I want everything.

Boyfriend snapped this while I was at my favourite store the other day.  My sole purpose was not to shop, but I won't get into that now except to say keep an eye out next week for something that I think is pretty darn exciting.

Fashion Favourites : July 18, 2011

Today was one of those days where I woke up and knew that all would be right in the universe if I could just go back to sleep.  I didn't think it was going to be a bad day or anything.  I just knew that all my problems would be solved if I didn't get out of bed… But, as I had work and no real reason not to get up, I hauled myself into the shower then threw on some random clothes (which involved a major fight with a pair of tights) and grumbled as I fought with my hair dryer (he won).

And then something amazing happened.  I managed to pick out a decent outfit with absolutely no thought involved.  What what's even more amazing is that this is probably the least expensive outfit I've ever worn!  Nearly everything is from Target – even my undies, Dear Readers.  Even my undies.

Dress | Mossimo @ Target
Sweater | Mossimo @ Target
Tights | Target 
Boots | Steve Madden
Earrings | vintage

In case you're wondering, yes I know it's July, but it feels a lot more like autumn here in Northern California – hence the tights and the sweater.  Also, apparently I work in an igloo.  Tights are my way of saying, "Eff you, Julember!  I'm still gonna wear this dress!"

Our first Hawai'i Trip

When I was a computer trainer, I had a student that told me the single hardest part in her 40+ year marriage was that she has travel-lust and her husband didn't.  Now in her late 60's she had finally stopped trying to convince him to want to go places with her and she decided to travel on her own.  As I was helping her plan her trip, she turned to me and said, "If the guy you are with does not have that innate desire to travel, he never will and it can't be learned.  Dump him. Dump him now."

As it happens, one of my favourite things about Boyfriend is that he has that same desire that I have to go places and see new things.  So far, we've been lucky enough to be able to take a lot of mini-trips together and at the end of June, we took our first trip to Hawai'i together. 

And by together and I mean us plus some of his family.  His Uncle arranged for us to have a condo as part of his timeshare, so we spent a week on The Big Island of Hawai'i on the Kona side. 

There was significantly less hanging out on the beach than one might expect for a Hawai'i trip.  For one, I'm really a hang out on the beach kinda gal, and for another, The Big Island does not have the sprawling sandy beaches that one pictures when they think of Hawai'i.  We did, however, see and do a ton of amazing things.

 We hiked the Kīlauea Volcano crater.  We visited Puʻuhonua O Hōnaunau - The City of Refuge.  We saw Akaka Falls, Pe'epe'e Falls, and Rainbow Falls.  And we took a snorkel trip to Kealakekua Bay, near the Captain Cook monument.  Oh, and in between all that we had some amazing meals, saw some amazing sunsets, and just relaxed. 


We also learned on this trip that I am very, very bad at saying Hawaiian words – I either leave out whole syllables or I add extra – I think I read too fast to be bothered with pronouncing all the vowels... And amazingly, I hardly got sunburnt at all!  Anyway, I had an amazing time and I can't wait to have other travel adventures with Boyfriend in the future.

Snogging Songs

Once upon a time, I created a playlist called Snogging Songs. This was back in, oh, 2005 or so, right after my First Big Break Up.

The idea behind this playlist was to have some softer music that would subtly lure men into my arms.  Actually that makes this playlist sound way creepy… Really, it was a collection of songs that I could play when hanging out with a guy I hoped to snog, and hopefully it wouldn't seem too obvious that that's what I wanted.  Then if and when the snogging happened, it would set the mood.

Here are some selected tracks from that playlist, which I would set to shuffle.

However there were two songs within this playlist that I added as a test.  The sole purpose of these songs were to see if the person I was snogging was worthy of my time:

• Fuck Her Gently by Tenacious D 
• Business Time by Flight of the Conchords

If the person I was with did not, at the very least, laugh, then they weren't worth my time.  If they sang along, well, then I had chosen a worthy gentleman caller.


PS. I feel like this tells a lot about both my musical tastes and the way my mind works…

Catching up...

