Living Offline

 So much to catch up on! Just wanted to make a quick post and update:
Mom and Johnny came to visit
Finished house sitting
Moved out
Moved in
No internet...yet...hence why no posts, instagrams, facebooking, blog reading, life, my data plan is maxed.
Supporting local coffee shops to use their wi-fi
cleaning my new house...men lived there before us and I'm surprised this place hasn't been condemned by the city as uninhabitable. Grossness to the extreme.
Antrhopologie candles make life in a dirty old house enjoyable.
Last weekend of summer before school starts.

Pseudo Single

Big catch up update:
I can almost mark one month on the Calendar since Joey left for school. Which surprisingly has flown by! He is pretty busy in his classes, but he is liking them pretty well I think. He worked in a team for the first couple weeks and now he will be in more regular classes. While he has been grinding out case studies and other business schooly things I have been busy. busy. busy. My life has basically consisted of house sitting, packing and deep cleaning my old apartment, moving into my new apartment, girls nights, my cat, working at j.crew, and volunteering at the museum.The house that I am "sitting" is AMAZING. It requires its own post. Here are some pics of my life lately...

Move out: Joey's "man cave" after I spent a WHOLE DAY cleaning this thing out. He is really good at accumulating things. Our apartment is so bare. It's so sad I have loved this place, and our landlords are super sad too. We are their favorite tennants...I'm their favorite tennant ;)

 Move in: I am slowly but surely getting things moved into my new apartment. It is kinda hard moving much with a mini, but I just take a car load a day and call it good. It is actually nice not having it be one crazy moving day like most students in Madison. Since my landlords are just the most amazing people ever they are letting me have my apartment until the end of the month. Unlike the rest of campus where August 15th (also known as hippie christmas) is the day where everyone moves. The city is filled with U-hauls, foreigners who don't know how to navigate through downtown Madison, scared freshman, and lots and lots of junk on the curb. -hence hippie christmas. I'll show you my little apartment when it is all settled into. By little I am not exaggerating...not sure how I am going to fit a bed in there...I'll worry about that later. My mom and lil bro Johnny come to town tomorrow (sooooo excited!) and we are going to get me a little futon or something to squeeze into my closet. I mean bedroom.

Girls night: Full Moon 5k with the j.crew girls. I did surprisingly well considering I have not been running much lately. Made me so excited that I registered for a 10k this October. Running is good!

Cat: Ethel and I snuggle a lot. I feel bad because I am not living at my apartment for a couple weeks so she gets lonely. I try to make up for it by rubbing her belly extra and give her all sorts of lovins.

Work: j.crew is a really hard place to be at right now. They have their new fall collection in and it is pure torture to control myself to not just max out my credit card five times over buying everything in the store. Need to find more monies...I considered selling my eggs because you can get paid really if you go to a good school, but its a little too invasive for just wanting to buy some clothes. Guess that's why it is good mommy is coming to town tomorrow huh mom???

Volunteer: I Volunteer at the Chazen's (UW's art musuem) print and drawing studies room a couple of hours a week. It is great getting the experience of working in a museum, handling art, and working with some of the most fun people ever. If  I can get a job just like this place when I graduate I will be set for life. 

Cat: I took Ethel to the vet for some vaccination updates, and she was classified level 4 (out of 5) in the overweight category. I have a chubby kitty! She doesn't like to exercise and she hates toys. Oh boy does she love to eat though! I have a cat that mooches more than a dog. Not even exaggerating. Sometimes she has moments of wanting to attack things so I let her have it so she can get that cardio  going. Work it Ethel!

House Sitting: Preview of the house I am house sitting. Just wait til you see the inside.

House Sitting: This is Roxy. She's a big hound dog that barks loud, and has a heart of gold.

Girls Night: Bronte and I went out on the town...

...60's style.

Volunteer: I love the prints in the print room. We have thousands! I need to get an exact number because it is pretty amazing how many we have. Lots of cool Japanese prints that I LOVE. My mom is going to get a tour of the print room tomorrow. I'm going to show her some of my favorite German expressionism stuff and maybe sneak in a little Shunga print just to add a shock factor to the tour ;)... Google it if you dare.

