Food, food, food!

Lately the food in the dining halls has been less than satisfactory. A girl can only eat so many roast beef sandwiches, curly fries, and canned fruit before she starts to wish she had her own little kitchen. 

So today I had a little fun imagining what I would put in my kitchen if I ever get my own place to live. Here's what I came up with: 

Grapefruit halves with sugar

Chicken and cheese quesadillas with a little fresh pico de gallo

Eggs and toasted cheesy bread

Grilled basil, tomato, and mozzarella sandwiches

Grilled PB&J

Pesto with tomatoes and mushrooms

Dark chocolate

Red wine

Frozen yogurt with berries and white chocolate chips

Granola

Fresh fruit, toast with honey, and hard boiled eggs

Salt and Vinegar chips

Key Lime Cheesecake

Toasted tortillas and guacamole

Crepes, strawberry cream cheese, and strawberries

Fresh French bread and sweet butter

It's just fun to think what I'll someday be able to stock in my own kitchen :) I've also been having some fun with Pinterest, a website that features pictures of everything and anything that you can share with your followers. In the theme of 'having my own place,' here's some of my inspirations:

I want a big, pretty garden with little twinkling lights someday. 

Tea lights - a pretty and easy craft

Look at this bathroom. Seriously, I'm in love - that bathtub is so nice.

These are beautiful colors - gold and rose and white. This is how I imagine posh Italian homes to be. 

Sometimes it's just fun to not worry about reality.

Have a great week!

Women of Legend

Bethany Joy Galeotti posted this on her blog today, and I really loved it. It's a poem she wrote herself, and I took to it because I like writing that portrays women as having strength and independence. It reminded me of the Nanci Griffith song "Women of the Phoenix." I've posted them both here so you can read Joy's poem and listen to Nanci's song. 

Women of Legend

O my child, the heart is a perilous thing.
The heart crowns all paradoxes of God;
     made of muscle and steel and fire, but frail as the sparrow's wing.

Women of Legend are not born-- they are grown
     out of spit and dirt and fire and sweat;
     they are not a glamorous flock.

They have grease underneath their fingernails
         and wrinkles around their eyes.
They have bruises from too-hard pounding upon their breasts.
They have lines from laughter and their feet are callused
         from barefooted adventures and sojourns.

Women of Legend are grown out of the spit and dirt and fire and sweat;
their significance is secured in their steadfast response
          to unimaginable pain.

Happy Friday!

Courage!

This semester I have been trying to be more bold in living my life! I started pretty small: being more honest, not being afraid to ask questions at my new job, and finding inspiration to be courageous in everyday things.

Then I got a little bigger, and decided that when the Avett Brothers come to do a show in Lincoln in April, I'm going to try to get the article that the Daily Nebraskan will do so I can interview them (even though phone interviews scare me, and phone interviews with fantastic musicians scare me even more).

And then I got even bigger by turning in my study abroad papers even though three of my closest friends would be studying abroad the semester after I do, meaning I wouldn't see them for an entire year. It's kind of intimidating, and it's a lot scary, but I'm excited for what the rest of the year holds!

Here's some of the latest inspiration I've acquired: 

In case you can't read it: "Today is never too late to be brand new."

"Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage, and I promise you: something great will come out of it." 

Rachel and I posted this quote on the chalkboard we pasted to our door. It's supposed to remind us to do great things!

If the President of the United States (who is pretty much my hero) can stand up in front of the world and sing an Al Greene song at the podium, I think I can muster up a little courage to do the boring, every day things. 

Hope everyone is having a great week! 

A.

Happy New Year!

I've been pretty grateful for my friends and family this week! Here's some pictures from what's been going on. 

On New Year's Eve, I spent the night at Sarah's new house. Here's some of the group, though there were a ton more! From back to front: Beau, Steve, Sam, Sarah, Travis, me, Alli, and Wanufi. (This is Wanufi's idea. She would want credit for this photo if she knew this blog existed - she really wanted to recreate The Sound of Music). 

Me and Bailey!

Here we are standing in Sarah's kitchen - Steve and Sarah's sister Becca are in the background photo-bombing as usual :) From left to right: Daley, Kim, Bailey, me, and Wanufi.

