Those Christmas lights keep shinin' on.

I try to decorate my place for holidays, even if its not much.

I put up some stuff for Halloween and Thanksgiving and was able to find some wintery stuff to put up for the holidays. I even found a little holiday tree. It's the perfect size for my tiny place! I didn't want it to be too traditional

so I spray painted it silver...

Much more my style.

I also put up a menorah, a snowflake wreath and some Channukah window clings.

I love the way everything looks... And my apartment looks festive and cute!

Unfortunately, there's still no snow on the ground but its getting colder so hopefully there will be some soon. Although, it is Michigan, so who knows ha ha

How do you guys decorate for the holidays?

Someday we'll find it,The Rainbow Connection.

By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I'm pretty much dead. That week at work is so busy that when it comes time to eat dinner, I'm so exhausted I can barely form sentences. So my Thanksgiving usually involves me trying to hold it together and then sleeping, lots and lots of sleeping. Just one of the causalities of working in the bakery business, I suppose.

This year was no different, but it was nice to see family and then fall asleep at 9pm and sleep for nearly 12 hours. I definitely needed it!

Luckily, I was able to enjoy a little Black Friday shopping-nothing too exciting, but still fun :-) My mom and I woke up around 8 so we missed all the good sales and the crazies but we were able to get everything we wanted. After we did a little shopping, we met my brother and went to see The Muppet Movie.


It was adorable! I am too young to remember the original Muppets, but a few years ago, when they tried to bring it back, I can remember my whole family getting together to watch it. The music was great, I loved all the characters and Jason Segel looks like he's having such a good time. If you get the chance, you should definitely go see it!

This past weekend, my mom and I started to do some things in my apartment-even though I've been there a few months, we've both just been so busy that this was really the first opportunity to get any real work on it done.

So we hung some shelves...



and some wall stickers...



and started to work on the bathroom.
There's still a lot of work left to do, but here's a sneak peak of my new bathroom.

And now, I'm enjoying the quiet this week before the madness begins all over again for Christmas! Woo hoo!

But, I did have a nice distraction from the insanity-I went on a date and it actually wasn't a complete disaster! In fact, we even went out again! haha I was seriously starting to doubt it was possible! He's super nice and sweet and we've had a really great time together so far. We are hanging out again tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to it-so yay!

I hope ya'll had a wonderful holiday!

With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.

I've seen this pop up on a few blogs, and since I'm addicted to Pinterest, I figured I'd play along!




Lately, I've been obsessing about fall, so here's all some of my favorite fall pins!

Source: blog.lescomposantes.com via Amanda on Pinterest

I just love fall fashion!

Source: blogs.babble.com via Amanda on Pinterest

Can you imagine coming home to a warm mug of this? Yum!

Source: hisforhandmade.blogspot.com via Amanda on Pinterest

So ready to wear all my scarves!

Source: nailstah.com via Amanda on Pinterest

Matte nail polish is so perfect for fall-and that color!?!?! I die.

Source: google.ca via Amanda on Pinterest

Peppermint hot chocolate. Second only to Pumpkin Spice Latte :-)

What fun pins have you guys found? I'd love to see!

And if you want, you can follow me!
Or if you need a invite let me know!

Go link up with Michelle at The Vintage Apple and check out everyone's Pinterest finds!

Ain't no colour paint gonna cover the stains.

My new apartment has basically been a construction zone for the past week and a half while I've been painting. What I thought would be a one day/8ish hour project ended up taking me over a week to complete.

It started with me spackling the holes....

It seriously looked like whoever was there before me just sprayed the room with a pellet gun.

then I was able to start priming...


and even though my mom warned me that I'd probably have to do two coats of primer to completely cover the old, dark, dry paneling, I decided to try it with just one...


but since I was able to paint one.whole.wall. before realizing admitting to myself that I needed a second coat of primer, I was also able to decide that I wasn't in love with the color. I wanted a more mustard-y yellow and this was, as my mom put it, "school bus yellow".

So I put another coat of primer on the other three walls and chose another shade of yellow for the accent wall.

The splotch is the new color, in comparison to the old.

The last step was to paint the other three walls.


It kinda looks blue, but it's actually a *really* light grey (It's Valspar Grey Mist). I wanted it to be darker, but the room is so small I knew I needed to use light colors to make the room seem bigger. The yellow is Valspar Bugle Call, in case you were curious.

Since I still want some darker grey, I'm going to paint a 6-12" stripe around the room on the grey walls, about two feet from the ceiling. I'm hoping that will bring out the grey tones in the light grey and satisfy my need for dark grey haha

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. And I'm super proud that I did it all by myself! Every roll of the roller and stroke of the brush was done by yours truly. What I was not expecting however, was how dang sore I would be after it was all done!

Manual labor is hard work, ya'll.

So this is the New Year and I have no resolutions, for self assigned penance, for problems with easy solutions

My New Year's was completely different than what I had imagined (and to be honest, kind of wanted...) but I'm so happy with the way it turned out! I ended up having about 10 or 15 people over to my place and we had such a great time! We played Apples to Apples which is the best game ever, watched some football and had a sparkling juice toast at midnight.