Girls Night:Bronte introduced me to one of the best movies ever. I am recommending to all you ladies out there to watch A Room with a View. It is also a book so read it too. The movie stays true to the book according to Bronte. The story is adorable, and they cast the most beautiful men...British men... Your welcome.

Cat: We are basically two best friends that anyone could ever have.

Girls Night: well technically boys were here too, but it was mostly the gigi girls. Cherie the owner of the Madison Gigi's turned 50 last week! We all went out for pizza to celebrate. She hates cake (but loves cupcakes?...) so we had cherry pie from Hubbard Ave Diner (best pies eva) for dessert. I love Cherie so much! She is so sweet, and is really funny after a couple martinis and whatever was in that shot was the waiter gave her for her birthday.

Girls Night: Went out to eat with my friend Julie to the Irish pub called Brocach. It was super duper delish. I tried bangers and mash for the first time which surprisingly I loved! I normally wouldn't order something like this because I don't like processed meats, especially sausage. However I decided to be a true midwesterner and enjoy some pre heart disease for dinner lol. I am glad I did, one of the best things I have ever tasted.

Keeping myself super busy is making time away from Joey fly. It still sucks majorly not having someone...a human (thanks roxy) to sleep next to. Or when little funny things happen or other random things pop up that I can't just share with him right away. I miss cooking him dinner (even if its a frozen pizza most of the time lol) and watching our favorite shows together. I want to go to the movies so bad, but don't want to go with out him. As much fun as I have at girls nights with my favorite ladies, I miss my Joey, my best friend. I will keep living it up being Pseudo Single though and have the best final semester of college ever.

1 week down.

23 more to go.

First week of Joey being gone really hasn't been too much of a change. After this week is over it will be the longest we have been apart :( We are both keeping nice and busy though so I don't think we will notice the separation too much. Joey started school yesterday and has a decent amount of homework to do...He is already hating having homework again haha. Sucker. Welcome to my life! He is able to ride his bike from the apartment to school which will be nice ALL YEAR ROUND woot! He had school pictures taken which by how he posed on our skype date last night they will probably end up looking like this

After his first day of what they call "immersion" he went bowling with his classmates. From Joey's observation it is looking like business school kinda revolves around drinking. The bowling party had buckets and buckets of beer. He said there will be cocktail parties and gatherings at bars a plenty scheduled in these next couple years. Lucky for Joey he will know how to look the part from his experience of watching Madmen.

This weekend I am excited because I get to house sit for someone in my ward and watch their dog. It will be nice to have a canine in my life again because I miss my Gertie! Also their house is absolutely awesome so it will be a nice change of scenery from my sad apartment with only an air mattress and a swivel chair to label as furniture.

Gertie is adjusting to the new place pretty well Joey says. She has a dog walker come during the day while Joey is at school for 12 hrs a day during immersion. Joey has found a couple dog parks, none that are up to par of Madison's dog parks, but they will get the job done. One even has a swimming hole of some sort. Gertie had no interest in that though.

From both Joey and Gertie the verdict is that Houston is H-O-T. Glad I am up north until Houston cools down some!

Costa Rica: getting there

ok I decided to recap the trip, but I won't bombard the posts with billions of photos and I will keep the posts short. I'm mostly doing this so I have this trip documented somewhere. Our journey started out with breezing through check-in and security at the Madison Regional Airport. We had a hotel in Orlando booked to spend the night for our overnight layover which wasn't ideal, but no problem....but our luck decided that we couldn't get to Costa Rica that easily.

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 5:30. 5:30 passed, 6:30 passed, 7:30 passed...still in Madison. We had boarded the plane only to be kindly asked to deplane because the flight crew honestly had no idea when we would be actually leaving Madison. There was only one mechanic at our little airport and we needed him to pass off the aircraft so we could have the clear to go. APPARENTLY there was another plane that needed his assistance more...for about 4 hours. We got food vouchers ate some bar food, and kept on waiting when finaly we were called to board the plane!...again!

We made it to Orlando around 1:30am. We cancelled our hotel reservations because we didn't want to pay to stay in a hotel for 4 hours. We didn't feel like sleeping on the floor either. We ended up getting a room at the Hyatt Regency in the Orlando airport. I was pretty excited we got to stay here because growing up going to Florida every summer I have been in this airport LOTS, and have always wanted to stay in this hotel!...I was a weird kid.

