One to Nothin'

What I wore

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Somewhere in my margarita-induced haze, I thought this shirt was green and that I should dance around in it as if I were in a club on St. Patty’s Day. There were a few flaws in this thought pattern. For one, this shirt is clearly not green. Second, me and clubs don’t go together — my feet are still sore just from wearing these heels in this photo sesh. Third, I’m clearly just dancing in my bedroom in front of my curtain that I’m so proud of (read that story here). Fourth, these photos are shoddy as hell. Look at that grainy resolution, but guess who has a DSLR now?! THIS GUY. Expect higher quality, hopefully less depressing, photo shoots from now on. In the meantime, feel free judge me for drinking skinny margaritas and dancing in my room alone on a Saturday night. Seriously, you guys, I am a damn catch. 

Linking up here.

Skinny St. Patty’s Margs

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Saturday was a beautiful day around here and it was hot. I laid out by the pool all day and all I could think about was tequila in margarita form. I decided it was time for me to try out a “grown up” style margarita. I needed to step my game up from college when I’d just have someone pour from a bottle of Montezuma and sugar-with-a-side-of-lime margarita mix directly into my mouth for upside down margaritas. They seemed like such a good idea. I think the real novelty was the fact that your head was tilted back and then you shook your head when you came up to mix it. Classy, I tell you. Especially since 98% of the time the pourer was drunk and ended up dumping cheap tequila all over your clothes. Good times.
This time around I decided to to do it differently. I Googled “skinny margarita recipe” and went with the first one I found. I even squeezed the orange juice straight from those oranges for the first one and then got lazy with OJ from the carton for the others.
Here’s what you need for one strong drink:
2 shots of Tequila silver (100% agave — I used Camarena which was delicious!)
6 T pure lime juice
4 T fresh orange juice
2 t light agave nectar
Coarsely ground sea salt

First pour the salt onto a plate and take a lime wedge to the rim of your glass, turn it upside down and swirl it around. Then combine all the other ingredients with a few ice cubes in a cocktail shaker (or two cups that fit inside each other if you don’t own one, like myself) and shake it until the agave is well incorporated. Pour into your glass, add a lime wedge and enjoy your lowcal cocktail. Then, if you’re anything like me, have a dance party in your bedroom and take lots of pictures. Get excited for those bad boys. Also, pace yourself or you might just end up obnoxiously Snapchatting everyone you know and, unlike texts where you can reread them the next day, Snaps remain a mystery. 
Happy St. Patrick’s day, friends. Will you be drinking green things today?

St. Patrick’s Day Nails

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So I’m kind of a big fan of nail polish and makeup and hair products and all things beauty-related, really. I haven’t discussed it much and that’s probably because the first time I tried to blog about my nails, it was beyond hideous (I did it anyway.. read it here if you must). Then I started working for a beauty website where I became really great at painting my left hand… but I couldn’t blog about it because, ya know, competition. So now that I watch babies for a living and do pretty things for funzies, I thought I might ease my way back into it. I mean, if you’re into it.. So here are my simple, yet somehow-I-made-them-complicated St. Patrick’s Day nails. 
The complicated part comes in when I used the essie copper + Rimmel gold to make a solid gold color and then went ahead and added Candie’s chunky glitter gold to make it even more prettiful. I just discovered Sally Hanson’s Dries Instantly Top Coat and it’s not even playing around. Within 30 seconds I was doing things with these nails that I normally wouldn’t consider doing within 5 minutes of painting them with normal polish (think unzipping pants for a pee break).
And in case you didn’t already know about my affinity for asymmetry, check out my other hand which was quite the opposite of the other one.
It might not be the most complicated way of painting your nails, but I thought it was pretty adorbz. Let me know if you guys got all cray cray with your nail art for this St. Patrick’s Day. I would love to see it. Enjoy and drink lots of green colored liquor/beer for me. Be safe. Byeeee.

So I just wanna say thank you for this day

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Here are a few of my happy moments from the past week. I snapped that beautiful tree on a long walk, I got some “Divergent” reading in, took the dude baby with me to Peet’s on another gorgeous walk (and a sneak peek of my St. Patty’s Day nails) and took myself out to get some froyo with lots of toppings to enjoy while I got all caught up on “Girls.” Be sure to follow me on Instagram to see the rest of my #100happydays. I have lots of fun (and sassy) posts brewing for next week and all weekend to work on them, so come back and see me! Enjoy your weekend.

