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Foxy Fall

Foxy Fall

Dang bros, so I hate when things I've connected from the back end update my other stuff without telling me, but hey, let's use this as an excuse to update my dear, neglected BLOG. Poor blog, so neglected and dusty.

I've been playing around on Polyvore a little during lunch, and what I like to do most on Polyvore is create outfits with things I already own, or close proximates. Obviously I don't own $185 jeans. Or Toms (yet?). But I do have that fox sweater (alas, it has disappeared from the website, only a week after I bought it, but the owl and sheep ones are still there) and I have that giraffe scarf, purchased at Target in Pinole about a year ago. This may be my casual Friday outfit. Or maybe SPARKLEPYRES PART 4 outfit on Saturday (did Malvina and I get advanced tickets to see the last installment of Twilight? MAYBE).

I don't even know what to talk about, it's been so long since I updated. 

I've mostly been working around the house and being busy doing other things, like working on OPERATION HOME IMPROVEMENT, which stalled rather impressively with the delivery of a new china hutch that I felt compelled to paint turquoise. With that done, and one closet cleaned out, I now have to clean up the living room A LOT and vaccuum A LOT all of the dust and paint detritus of various projects I've been working on around the house. I did remember after the hutch adventure that I totally hate painting. Good times! But the hutch looks nice. 

I got a Melmer for my nail polishes, which are now stored in the cleaned out closet over my linens situation. I filled up the entire Melmer in one go so now I need another one; I'm just waiting for another 50% off coupon for Michael's to drop in on me. I suspect with Black Friday next week (already!) that I will get lucky. I read somewhere that a Melmer holds like 400 nail polishes. I don't think that's true, but I stopped counting after 250. (Basically I've been spending my yarn money on nail polishes this year.)

Speaking of nail polishes, I went slightly nuts this month and got a bunch of Deborah Lippmann sets and some other things (my first Cult Nails purchase!). In the next few months and particularly next year I will be tightening my belt and not buying stuff so I am basically having a last hurrah before having no fun. Or rather, buying less stuff than usual. *cough*cough* Also it's almost Christmas and I need to stop buying nail polish and finish up getting Christmas presents. Here's what I got so far (that I could find pics of.) (Because I got like four of the China Glaze holiday collection and I found some stuff on sale places…)

November '12 Nail Polish Haul (so far)

Haha, I'm the worst. 

Till next time folks! 😛

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Operation Home Improvement (dammit)

So, the time has come, now that I've been in my house for almost four years (I know, right??) to actually unpack some stuff that I shoved into one of my closets approximately 3.5 years ago when I hosted Easter not long after I moved in. 

Last year I accidentally set a precedent to host Christmas Eve, and as the daughter of the family matriarch (sorry Mom… it's true!), I guess I have to Suck It Up™ and continue on with new family traditions. At my house. In my stuff. *sob*

Anyway, so last year it took me all of December to shovel out my house, and this year I'm determined not to spend all month cleaning out my collected detritus. I truly, deeply, abhor housekeeping (except for laundry, I kind of love doing laundry), so for me to undertake the following projects is a sign of how much I don't want to spend time doing things in December.

Here's the deal. In the master suite (haha… but it kind of is one) there is a section of the room that has two closets – a regular sized one and a big one that meet, more or less, at a right angle. The regular sized closet is full of plastic storage bins, my dresses and paint cans. This closet is opposite the vanity, aka Clothes Receptacle Dumping Ground. I would actually like to use the vanity as a vanity since I have real designer makeup now and a huge nail polish collection that needs a real home aside from the den coffee table. 

PROJECTS TO COMPLETE BEFORE CHRISTMAS OMG:

  1. Clear out second closet completely, bins, dresses, paint, foam bed thing, everything. Actually unpack bins and put things away and/or get rid of stuff.
  2. Move filing cabinet from big closet to second closet
  3. Install shelving into second closet so it can be a linen closet (which I don't have – my linens live piled in a cardboard box, as they have since 2009. Oops. For someone who has a generous amount of sheet sets and towels, this is vaguely embarrassing.
  4. Get massive Star Wars collection out of the den and into the big closet, where the filing cabinet was. My Star Wars crap is stored in two very large bins under the bar section of my kitchen counter (on the den side). I want to get at least one bar stool to place there instead. 
  5. Clean out old clothes/shoes, stored clothes at bottom of the big closet, and donate to the Richmond Rescue Mission.
  6. Move shoe bin of shoes I actually wear to big closet instead of under vanity.
  7. See if I can get purple luggage set into either big or second closet OR store outside in the shed.
  8. Move paint to shed.
  9. Clear off vanity of clothes thrown on it and chair, move makeup train case to vanity from bathroom and maybe get a Melmer from Michael's to hold the nail polishes. Also get a 5x magnifying mirror for the space and move some of the other makeup crap from the bathroom to the vanity.
  10. Clear out vanity drawers (I don't think there's too much stuff in them)
  11. Cull books and donate to WC Library foundation for fundraisers
  12. Straighten up living room and get cow horns up on the wall (not sure how to attach, need to check 3M products if they have a narrow hook to hang it – can't really use a nail because the area where I want to hang it is right behind the stove vent and power outlets above the microwave in the kitchen)
  13. Move old computers and Harry Potter Legos from the living room into now-organized closets. Harry Potter Legos might go into the craft room closet, but that is another disaster for another day. 
  14. Unpack new dishes and pots and get them into rotation – clean out old dishes and pots and donate to the foster kid program (for kids who age out of the foster care system and don't really have anything to start out with – a program I hugely support! I think these kids are often forgotten about in the grand scheme of society.)
  15. Move sconces from foyer to flank college diploma over bookshelf. I ordered a large print to hang in the foyer that I've been wanting. (We're coming up on the end of 2012: Year of Doing/Buying Whatever I Want… gotta get some final stuff in! heh)
  16. Replace pinch pleat curtain hooks – the hooks have disintegrated and I need to reinstall new hooks along the rod and rehang the curtains. I'm pretty peeved about this because I feel like I JUST replaced the one set, but what are you going to do? The hooks are plastic and don't cost very much. 

Generally speaking I would just do one room at a time but all of the above kind of interelate – except for maybe the book cull and sconce moving. Everything that needs to be done all starts at the second closet! Boo! The time has come. 

Since I do hate, oh so very much, pretty much everything about housekeeping, I'm hoping that the above projects will keep me organized for the foreseeable future, so I can keep the house straightened up on a regular basis. Having a dedicated place for linens will be delightful! I haven't had a linen closet in years. 

You'd never know it, but this year the house has been much more organized and less covered in papers than it was last year (somewhere my dad is shaking his head in disdain) – I can tell, and since I'm the one who lives there, mine is the only opinion that matters. Seriously though, I have been a lot better about keeping the junk mail off of every flat surface. (I throw it in a pile by the back door, which then gets thrown in the recycle bin.)

I'm not really a minimalist when it comes to home decoration – I love STUFF (boy do I) but at the same time, I'm also not really attached to any of my STUFF. In fact, as the years go by and I acquire more STUFF, the less STUFF I feel like I have a real connection to. (Probably because my affection is spread around). 

I do love those terrible cow horns though; they add a certain je ne sai quois to the whole thing. And by je ne sai quois I mean awesome. Heh.

(I am the person who has a hot pink flocked deer statue in her living room. Taste is not exactly an issue around here.)

I ordered the above linked art print, and I want to get my Ed Emberley (!) print "Monster Parade" framed. I want to do a floating frame (can't have the print touch the glass) and the print has rounded corners so I don't really know how that would work. I guess I could, you know, actually take it down to the frame shop and get a bid. *rolls eyes at self*

I got started on the bins the other night and have been finding interesting things in them (sketchbooks from years past with crying Batmans, zombies, etc., my handgun safety booklet, a CD I thought was long vanished, decorative papers…). I am definitely making progress on my project – and I found the size shelving I want to install in the closet on the Lowe's website. I may get organized sooner than I was expecting!

Anyway, so that's what's going on with the house. My dream someday is to have a weekly housekeeper. Yes, it's one of those things that I would gladly pay someone else to do (much like yardwork, which I do pay someone to do occasionally [my cousin]). 

***

When I bought my place in December 2008 (I moved in over New Years of 2009), I always figured I'd just be there for three or four years before moving on to someplace else. Well, I've worked with homeowners associations for six years now just about, and I know that I do NOT want to live in a condo. I don't know what I want to do or where I want to live. But I CAN tell you that I'm perfectly happy where I am for now, and I have no intention of moving any time soon. So that three or four years may turn into six or seven or eight years. 

I may not live in the richest, best neighborhood, or own the richest, best house, but when I see what's happening around the country, and I look at what are, essentially, the riches surrounding me (dudes! I have a laundry room and satellite cable and I can park right next to my house. I'm not attached to any neighbors. I have central air and heating), I have no complaints. So what I am doing right now, is making my house my home, because I live there, and I will for awhile. 