MURPHEY! We were so tired at this point haha.

 Joey tried to get a deal since we were only spending half a night in a room. The concierge gave us a conference room for cheap. Inside the room they opened up a Murphey bed for us. It was awesome. The conference room had everything a regular hotel room had so it worked out perfect.

We slept for 3 hours and got up around 4:30am to go through security for our flight to Miami, then finally to San Jose Costa Rica! When we got there we met up with Joey's parents and his younger sister Kimmie. From there we got our rental car, and I was desperately trying to find some wifi so I could turn in my homework. I didn't realize we still had a 2 hour drive to the town we were staying in, and I needed to get my paper in by 5:00 Madison time (stressed). Luckily there was a Denny's just up the road from the car rental place! I camped out there while submitting my Rhetoric of Religion final.

so happy to have homework while on vacation!

After what seemed like forever getting our rental car we were on our way to Manuel Antonio! If any of you have driven in Costa Rica you know what a crazy adventure that can be! Luckily we had a GPS to guide us along the way. There were crazy bends and steep hills on super narrow roads. All of a sudden we would whip around the corner to find ourselves at a one lane bridge...or be going up a road that would have been a freeway exit in the States, but here it was both an exit and a road you could drive up? It was crazy but made it really fun. Getting to Manuel Antonio was only supposed to take a couple hours, but there was construction along the way that made the drive take FOREVER!

It is winter in Costa Rica right now so we experienced a few showers. It was coming down so hard at one point I thought we were going to get washed off the highway.

When the rain stopped we saw the most beautiful sunset behind us. I was deciding at this moment that this trip is going to be amazing.

After driving through the most curvy, steep, and narrow road I have ever been on somehow we showed up at this beautiful place. Finally we could say we made it! The hotel staff scooped up our bags and gave us some delicious mango juice stuff and scented towells.

 We got a tour of the resort grounds and got to our room. There were chocolate covered strawberries waiting for us! They were delicious...until I saw that hundreds of little bugs thought they were delicious too. We got the treats out of our room ASAP. After all this traveling I was ready to crash, but I had to get some more homework turned in before the midnight deadline rolled around. I did my homework on a porch over looking the pool and ocean...not too shabby. As soon as my homework was turned in I crashed. We slept like babies.

Sorry it was still a long post. meh don't read it if you're bored lol. That was day 1!

Birthday Recap

My birthday was a good day yesterday. As simple as it was, I think it was my favorite birthday in a long time. I started the day waking up at 5 so I could finish my mountain of reading for my rhetoric of religion class. Treated myself to driving to school instead of sweating in 90 degree heat (before 9:00!) on my bike. After class I headed home, had some lunch, and headed off to work. After work was over it felt more like a birthday. I cam home to some lovely flowers from my sweetheart!

I was feeling creative and hyper so I made a headband out of my bouquet and posed Lana del Rey style. The flowers were just going to wilt and die anyways so why not make a sweet crown out of them?

See? Just need longer hair and serious eyeliner and you won't know who is who.

After I played with my roses, I opened my present from my sister in law jojo (Jonessa). She got me an amazing cookbook that I can't wait to try! It is super natural every day. Jojo says all the recipes she has tried are amazing so I can't wait to get cookin! My pinterest recipes will have to be put on hold for a bit :) Speaking of which I made my birthday cake from a pinterest recipe. I made triple lemon blueberry cake with lemon curd filling and lemon buttercream frosting. LEMON. It was super tasty and fresh. perfect cake for summer. Gotta give props to joey for letting me make a cake that definitely wouldn't be his first pick. I baked it the night before my birthday since I was going to be so busy yesterday. I was baking a cake a midnight, and anyone who knows me knows my brain stops functioning properly after a certain hour. Well I was making the cake just fine. Took a pic.

