Come Ride with Me...

Stephen and I've spent the last week with his family on St Simon's Island off the coast of Georgia. A few days ago we rented bicycles and spent the entire afternoon exploring the island together. It's been forever since I've ridden a bicycle and recently a few of my physical therapy school friends have taken up biking and I can see why, it's so much fun! More than once it felt like the wind from the ocean was against us and we had to peddle hard! Our quads were burning! I took some pics along the way.

Early in the morning we walked just up the street to Ocean Motion where we picked out our bikes, got a basket and our locks and headed off!

Our first stop was to East Beach where we took this pic of us on the wooden walkway to the beach.

We then stopped at the Maritime Center and had a look around.

We continued riding toward town and came across this beautiful park full of live oaks and spanish moss. There were also tons of historic markers throughout the island and we made sure to read them whenever we came across them.

We decided to take a short break right at the marsh. The background in the pic above is the marsh.

We came across this secluded, wooded beach access area on our way back to the condo for a break. The view was too gorgeous to pass up.

Overall we had a great time finding a new way (at least for me) to explore everything the island had to offer with the freedom warranted by the bicycles. It was a great day!

Time off? Yes Please!

So, I absolutely LOVE having time off from school stuff, in the spring, for Christmas vacation, you name it, and I relish that time like no other! From my other posts you can tell that I love to read and that I've started reading some on this four week break I've had between the end of the semester and the beginning of internships. However, in addition to reading, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE scrapbooking and I love having the time to sit down and be creative as scrapbooking is one of my only creative outlets! 

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my favorite pages with you that I've created for the scrapbook I'm doing of me and Stephen (see my 101 in 1001 under "I want to be creative").

I apologize in advance for the poor photo quality as these were taken on a whim with my iphone and I didn't even take them out of the page protectors! (oops). I hope you enjoy.

This first one was inspired actually by Stephen; I initially wasn't going to scrapbook it but he insisted because it was one of my favorite places in the Peace Garden in Bitch, France where we visited in the summer of 2008.

The next two are part of a double page spread from the second time Stephen and I went to Guatemala.

I had a lot of fun with this page; I love the colors and the content inspired by a trip to a random sculpture park in St. Louis during the summer of 2009.

This next one is one of my favs because it actually tells a story: How we chose, chopped and took home our Christmas trees in 2009.

I was inspired by the crazy background paper I found for this page. I love the colors I worked with and the content was great. This page is part of a double page spread illustrating New Years Eve 2009/2010 a.k.a Stephen's Dad's birthday, a.k.a the night we got engaged!

This is the most recent page I've completed. I got some new spring paper and was excited to get creative with it. 

I love having free time! What does everyone else like to do in their free time?

Thank God It's...Tuesday?

There's nothing better than some unexpected fun, good food and quality girl time right in the middle of the week. Tonight I went to dinner at TGIF's with some great girls from class and another friend. All of us from class were engaged and there was definetly no shortage of wedding talk since the last to be engaged was just engaged not even a month ago! All the talk about wedding stuff got me thinking about my own wedding planning and how I've kind of fallen off the bandwagon.

It's weird but I've seemed to have lost some steam when it comes to planning... but I'm telling myself that it's normal because my wedding is not for 17 months and that I've got plenty of time to get wrapped up in the planning. Besides I've alreading got some big things out of the way:

The venue:

A great industrial space full of artists studios that was once a meatpacking plant. I know it seems kinda weird, but it's a great space and has lots of character and history.

The photographer:

The decorations:

The space is huge and has a great brick floor with exposed piping in the ceiling...perfect for hanging strands of lights and paper lanterns to create a beautiful and romantic glow.

The center pieces:

I think we've decided on a 3-piece center piece to include a glass cylinder, candles and hydrangeas.

The cake:

I'm pretty sure we're going to do cupcakes with a small tier of cake so Stephen and I can cut it. We found this amazing cupcake shop, and in comparison to other cupcake shops in the area (well really there are only two cupcake shops we know of)...well there really is no comparison. These are the best.

Whew, so now all I need is

• caterer
• officiant 
• dress, bridesmaid dresses, tuxes
• flowers
• linens 
• honeymoon

Hmmm... maybe I should get on this stuff!

Wish me luck and I welcome any ideas!!

I Don't think you're Supposed to Borrow This...

