Houses and Puppies and Crafts… Oh My!

I’ve been on hiatus from the blogging world for most of this year and the guilt has finally gotten the best of me.  I do have some good excuses though: getting used to married life, going on an awesome Costa Rica honeymoon, holidays, BUYING OUR FIRST HOUSE (yay!), moving in February, decorating – which is a perpetual work in progress, and on top of all that in April we adopted a boxer-lab mix puppy who we named Maggie. 

Zip Lines in Costa Rica!

Shiny New House!

Maggie Moo!

 
It’s actually Magpie, but we call her Maggie or Maggie Moo most of the time.  She has the sweetest disposition in the world and is learning her manners very quickly; we’re already done with our first puppy class.  So we are officially a happy little family now.
 
Since things are starting to calm down, or I’m starting to get better at time management, I want to try to return to the blogmosphere and start sewing and crafting again.  I never completely stopped but I did get sidetracked and I definitely fell into blog silence.  I hosted a scrapbook party with my Creative Memories rep Mindy in June and had several friends who were interested in starting an album.  The party inspired me to host a scrapbook day for some friends a couple weekends ago.  We listened to music and had snacks and got to be crafty for a whole Sunday afternoon, it was a lot of fun and will definitely be happening again in the near future. 
 
I’ve also been working on a crate cover for Maggie.  Right now we are using one of Adam’s old blankets on top of her crate and I do NOT love it.  So I found some cute black fabric with little paw prints all over it and decided to attempt to appliqué her name on the top in a lime swiss dot print.  I’ve never appliquéd before so I’m using a tutorial that I found on the Sew Mama Sew blog and things are going well so far, everything has been cut out and fused, now it’s time to start stitching down the letters so I can sew the whole cover together and figure out how I want to finish the edges – wish me luck!
 
That’s all I know today, ciao for now!

We booked our Honeymoon! :-)

We finally made a decision about our itinerary and got a quote we were really happy with, and a few days after our wedding Adam and I are headed to Costa Rica!! I’m just about to burst with excitement, not to mention the fact that it’s one more thing checked off the list which is always a plus in the world of wedding planning. 🙂

Wednesday we paid the deposit and officially booked our honeymoon with Cecilia at the AAA in Raleigh, who is really sweet and patient, I would definitely recommend her if anyone is looking to book a vacation in the future.

So now the fun part… details! We’re going to fly into San Jose and spend the night there in a luxury hotel, then transfer to Arenal (the site of one of the 10 most active volcanos in the world) and stay for four nights at the Arenal Kioro and then head to the west coast to the Guanacaste Province and stay for four nights at the Paradisus Playa Conchal, an all-inclusive resort on the beach. The picture above is actually from the restaurant at our hotel in Arenal, all of the rooms have panoramic views of the volcano! We have transfers and drivers arranged between all the locations and won’t have to rent a car and drive ourselves (apparently driving in Costa Rica is not the most relaxing experience in the world). While we are staying in Arenal we have already booked a Hanging Bridges tour and a Zip line tour, so we should have plenty of chances to explore the rain forest surrounding the volcano. Part of the reason that I like Costa Rica is that it hasn’t been completely engulfed by tourists yet and they’re doing a good job of enforcing sustainable tourism to preserve their natural beauty. It also doesn’t hurt that the dollar is strong there and they are famous for their hospitality. There’s still more research to do on side trips and restaurants, but we’ve got a lot done already and I think it’s going to be amazing. I just wish it was less than 5 months away!

We’ve also been working on the registry and we still have to pick out our formal china, which Adam graciously told me that I could pick out and if I need to I can just show him the two options I need help deciding between. Who saw that coming? 🙂 He’s been awesome with all the other stuff and doing his hold the scanner job very well, so I have no problem taking care of that one on my own, especially since he recently told me that all flatware and china look the same to him. They’re all so different and it feels like there are at least 500 different choices! Men, gotta love ’em.

