So not to make a really left-field reference to something that happened months ago, but.... anyone remember that "just because" collage I made back in January? No? That's ok, I won't hold a grudge. It's right here, if you'd like a quick refresher. G'wan then. Take a look - it's relevant to this blog post.
K, now that you've definitely gone and looked, here's why it's relevant: Using the scraps of magazine cutouts that were leftover from that collage, I made another collage altogether. Heyooo! #Recycle.
Here's a casual step-by-step via photos:
And the mandatory close-ups of the details:
Here are the two pieces together:
The cool thing about recycling scraps from one collage to make a new one is that you can create multiple pieces of art that have a similar feel, but each with
its own unique look. It kind of reminds me of a fashion show - where everything that comes down the
runway looks like it belongs together, even though each piece is different. Here's another example of a similar kind of project I made for my grandmother several years ago:
I hope to do more crafty things soon - whether it be painting or making more collages or drawing. I feel happy and purposeful when creating things, so it makes sense to make an effort to do it more often.
On that note, I'll have a recap soon of Craft Club #5, I promise!
So what artistic projects are YOU working on?
Do you have a favorite Pin board for color palettes? They make for great collage inspiration!
WELP I just got my upper-right wisdom tooth removed this morning, and I feel like a NEW WOMAN.
Actually, the first dose of pain meds are just starting to wear off, so I'll likely be feeling like a sore, cranky woman very shortly. Either way, getting this sucker out is one more thing I can take off of my mind/plate for now, so thank god for that.
This was much less dramatic than my last wisdom tooth extraction,
which involved lots of tooth-breaking and gymnastics on the part of the
oral surgeon. This time, the tooth was able to be pulled out all in one
bloody piece:
I'm one of those people who requires entirely too much local anesthetic before feeling properly numbed, and this time was no different. At first, it felt fine with the initial dosage, but when the doctor started really pulling the tooth out, I could definitely feel some uncomfortable, slightly-painful pressure. We stopped, and she gave me more anesthetic while explaining to me that she was twisting out my tooth "like a lightbulb." Hmm. Interesting visual, doc. Thanks! With just a couple minutes of twisting and without much more fanfare, the tooth came out. Done and done.
And yep, I took this one home with me, too. Why should the tooth fairy have all the tooth-collecting fun? Speaking of which, my mom told me to put the tooth under my pillow tonight... Note to self: #DONTFORGET.
I do encourage you to check out the "after" photo of Wisdom Tooth #1 - it didn't fare nearly as well as this one did. But in its defense, it was in a much trickier place in my mouth.
Currently I'm just slightly chipmunk-cheeked on my right side, but it may get worse in the next day or two. I'm not allowed to exercise - or SNEEZE - for a couple of days either, so... wish me luckkkk.
Sidebar, I was really, really pleased with my entire experience at this dental office - Great Hill Dental in Boston. The surgeon I saw, Dr. Carol Lorente, was unbelievably kind, patient, and warm. The woman assisting the procedure, Kim, was the same. I felt like I was in very good hands with them, and that peace of mind goes a long way with someone like me who is very anxious about the dentist.
Who else has some misbehaving wisdom teeth? If you have a funny story about yours, I'd love to hear it!
Heyoooo, happy Sunday evening! It's the end of the first weekend of spring, so I hope you did it up right and proper.
My weekend has been a solid mix of solitude and friendship, so no complaints there. On Friday I went to the gym, did some online shopping (bought these little guys from DSW's site), went to the grocery store, and binge-watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones into the wee hours of the morning. (By the way, I just finished Season 4, so I'm all caught up now... and actually loved the show so much that I immediately started it over on Season 1 last night. Is that weird? Don't answer that; I don't care.)
On Saturday I started my day (predictably) at Donut Villa, then hit up the gym for a lower body workout before meeting up with my friends for an evening of shooting pool at Flat Top Johnny's in Cambridge. I'd never been there before, but it's an open-layout bar with food, drinks, and 12 pool tables. J-rod and I won a few games in a row - #NOBIGGIE - and a couple games of Skee-Ball were also enjoyed.
Today was Craft Club #5! That, of course, will get its own blog post, so I'm not going into too much detail about it now... but I will gladly share that I made a scrumptious fruit salad for the occasion. Noms on noms on noms!
Alright with the weekend in a nutshell, let's move on to zee workouts of zee weeeeeek! Here's what I did at the gym this week:
* When I go "hiking" on the treadmill, I adjust the intensity
and/or incline every minute for the entire duration, making sure to go
through the entire range of available inclines (0-15).