Our beautiful hostess! Sarah, me, Sam, Bailey, and Kim. 

Sarah's house is in the neighborhood where I lived when I was growing up, and a lot of the houses are pretty old. Her basement looks like ours did before we finished it. We all call it the 'frat basement' and have vowed to throw frat parties as often as we can (and by frat parties, I mean small gatherings of nice people). Here I am with The Posse! Me, Sarah, Alli, and Wanufi. 

We had such a great time! The party was hopping, and we ended up staying up really late talking and laughing and finally fell asleep sometime around 5:30. Sarah had a great, comfortable bed where she, Wanufi, Alli, and I all collapsed and fell asleep almost instantly. 

Then, yesterday Wanufi invited The Posse over for dinner at her house. 

She made baked ziti and bruschetta and topped it off with some sparkling grape juice. Such a classy hostess! Her family was adorable too.

Alli got a new camera for Christmas, so Sarah and I have been having a grand time taking funny pictures and leaving them for her to find.

She also has a feature of the camera that takes a series of pictures at a really fast pace so when you look through them, it's like you're looking through a flip book. It makes a little movie! (But by pushing still frames together.) So Sarah and Alli and I danced while Wanufi filmed. This was only one of many funny shots we got out of it.

I am so grateful for my friends and family! I've had such a great break so far, and I'm looking forward to a fabulous last week!

Hope the New Year started off right for everyone! <3

My Dear Acquaintance

New Year's is my favorite time of year. As cheesy as it sounds, I like the idea of starting over as soon as the clock chimes midnight, and I love the idea of New Years Resolutions. I make them every year, and while oftentimes I lose track of them after February, there have been a few important ones that I've kept the whole year and into the rest of my life. I don't do New Year's Resolutions like everyone else, though (because I'm a hipster, duh). My resolutions are never "I'm going to lose 10 pounds by Memorial Day" or "I'm going to stop drinking caffeine." My resolutions usually have something to do with expanding my creative base, or updating the way that I view the world, or ceasing to be so afraid all the time.

This year, I have four resolutions: 

1. Cross off four things from The Bucket List

2. Finish editing one of the last two National Novel Writing Month novels I've done. 

3. Keep a book of one wonderful thing happened each day (with a physical reminder) - something to be thankful for. 

4. Keep a 2012 box (This is something I did this year, too. I have a green 'photo box' that I bought from Target at the beginning of the year, and as the year has gone on, I've filled it with ticket stubs and letters and physical reminders of things that have been wonderful in my life. And now I can go back and look through that box and see how my life progressed). 

I'm hoping to cross of some of my Bucket List items while I'm abroad in the fall - I have plans to travel to Florence, Rome, and Venice while I'm in Italy, but I'm also hoping I can visit Greece and Austria, too. I am so excited for my study abroad trip, and I just hope that it works out as I intend for it to work. 

This year I'm also hoping to re-evaluate some of the relationships in my life. While this semester, I felt like I really needed to hold on to a lot of my high school friends, I am starting to wonder whether or not this is the time to start letting them go. We've become very different people, and we've started to want very different things. I'm not saying I want to abandon them entirely - I'm just saying maybe it's time to ease up a bit on the friendships I used to have, and start to look forward. 

Finally, this year I'm hoping to become better friends with the people I've been seeing during Friendsgiving and Friendsmas. I've known most of these guys since high school, but I wasn't friends with most of them, and we definitely weren't close. But now I've started attending these events, and getting to know them better and I think the relationships and friendships they have to offer could be really beneficial. From what I've seen, their friendships are based completely on selflessness and mutual respect. They support one another entirely in their respective endeavors, and they respect the talents each of them owns for themselves. They tease each other and they wrestle each other and they're clearly grateful for one another - to be invited to join in with that group is sort of a small honor. They make me want to better my own friendships and find people who want that kind of friendship with me. The atmosphere they create is very open and very loving. There was never I time I felt like they weren't trying to make me feel more welcome. So if I can be a part of that for even a moment...I'll take it!

