the bus. Love it.

We may or may not have seen Captain Jack Sparrow wandering the streets of Seattle. Just sayin'.

But, let's back up. Saturday morning, around 8:30/9am, we get a call from our apartment manager, asking us if he can go into our new apartment, because the people below us are complaining about water dripping through the ceiling in the bathroom. Uhm...okay. It turns out that the apartment above us has decided to not tell anyone that their tub drain is completely backed up and their toilet is falling off its hinges, so now, there is water gushing into our new bathroom and the bathroom in the apartment below that. FANTASTIC. Apartment Manager is pissed and there are lots of buckets in our bathroom to catch the falling water.

Anywho, so the water seems to have mostly stopped by Sunday morning, so we go ahead with moving the rest of our stuff. We started around 10am and finished around 11pm (with a 2 hour break to go get dinner, because who feels like cooking after moving all day? Not this girl!) and were exhausted when we fell into bed. Our bedroom is tiny, and there are things all over everything, but all we have left in the old apartment are a few random things and our cleaning supplies. All that's left to do is vacuum, sweep and the bathroom. Thankfully, the kitchen is already done...which is probably what would have taken the longest, anyway.

I'll post pictures of everything soon, but this is what our view looks like.

Kinda worth the exhaustion.

nyeh

There's a leeeeetle nerve inside my nose, near where my sinuses start that has decided that today is a good day to be sensitive and that it's going to make my head hurt and my eye twinge all day. It's super awesome.

We are getting the keys to the new place tomorrow evening, so I'm going back through my home decorating board on Pinterest and rueing the fact that we a) live in a small apartment where we can't/don't want to do that much demo/painting/etc. and b) don't have the money to buy all new beautiful furniture. Le sigh.

See, I'd love it for the bedroom to look like this:

Or maybe this?

Or something like Young House Love?



...minus the white ceramic animal head.

And then, there's the bathroom. Something along these lines:

Or maybe this?

So pretty!

In any case, they will look nothing like that, but a girl can dream right? And don't even get me started on the kitchen.

I took off the second half of the work day tomorrow to bring some boxes home and start packing up little stuff to be carried upstairs. I have a feeling we won't be doing too much big furniture moving until Sunay, but if we can have most of the little stuff already piled upstairs, then moving the big pieces and cleaning up the old apartment shouldn't take too long.

Hah. Famous last words.

But seriously, it's kind of my goal to have everything upstairs Friday night, except:

• bed, desk, TV & stand, nightstand shelves and living room chairs (we have three, two oversized and Ikea one with an Ottoman)
• a few cooking and eating items, for Saturday and Sunday morning
• a few wearing items, for Sunday and Saturday
• shower stuff

Everything else we should be able to get upstairs to the new apartment Friday night without too many incidents. We also have a few things we've decided we probably need to buy for this apartment. Namely:

• Curtains! (since the apartment gets direct sunlight, it might actually, you know, get warm? or be very bright? or people might see us, since it faces the stree?! this is all very exciting.) Fr at least the living room. The bedroom has a tree outside the windows, so we might actually be able to wait on those.
• A fan? For the bedroom, mostly. The living room has a ceiling fan! (This is something I've missed from the South -- the first place I lived in Boston had a ceiling fan in the living room, but not the bedrooms; the second place didn't have any, I don't think. You definitely couldn't put one downstairs -- the ceilings were too low. Someone would die. But seriously, ceiling fans are dope, yo! And effective.)
• New towels and bathroom rug. The ones we got from Target a while back leave red fibers everywhere and while I really do like my red/black/cream color scheme, I do no like having piles of red fibers gather in the corners of EVERYTHING. I'll have to decide on a new color scheme for the bathroom. Maybe black, cream and yellow? Or green? Maybe just buy nicer towels that don't shed. (what a concept.)

(mah shower curtain. i lurve it.)

• Arug?! for the living room. not that I don't enjoy walking around in my bunny slippers... (I need new bunny slippers, too, come to think of it...)
• Mybe a new mat for the kitchen. The one we have is getting kind of nasty. That probably means we should clean more often. Just...a thought.
• A vacuum cleaner? Problem is, we don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on one, and we need one that will do both hardwood and carpet effectively. I am taking suggestions! (we do have a 20% off one item from BB&B to use, so...)