By the way, if you didn't catch the update that I added to last week's workout post, here is the link to the first workout video that I filmed for my company's YouTube channel: Intense TRX Interval for Your Core. A few people asked me about it, so figured I'd share here! Feel free to like/comment/share it with all your fitness-loving homies.
I shoooould have gone to the gym today, but Craft Club just sort of took over the morning/afternoon - which I'm certainly not complaining about. I absolutely love this scheduled "crafts and girls" time. Oftentimes it's more chatting than crafting, but - again - no one's complaining about that! #Love!
Annnnd here's the one grey cloud on the horizon that's been keeping me a little anxious all weekend: I'm getting a wisdom tooth out tomorrow morning. Eek! Because it's on the top (rather than my lower jaw bone), it shouldn't be as big of a to-do as the last one was, according to the oral surgeon. I'm hoping she's right!
Wish me luck in my recovery ;) And feel free to send me your favorite smoothie recipes.
How are your workouts going this week?
Did you do anything fun this weekend?
Fridays usually mean nails around here, but I'm taking a break from that this week because I didn't have the energy in me yesterday to come up with an idea, do all the nail/cuticle prep, polish my nails, take pictures, edit the pictures, etc. My Wednesday night went a bit further into the wee hours than I'd anticipated, which is why I was so done-for all day yesterday. What was so terribly exciting about my Wednesday evening, you ask? OH JUST MS. LAURYN HILL.
Yeppp, on Wednesday night I went with a few friends went to see an acoustic performance by Lauryn Hill at the Wilbur Theater in Boston. The tickets had been burning a hole in my iPhone (that's what we say
these days when we use Passbook, right?) for months!
I have a pulse, so obviously I was a fan of Fugees, and I was among the millions of people who bought (and became obsessed with) The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill back in 1998. A few years ago, she performed her entire Miseducation album at the Rock the Bells festival, and witnessing it in person was pretty special. When I heard she was coming to Boston, I immediately rallied some troops (Kara, Steph and Amanze!) and put it on my calendar.
The show was supposed to start at 8, but at around 8:30 a film began playing onstage - Concerning Violence, a short documentary about anti-imperialism and decolonization that was narrated by Ms. Hill. It was interesting (and also a bit depressing), but not everyone in the audience was psyched about being shown a documentary at a concert. When the film ended, a DJ began spinning onstage - who, by the way, was definitely dressed like she belonged in the background of a 1993 Salt 'n Pepa video. At this point, not everyone in the audience was psyched that there was a DJ playing instead of Ms. Hill. Can you pick up on a theme of growing malcontent?
It was well after 10pm when Lauryn finally came out and took her place on a loveseat-style couch at the center of the stage. Picking up her guitar and speaking little-to-no-words to any of us, she and her band launched into Conform to Love. Cue the chair-dancing, because it was a smallish venue and no one was really standing much.
I only took one photo while we were there, and it came out terribly blurry...
... but you get the general setup. I've been trying to find the setlist for the show, but so far it's nowhere to be found. Other highlights were when she did Sweetest Thing, Lost Ones, and Fu-Gee-La in its entirety.
She closed out the show with Doo Wop (That Thing), which is when she finally got up out of her chair herself. The rest of the audience followed suit, and it was a great closer. It was almost 12:30 in the morning when she finished, so that was an unexpected element of a Wednesday night show. So very worth being exhausted the next day!
Now for your entertainment, here is some music from Lauryn to get you on my level:
Sweetest Thing
So High (Cloud 9 Remix) - John Legend feat. Lauryn Hill
Turn Your Lights Down Low - Bob Marley feat Lauryn Hill
And here's a random cover of Conform to Love by a young woman named Kamilah Sumner - watch the whole thing, she just gets better and better.
Leave a comment to let me know what your favorite Lauryn Hill song is! And I'm sure that a regularly scheduled nail polish post will be back next Friday ;)
This was another week of doing pretty well at the gym! It's becoming a nearly habitual part of my day-to-day, and that's a habit I'm notttt mad about forming. Just need to make sure that I don't injure myself. God knows I'm prone to doing that, so... knock on wood.
* When I go "hiking" on the treadmill, I adjust the intensity and/or incline every minute for the entire duration, making sure to go through the entire range of available inclines (0-15).
