Here's to a Bun-less Year

ringing in the new year right!

Like most every other person on the planet, today is the beginning of something different! Don't laugh, I swear that it is going to work this time! I mean, I have only been awake for 10 hours and I have already completed NUMEROUS of my daily 'New Years Resolutions,' starting with this blog overhaul.

I was looking back at my blog while I was trying to figure out how to import it to its new home and realized that I didn't blog a single solitary time in 2014. I point this out to show how its not a lie that this year is shaping up to be the best. In 2014 I dated quite possibly the worst option for me, gained 30 lbs, and even took a job at the mall to try and tide my finances over until my business picked up. With all of this lovely baggage I moved into 2015. My year started off (like seriously less than two weeks in) with me calling the cops on my ex who in an attempt to win me be back decided it was a great idea to get wasted, threaten my roommate and me, and then circle my house banging on all the doors and windows. Now you see why I have I haven't blogged much? I turned into kinda a hot mess. 

The year did shape up some. I lost some weight, I actually asked a guy out (that is a story for another time) which I hadn't done in 10 years, had consistent work, was asked on 7 dates, and started being a bit more happy. Now that I have the basic framework to get the best of my old self back--and hopefully some new good traits--I feel like this next year truly can be the best. 

I didn't get the set up done for my Photo A Day, so this will have to do. I was not made to stay up until 3am... I almost thought 2016 wouldn't even be a thing, I felt so terrible this morning. 

So, to make the resolutions stick here they are in all their glory:

Health:

1. Do something active for at least 30 minutes a day
2. Limit sugar
3. Limit soda (eventually get to no soda)
4. Cook 1 new meal a week

Beauty:

1. Get dressed everyday (preferably real pants)
2. Put on makeup everyday
3. Fix my hair everyday (no more buns)
4. Floss more than once a year

my sediments this morning

Self Improvement:

1. Limit screen time (keep iPad out of my room at night)
2. Read at least 1 book a month
3. Write at least 1 blog post a month
4. Work on personal projects for 30 minutes a day
5. Send more cards/snail mail

Love:

1. Activity try to date (try actually leaving the house)
2. Stand up for myself early, don't let them string me along
3. Only date people who put in as much as me
4. Be kind to myself

To make these things work, I also have one more resolution. I will try to photograph myself everyday for the next year. This way I can see the improvements (that I put on real pants!) and hopefully that my happiness level has increased too. I want to get back to my old weight--but I don't want this year to be about that, I want it to be more about being happy with myself and seeing that I am a person worthy of photos, dates, and everything good I want. 

So here's to 2016, a bun-less year for my hair and hopefully a smaller bun on my backside!

this single lady

You'd think that dating someone for four months would make it hard to get back into the swing of single life. Turns out i am almost as good at adjusting to single-dom as i am to jet lag (i am a rockstar at combatting jet lag by the way).

this is the face of a recently dumped girl. or a girl that just cut onions. okay fine, this photo is from when i cut onions. i wish you could see the tears dripping off my chin soaking my shirt. ironically, my boyfriend always cut onions for me, i guess it is tear stained shirts again for me now. sucky suck, i eat a lot of onions.

So what is it like to be single and live alone? Oh, it is a party i'll tell you what. It only took one day to adjust back to my normal--perfect-- sleep schedule, in bed around ten and up at seven. Being dumped ironically also pushes me to exercise and eat less sweets (except for last night when i 'accidentally' ate half a (small) pan of reese's bars...) so i have been working out like none other (should i be worried that i am an aggressive person if instead of crying i want to lift weights and run until my legs throb?). I was at my heaviest ever last week but now i am on the road to skinny jean recovery. My apartment is also very clean. I think i replaced my boyfriend with another man, my new dyson. I vacuum all the time. Seriously, all the time.

Being single lets you do anything you fancy. Lately, the things that i have been fancying involve Christmas. So now, without anyone judging (not that my boyfriend ever judged how i decorated my apartment, but whatever) my plan of attack for things, i have fully 'thrown' up Christmas all over my house.










Today i pulled out my iron for the first time. I didn't use it for clothes--i try not to buy things that need such a device--i used it to flatten snowflakes of course. I also got creative with my Christmas tree. I couldn't find paper clips to hang my small silver ornaments so naturally i choose the smallest clothes pins i have.  I then decorated with my trusty--twelve odd years old--popcorn and cranberry chain. She is a real beauty and makes my tipsy tree perfect. Speaking of being single, you know you are single when your Christmas decorations take up less than a square foot of closet space. All of my ornaments fit in a small tin can, pretty classy indeed.