That's all! Doesn't sound like that much, does it? It will probably feel like a lot. I'm psyching myself up. Moving, moving, rah rah rah! (Shark bait, ooh! ba..ba doo.)

Oy.

as promised

Here are the floor plans we came up with for the new apartment:

(the white space to the left is the door to the kitchen, the white space to the right is the door to the bedroom, and in the bottom right corner is the door to enter.)

Option 1:

We like the separation of the 'living room' from the 'dining area' using the loveseat.

 Option 2:

(on this one, the white space on the bottom left is the door to the bathroom)

We like the open space in between the bathroom and kitchen, because it means no moving furniture to put the air mattress down. We also like the separate "office" space the desk being perpendicular to the wall creates.

Option 3:

(there's a piece of furniture in the "wall" in this one, because there's actually a little inlet for the bathroom door that extends past where we put the 'wall' for the room, so that piece does fit there, we promise ;)

The more I look, the more I think I like this on the best. There's space to walk between clearly defined "rooms": office, living and dining space. The chair with the footstool being off to the side is probably the only thing about this setup that I don't like, but Nathan says we aren't allowed to get rid of it, so I'll just have to deal!

What do you guys think? Anything that I missed jumping out at you?

to need release

The good news: We're moving!
The bad news: We're moving...again.

After visiting the west-facing apartment again on Saturday morning to measure the whole thing from top to bottom, we went back to our current apartment, measured all our furniture and used a room planner to make sure the furniture that we really care about will fit in the space. It will be tight - especially in the bedroom, where we will have less than two feet on either side of the bed (unless of course, we decide to push the bed in the corner and I will use the window still for my nightstand, but we'll see about that!) The living room will be less of a struggle - mostly it's deciding which, of the three we came up with (I'll post them later-on,) way we want to position things. We started going through things on Sunday while we watched a barrage of Disney movies, to try and decide what we could throw out before we actually haul everything upstairs. Thankfully we will have pretty much the weekend (minus Saturday when we're doing our Treasure Hunt!) to move everything up. I'm contemplating trying to take a half-day on Friday to get more things packed and/or moved, so we have less to do on Sunday, but we'll see.

i want you on my team

So, I realized that it's hard to measure out real food when you don't have the correct tools.

I'm sure I busted my calorie intake yesterday for dinner, but we also spent an hour afterward moving the rest of our stuff from our old apartment. We're officially moved out. Nate keeps talking about "moving back" to the other apartment when they're done fixing the windows, but I am really against that proposition. I hate moving. And it's already going to feel like too soon to move if we decide to find a new building at the end of our lease at the current one.

Today is going well, so far. I had a toaster strudel for breakfast. They're only 180 calories (with the icing,) and we bought a bunch of boxes at Target last weekend because they were on super-sale (four boxes/ie: 16 strudels for $6.) I know they aren't terribly healthy, but I'm so bad about eating breakfast that I figure eating something to get my metabolism started in the morning (besides my coffee) is better than nothing at all. My morning routine is entirely too hurried for cooking of any sort, and the breakfast "burritos" I see are either not very appetizing looking, horribly full of salt or tiny and expensive. I supposed I could make them the night before, but re-heated eggs are never very appetizing.

I actually measured the sugar/creamer for my coffe this morning. It's a little more bitter than I'm used to so far, but I'm planning on weaning my tastesbuds off the ice cream taste by the end of the week, so I have to start somewhere. Totally drinkable, though more bitter when paired with delicious toaster strudel.

Mostly everyone is out of the office this week at a show in Atlanta, so it's been quiet. With Payroll in and the MS Report basically done, there's not too much to do. So, I plan what to eat. Dinner tonight will be chicken breast, probably with Garlic Butter (read: Margarine) Brussel Sprouts with Cooked Onions. But I'm out of Light Ranch, so I'll have to find something else to marinade the chicken in. I need to go back to buying Catalina dressing, it's soooo tasty. Noms.

Anywho, veggie, meat and either pasta, rice or potato. It's always a great debate: I am a pasta-holic, but sometimes you need a change of pace. I love potatoes, too, but I usually don't feel like washing them off and chopping them up to either roast or mash. And I always feel like rice is going to take too long, and then act surprised when it's done the same time as everything else. It's kind of silly. I think it'll probably be a rice night, but we'll see by the time I get home, if I still feel like it.

