Here's my past month recaps: June, May, April, March
I can't believe I've been doing a hand lettering every day since February! It's been so much fun to add this into my daily life. So here is the full month of July, enjoy! Here's my past month recaps: June, May, April, March
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It's been awhile since I had a girls weekend with my sisters & mom, the last one was 2 years ago and I wrote about it here. We had one planned earlier this year but weather/being sick got in the way and then life just got busy. Luckily we were able to plan a short weekend in August where we could all get together out in Maryland & Virginia (hopefully next time Sonya can make it!) We packed quite a bit of stuff into the weekend without it being too rushed, it was a good amount of trying new restaurants and exploring new areas. We started Friday with pedicures and dinner at Cava in Baltimore. I've been to Cava a few times and it's one of my favorite restaurants around here, both the upscale restaurant and the fast casual version. They serve mediterranean small plates which meant we could order a bunch of different items and try a little bit of everything. That's pretty much the perfect type of meal for my family since we love to share food and try it all. They also had fantastic cocktails. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out at Brittany and Dustin's apartment relaxing. The next morning we eased into the day with a nice walk around Columbia before getting around and heading to Navy Yard in DC. We found good lunch and dessert options here plus pretty views just walking around. The next stop for our day was in VA. We made a quick pit stop at my apartment then off to Arrowine where we did some wine and beer tasting before driving to Mosaic at Merrifield. We spend the rest of the afternoon indulging in treats and shopping here. We shared affogatos from Dolcezza, shopped at Papersource, Anthropologie, and Target. We ended the evening with dinner at Matchbox, I had only had brunch there so having dinner was a treat and we tried out the pizza which was spot on! We wound down back at my apartment the rest of the evening. Mom and Danielle headed back to Ohio on Sunday but we couldn't send them off without having brunch first. And no trip to this area is complete without Founding Farmers. This time we checked out the breakfast buffet at the Tyson's Corner location and WOW! It was soooo dang good. There were so many options and treats and food and just anything you could want. The amount of food was almost overwhelming but that just means I need to go back some other time to try the food that just would not fit in my stomach! Overall it was a fun weekend with the girls and already looking forward to another one!
I love to start the week off on a good note by prepping my food, and today I prepped like it was my job so I just wanted to share the few things I did today. I'm definitely not this organized every Sunday but I have a pretty crazy work schedule this week and if I don't have good, healthy food ready I know I will make lots of super unhealthy decisions this week! First off I started with some food I already had at home and built some of my meal prep around that. I had some amazing home grown chickens from my parents neighbor/friend Mary Jo that I've been wanting to cook, plus some fun Trader Joe's spice rub, and veggies that needed to be cooked so that was meal # one. Here are the steps I followed: 1) Coated the chicken in olive oil and the spice rub, let it marinade for a few hours 2) Placed quartered red skin potatoes and carrots in the bottom of a foil lined pan and tossed with olive oil and salt & pepper 3) Placed chicken on top of veggies 4) Baked at 375 degrees for a little over an hour until the chicken was fully cooked and veggies roasted and voila! Perfect meal of meat & veggies which should last me a few lunch or dinner meals. I still had potatoes left and some good quality cheddar sausage from Whole Foods so I made up a few breakfast bowls by chopping the potatoes into small squares and sautéing them and the sausage in ghee and then adding a fried dippy egg on top. Lastly I prepped a few other random ingredients to have ready to eat/transform later and the week and to snack on:
1) Cut up lemons and made a pitcher of lemon water 2) Washed figs that will be used in smoothies and to snack on 3) Chopped up and riced a whole cauliflower for future use - I ended up getting 4 bags of 2 cups of the "rice" that I'm freezing 4) Washed cherry tomatoes from the farmer's market to snack on all week 5) Hard boiled eggs to make egg salad. Over the 4th of July one of my good friends AC got married down in southern Virginia which was a great excuse for my and Kyle to take a long weekend exploring the area, seeing family, and catching up (and meeting) old friends. It was a pretty packed weekend but nice to be out of the DC area over the holiday. The wedding was not until later in the day so we were able to do a little exploring around Charlotesville which was fun since I had never been before. We made sure to find good coffee, food, and desserts of course! Besides the eats, we walked around and checked out UVA. Besides the wedding we were able to visit with Kyle's grandma and see the building his grandpa used to run his wood working business out of. It is now a winery tasting room but still has some of the original architecture and signs. It was really cool to see plus the wine was awesome. We then met up with one of Kyle's best friend from high school and his friends family, it was great to finally meet them and have a great home cooked meal and just catch up!
I already wrote up a post about my trip to Philadelphia for PePcon (the Print + ePublishing Conference) which was mostly just a touristy post on the food and fun stuff I did, you can read all about it here. So I wanted to also do one post about the conference, more specifically I wanted to show my sketchnotes! The conference was pretty good overall, I liked the mix of the workshops at the beginning and end along with all the presentations in the middle. It was also a good balance of shorter presentations demoing tips for Adobe programs and then longer presentations from really great speakers on anything from print design still being alive to where is the digital publishing world going. I could ramble on but instead I'm just going to post my sketchnotes that I took throughout the conference. Taking these notes made the whole conference seem a little more engaging for me plus it helped me remember the information better.
Carter and Sophie are my two furbabies and they definitely make their appearances in my Currently posts: May, March, & February this year plus on my Instagram, but I don't seem to write too much about them on here even though they are basically my "children." I've raised Carter since he was a baby and my family adopted him from the Humane Society back in 2002. And then with Sophie, my mom randomly found her abandoned when she was a kitten back in 2005 (I was away at college) and she took her in and then I inherited her as my own when I moved to DC and took Carter with me. At that point they had became a pair that couldn't be separated and I love having them both anyways. It's hard to believe that Carter is now over 13 years old and Sophie will be 10 this year, time seriously flies! The past few weeks Carter has given me a little scare and put me into worried kitty momma mode. He had started a weird mouth spasm/tic/??? it was very out of character for him and led to a few vet visits, which he handled awesomely even though he HATES his pet carrier and having to go to the vet. I'm pretty sure it's a traumatic experience for him, if I even move the carrier an inch he gets grumpy and will go hide for fear of being put back in it. Sidenote: Sophie looooves the cat carrier (maybe since she hasn't gone anywhere in it since February) and she lays in it constantly like it's her home and I think it makes her feel safe. So back to the vet visits we never truly figured out what was wrong except that Carter was really dehydrated so we gave him extra fluids and I'm just watching him closer than usual at home. Since the visits the spasm has stopped and he has been enjoying wet cat food more regularly to try and keep him better hydrated. I'm hoping that he stays healthy and the spasm does not come back. Through the whole ordeal he at least seemed like his normal, happy, active, self! I do have to give a shoutout to my vet at Dr. Zyga at Cherrydale Veterinary Clinic, she was fantastic, answering all my questions, going over the options, seeking other expertise, not doing unnecessary testing just to charge more, and keeping me informed through phone calls even on her day off.
I recently traveled to Philadelphia for a design conference called PePcon, since I had never been to Philly before I did a little bit of sightseeing, even though the conference took up the majority of my time. It was also super cold/rainy for June which equaled me not wanted to walk around the city too much, but I did clock a few miles of walking around the city. A few months ago my younger brother Eric moved to Philly so I was also able to meet up with him and surprisingly meet up with my older brother Chris since he was in the area for work. I fit a lot in over the week there and it was a nice change of pace, plus getting to see family away from home is awesome. I will most likely do another separate post on my sketchnotes from the conference so this will be more of a touristy collection of photos! |
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