The second easy-breezy book I chose to read on vacation was Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin. It's told from the perspective of a maid of honor, who after getting somewhat trashed on her dreaded 30th birthday ends up sleeping with/"borrowing" her best friend's (also the bride to whom shs is the maid of honor) boyfriend/fiance. And actually the entire book is about their affair and the big question is whether or not the fiance/boyfriend is going to call off the wedding. Who's he gonna pick? The fling or the woman's he's been dating for seven years and is engaged to? Oh and this book is full of drama, but fun-good-for-the-beach drama! The sequel is Something Blue, and I can't wait to pick it up when I get home to read it when Mr. Chicken Butt and I go with his fam on vacation to yet another beach (ahhh, it's the life :))

Oh, and it's also an older book so you can get it cheaper at places like Half Price! Happy reading

Going Coastal Cont...

So I couldn't resist!!!!!

I went shopping today and want to share some of my finds from shops around PCB!!

I love how they look in the shopping basket, just hope they look good in his apartment.

On a completely different note, I also went shopping for regular things, clothes, accesssories, books, you know, the usual stuff. Well as soon as I walked into Bath and Body Works a woman that worked there came up to me and said, "Babe, you need some of this as red as you are (it's true, I'm lobster red, you'd think after 23 summers I'd have the whole sunscreen thing down)"

Anyway she handed me their body souflee in their new scent, Deep Aqua. It was very cool and refreshing and felt great on my skin, so I bought it and I'm happy with it.

Going Coastal

Exciting news... Mr. Chicken Butt is getting an apartment and like any self-respecting fiance...I'm decorating it!!!

So after being on the beach for a while and spending another week on the beach in about 2 weeks I've decided that his apartment will have a understated beachy/coastal theme (not to mention it will already match the great furniture we've acquired from friends that moved to Alaska and couldn't take it with them).

These are the colors pretty much of the oversized chair we have and the couch is a blue jean color and material.

I've been hunting down all the not-so-tacky-touristy shops here and have found this one store in particular that seems to carry nicer home decor and I'm excited about picking some of it up.

I love the look of these weathered picture frames, I think a couple of them scattered wouldn't be too overwhelming.

I also loves these decor balls with shells, I love how in this pic they combined the balls with the star fish. (And I actually found this pic on a blog That's so Cuegly (just ugly enough to be cute). Check it out, she's got a lot of home-made decor ideas and I love, love, love these decor balls and might just have to make some myself!

I'm excited to get shopping and I'd love some more ideas about decorating!

Come Fly with Me!

OH MY GOODNESS...

I went PARASAILING (you know, the beach activity where you're strapped to a huge parachute and let off the back of a boat with up to 1200 feet of rope flying hundreds of feet in the air) yesterday afternoon and it was amazing!!!! Soooo scary but so beautiful and also...very different than what I was expecting to experience. Once they let out that rope and you're hundreds of feet in the air, there is no sound, the wind is barely noticible if at all and as far as the eye can see is ocean. We were initially worried about losing our sunglasses so I went first because mine were tighter, and I found out there was no reason to worry at all.

I'm not trying to read more into the experience but when I was up that high, it was magical! I felt like the only person in the world up there in silence-amazing! I love experiencing new things and this was great. I recommend it for everyone.

p.s. don't look down if you're afraid of heights lol (although you will miss some awesome marine life)

Read, Laugh, Drink

Being on vacation, for me at least, means diving into some good reads that I've felt to guilty to indulge in during the semester. The book of choice for the first part of this vacation is Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. When it initially came out I was intrigued but never picked it up. Recently, however, I've come across previews for a film version of the book staring Julia Roberts (my fav!!!) and this resparked my interest in the book.

First off, I love that I couldn't find the book because it was in the "Travel Memoir" section. Ahhh I absolutely love traveling and although I haven't read any travel memoirs, I think it is slowly becoming my new favorite genre. I find it so insightful to read about other people's travels, especially those who can write so beautifully and have really experienced something worth reading about.

So, I've spent the past several nights on the balcony overlooking the ocean, snuggled up underneath a fleece blanket reading, laughing (outloud sometimes) and drinking a tall glass of reisling wine while enjoying Ms. Gilberts adventures through Italy, India and Indonesia. I recommend this book to any and all who love traveling, love the idea of exploring one's faith (note faith doesn't necessarily mean religion in this context) and finding ways to enjoy life and love.

Catch of the Day

Oh BTW the I'm on vacay with the fam this week in Panama City Beach! Today we chartered a fishing boat for half a day and set sail out into the great ocean to catch some fishes!! Well, we ended up catching a lot of bait fish but only 2 fish that we could actually eat, and guess who caught the biggest? ME!!!! I was so excited I caught a King Mackeral, the first that charter had caught all season! So after the arduous 4 hours in the middle of the ocean under the hot sun we headed back to shore to the BoatYard restaurant to have our fish cooked and boy did we enjoy a delicious meal. Yum!

Pardon the blood, but isn't it a bute?!