I had all these plans for decorating the old apartment, but the new apartment layout is completely different, so some of those plans have gone out the window. Most of it was just curtains, but I'm glad we didn't buy curtains for the other apartment, because there are more windows in the new one, and they are a different size. Smaller, so we might be able to get away with one curtain on each window, instead of definitely needing two. This is mostly for the bedroom, where they will be to block out light, and less for the living room, where I'd like two sheer(er) panels on each window. But sheer costs less than big, thick and heavy, so I think this will be good.

I think it's time to be done with the coffee and move on to water. It's a wonder my lips aren't more chapped, considering I sit here drinking my caffeinated beverage with my space heater on full blast. I'm just glad I'm not on the East Coast right now, where the tempatures are frigid and everyone's heaters seem to be malfunctioning. Including my mother's.

It's nice outside for the time being. It was raining when I had to walk to work, and it will probably be raining when I have to walk home. Just my luck.

i'm into something good

So this is it.

Old attitude out, new attitude in.

I feel like I am resting. On my laurels. More like on my butt. I took a five month hiatus from working (save making targets for my father -- not real work, mostly watching TV while waiting for spray adhesive to dry) and took a road trip. We went from Boston, to Florida, to Louisiana, to Minnesota, to Colorado, to Southern California, to Seattle (see --> http://www.adventuresunday.com/.) I spent a lot of time sitting and thinking in the car. Or sitting and singing. Or sitting and wishing the air conditioning worked.

Now that we're settled in Seattle, I find myself complaining, more often than not. Inside my head, but complaining, none the less. Every little thing annoys me: Getting up in the morning. Not having money to spend on the things I want. Not having a larger work wardrobe (completely my own fault, by the way. To be fair, I've never had a job that required business-wear, so I've ignored that part of the clothing world for as long as possible.) The ten-straight days of rain on the Weather forecast (it's, of course, currently sunny and beautiful outside.)

Really, I have very little to complain about. I have this awesome job, where the recruiter contacted ME to come in for an interview. I love the people I work with. Our apartment is in a prime location, and it takes me less than twenty minutes to walk to work (and the only reason it takes that long is the HUGE hill that our building sits on top of makes it hard to walk quickly up or down for first/last five minutes.) We are not completely broke. We can afford food, rent and some extra things to make our life comfortable.

And the one thing I do have to complain about, our landlord is fixing, and making it as difficult as possible to actually have any complaints. We discovered, after the last couple weeks of constant rain and snow and general dampness, the five windows in our little corner apartment are completely covered in black mold. Like, they're fuzzy, and the one in the kitchen even has mold gel growing near the lock in the middle. Ewwwww. Luckily, there's an apartment on the third floor in our building that was recently vacated. It's larger, but our rent will stay the same for as long as we want to live in that apartment. The hardest thing we had to do was move all of our stuff down two floors and call the cable rep to come switch where our cable is coming to. Our landlord is even switching our electricity for us. They're going to replace the windows upstairs, and then we can either stay in the new apartment, or move back to our old one.

It's fortunate and unfortunate in some ways, and I wish we could combine my favorite features of the two apartments, but we'll probably wind up staying in the new apartment simply so we don't have to move again. We've been in Seattle for a little over two months, and considering all the bitching and moaning we were doing while we were carting things downstairs yesterday, we won't want to move again.

Old Apartment Pros/Cons:
+ hallway closet at the entrance for coats/shoes/outdoor things.
- small living space (we had a hard time fitting two oversized chairs in the space so that we could walk and see the tv)
+ awesome enormous pass-through to the kitchen w/ large breakfast bar that we could get cool barstools for
- bathroom exited directly into living area
+ double sink in the kitchen, plus it has a built-in cutting board.
- less than ample cabinet space...and the one large one we did have was strangely shaped)
+ long shelf w/ bar installed in the closet
- (free) bed (from craigslist) too large for the bedroom, so with the closet doors open, you couldn't walk on that side of the bed. (also means no nightstands, but we had space-saving ideas for such a problem we just hadn't gotten around to yet...)
+ cable/internet ready in both living and bedroom