This weekend is Adam’s stepmother Diana’s 40th birthday so we’re going to Gastonia for her birthday party and we’re going to stay with our friends Josh and Sharla and their newest addition to the family, baby Jackson! I’ve been reading all the updates on their blog but this will be the first time we see Jackson in person, and Adam and I are very excited to meet him. Don’t worry though, I will not be catching the baby bug until we have at least gotten married, have a house, and have maybe gone to Europe, haha. I might catch the Pottery Barn Bug though, Sharla has the best decorating skills of anyone I’ve ever met, her house is like stepping into a Pottery Barn catalogue and everytime we visit I come home wanting to buy all new furniture. This is where the house we’re buying next spring will come in handy, wink wink. Speaking of Gastonia and it’s natives, we’re leaving right after work tomorrow, so I suppose it would be smart to get my stuff together now… goodnight folks!

Hannah in Savannah!

Hello blog world! I signed up for this blog about a month ago, but I am a busy woman with less free time than would make me happy, so I am writing now. Besides, it’s hard to find something interesting enough to warrant a FIRST BLOG POST. No normal mundane “today I had a bagel” post will do, it needed more spicy. No worries though, I just got back from a 3-day weekend trip to Savannah w/ my best friend Cheryl, who is probably one of the coolest people I know, so here we go…

We had Friday off of work for Easter so we left in the morning and started the 5 hour road trip south to not only Savannah but the outlet mall of awesomeness at Hilton Head, which is about 45 min outside of Savannah. The outlet trip was not as successful as some others have been but I did score a lovely dress from the J Crew outlet and a couple shirts from Banana Republic without managing to put too big of a dent in my wallet, bonus! 🙂

Our hotel in Savannah was right on the line between happy fun city and scary creepy place, but it was very nice on the inside and clean, plus it ended up being within walking distance of everything we wanted to do so we didn’t have to try to find parking all over the city – double bonus! We went out to dinner the first night and were tired so we ended up back at the hotel before 12am and fast asleep, until 2:30 in the freaking morning when the fire alarm of death woke us up with a sound and strobe light effect that I’m sure was not neccessary, even in the event of a fire. So after grabbing our purses and hoodies we walked down four flights of stairs to stand in the street in our pjs and watch our hotel not burn down b/c there was no fire (there never is). It was interesting to see how many people decided to get fully dressed and even bring luggage down, instead of hurrying out of the hotel to safety… I know that the hotel is never really on fire, but I feel like everyone should hurry out to satisfy the 0.05% chance that the flames are coming. Nobody wants to be the one who has to jump out the window into the parachute, right?

So day two consisted of sleeping longer than we planned due to the fire drill the night before and then heading out to explore the city. Savannah is lovely, especially when the temperature is in the mid-seventies and it’s bright and sunny outside. There were gorgeous flowers everywhere and everything was nice and clean and most of the people we encountered were nice and friendly. We ate lunch in City Market close to our hotel and then took a trolley tour to see the sights and take some pictures. There were tons of really pretty older houses and parks, and our trolley let us hop on and off at all the stops all day long if we wanted too, so it ended up working out pretty well for us. My favorite highlights would have to be Forsyth Park and the houses, I’ve always loved the wide wrap-around porches and the pretty paint colors on the houses that towns like Charleston and Savannah are full of. Here are some good examples:

After we were done hopping on and off the trolley for most of the day, we shopped around for a little while on River Street and then stopped back at city market where we found a nice lady in a little art shop and I bought a print and a tiny painting to take home as my souvenir of Savannah (I’ll try to add a pic later). Pretty pictures are my favorite thing to take home from my vacations, that way when I am old and gray and I can sit at home and be surrounded by memories of all the places that I’ve been to over the years. 🙂 We went to a Scottish Bar on the way back to the hotel for a beer and an afternoon snack and then we hung out and relaxed for a bit before we headed back out for shenanigans on our last night in Savannah. We ended up having a great time and Cheryl got loads of compliments on her new glasses, which are damn sexy if I may say so myself! That’s pretty much the end, since we had to get up and start heading home in the morning, over a huge bridge that I had to make sure to take pictures of for my M0nky (it’s what I do):

Disclaimer: Blog posts this long are not to be expected, they are to be savored… mmmm, tasty 🙂