I thought it was funny how thick the batter was, but I had made cakes with thick batters and didn't think much of it. So I popped in in the oven and felt so proud of myself for making a tasty cake. Then I noticed 4 oval shaped brown things sitting in a cardboard carton. sweating...(it's really hot here) Yeah. forgot the eggs. Soo after the cake had been in the oven for 10 minutes I frantically snatched it out, slopped the semi cooked mess back into the bowl and folded in the eggs that I whipped together like I was folding chocolate chips into cookie dough. I was sure that this cake was screwed, but lo and behold it turned out great still! I wrapped it up and saved it for my birthday so I could frost it.

Joey and I went to dinner at the old fashioned which is THE restaurant to go to if you want traditional wisconsin food. it was delicious. I have always wanted to eat here since we moved, but it has always been so busy that we just end up going somewhere else. Last night though the wait wasn't too bad and we got our sconnie eats on.

Joey got the no.30 which was high cholesterol in a bun. grass fed beef burger, all natural bacon, local cheddar cheese, and a fried egg (which I'm sure was also cage free/natural feed/no corn standard stuff). it would have had fried onions too but we know how joey feels about onions.

burgers make joey happy

rar!! get in muh face!

the inside of the restaurant is cool too. it's filled with old vintage wisconsin stuff...and lots of loud people who think yelling is proper restaurant vernacular.

I had the macaroni and cheese which was bubbly and oozy creaminess, with little puddles of melted butter when it was placed in front of me...by the end of our dinner it was solid...yeah there's no fat in here.

what is a traditional wisconsin meal though with out cheese curds and ranch? this restaurant has the best curds in madison. hands down...now where is my lipitor and sweat pants?

we had a lovely dinner and I love this picture. despite joey's deformed hand haha.

after dinner we went back home and just hung out together. which might sound boring, but it was perfect to me. I just wanted to relax with my family and watch a movie on netflix while stuffing my face with cake. This is the inside of my cake after I sliced it in half. soo tasty.

before I sliced my (mini) cake I dressed it with pink sprinkles, 23 candles, and made joey and the cat sing happy birthday to me...gertie was hiding under the couch. she gets a little moody when the attention isn't all on her.

kitty wasn't too sure about the candles so she was squirmy

It was a perfect birthday! I loved just being with my joey and keeping it simple. It is funny the older you get the less hyped up you want to be about your birthday. Last night while I was falling asleep I was thinking of things I wanted to do in this next year:
1. graduate college
2. get a job/internship at an art gallery or auction house
3. fit into a pair of jeans that I had in high school.
4. get back into yoga
5. be more spontaneous
6. be more organized
7. be a better homemaker (cleaning, decorating, wifey things)
8. be a better wife to joey
9. read more books (good books. ie the classics)
10. learn a language (german or french)
11. become a better writer
12.apply to graduate school???

Birthday week

Woo! best time of the year baby! Birthday week officially commenced this weekend. Here's what happened...

                                                     I went to school. Took a final.

Found a food cart with green smoothies!

Joey got a new laptop for school. He is SO excited about it.

I got a card in the mail with some mula! Thanks dad! Also thanks Nana for the card and mula from when I was in town a couple weeks ago!

Made chocolate almond croissants for a baptism...that I forgot what time it actually started. Thought it was at 12, sent Joey to drop them off...yeah baptism was at 10 am. FAIL. Sister Missionaries sure got a lovely treat though!

We are training Gertie to be able to go on walks with us with out a leash. She did pretty well, but gets distracted sometimes and likes to wander a little bit. We just lure her back with a tennis ball.

We went to the movies at my favorite theater. Sundance cinemas. They are seriously the best! So glad we will have one in Houston too!

We saw Moonrise Kingdom. Best movie ever at the moment. This is the film of summer 2012. Go see it.

Kitty/Ethel likes to hang out in our cupboards.  She also has an undying love and friendship for computer cases. She has been pretty serious with my case since I got my laptop. Now there is a new guy on the block since Joey got his laptop. She is letting my case down easy not totally quitting it cold turkey, but she doesn't leave big black's sight for much. I thought she would appreciate me merging her two loves into one spot. I think it is safe to agree that she does.

I have an addiction to sweets. I also have an addiction to pancakes. I was seriously craving some almond flour pancakes yesterday, and these little minis did the trick. I should have waited to eat pancakes for later, because I want to try a pinterest "funfetti" pancake recipe on my bday...is that too many pancakes in a week? Prolly. Oh well. Happy Birthday week to me!