One of the reasons that I started this blog was to keep myself in the habit of writing.  And when I'm on top of things, that seems pretty successful.  This isn't to say that the writing is superb or profound in any way, but I'm writing nonetheless, which is something I used to do constantly and I've been missing.  To quote Sugar, I need to write like a motherfucker. 

Now that the weekend is almost upon us, I hope to catch up with some posts.  Boyfriend and I were just on The Big Island of Hawai'i for a week, as you can see in the photo above (or if you're like me, you can't stop staring at the Domo with a mustache on Boyfriend's shirt – and, yes, he wore that to a Lu'ua because he's a badass).  As the official photographer for this blog, I'm waiting for Boyfriend to pass me the good (good meaning his photos, not mine) pics from the trip so I can do a recap.  So, you've got that to look forward to.

I've also been neglecting because of some weird, random health issues.  I had planned to write a pre-travel post before we left, but I spent the last day here really, really sick with a migraine.  Then on Monday, in the airport on the way home, my mouth started swelling up… Tuesday, I had to have an emergency gum procedure.  They think that I had a cut on my gum and then had a reaction to something and it caused an infection. Delightful, yes?  So, now I have stitches and a lot of mouth pain.  I haven't been a happy camper this week.

Oh, and since I'm being honest, I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings and that's taken up quite a bit of time, too. :)

But all that aside, over the next two weeks, I get to see two of my most favourite people in the world, see the last Harry Potter movie in theaters, celebrate a ton of birthdays, and gear up for my own birthday at the end of the month.  There will be tons of fun here, guys! I just have to get on it!

Wizard Rock & Dinosaur Cake

One of my most awesome nerdy loves is Wizard Rock.  Oh, you've never heard of Wizard Rock?  It's cool, let me explain.

A Quick (and probably inaccurate) History of Wizard Rock:
I'm fairly certain that you can call Led Zeppelin the Godfathers of Wizard Rock.  If I have to explain that to you, we are no longer friends for at least 3 reasons... But that was back in the day.

In the early 2000s a band called The Switchblade Kittens wrote a song called "Ode to Harry Potter" which was from Ginny's POV in Chamber of Secrets.

A little while later, in 2002, two brothers somewhat jokingly formed a band called Harry and the Potters and wrote a bunch fast and sloppy songs about the first few Harry Potter books and from Harry's POV.

After that, the world exploded – Wizard Rock caught on BIG TIME and now along with Harry and the Potters and their evil counter-parts, Draco and the Malfoys, you can find tons and tons of other Wizard Rock bands (there was even a Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club for a couple of years and Christmas CDs and everything)!

And now you know.

So, anyway, the champions and reigning kings of Wizard Rock are still Harry and the Potters.  At some point their cute, few-lined, silly songs turned into really good, introspective, interesting, and often hilarious songs.  They're pretty good and are super fun to watch live (Boyfriend said that if they practiced they might be really good, but he also said he wants to join the band and play bass as Cho Chang, so I'm not sure I can take him seriously anymore).  They get so into the songs and into the characters (one brother plays as HP year 4 and the other as HP year 7) and there is tons of bantering and Wizard jokes.

I saw them for the second time this weekend at the Sunnyvale Public Library.  It was hot, outdoors, and there wasn't a huge crowd.  Still, it was a good show in the way that a show is good when a lot equipment gets knocked over and one of the Harry Potters is wearing his sweater backwards for half the set before noticing. 

They played a lot of the songs off their earlier albums which was fun (though "Power of Love" is hands-down their best album). And their drummer apparently keeps changing his identity at each show – at our he was Sirius Black. They also made a Pog joke that kinda fell flat, but I suspect that's because 3 of us in the crowd were old enough to know what Pogs were... And Boyfriend was stoked over their many Back to the Future references, too!