New Apartment Pros/Cons:
+ larger square footage in general, both in the living room and bedroom
- smaller pass through, w/ smaller breakfast bar. it feels more like a drive-through window. and the bar is right next to the front door, so any stools we could get to eat there would have to fit under the bar
+ larger closet for shoes/coats/outdoor things
- closet is in the back of the apartment, so you have to take your shoes off and carry them there. or risk tracking whatever is on them through the whole apartment.
+ larger closet in the bedroom
- there are no studs in the closet in the bedroom to hold our awesome shelf w/ bar that we brought down from our other apartment, so it keeps ripping out of the wall. we're having the landlord look at it, b/c the closetmaid shelving that was in there just isn't gonna cut it
+ bathroom exits into a small hallway that leads, first past the kitchen and then into the living space. i think this is awesome. Nate didn't seem so impressed, but this is my list, not his.
- kitchen is smaller. like a hallway, with stuff on either side. i think there might be less counter space than in the other apartment, however...
+ kitchen has WAY more cabinet space. for some reason, they like to make the top shelves super high, to the point where you can't use them. but there's only one cabinet like this in the new kitchen, whereas ALL the cabinet were like this in the old apartment. so now we only lose 2 shelves out of 17, instead of  4 out of 11. A much better ratio.
- there is one cable hookup. next to the door, in a horrid spot in the living room. nothing in the bedroom. I believe Nate is trying to make the cable rep drill a hole through to the bedroom for another cable as we speak.
+ bigger bedroom = more space around the bed. and the closet doors don't open out anymore, they slide to the side, so there is ample walking space on either side of the bed. we might even get nightstands in the not too distant future. exciting!
- the guy who lived there painted the walls orange. and the blinds...and the baseboards, and some of the tile on the breakfast bar. he did a lousy job, so there are orange splatters in various places. stupid. orange is stupid.
+ FREE COUCH. the guy who was living there just left it. so...awesome.

I personally think the new apartment is the winner, but I will miss the awesome pass-through and breakfast bar from the old apartment.

In any case, the purpose of this blog is to keep my whining in check. Hopefully someone besides me will read it, and tell me to quit my bitching and moaning. If I start to ramble on about how bad things are, just smack me. Well, virtually, anyhow.

The other thing I'm going to track is my weight. We're getting Wii Fit Plus this weekend (one of our Christmas gifts to ourselves, since our original Wii Fit seems to have disappeared in the move,) plus I'm going to actually start keeping track of my weight (and weigh myself in the morning, when I get up, before I stuff my face for the day, and count my calories consumed/expended with my awesome Lose It app for my iPhone. I am by no means fat, but I don't like the way I look. And unfortunately, this means I've been having a really awful time letting Nate like the way I look, so I'd like to remedy that. Also unfortunately, I put a heaping amount of sugar in my coffee this morning (which has just got to stop -- it's no wonder I crash by lunchtime,) on top of the sweetened creamer I add. I'm just gonna have to get used to my coffee not tasting like ice cream. Sad day.

Fortunately, I am down about 10-12lbs from where I was when we "started" our trip (ie: stayed with Nate's parents in New Hampshire for five weeks while the seized engine in our car was replaced,) just by counting calories and measuring out portions, so I feel like another 10lbs is very achievable in the next couples months. I am blessed with a fast metabolism, but since I stopped dancing/working out basically every day, the amount/type of food that I like to eat has caught up with me. Mostly losing weight means the following things:

1) one coffee or one half-sized coke a day. not both. not a giant coke from the vending machine at work. not a coffee from starbucks when Brian/Charli offers. (and less sugar/creamer in the coffe i do drink)
2) knowing my calorie count for the day and measuring out snacks apparopriately.
3) not drinking multiple nights after work. i need my beauty sleep, anyway.
4) measuring DINNER portions. this is a big one, b/c this is where I tend to eat the most food.
5) not thinking that going over my calorie count is by just a "little bit" is ok.
6) working off what i do go over.

I love that the Lose It app has so many activities included in its "exercise" category. Like typing. Or "household" walking (which is mostly what i do around the office.) I need to also just start walking around the office more. But my personal heater at my desk is so nice and toasty, and it's so cold everywhere else. Le sigh.

-C