dear yoga, I miss you.

{via} 

I desperately want to get back into yoga again. I started it while living in Spain as a new way to stay active and stretchy, but now my non-yoga hiatus has gone on long enough.

My poor yoga mat sits in the other room, collecting and dust, and probably judging me for my lazy ways. Which reminds me I need to stop anthropomorphizing things all the time.

But seriously, with all the yoga studios here in San Diego, I have no excuse. It's just a matter of finding one that fits my needs (total beginner here), and my budget (I got it for free in Spain, so I'm not sure what's considered a fair and justified price anymore).

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go dust off my yoga mat and bring it out of hibernation.

Gregory Crewdson // Brief Encounters Trailer

I'm such a huge fan of this man's photography. This looks amazing.

nesting and why blank walls scare me

The nesting process is usually pretty slow for me. If I move to a new space, I like to just live in it awhile before I decide what goes on the walls, and where.  I'm pretty fickle too; I've moved the couch around at least two different times, and I keep moving my indoor plants around too. But after four months of living here, some of these blank walls were turning into my nightmare. A girl just needs stuff to look at, ya know?

So right above my desk, I hung up some of my favorite photos, cards, and things that currently inspire me. I really love using twine and bulldog clips to hang stuff because I can always swap things out and hang different stuff. Cause I'm fickle, remember?

This is one of my favorite cards from Cracked Designs. So awesome.

Since the mister and I are slight hoarders when it comes to traveling, we had amassed an obscene amount of travel ticket stubs from our adventures in Europe. They were all just sitting in a box along with a bunch of coasters, maps, and travel brochures (cue flashback to every episode of Hoarders ever: Why am I keeping this stuff? What is wrong with my brain??), until I realized I better do something with this. So voilà! One free afternoon and several blank frames later, I had this. It's only a fraction of what we've collected, and I'm sure I'll add on to it, but for now, pretty dang good, no?

I call this the Buyer's-Remorse-Turned-Photo-Collage-Project. That big faux-wooden old-timey map wall hanging (actually there's two of them) was an impulse buy back in Spain, and it wasn't until our stuff arrived here in our new home that I realized, "Ugh. I hate this thing." So I decided to re-purpose one of them as a backdrop for a bunch of photos. Photos that were previously in a box, all sad and desperate to be displayed. All these photos are 35mm film photos from my Diana Mini camera. I'm thinking of using the other matching wall hanging for a bunch of Instagram prints.

I know, this doesn't really count as wall art, but I still wanted to share this. Up until today, all our books were stored in a bunch of cardboard boxes and sitting against this wall in our living room. The mister and I have plans of building custom wall shelves from floor to ceiling in this space, but that probably won't happen for a while. Which I'm fine with, but staring at ugly brown boxes was starting to get me down, so I took those bad boys out and started stacking them by color. Which makes my eyeballs so much happier.

Dear Current-And-Potential-Friends-Who-Borrow-My-Books, I can be pretttty stingy with my books. Just warning you now. If I haven't gotten a book back after a couple months, I start to worry. After six months, I start to question the solidity of our friendship. And if it's been a year or more, you're pretty much dead to me. Just kidding. Kinda.

This is in my bedroom, even though it's not quite finished. I need to mount the map to some cardboard or something, to make it a bit more sturdy. But this was super ridiculous easy. Just some vinyl adhesive letters and a ruler to line things up. God bless you, Michael's Arts and Crafts. I have missed you for three and a half years.

I use Instagram, and you probably do too.

I came across that image above a month or so ago and had a good chuckle (you should see the rest of the Grandmother Tips series, it's pretty awesome).

Yes, I am guilty. I am an Instagram user and (slight) addict, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But for me, it's just another arsenal in my toolbox for visually documenting my life. Whether I'm using my fancy pants DSLR, or an old 35mm Minolta, or my iPhone's camera, it's just another extension of my photographic eye. Or so I like to think.

Food Instagramming is pretty popular, but I can totally see why. Sometimes a bowl of delicious Bibimbap or the perfect mall food court corn dog is too pretty NOT to photograph (yes, I just referred to a corn dog as pretty, and if that makes me wrong, I don't want to be right). The mister thinks I'm cuckoo bananas for wanting to take a photo of our food right before we dig in, but he's just gonna have to deal.