And I'm grateful for that. 

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Vacaciones! The Ronald Reagan Experience (Days 7-8)

The conclusion to my vacation posts…

Awhile ago I had looked up to see where exactly the Reagan Library was located because I thought it might be something to do the next time I went down to visit Sarah, and it turns out it's pretty much in their hood, only 40 miles away from them in Simi Valley. As it turned out, they are also currently running an exhibit on Disney Archives – costumes, props, memorabilia from Disney's past. That sounded like the perfect excuse to head down to Simi Valley, so all of us headed down there on Saturday to check it out. 

We got there just a hair after 10 a.m. (when it opened) and the parking lot was already almost full. We had already purchased our tickets online and since the kids were with us, we headed to the Disney Archives exhibit first. One of the things that I thought was really well done was incorporating how Reagan actually had involvement to some degree with Disney – he was there as an announcer on the day the park opened, and continued on to have a friendship with Walt Disney himself, which was documented through letters and photos. 

The part of the exhibit I liked the most were the costumes!

Giselle's wedding dress from Enchanted. It really is that poofy!

Big Maleficent dragon head from the Disneyland Fantasmic show!

Model pirate ship from Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

I've been to only one other presidential library – George H. W. Bush at the Texas A&M campus back in 1999, and at that time, it was pretty boring and more like a library than a museum, though I looked at that link and it looks like it's now pretty impressive in its own right (a new building and exhibits were built a couple years ago). 

Anyway, I was really impressed with everything. The building was set up so each exhibit flowed into each other organically. I've been to plenty of museums and usually they're like, here's the Meso-American room, here's the Ming Dynasty room, right next to each other with no flow. The Reagan Library was set up really well in a timeline so as you toured the building, the narrative really flowed well. 

I was most impressed with the section that had the actual video of the 1981 assassination attempt – I'd never seen the video before and actually only knew the bare minimum about it – that it happened, that the shooter was nuts and trying to impress Jodie Foster, that Agent Brady was severely injured and went on to lobby for stricter gun control laws. The way the library had the section set up was really powerful – first you watch the video in surround sound, and then there were all the displays and artifacts, and more video about the recovery and what have you. I thought it was really well done. 

One of the really awesome parts of the Library is that they have, in its own glass pavilion, the verysame Air Force One that Reagan (and other presidents) flew around in. It was decommissioned in 2004 or thereabouts and transported to the Reagan Library for display. 

It's kind of amazing. 

The pavilion from outside

The view from the pavilion into the valley

You could go inside the plane, but you weren't allowed to take pictures, which was kind of a bummer but on the other hand, I understand that for security reasons it's probably not the BEST idea to take pictures of the airplane that squired around various presidents and their technology. There were also these pictures put up on how they got the plane from wherever it had been, all the way to California and up the hill and into the pavilion, which was essentially built up around it. Really an engineering feat that was just as interesting as the plane itself!

Anyway, it was a GREAT trip! I'm so glad I went, and I'd love to go back to the Library by myself someday – I would probably spend all day there, have a Guinness in the pub underneath the plane (yes, really!) and read every single display in the place. As it was, it took us three hours to get through everything, even with a passle of kids. 

After the library we had lunch at an incompetent Chili's, then headed back to Santa Clarita. 

That evening we headed out to New Moon, which is my favorite restaurant down there. I know what you're thinking: New Moon? Isn't that part of the Twilight franchise?

NOOOOOOOOO

It's a really delicious Chinese restaurant. We ordered Chloe Shrimp (my faaaavorite!), spicy green beans, chicken fried rice, honey walnut chicken, dragon beef (my NEW favorite! omg it was amazing)… and maybe something else but now I can't remember. I did manage to beat Bill to to the bill (hah) and treated them for the meal since they'd been so generous to me the rest of the trip. DRAGON BEEF 

*** 

In conclusion, while I bought a ton of noodles and a cutting board shaped like the United States on my vacation, I did not buy any nail polish. Don't worry, I made up for it during the rest of the month. (My nail polish guy even called today with the new OPI holiday collection. It's like he knew it was payday!)

I'm heading back to LA over New Year's to see the new bebe, so that's something to look forward to, and in the meantime I'm trying to sort the house out (more on that later) and finish my Christmas shopping before December. I ordered a ton of stuff from Lima Beads and there's at least two more bead shows I'm attending before the end of the year, PLUS I discovered there's a new Hobby Lobby in Stockton (45 miles from me – as opposed to only getting to visit Hobby Lobby when I'm in Texas every two years!).

I can't believe it's almost October!