Christmas Cards

How can it be that time of the year already! The fact that Thanksgiving is just a little over a week away is blowing my mind. I don't know if I completely lost track of time because I've been wrapped up in my new job but this year the holidays have completely snuck up on me.

Anyway, seeing everybody start to post about their Christmas cards reminded me I should probably get on that too. Shutterfly is doing their promotion again for free cards if you blog about them which I love! I did this last year and used pictures from our trip to Paris. 

Since I don't have adorable babies like all the sample Christmas cards show I just use pictures from vacations we've been on :) It feels a little weird to send out pictures of just the two of us but oh well!

I started looking through all 930 Christmas cards (http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-cards) and found one that I thought might be nice. The funny thing is that out of all of those cards I picked one from the exact same designer as last year, and no, its not obvious that they are from the same designer :)

I've also been thinking about having a Christmas party this year. I've been wanting to have one but John and I don't have many couple friends so then I started thinking about just doing another cookie party with the girls like I've been doing for Valentine's day. I checked out Shutterfly's holiday invitations while there (http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/party-cards-stationery ) and they have some pretty cute invites too, now to plan a party :)

If you aren't already a member of at least one photo site you should definitely consider it just for the promotions. Last year, along with the free Christmas cards I got free address labels  (http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/address-labels) as one of Shutterfly's many promotions. Honestly I'm probably a member on too many photo sites judging from all the emails I get but I love to do things with photos! I think I'm up to four or five photo books now :)

AR Wedding

Two weekends ago I flew back to Arkansas for a friend of mine's wedding. I flew into Little Rock a little early so I could spend some time with my family and then I drove up to Fayetteville for the wedding festivities.

The wedding was at the Garden Room on Dickson and it was so beautiful! It was a perfect Fall day (keep this in mind for the irony later)....

Julie and Tony

I have to admit I borrowed all of these photos of the lovely couple from Facebook, my bridesmaid dress didn't really allow for my camera :)

Julie and I went to design school together along with Pepper and it was so fun to be back in town and get to hang out with old friends!

Pepper, Julie and Me

A quick note about the bridesmaid dress, its very cool but a tiny bit complicated. Its the Dessy Twist dress and can be configured in so many ways which is awesome but it definitely requires some practice and maybe another set of hands :) 

Me and Charles (Pepper's significant other)

After all the wedding festivities I drove back down to Little Rock and I was really looking forward to a scenic drive but unfortunately the entire drive looked more like this :(

And as a super fun welcome back to NYC we had snow this past weekend, yes, I said snow....in October!

Massachusetts Weekend

A couple of weekends ago John and I took the bus to Boston to visit with John's family. His brother and sister-in-law moved to South Hamilton, a small town about 45 minutes North of Boston earlier this fall. The rest of John's family came up for the weekend too. 

We got in really late Friday night so ended up just crashing. Saturday we all got up early and drove to Gloucester which was a cute little town on the coast. They were having a harvest fest so we checked out all the local shops.

All of the restaurants of course had lobster so the seafood fans were inspired to stop and get fresh lobster for dinner. The local lobster is super cheap so all of the guys each got their own to play with :)

Sunday we got up even earlier and drove into Maine. It was beautiful!

We got to check out Cape Neddick lighthouse and eat more seafood overlooking the ocean. I unfortunately don't eat seafood and so I ate the equivalent of kids menu food all weekend :(

It was a pretty quick trip but was lots of fun seeing the area and hanging out with family!

The Rest of Niagara

After we thoroughly checked out the falls we went up to Niagara-on-the-Lake on Saturday. Of course we watched the Razorback game but after that we spent the rest of the day wandering around Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

It was such a cute town, unfortunately I didn't take any pictures in the town, just of the lake. Its only about thirty minutes from Niagara Falls where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario.

I've never seen any of the Great Lakes before so I have no idea about the others, but Lake Ontario was huge! I'm used to lakes in Arkansas which clearly pale in size. There were actually waves and you couldn't even see the other side. Way off in the distance there was even a tanker (not in the picture, but just saying!).