I'm trying to increase my arm/chest strength ("pushing" exercises like chest presses) before I increase any of the weight on my "pulling" exercises (seated or bent over rows) so that my chest muscles have a chance to catch up to my back muscles. From what I have learned, if your back muscles are much stronger than your chest then you're not building a balanced upper body. I've moved up to 15 lbs for presses now, and once that becomes easy then I'll increase to 17.5 - probably in a few weeks? And won't that be exciting??!?
Speaking of exciting, here's a sneak peek of the first video I shot with my company's YouTube channel a few weeks ago:
Watch out world, there's a whole video coming. (Update: Here it is.)
I made sure to get in a Saturday morning workout this weekend because I knew that there'd be some ridiculousness happening later that day. My friends had planned an afternoon of early St. Patrick's Day festivities!
Around 2:30 on Saturday, a group of us met up at Orleans in Somerville's Davis Square for early afternoon drinks and apps. As I promised on Friday, I did indeed enjoy some Bailey's Irish Cream mixed with iced coffee and topped with whipped cream. Obviously, my kind of drink.
From there, we decided on a whim to go bowling, so we drove/Ubered over to Lanes and Games in Cambridge, which is fo' sho' a recurring favorite place to have fun together. Ten of us played 2 games on adjoining lanes, and more drinks and apps were had. I bowled a 101 my first game (not bad, for me) and then put in a dismal performance during the second game. I can't remember my score but it was probably less than 60? #facepalm
After bowling, some of the group splintered off, but some of us headed back to "after party" (it was only 8:45pm) at the house of my friends in Somerville. Insert drinks, darts, and dancing over the next 4 hours. It was a good night.
This morning afternoon when I got out of bed, I headed straight over to Donut Villa to fill my stomach with greasy breakfast food and the best-effing jelly donut I've ever had. How do they make them taste so good? The owner of the restaurant, John, told me with a wink that he gets them from Dunkin Donuts every morning, but I shook my head at him and told him I could taste the difference. Sidebar, they all love me at the Villa now. Score!
Anyway, I'm going to relax so hard the rest of the afternoon. You can catch me lounging in the bathtub and then watching a movie - or a few episodes of Game of Thrones. It's that kind of a recovery day, haha!
I hope you had a great weekend yourself. Any fun shenanigans or challenging workouts going on in your neck of the woods?
As a nod to my Irish heritage, I've got some green St. Patrick's Day nails today. But let's be honest - even if I weren't Irish, I'd be celebrating, right? That's how we do things in America. And on May 5th, we'll all be Mexican. #Freedom.
Here's how my nails are getting in on the holiday action:
The green is Balsam Fir by Revlon and the gold is a combo of Big Spender by Nina Ultra Pro and Crystal Gold from Forever21's Love & Beauty line.
I used two coats of Big Spender on my ring and thumb nails and topped that with 2 coats of Crystal Gold, which is a fairly sparse yellow-gold glitter in a clear base. It would have been way cooler if it was more jam-packed with glitter, but you can't win them all! Do you have a favorite gold glitter that's pretty opaque? Give me the deets!
I used 2 coats of Balsam Fir on all my other nails and finished those nails off with a matte top coat. I topped the gold nails with Seche Vite, to make them really shine and contrast with the green.
I'll be doing a bit of St. Patty's celebrating tomorrow with my friends at some Irish pubs around town. I can't stand the taste of beer, so no Guinness for me, but there may very well be some Bailey's Irish Cream in my future.
There's also a slight chance that I'll check out the (in)famous Southie St. Patrick's Day parade on Sunday... though that may be biting off more than I can chew, since Southie is known for becoming pretty chaotic on parade day. We'll see!
What are you going to be up to this weekend?
Are you wearing any green on your nails to celebrate?
Remember when I posted some pictures of a wintery Revere Beach back in February? Well those pictures were taken just before the Juno blizzard, and we've gotten feet upon feet of snow since then, so it seemed high tide time to head back out to the coast to see how the beach was looking these days.
The last time I was at the beach, the snow had freshly fallen and the entire beach was unsullied. Things weren't quite as pristine this time, since the waves of the many winter storms have battered the sand back over the last month or so...
A plane flew pretty low overhead as I walked along the water's edge...
The line from the tide was marked with a broken wall of sandy ice that stretched along the whole beach...
And oh, look, there's me!
As I walked back to my car, I stopped at the seawall to peer through a snow bank back at the beach:
Eventually I suppose I'll make it to Revere Beach when it's not covered in snow. And that day might be sooner than you'd think, since we've been hit with a "warm" week and the snow is finally starting to melt. And by "warm week" I mean that we're into the 40's now, so break out the flip flops, Massachusetts!!