Also, before the show I bought their super awesome, punk rock 12" vinyl record "Live at the New York Public Library" (I collect records, too) and met the band – brothers Paul and Joe.  My dear friend, Kate, has been friends when them for ages, so she insisted that I go introduce myself at the show (she had warned(?) them that I would be saying hi when she saw them a few days earlier in San Diego).  I was wearing my Pterodactyl dress in preparation for the next part of my night and the boys – in a moment of absolute hilarity – tried to invite themselves to the Jurassic Park Party I was going to next, then realized they had another show to play in Santa Cruz.  That, my friends, is the drawing power of the dinosaur.

Which brings me to later that night...

My friend Peter, aka The Mayor, had been putting off his birthday for so long that I decided to swoop in and declare it a Jurassic Park Themed event.  Unfortunately, this didn't really work as Boyfriend and I were the only one who stuck to the dinosaur theme (my dress, his t-shirt)... Oh, and our friend maRk did bring dinosaur toys, so there was that.

But, not realizing that everyone would be total Flounders, I had spend the morning getting dinosaur type goodies ready for Peter: some candy that looked like dinosaur eggs, chocolate rocks, dinosaur toys, and a dinosaur cake, which ended up looking more like Reptar from Rugrats than the actual cake tin (because I frosted it backwards)...  Still, we had a good time at dinner and then went and drove go-karts before eating the dinosaur cake.

All in all, awesome Saturday night.  Did you do anything amazingly awesome, too?

Also, find out more about Harry and the Potter's Ride the Lightening 2011 summer tour here!

Fashion Friday: June 13 – 17

This week felt pretty fast probably because I had a few things to look forward to: Fellowship in theaters and a photo shoot with the lovely and talented Barb – I hope to share the photos when I get to see them.  So this week's wardrobe was all over the map, including a purple Hawaiian-esque dress I wore with pearls on Wednesday that I managed to not get a picture of (which is OK, because it means I can wear it again and you guys will never know).

I love this dress.  It's from Target and is actually more of a coral-orange than the pink it look in this pic.  It's cotton and drapes like a dream and has enough detail to keep it interesting; the sweater is another Christmas gift is is probably from Nordstrom or Macy's or something; the shoes are Tom's wedges which I live in (I think I wore them 3 times this week... is that a valid reason for buying more pairs?); the belt came with a skirt and the earrings are also Target.

You may recognize this outfit as it was peaking out behind me polishing off a pizza before LoTR the other night.  I really like how this came together... The blazer is actually an awesome red lined with white polka-dots on blue and it's cropped so you roll the sleeves; the shorts are super high wasted and I thought it was a skirt at first, though I also thought the pattern was bunnies (they're deer) – both items are from H&M; the shirt you can kinda see blue and from Anthropolgie and I've worn it before; earrings are from a Kate Spade sample sale and you can't see them but, you guessed it, Tom's wedges!

So, this is something that I had wanted to try for a while now: shorts with tights.  I think it kinda worked.  The tights are from Target and the unseen boots are Cathy Jean; the shorts are H&M and I adore them because a) they are purple and b) they were under $20; the shirt is from the Van's Outlet which I used to pass all the time driving between the Bay Area and Monterey, and it's paird with a boring Old Navy tank top underneath; And another mysterious Christmas sweater – it matches the one in the above post because it was given to my sister who traded it to me for another sweater I got.. now I have twinsies!

 I guess I'm inadvertently doing a monochromatic thing if I ditched the sweater.  I didn't actually realized that I own this much navy blue nor did I intend to wear it all at the same time...  Anyway, we see a repeat of my favourite Genetic jeans and – oh wow! – Tom's again (but at least they are flats this time); the shirt is shirt is Jones New York from Ross and the sweater is from Nordstrom; you can hardly see the necklace but it's this awesome beaded mess which I discovered in the communal jewelry drawer at home! 

To round our this busy week, I have band practice tonight (actually it's happening right now in the other room).  Boyfriend and maRk are playing with some amazing sounds in Logic and I'm polishing off a bottle of wine and writing melodies.  And that's just the start of this weekend that will be full of awesomeness – I'll be seeing Harry and the Potters for the first time in a few years and going to a Jurassic Park themed birthday for my dear friend, Peter! 

Any else have awesome plans this weekend?