On Sunday the weather wasn't so fabulous so instead of going on the cable car like we had planned we went to the butterfly conservatory instead :)

The butterfly conservatory was fantastic! Of course there were butterflies everywhere :)

I took tons of pictures, one of my favorites is John deep in thought with his new butterfly friend :)

I'll end the butterfly slideshow with my favorite butterfly, I liked it because it was different from your classic butterfly :)

Now to get ready to go to Boston this weekend!

PS - In case you were wondering I'm wrapping up my first week at my new job and so far so good :)

Niagara Falls

Last weekend I surprised John with a weekend trip to Niagara Falls for his birthday. I accidentally let it slip where we were going a couple of days beforehand but it was still a nice little get away :)

Niagara Falls

We took Friday off of work so we could fly into Buffalo and get the rental car at a decent time. Niagara is only about thirty minutes from the Buffalo airport so we got in around 1pm. It was perfect timing for us to eat lunch and then explore the falls.

American Falls

It had been raining some on and off but luckily by the time we finished lunch it stopped raining and the sun came out making for a beautiful afternoon!

Horseshoe Falls (Canadian Falls)

Of course we had to do the Maid of the Mist boat tour, I mean you can't go to Niagara Falls and not :)

It was a little bit chilly but we braved through! Even though we had ponchos the wind and spray is so powerful that you can't help but get a little wet. We kept having to take our glasses off to see because they would be covered in spray :)

After the boat ride we went to the next falls related activity which was the behind the falls tour. 

We got to go out on a platform near the base of the falls where you could see behind the falls. We also went through a series of tunnels that had openings along the way. The openings were directly behind the falls and it was amazing to be that close to so much power! 

After all that fun we got some warm drinks and sat overlooking the falls for a while :)

By the time we were ready for dinner we were so tired we just ate at the hotel restaurant and then crashed.

Saturday and Sunday we ventured away from the falls but I'll tell you about the rest of the weekend in another post since this post already has tons of pictures :)

Fall

The weather isn't the only thing changing up here in the Northeast. I can't wait for the leaves to start changing because we have yet to leave the city to see that and I am determined to see the famous fall colors this year!

The other big change this fall is that I put in my two weeks notice at my job last week. I have been there for two years and really loved some of the people I worked with so I'm sad to leave but really excited about the new opportunity. My new job will still be in the furniture industry so not any less stressful unfortunately but I did manage to cut my already short commute even shorter. My new office is literally two blocks away from my apartment!

In the mean time John's birthday is next week and its his 30th!!! He thinks its no big deal and didn't want to do anything special but how can we not, its the big 3-0!  I have a quick weekend trip planned for him as a surprise, all he knows is that he has to take Friday off and we are flying somewhere. I can't wait and will post all about it when we get back :)

Hurricane Weekend

Well we made it through Irene and we never lost power, thank goodness! For the most part it just seemed like lots of wind and rain but Rosie did hide out in my closet all weekend long. I put one of her beds in there but apparently my bin full of scarves was much more cozy :)

Being sequestered in our apartment all weekend got really old really quickly but I did manage to do a few projects :)

I ordered these decals from Etsy months ago but this was my second attempt at actually getting them up on the wall. The first time I thought I could do it using just the level on my Iphone.....wrong! I had to buy a large straightedge so that I could actually line these up across the wall, I did still use my Iphone level though :)

I also finished knitting a blanket that I've been working on since around Christmas! Silly me thought one color would be boring and that I could just revise a pattern to fit what I wanted, wrong again. Although this is only two colors the way it's knitted I actually had six balls of yarn going at the same time! It got incredibly frustrating to untangle all of that mess every few rows.

I just finished knitting the blanket, I haven't sewn in all the loose ends yet so it's still not quite done but soooo much closer :)

It was quite a week with an earthquake on Tuesday (which I did not feel) and a hurricane on Sunday, who would have imagined such things in NYC. I'm looking forward to a nice calm, uneventful Labor Day weekend :)