I hope your New Year's is wonderful and full of new resolutions and new ideas. Now is the time to re-invent the pieces of our lives that are messy. I plan to embrace it 100%. 

Happy New Year!

December, I Will Carry You Home

December.

Winter, I'm so glad you're back. I've missed you terribly. November was wonderful, of course, as November always is. But nothing beats walking outside in the morning and just smelling the impending snow. It's the greatest.

As for an update, November was National Novel Writing Month, and I successfully completed the challenge with a grand total of 54,311 words. That's a pretty productive November, I'd say. I'm so thrilled to be finished and have a new manuscript to look at and edit and play around with. Did I mention how much I love November?

And now it's December, and yesterday it snowed. I took a walk in the first snow of the season and hung out with some friends on my floor and just in general had a really fantastic day. Today I'll be spending the majority of my time either hunkered down in Panera, studying, or at Kimball Recital Hall because today is our big holiday concert at the university. Hopefully it'll be a great day - who doesn't love Christmas music?

Some things I'm loving this week: 

1. Michael Buble's new Christmas album, particularly this song:

2. My planner. This upcoming week is Dead Week and then I have my first college finals. Somewhere back in mid-November I planned out every single class on every single day so I knew exactly what I needed to get done in order to not fail my finals. So I'm sort of clutching my planner to my chest no matter where I go. 

3. Twitter! I just recently got one and I am sort of addicted. When you follow the Kardashian sisters, you learn all sorts of fun things.

4. This was back from November, but the memories still make me smile. I was invited to "Friendsgiving" this year with some of my friends from high school, and it was just the greatest time. We all got together at one house and ate a meal, and one of the guys wrote a play about the 'origins of Thanksgiving' and we had a ceremony for Mr. and Mrs. Friendsgiving. And then we all went back to Cory's house, where he had built a gigantic fort/'wigwam' in his basement. Then, we all watched this movie: 

Friendsgiving was probably the best part of my November. 

5. My mother, who keeps letting me come home and do my laundry and eat all of her food. I'm just extra thankful for her this week. 

Hope your December has started off as magically as mine has!

November!

Again, sorry that time has gotten away from me so easily! It is now November, the greatest month of the year, and I have so many things to be excited for this month:

First off, it is National Novel Writing Month, the one month of the year where hundreds of thousands of writers gather from around the world to do that one crazy thing everyone always says they want to do: write the Great American Novel. Okay, so it might not always be great. And for many, it isn't American. But it is a great challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. That breaks down to about 1,667 words each day, for a grand total of one amazing, destructive, all-together wonderful month. Day two is already a success - I'm about 20 words ahead of schedule :)

It is also that time of year where I start signing up for next semester's classes. Next semester I'll be taking Communications in Small Groups, French Grammar and Composition, Problems in International Relations,  History of Contemporary Europe, Contemporary Issues in Music and the Arts, the choir I have been involved with this semester (although I am looking forward to this more next semester because we have a new instructor, and we'll be joining with the men's choir - I cannot tell you how nice it will be to have some deep basses to counteract the warbling sopranos in that choir), and my E.N. Thompson class. It will be a full semester, just like this one! But I will have finished all of my ACE requirements and will be well on my way to finishing my major.

Soon, I should also be able to start filling out the official applications for my study abroad program next year - it's a busy time here at UNL! Just think, by this time next year, I could be preparing for midterms in Milan.

Some things I'm loving this week: 

1. Ally McBeal. Mom and Dad have been watching this show abundantly over the past few weeks, and I absolutely adore it. I want to be almost every woman on this show - Ally, Renee, Georgia. Not Elaine, though. Probably don't need to invent a face bra. 

2. "Within You" - Ray LaMontagne

3. Peppermint Mochas from Starbucks! What a wonderful way to welcome winter  - it even snowed here a little today. Thank goodness!

4. Bethany Joy Galeotti's Blog. This woman is the absolute greatest - smart, funny, classy and put together, and extremely motivated. She is the reason I was looking to get involved with Love146. She has the greatest support system in place for her fans. 

5. Sensual Amber lotion from Bath and Body Works. Yeah, it's the little things. 

Have a great week, everyone!