Why hello there, not-boring wall art. That first one was at a bar in State College, Pennsylvania, but the rest is right here in San Diego. And there's so much of it. And that makes me happy.

Ah, the gratuitous self-portraits taken in front of a mirror. Definitely guilty of these too. I try to keep these to a minimum on my IG feed, but somtimes, when you come across, say, a ladies restroom with epic black and white patterned wallpaper, a brick wall message, and a giant deer head, it can be pretty hard not to take a photo.

So do you use Instagram? Do you love it? Or downright loathe it? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

StoryCorps

I came across StoryCorps not too long ago, and upon watching an animated short on their vimeo page, I was instantly hooked. According to their website, "Our mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives" and is described as "one of the largest oral history projects of its kind."

Here are three of my favorite animated shorts from StoryCorps, but you should really watch them all. Some are hilarious, and some are downright heartbreaking.

this old house

I thought I'd share some snaps of my home that I took the other day. Neighbors have told me that when the previous tenant lived here, the front yard was so overgrown that it was almost impossible to see the house from the street. I've also heard that he had over 500 potted plants and was even growing grapes in the backyard! (I actually wouldn't mind if the grapes had stayed behind, but oh well) 

The kittah is spoiled as all heck here. A huge fenced-in yard to run around and stalk the local lizard population (if she brings one more cut-off lizard tail into the house, I'm gonna lose it), and as seen above, plenty of outdoor scratching posts. Living the life I tell you. If I believed in reincarnation, I would totally want to come back in my next life as a spoiled rotten house cat.

Reason #478 I love living in an old house? Mature fruit trees! And we've got four! This is the avocado tree on the side of our property. What a beautiful, glorious thing that is. The only downside is that we have to bust out our ladder to pick the avocados, because they're usually way up high. And see that twisty, Tim Burton-looking tree in the back right corner? That's our persimmon tree, even though it's not looking so pretty right now. When we moved in, it was bearing leaves and fruit, but I'm guessing it's out of season now? At least we had the chance to pick and taste them. I had to do a little research though, to find out that our persimmons are the astringent type, which means that they'll turn orange and look ripe long before they actually are. So I picked some off when they were still firm, and let them ripen on my kitchen counter until they were soft and squishy to the touch. Then they're ready to eat!

Other odd quirks of this house: Some of our windows have to be held up with bamboo sticks. Some people might find this annoying and inconvenient, but I don't really mind.

And glass door knobs! How awesome are these? We've got a few of these around the house, on my bedroom closet door, and in one of the bathrooms. They add a nice vintage touch, if I do say so myself.

six months in a leaky boat

 

{image via Tobyotter} 

My better half is a U.S. Navy Sailor, and while I'm not one of those wives who regularly bemoans the fact that their husband serves in the military, I also don't place his profession on a pedestal and pretend that he is somehow a better human being than a person with a civilian job. I find myself comfortably in the middle; I respect his choice in profession, and I'm proud of what he has accomplished.

He's just a regular guy doing his job like anyone else. Sometimes he loves it, sometimes he downright loathes it. Highs: dude, we got to live in Spain for three and a half years. Travel. Culture shock (some people might consider this a low, but I love it). Lows: Trying to Skype with family overseas with a six hour time difference. Lows for him: Ship life. Cramped quarters, long hours, things breaking all the time, and the painting. So. Much. Painting. He's surrounded by so much grey color where he works that he refused to paint our walls any shade of grey when we started our painting project.

I was looking through some old photos on my computer, and I found this one that my dear friend Felicity photographed what seems like eons ago!

Another high: seeing him in his fancy pants uniform, whether it's dress blues or dress whites. I am DEFINITELY okay with that.

So anyway, the reason for this whole post to begin with...I came across this great song yesterday by Split Enz called "Six Months In A Leaky Boat". Great title. Even sillier video. I have a feeling Navy ship life isn't accurately represented in the video, other than the guy pushing the broom around. And I'll have to ask the mister if there's a token accordian-playing dude on his boat. And if they still use those old-timey telescopes.