project life: the beginning

I've seen lots of people on the internet using project life to save memories from the year and I thought this would be a great way to record our first year of married life.  Joshua and I will be moving to Oslo, Norway shortly after our wedding.  Not only we will be married, but we will be living a crazy adventure in a foreign country so it will be a year worthy of recording.  Josh will be studying, but as of now I don't have anything to do in Oslo.  Enter: project life- the perfect week by week memory keeping project and something fun for me to do on a consistent basis!  I just couldn't wait until after our wedding to start this project, so I started this summer. However, since it's the summer and the main purpose of this project is to record our married life, I've done a lot of lumping weeks together onto one page.  Two of my closest friends are getting married this summer, so each wedding will have it's own page. Basically, before the wedding each page will be different-a jumble of weeks or an entire wedding.  But after the wedding and once we get settled in   I love that this project is flexible because, of course, since I'm making it I can do whatever I want with it. The binder, page inserts and cardstock kit were a graduation gift from my soon to be in-laws!

Cover Page:

I used some of our engagement photos for this page, a bicycle greeting card Josh sent me last summer and some patterned paper from the PL Cobalt Paper Pack.  The heart button is from ormolu.

 

Graduation and the first few weeks of summer:

I included lots of journaling on the graduation page about the events of the weekend and my feelings about graduation.

The first few weeks of summer were pretty busy for me and I didn't have much much time to spend on this project, so it made sense to just lump them together into one page.  In the top two 4x6 slots I described what Josh and I will each be doing for the first part of the summer.  My photo is of my work desk with lesson planning stuff sprawled about, while Josh's photo features him working in the garden.  He has a few different part time jobs this summer, which allows him to be flexible and work when he wants.  Also, the garden has grown so much since that photo was taken.  It's like a jungle out there now. My friends and I went to see Othello in St. Louis at Shakespeare in the Park.  A different work of Shakespeare is performed every summer in Forest Park.  I love it.

 

  

I'm planning to do the date card the same way each week during the summer. Mostly likely I will have a different "theme" for my date cards during the different seasons.  I printed off the dates of each week using bebas font and will attach it to some sort of chevron patterned paper.  The "summer 2012" button came with my order from ormolu! 

 

So far I am loving this project.  The main obstacle I'm encountering is not having a good way to print off photos.  I have a good printer at home, but don't want to pay for the ink since I will only be here for 3 more weeks.  It is pretty cheap for me to print off photos at the local drugstore or CVS, but I can't seem to figure out how to print 3x4 photos.  Any suggestions?

 Supplies: Black Signature Binder, Project Life Cardstock- Cobalt Collection, Photo Pocket Pages Designs A and B (I have this variety pack),  buttons and paper tabs from Ormolu, colorful Sharpies, American Crafts Slick Writers. Since I'm pretty thrifty, I plan on mostly using supplies I already have.  However, I have discovered the wonderful world of free project life printable journaling cards.  I suggest searching for project life on pinterest to find lots of freebies. 

summer beats/beets

This post is mostly about beets-that awesome purple vegetable that stains everything the perfect purple color- but the pun was so good that I thought I also ought to post something about beats, you know as in music beats.  So here is a really cool song:

 

And now, for the beets.  I LOVE beets. I love their earthy taste and their purpely color. Plus, they are super healthy.  When I studied abroad in Costa Rica I learned about organic farming and more than ever before I began to care about the food I ate.  At that point in my life I was already a vegetarian, but after visiting farms and plantations, I began to care about eating food in season and eating locally grown food.  As a college student sharing food with four other girls, eating local, seasonal food is tough and sometimes expensive.  But as a college graduate living at home for the summer with a vegetable garden in the backyard, this is not as much of a problem.  A couple weeks ago I visited the local farmer's market and picked up many goodies including beets.  I like to boil them and eat them kind of lukewarm on a salad or just by themselves.  Here's my simple, step by step recipe:

Step 1: obtain fresh beets:

  
Step 2: cut beets into chunks:

Step 3: boil beets (covered) for 20-30 minutes until tender or the beets reach the consistency you desire:

 

Step 4: strain beets and run cool water over them several times:

Step 5: after beets have cooled a bit, peel off the skin with your fingers (it's easy!):

 Step 6: cut beets into smaller chunks if you want and enjoy!

Do you like beets?

What is your favorite summer veggie?

currently: late june/early july

 

 

enjoying nature + my new camera

nearly finished teaching for the summer

reading The Cloister Walk

eating summer veggies from the garden

loving bikes rides to and from work

harvesting a few tomatoes here and there

running despite the heat

watching the Olympic trials

looking forward to two weddings: Niquita's and then MINE!

a short & sweet backpacking adventure

This past weekend my family (including Josh) and some friends went on a backpacking getaway in the Mark Twain National Forest in Southern Missouri. We left early Saturday morning and started hiking around 11am.  We stopped for lunch shortly after beginning the hike and then continued hiking until around 4:30pm.  We chose the Mark Twain National Forest because campfires were allowed and apparently the trail has a good upkeep.  After hiking 30 minutes downhill in the wrong direction we realized that maybe the trail wasn't kept up so well; we had trouble seeing some of the trail blazes and were confused a couple times about where the trail actual was!  Finally we came across a beautiful stream (seen in the picture above) so we set up camp, filtered water, started a campfire and made dinner.