What I Wore.. TMI style

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Jacket: Free People / Shirt: F21 / Jorts: Goodwill DIY / Shoes: Target

It was pretty warm out the other day, so I decided to break out the mom-jeans-turned-hipster-jorts for a photo sesh. Does anyone else feel like this trend is just asking for some major camel toe action? Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. Also, I’m obsessed with these shoes, but I’ve had a bandaid on my ankle ever since wearing them to this park for, like, an hour. It’s only on my left foot which just so happens to be about half a size bigger than the right one. I mean, I’ve always found symmetry to be boring but come on. At least I can adjust the straps of my bra to accommodate for the bigger one. Wow, this outfit post just turned into a TMI post really quickly. And since I’m on a roll, a bug just flew into my nostril. That just happened. I fully blame this on the fact that I’ve been watching “Girls” all night. Yeeeeea. 
Play me out, Pharrell.

Feel Good Country Jams

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My mood is very easily influenced by my surroundings. I feel cranky and down if I’m in a room without natural light; reading articles about war and real life scary stuff makes me incredibly anxious; TV shows and video games that feature dark colors, yelling or violence stress me out; and music that is too aggressive or screams at me makes me tense. To avoid some of these common triggers, I try to surround myself with bright colors, uplifting stories, soothing tones, pretty images and all-around feel good vibes. I know this isn’t practical all the time. That real life scary stuff is really important, but I need to keep my inner seesaw from teetering too far in the wrong direction sometimes.
This is how I first started enjoying country music. I came from a family that was totally anti-twang (despite our southern roots), and my wanna-be-punk-rocker self was totally down with the country shaming right up until ninth grade. We spent a week at a condo on Crystal River one summer where I spent the days out in the sun eating popsicles, constantly reapplying sunscreen and reading teen magazines that taught me how to make out. At home I had gotten accustomed to watching music videos every time I was near a TV — specifically Fuse channel because I was hardcore, remember? So whenever I came inside I surfed through the channels hoping to find some music videos, but with MTV pumping out gems like “Room Raiders” and “Next,” my only option was CMT.
Maybe it was because aside from a tear-in-my-beer tune here and there, the songs featured were mostly upbeat, happy party anthems, or maybe it was just because I really listened to the genre for the first time while spending a great summer on a river with my family, but from then on I was hooked. By the time I turned 16, there was a country station programmed into my favorites that hardly ever got played unless I was in the car alone or cruising with a couple of my girlfriends who appreciated it too. Even now, if I have access to cable and it’s early enough in the day, I know I can tune in to CMT to see the top 20 videos of the week and that’s enough to make my heart happy right there.
To this day I feel like I need to justify my affinity for the genre, perhaps because I still have so many friends who hate it or maybe it’s my family’s voices echoing in my head going “ewww turn it offfff!!!” But it makes me happy. No matter how simple or cheesy or ridiculous the lyrics are sometimes, I just love that it has the ability to make me smile.
If I’m in a terrible mood and everything seems dark and dismal, sometimes just tuning in to a station that features songs about booze, sunshine, love and honkey tonk badonkadonks is all the motivation I need to stop taking myself so seriously. So that’s what we’re doing today, friends. We’re going to listen to some of my favorite country jams in an attempt to take ourselves a little less seriously and balance out all the other stressors we’re dealing with today. I hope you love them as much as I do.