When you are single you also get to do classy things like lounge around in your sock monkey slippers with your huge plush robe while you pick apart a chicken carcass on your leather ottoman. Next i will probably paint my nails skanky barbie pink, you know, to shake things up a bit. 

Don't get me wrong, i don't seek to be single even though i am so damn good at it, it is just something that unfortunately happens. Do i wish that my boyfriend would realize that i am a catch (come on, i even postpone painting my nails so i can pick a chicken clean, that is a damn good woman)? Yes. Do i wish that he hadn't had me pick him up from the airport and use my time and gas only for him to dump me when we got to provo? Yes. Do i wish i hadn't accidentally started crying in front of my class when a friend asked about him the day after he dumped me? Surprisingly, no. It was rather entertaining with this poor boy was trying to console me while i was laugh/crying. He was patting my knee from a distance trying to make things better saying, "um i usually don't make people cry...". Lucky chap, he's been married so long he forgot how to console girls with broken hearts. 

oh and my exboyfriend admitted while we dated that he never read my blog. one of my friends said that should have been a sign...

i here by declare today, a reese's holiday

 I love reese's.

I love normal reese's cups

 but more than that, 

i love the seasonal reese's tree/heart/egg/pumpkin.

I don't just love reese's, i might have a slight addiction. 

(you can probably tell this by how many images are in this post, it rivals the amounts in post about my lovable family)

Easter for me means lots of reese's, don't get me wrong, i celebrate for all the right reasons too and understand Passover, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but for the commercial aspects of Easter it is all about reese's, none of that crappy chocolate coated in an 'egg' like shell. gross. 

Last year, bless her soul, this was my Easter basket from Mother Dearest. It might not have been large, but she knew that the only thing i really wanted was one of those eggs so it was perfect. perfect in all of its tiny glory.

My love of the holiday reese's has been around probably since i discovered their goodness. They have the perfect chocolate to peanut butter ratio, which by the way is WAY more peanut butter than chocolate. They are easier to crumble on top of ice cream. The chocolate layer is easier to peel off so you can enjoy just the peanut butter. They are perfect in every way.

Last year i had a disappointing experience involving reese's. The following email was sent to my siblings after i purchased our Mom's Christmas present. I told them how much each of them owed me and included methods of payment. More disappointing to me than not receiving even one payment in back tickles was the fact that no one paid me in reese's Christmas trees. Two of my sisters said that they were afraid i was going to eat my self into an oblivion. Stupid sisters that look out for you girlish figure...

This year i decided i would take my reese's fate into my own hands.


Meet my best/worst decision: the 6 oz egg. 

I somehow convinced a boy that we should go on an adventure to find/eat these. Of course being a boy, he decided that we should each get one. WHAT THE?! I could have told you that 6 oz is enough for a small army but he must have been a reese's novice. Needless to say we both only ate about a quarter and then admitted defeat. The said boy just laid on my family room floor the rest of the night. I think i killed him. Okay he isn't dead but he told me last week that he hasn't been able to look at a reese's since.

This sucker is not for the faint of heart. It even took me two weeks to want to each a normal size egg again.

Then it was the monday after Easter which equals National Half Price Reese's Egg Day! Even if the large egg almost caused cardiac arrest, i couldn't pass up the chance to stock up on the delectable treats. You see, the next holiday that has a specially shaped reese's is halloween, you can't have a 6 month drought, my body won't allow it.

Don't worry, i didn't buy any of the large eggs, the chocolate is just too thick and the egg too hugantic. But i did buy a year supply of normal eggs, 36 to be exact.

