Bag Lady

I. Love. Bags. Purses are nice, but I have no need to own expensive purses with brand names. No. Purses are fine for other people.

Bags? Bags are for me. I have more bags than I know what to do with. Mostly, little duffel bags with bows or polka dots or something cute...also known as "I love this. I don't need this. I'll take 2, please."

The lovely people over at Simply Bags sent me a lovely little bag this week! And I love it. Why? Because it's adorable, and if there is one thing better than an adorable bag, it's an adorable bag with your name on it.



This little beauty is one of their Insulated Lunch Bags.


But that's not all they have. They have tote bags, duffels, photobags, diaper bags, kids bags, and tons more. All adorable!

Oh Simply Bags, I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship!

A Word About Passion

This is going to be one of those actual "writing" posts. I know, crazy. Not even a picture.

I was thinking about passion this week. In the two weeks of break from my summer classes and my fall classes, I read a couple books. I chose both for specific reasons, none of which were really important, and finished them fairly quickly. But, when I was done, I came to a horrible realization: I don't know if I liked them or not. Somewhere in the past couple years, I basically lost the ability to tell whether I enjoyed what I was reading or not. How do I not know if I like it? And if I don't know, who the hell does? I could easily point out the things about the books that I didn't like, but that didn't mean to me that I didn't like the book as a whole. I live a lot of my life in the grey matter. It was good, but it was also bad. Neither means I did or didn't like the book.

This got me thinking along the lines of likes and dislikes. Plus, with my extra time this week, I was able to submit some writing pieces to various publications, do some painting, and even do some drawing. All of which I like to do. Then I realized: I don't have a passion for all of those. I like to do a lot of things. But...who was it that said this?..."I can do anything I want to do, but I can't do everything I want to do." If you say you have passion for many things equally, then you spend little time on each and never spend enough time on any to make them effective. There has to be some kind of focus. One or two things that hold your passion, and not just your enjoyment.

I do a lot of things I don't like to do. Everyone does--I'm not some ultra-sacrificing woman, no one can do what they want to do all the time. I don't like doing laundry. I don't like cleaning the bathroom. I'm not a big fan of dishes. But we all have to do them. That's fine. But, I think a lot of time we get lost in doing things we "should" be doing and forget to do things we "want" to do--things we have a passion for.

And therein lies the question: what is your passion? I like to draw and to paint, but not for long periods of time. I like to bike and kayak, but often I find myself forcing it. I like to write, but many times my brain prefers to focus on 928392 other things while I'm writing and that's makes the process frustrating. So, what do I love to do?

I don't know. It seems like an easy question. I mean, it's me...no one knows me better than me...this shouldn't be difficult. But, I do know that there are a few things that I'm waiting for right now that may point to my passion. I'm waiting for our PCS date, so that I know when I'm going to be on the other side of the country. So I can call the RedCross there and set up disaster relief training. And I know that if I hadn't ever started dating B, I'd be getting my assignment for the Peace Corps next year. But, does that mean that because my life with B took a higher priority than my Peace Corps plan that my dream--my passion--is lost? No. It just means that I have to look for my passion in other things. And that's okay.

As long as I'm passionate ;)

Craft Time: Red & Turquoise

I got a little carried away with kitchen decorations this week. It was my only week at home without having classes, and it was wonderful. Plus a little IKEAing didn't help with my decoration overload. I found this lazy susan at IKEA some months ago. I love it, but it's brown. Our kitchen is all red, turquoise, and black. So, of course, throwing a brown lazy susan on the middle of the table wouldn't have been too pretty.

But, with $4 in paint, some tape, some sandpaper, and two 59cent foam brushes, it went from this...


To this...


And suddenly it matched!

But I couldn't stop there. Oh no sirree. By then, I was thoroughly enjoying the painting process. At this point in the decorating, I should have put more thought into it. But, instead my thought process went a lot like this: I want to paint something else. I already have the paint. I can't buy anything else right now. Hey, how about painting on some sketchbook paper? Could I find 8.5x8.5 frames? It didn't matter. There was no stopping me.

I spent a little bit of time searching "red and turquoise" online, and found a few prints/paintings and used them to imitate my own on paper. With the paint. (imitating here and here, but only using simple specific colors). I came up with these:



Where I go from here, I don't know. I have two options for displaying these (assuming I can find frames to fit them) and both include at least one more painting. I could do two more paintings, both with black backgrounds, and go with one of these hanging situations:


OR.

I could buy this really awesome red shelf from IKEA, do one more painting with the black background and both red and turquoise in it, and set the three paintings on the self (below) and just hope that it fits in our house...which we don't have yet.


Decisions decisions!

Someone should really hide the red and turquoise paint from me.

One Bahama Mama, Please!

The honeymoon was wonderful. Although we didn't sail right into the middle of Tropical Storm Colin, we were awarded three days of the rain caused by him (added to the list of names I dislike: Colin). But, the last two days of our cruise (in Nassau and at sea) were hot, sunny, and perfect!

I'd love to show you some pictures of the boat. But I'm legally bound not to. But, I like to think we are prettier than architectual structures anyway...so here is some of what we did!

We sat in the window of our room and watched the rain. For two days.


We drank incredibly strong daquiris out of carved coconuts on the beach under the storm clouds. On the third day.


We took pictures of our feet (mine are the brown ones. what can I say, I married a white boy).


We wrote cheesy love letters to each other in the sand. On the fourth day. The one where the sun existed.


We stopped by Oprah's to say "What up, Oprah."


We built a crocodile.


We visited the straw market and saw more knock-off bags in one are than anywhere else in the world. I have never been called "pretty lady" so many times in my life.


We watched Dion, whose address on his business card is "on the sidewalk outside the straw market," paint this. And then bought it.

We took pictures of unsuspecting locals...


...random ship parts...


...cheesy poses of ourselves...


...and gorgeous sunsets.



We finally got some sun on our last day at sea, which made me super happy!


The cruise experience was different. I've been fortunate enough to have been able to experience many different "types" of vacations and, although the cruise was fun, it's really hard to top the all-inclusive resort.

The ship had 2600 people and one pool the size of the one in the backyard, so we only ended up using it once and that was just to cool off for a minute in the hot sun on the fifth day. I found myself wanting to jump off the boat multiple times in a non-titanic-suicidal fashion (which we, of course, took pictures of ourselves immitating), but because I really just wanted to swim! Plus, soft drinks weren't included...and that just seems odd to me.

It took hours (literally) to get on the boat the first day, and by the time we finally made it to our room we were starving and exhausted and couldn't decide which was more important, food or sleep. Getting off the boat was much much faster, which pleasantly surprised us! We were basically planning on missing our flight home because of a long debarkation process, and we were actually at the airport 2.5 hours early.

But, we enjoyed ourselves and the food in the dining rooms for dinner was absolutely fabulous. Lobster, steak, the best lasagna I've ever had, turkey...we even tried a little esgarot and discovered that it's really not half bad (as long as we don't have to pay for it :)].

We had a lovely honeymoon :)

Weather: It follows us.

Lots has occurred this week, including but not limited to free new jukeboxes, broken car windows, expensive useless car parts, kickboxing mishaps in sporting good stores, and several finals. My last final is tomorrow, so Saturday will rock.

And that's not just because we're going to the Bahamas.

It's because we will be rocking from side to side in the middle of this:



Do you remember when my husband was chosen for training in DC, and the day they went DC began it's biggest snow storm on record?

Mother nature is pissed at us for something. It's definitely not legit though, I've planted flowers and we grow strawberries. Everyone loves strawberries.