Weekend Things

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Let’s talk about my weekend, shall we? It was a doozy. The madness started Thursday night when my sorority little got into town from Boston. I had a feeling we’d be going hard, so I tried to make paleo breakfast for dinner before heading to SF for the night. That burned scrambled mess up there was supposed to be delicious paleo pancakes. I messed up the ratio and created the weirdest banana omelette the world has ever seen. Then I went on to knock a warmed up bottle of coconut oil all over my kitchen, so now that it’s at room temperature, it’s quite impossible to clean up. There’s the evidence on my La Croix can. Lovely. All of this was remedied, however, when I was reunited with my little and we drank fancy drinks in fancy bars that I’d usually never consider walking into. It was a unique and drunken experience that ended in my crashing in their room at The Ritz. I’d call Thursday night a success. 
My hangover on Friday was a different story completely. It started with me turning the wrong way on a one-way street and ended with Ziggy sitting her sausage butt right on my head while I tried to sleep it off. Friday night I decided to take the train into the city to avoid one-way street driving and I ended up seeing those guys up there do an awesome dance to Pharrell’s “Happy.” It was an exciting twist on a usually painfully long commute. The rest of the night was spent drinking cocktails out of mason jars in SF hipster bars, aka my comfort zone. Saturday was spent sleeping. Like, a solid 12 hours.
Sunday I played with puppies at the dog park, admired pretty flowers and nail polish, and even made it to the city for a record high third time in one weekend to eat a delicious dinner at a restaurant where I didn’t know what 80% of the things on the menu were. In other words, my weekend was amaze-balls. How was your weekend?

Sunday Currently

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Currently..
Reading “Divergent.” I put “The Paris Wife” on hold for now because I felt like it was going to end up upsetting me more than it was worth. We’ll see if I pick it back up. So far “Divergent” isn’t so cheery either. Anybody have some uplifting story suggestions?
Writing personal essays. I haven’t decided if I will post them here or not (they are pretty personal after all), but it feels pretty great to just write for no reason.
Listening to the RENT soundtrack. It’s my favorite musical hands down. I would love to see it on broadway. 
Thinking about my crazy weekend.
Smelling the bacon, sausage and eggs I just made. 
Wishing for peace and strength for some friends who are suffering from the loss of loved ones.
Hoping to find the motivation to go for a run today. It’s been too long.
Wearing the shirt from my very first half marathon, the Five Points of Life race in Gainesville. That was a truly great day.
Loving San Francisco. The more time I spend in that city, the more I love it.  
Wanting to visit Portland really, really soon.
Needing to figure out what I’m going to do when my lease ends. It’s been weighing on me a lot lately.
Feeling stoked that Pharrell’s new album, G I R L is out. I just love that man.

siddathornton

Goat cheese & walnut salmon recipe

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I bought salmon a couple weeks ago and much like every time I go to the store, there was no planning behind it. I just thought to myself, “hey, I like salmon,” so I bought it. Then upon realizing I had purchased far more meat and poultry than I would be able to consume before expiring, I threw some salmon and chicken in the freezer. Some things you should know about me: I love cooking when I’m actually doing it, I hate it when it’s inconvenient, I find thawing things to be very inconvenient and I love spam. That last one was unrelated. 
So I decide to be responsible one night and take the frozen shiz and throw it in the fridge to thaw out the safe way. Unfortunately the next day also happened to be the day that our apartment turned off our power for a few hours and I don’t know that much about how quickly things go bad or whatever, but I do know that by the time I rolled around to finding cooking salmon to be convenient, I was very inconvenienced by the smell of it. It was much like the smell of a really old, neglected dish rag, which is even worse than fish smell, believe it or not. Finally I allowed myself to throw away the no good salmon and was left no choice but to go to the grocery store. I even thought about making a list, and then I didn’t.
This time I picked up more salmon, but I also got distracted by the goat cheese section. So without a plan of action, I knew I would be combining salmon and goat cheese some how. I grabbed some veggies and obviously capers and headed home. As I started Googling things, I found that a lot of people like to stuff meat with things like cheese. For whatever reason, the idea of stuffing meat with anything churns my stomach in a weird way, so I settled for topping my salmon with goat cheese and walnuts. Here’s what I used:

sockeye salmon

olive oil
Italian seasoning
roasted red pepper and garlic goat cheese (Safeway = the best)
chopped walnuts
Preheat the oven to 450 and line a pan with aluminum foil. Coat the salmon pieces with olive oil and sprinkle with Italian seasoning. Spread goat cheese over the tops and mash walnut pieces into the cheese. Place the salmon on the foil skin side down and bake for about 10 minutes (maybe a little less depending on your oven, mine was slightly overcooked). I was super pumped about how it turned out. I paired it with sauteed mushrooms and onions and paleo egg salad (which is really easy–let me know if you’d like the recipe).
Have a lovely weekend, friends!
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