Now when you come to my lovely apartment you are greeted with a large supply of eggs, exactly how every apartment should be.

and on a completely unrelated note, i split my pants again today (the other side split two weeks ago). I swear this was a work related box lifting injury and not the fact that i just bought 6480 calories worth of reese's...

letters, love, and high school romance

I get a little frustrated when people attack Valentine's Day. So what you aren't dating anyone, what percentage of mankind is on this one certain day anyway? Just because you aren't raptured by another doesn't mean that you can't have a stellar day. I LOVE Valentine's Day, basically i love any day that involves sending letters/cards/love notes/and has a specially shaped Reese's.

letters from all my 'missionaries'

Basically since forever, i have been saving every letter or note that i received. I am getting quite the collection (this also means that i attend way too many weddings/bridal showers/baby showers and therefore get copious amounts of thank you cards... which by the way, means i had better get a heck of a lot of people at all of those events for me.) Yesterday i went through the basket of letters and read a few, finding among some generic greetings, a few dazzling treasures.

letters from just one certain missionary

I have always had a love for letters. When my siblings were in college i would write them fairly often, and no, my spelling hasn't really improved since then. Even as s child i knew that letters have an aesthetic presence that can't be beat, i love a simple envelope sealed with wax. This is probably why i was so good at writing missionaries, i loved the visual final of the letters. One time i was writing around twenty different boys that were on missions. I didn't write them all a ton, some only got a few letters over the years but the lucky few got more than a handful. Because of this i was also graced with a number of letters.  It was hilarious going back through them, especially the Valentine's Day cards pretending to be in love with me (i think they just wanted more letters...) -side note, i went to one mission reunion with a friend and someone referenced me as the girl with the cool envelopes and wax seals, i guess my letters made it around the office...

Then there were the letters from my family. Sarah gets the award for the most creative addressing ever. Too bad i can't seem to find her Valentines, those were works of art. Any letter that is addressed to Aunt Barfy/Bethany also holds a special place in my heart, espcially when the envelopes only contain crayon drawings of ducks that look like the Pigeon books. 

There are also love notes from church. In the last couple of wards i have been in people can write notes to each other and have them delivered after church. My most favorite would be the three poems that i received from three different boys about my yellow high heels (i don't blame them, they are the most amazing shoes-quite possibly ever).

But still my most prized letter that i have is one written on Valentine's Day in 2005. In january of that year i broke up with my high school boyfriend. A few weeks later he slipped this into my hand.  We hadn't really talked since the break up, go figure, but we had been friends since elementary school. I won't bore you with the whole letter but the end was amazing. 

My favorite quote: 

"Seeing as how it is Valentine's Day i just want to say a few things. To me you are still the prettiest girl that i know...I never told you this but out of all the girls that i've kissed you were by far the best kisser. Your kiss could make an old man jump up and dance like he was young again."      

oh the wisdom of seventeen year old boys.  

Everyone needs to know that someone thinks they are pretty and amazing enough to give even old men new life. Though lets hope that i never actually find out about the old man part, unless of course i am an old bitty that is married to that old man.

Moral of the story: save all your notes so on Valentine's Day you can stop pretending that no one loves you. Have a little review of the letters and eat a heart shaped Reese's, this can cure all that ails you on such a day.

a tim tam thanksgiving

I have fallen in love with many a thing while i have been in New Zealand, so much so, i may never come back to the states. 

one of these newly found wonders is:

Tim Tam cookies

It is actually a Australian creation but i discovered it in New Zealand so i will leave it with that. It is pretty amazing and you can do what they like to call 'the tim tam slam' where you bite the ends off of the cookie and sip hot chocolate through it, then you slam the cookie in your mouth before it melts/disolves. This sounds like a winner of an activity. If i like you enough, you may be one of the few that is invited over for a tim tam slam night (since i will of course be bringing some back since i have ample room in my baggage as my last post indicated.)

In honor of Thanksgiving, i decided to be glutenous with Tim Tams instead of the usual pie (BUT i still need a pie fix, i am thinking i can only safely make it two weeks without the pie i was due today). We also had a turkey dinner, i think by accident, but however it came about, i appreciated it.

And in the true Thanksgiving spirit, here are the things i am currently grateful for (just some, not all of course):

-my hilarious family that is always a fountain of good stories
-a good job that lets me take paid vacations, a good brother named levi would go along with those too
-milo, especially when he wears a sweater and falls asleep on me at work
-tim tams and pie
-education and the fact that i enjoy learning/reading/school
-friends, the good kind that stick around forever
-boys, even if they don't like you back, having crushes is at least entertaining/fun/funny
-home furnishings, the more i apartment shop the more i appreciate good furniture/bedding/linen
-food, all of it (except mushrooms and olives, they are always a bad decision)
-and last but not least, i am thankful that i am happy.

In other news from my trip: i of course had a tiny mishap involving water, long jumping, mud, and my iPhone.

you can probably figure out what happened, but when i get a better internet connection i will add a photo...