My day started at 6 am to work out then off to Meijer and Target for some last minute supplies. I got home about 11 and immeadiately started baking and doing some *much needed* laundry. (Seriously, during the holiday season I may have done 5 loads tops and four of those were probably my jeans).

While the cupcakes were baking, I worked on the dips. I made a Jalepeno Popper dip, a recipe from a friend at work, and a Garlic Feta dip, from my room mate. They were both sooo delicious! I'll definitely be keeping the recipes handy for more parties.

After the cupcakes were cooled, I decided to be adventurous and pipe the frosting on to them.

They look pretty good, huh?

My mother loaned me all sorts of serving dishes and decorations so I made a little table scape.

I was really happy with how it turned out :-)

But I think the best part was watching all of this:

Turn into this:

All in all, it looks pretty darn good, I think!

I was pretty much in the kitchen from 11 am till 4:30 and then finished up cleaning shortly there after. I did get to give myself a nice New Years Manicure though:

(I know it looks like I have some sort of deformed foot, but oh well)

I got two new polishes from the Sonia Kashuk at Target line. The base is silver-it almost looks like tin foil on my nails! The top is black and it has some silver sparkles in it that are kind of hard to see.

Last weekend my mom's brother and his family were in town. It was bearable at best, but we did get to see True Grit, which I really, really liked. Besides seeing the movie with them, I didn't see them too much. I had to work and stuff and they were only here a few days. I know my mom was pretty happy they were here though.

My January 1, 2011 was spent working and following the Michigan and Michigan State games on ESPN.com. After work, I jetted home, packed up mom's stuff to bring back and went over to watch the Winter Classic with my dad. The Capitals ended up beating the Penguins 3-1. I fell asleep before the end (I'm old! :-( I was so exhausted and I was in bed before 2!). I ended up falling asleep in the guest room haha

Also, we've had a pretty crazy winter so far. We've only had one snowstorm, which was more like an ice storm. We had about 6inches from that, so it wasn't too bad at all. Then, n Dec. 31st, it rained and all the snow melted!

So weird!

It's snowing a bit now, but nothing's sticking. I just can't believe it's December and we have basically no snow on the ground.

To sum it up, it was a pretty good NYE/NYD. I wish I would've been at home watching football, instead of at work, but besides that everything was A+!

Put down your sword and crown. Come lay with me on the ground.

First things first-I found a place to live! Yay! My aunt happened to know someone looking for a roommate, so I went and checked it out. I really wasn't planning on anything coming from it because I was pretty adamant about getting a one bed room and being on my own. But the place was just so cute and the girl was so sweet, I fell in love. It's a little 3 bedroom ranch over on the east side of town-fenced in yard, garage, cute little kitchen and basement. It's really adorable. Plus, she's letting me paint which is pretty awesome. So I'm moving middle of August, luckily most of my stuff is still in boxes :-P

I want to have an "adult" bedroom. No more of this college-dorm room-nothing matches BS. I have a comforter set that I really like-it's kind of Indian themed with a henna pattern in like burnt orange and gold-ish colors so I think I'm going to get some shade of yellow to put on the wall. I got some shelves and a H-U-G-E mirror that are all in a really deep browns...so that's what I'm going with. Hopefully it'll all come together!

I went on a little shopping spree last week-oops! But how could I not when Old Navy was having a crazy sale on jeans! I got three pairs for $7.50 each, plus a white trench coat for $12! Amazing!

Then, silly me went to DSW. And told myself I wasn't going to buy anything. Cause that's totally possible, right?

Apparently not.

They look kind of plain in the picture...in person they look a lot taller. I think they are like 5.5 inches...maybe even 6. But they only cost me $12. The little yellow stickers at DSW are my best friends.

Then on the way out the door, I see these.

With another pretty little yellow sticker, meaning these cost a whooping $9.

I swoop them up, and literally run out of the door before I can buy more shoes.

Unfortunately, that only lasted about 24 hours, until I went back and bought them in brown too :-)

I did buy some stuff for my new place, which I am rationalizing as "investments". New shoe organizer, some shelves, etc. But I'm really loving the wall decals I grabbed from Jo-Ann Fabrics.

This is one of them (Not exactly, but same basic idea).
The kit I got came with the chandelier and some butterflies to put around it, which are cute, but wouldn't really go with everything else in the room. So I bought some cute little birds with a metallic damask print, which is my absolute fave. I'm pretty stoked to put it all together!

Also, I made a little pit stop a little shop we have around here.


You've never heard of it, have you?
Nah, didn't think so :-)

Every time I go in there I see all these super cool light fixtures and I always want them but never get them. Well, I found one in the As-is section (i.e. clearance) and had to buy it.

It looks kinda weird here, but it's a wreath basically, with little LED lights. And the one I bought is black. I can't wait to put it over my bed.

They also had these super long (I'm talking like 8 ft.) mirrors in there. 2 for $10. I didn't get them but I'm seriously kicking myself about it. Me and my mom are supposed to go shopping this week, so hopefully they are still there. I don't really know what I'd do with them...but I want them haha

My dad has a second interview this week so *cross your fingers*. Other than that, I'm dreading going back to school. Tomorrow is August 1st... Um WHAT! Where did my summer go?!?