 

The vegetarians had prepackaged Indian curry with rice, while the meat eaters ate pigs in blanket.  I've found that meals on a backpacking dish are always incredibly satisfying and tasty.  After dinner we toasted s'mores and drank hot cocoa.  We were living the high life on this trip, considering we only had to carry our food for one night.

I felt a little nerdy because I was so intrigued and amazed by all the cool rocks on the ground!  I kept seeing all these sparkly rocks and rocks that looked like a tie-dye sunset.  Does anyone see where I'm coming from?  My love for the rocks quickly faded during the night when I found a rock jutting into my thigh.  But, I soon fell asleep and forgot about that unfriendly rock. 

Josh slept in a bivy on the flat rocks. (so cute!) Everyone in my tent (Mom, Dad and Lay) woke up the earliest on Sunday morning and pretty much woke everyone else up.  But then we enjoyed breakfast couscous, coffee or cocoa and a morning campfire.  The hike back to the car was rather short for my taste-only about 45 minutes.  Despite the shortness of the trip, it was refreshing to spend time in nature and not think about work.  Plus, Layla found a turtle on the way back! 

  

Are you going on any adventures this weekend?

June Goals

During the second to last week of May I started a new job.  I'm now an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher to an awesome bunch of Chinese students through a program at Greenville College, my alma mater.  Yes, that's right, I am a college graduate.  So in the end of May two big things happened: I got a job and graduated from college.  These two coinciding events brought me quite a bit of stress.  Since I began focusing all my attention on preparing lessons for my ESL classes, I left many of my emotions about leaving college unattended; I didn't take much time to reflect or process what was happening in my life.  I knew that I needed to stop everything and write in my journal, but I didn't.  I keep plowing through the lesson planning and the tasks of everyday life and if I had free time I wanted to be with people, with my friends and my family.  But then my second week of teaching began and I couldn't handle the load.  I broke down one day and through a conversation Joshua I realized that I needed to take the time to revive my emotional, physical and spiritual health.  Last week I made steps towards this revival; I went running once and wrote in my journal a couple times.  That was good, but sometimes without clear goals I let myself slip back into tunnel-vision/get work done mode.  These are my goals for the month of June:

I'm excited about these goals because I really like doing all these things.  I have already played soccer once this week, I have written in my journal twice and I have been praying for my students (almost) daily.  The Cloister Walk is an intriguing book about the author's experiences at a Benedictine monastery.  I have a bad habit of not finishing books, but I hope to finish this one in June!  Although I am focusing the most on my physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, I would also like to spend time being creative.  Working on craft projects and making things to sell in my etsy shop has often been a stress-reliever for me.  When I'm being crafty I am thriving and I get more excited about life.  I think having these goals will encourage me and remind me to continue to take care of my whole being.  Do you make monthly goals?  I got the idea for making monthly goals/blogging about those goals here.

our new garden.

 

This spring a bunch of friends and I started a garden.  We built raised beds, shoveled horse manure, dug up the Earth and planted vegetables upon vegetables (all from seed).   Joshua spends a lot of time weeding, watering and hanging out with the plants everyday and I join in on the gardening activities about once or twice a week.  Friday was one of those delightful days.  Classes have ended so we spent a couple hours gardening in the sun. (Sidenote: I'm completely done with college!  All that's left is graduation in a week.)  We've planted squash, tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuce, beets, carrots, zucchini, basil, oregano, dill, and peppers.  So far we've harvested some lettuce for salads and basil for pasta.  I can't wait until the tomatoes are ripe!  Fresh, homegrown tomatoes are my absolute favorite!  That twine thingy you might notice in some photos is for the climbing peas.  Some are climbing, but some are dying :(  We're still learning how to make plants grow!

 

For Joshua's birthday we went to the Botanical Gardens in St. Louis.  Josh's favorite was garden was the vegetable garden (not too surprising).  We were impressed by how productive the botanical Garden's vegetable garden already was!  And for any curious readers, none of the vegetables in their garden go to waste (we asked). I thought this vertical garden was pretty cool too:

Enjoy the rest of this beautiful Sunday!

Week in the Life: Tuesday-Friday

my sister got some pet ducks -- preparing to present on my semester long project about transgender -- salads with homegrown lettuce -- morning routine: oatmeal and coffee -- sunny walk -- strawberry patch --  another sunny walk -- speaking spanish with nat and kayla -- awesome sky at layla's soccer game -- presentation plan for transgender project -- wall next to my desk (paintings from cuba, postcard from rome)

I got a little sidetracked from finishing my week in the life posts, so my pictures from April 24-27 are a little lot late.