In the few days it's been since I've last posted, Le Boyfriend and I have realized that when paired together and forced to craft, we actually make a pretty good team.
Before my birthday, I felt so overwhelmed by all of the material items overflowing in my house, all of which we had to organize before my party. I felt drowned in my families collective possessions, recently moved from our storage cubicle down the street and straight into our living room. So when Le Boyfriend asked what I wanted from him and his family, I asked if his Grams, the sewing extraordinaire, could take the 30-something t-shirts I had laying about and make them into a snazzy T-Shirt Quilt ala Pinterest (and this post here).
Adam outlining our cardboard template.
Adam was outlining our cardboard template (after some trial and error) and I was cutting the squares out. Grams is currently sewing together the shirts, and tomorrow we will venture to a fabric store (my Kryptonite!) to get the stuffing and fleece backing material.
In more recent events, we traveled to the Rangers game last night with our friend Paul and watched them play the Angels. I wasn't sure who to cheer for, because being a California girl at heart I have a love for the Angels and Dodgers, but I came to the conclusion that if I cheered Hamilton in any way, shape or form, I might get shanked.
Paul, Adam (I know, his hair!) and myself.
Of course, my favorite part about Rangers games (besides finally pulling out my $60 pink Rangers Jersey) is the food. More specifically, the Garlic Fries. Eight dollars worth of deep fried, cheesy goodness that made my breath smell like the inside of an Italian restaurant. I worked out twice today to burn off the calories, but oh god it was worth it.
This was after a good dent was decimated...
We also ran into Bobbie, one of my lovely ladies from Celtic Troupe at faire, as she got prepared to volunteer with Rangers Go Green, the recycling program at the stadium. It's very rare to see people from Faire outside of the grounds, so we had to document it with a picture.
(My jersey is pink and white, so the pink dress felt appropriate.)
Overall, it's been a good few days. Time for some shuteye, talk to you all soon!
So on day two of my new fitness routine, I'm pretty much dying. My thighs, abs and back are killing me, but I feel...stronger. If that's possible, already. I noticed today that I could run a little longer, hold the wall squat on my new ab routine better, just a few small improvements that put a smile on my face.
Today was quite an important day for me, because the Travel Channel aired a episode of their new show, Fandemonium, hosted by Adam Richman from Man v. Food, titled "Midieval Madness." It was filmed at, you guessed it, Scarborough Renaissance Festival, my home away from home.
Shenanigans with fellow UNT girl and troupe member, Kristen.
I was - of course - out of town the weekend they filmed at faire, which was the weekend I left for ICDC in California (to read about that crazy week, click here). But in watching it, I could name at least one person in almost every frame/scene, and promptly did so, much to Le Boyfriend and his father's annoyance.
Celtic Troupe, my lovely, award winning group, is featured in the video above, and one of our two troupe directors, David, is featured in the episode, as well as the Pirate Crew I'm a part of and the reason I got involved in faire, the Seahawk Society. It was super surreal seeing all of my friends on TV, but it was such a great feeling knowing that this show would bring more tourism to the faire and hopefully more publicity to our troupe! (The faire website totally crashed after the episode aired, so you know it did it's job!)
One of the highlights of the season - the Scarborough Celtic Troupe Scavenger Hunt for children on Celtic Weekend. They had to find the 10 of us listed on the page and get our John Hancock - I mean Henry Tudor....
Welp, that's all for now, folks. Time to go get some shut eye before an early run to beat the heat tomorrow!
Love,
Holly
PS: Did you like my little Mean Girls reference in the title? I thought it was clever (:
When I lost weight freshman year, it wasn't because I was exercising or eating healthy, it was simply because I wasn't eating. I spent so much time running back and forth from Augora Hills to Burbank with a mother who could survive on Diet Coke and gum (and you wonder where my caffeine addiction comes from?) for days that I didn't even think about where my next stop for food was.
Four years later, and if I don't eat every 6 or so hours my stomach feels like it's going to eat itself. But despite my attempts to eat better the last few months or so, leading up to ICDC and after, I still managed to get a Kidney Infection following my recent trip to Galveston due to dehydration and poor nutrition.
So for me, it's time for a change. I mentioned in my "Summer Girl" post that I wanted to spend the time before school starts bettering myself, so here's my chance. I started Day 1 of my new adventure with a run (well...walk/run - I'm not that active!) from my house to our local water park, a good 40 minute workout, followed by a small ab-blaster routine I found on Pinterest.
I found so many pretty spots I've never seen before on the trails behind my neighborhood, including the bridge area to the left. And some of the houses I didn't even know existed!
Of course, the second part of a good weight loss plan is diet. Three balanced meals of cereal, a large salad, and chicken with veggies left me full and enough calories for some no sugar added Vanilla FroYo from Braums (100 calories a serving and my weakness!)
On the mention of food, for lunch we stopped at one of my new favorite places, Snappy Salads in Southlake. It's very similar to a Chipotle, but salads instead of burritos. You can do a half salad, which is still sizable and fills me up, and comes with your choice of lettuce 8 toppings like bacon, carrots, tomatoes, etc. The full salad is only a few dollars more, and comes with 16 toppings. I'm stuffed off a half salad, so I don't even want to know what I'll feel like after a full salad.
The first time I went I got steak with a lime chipotle dressing (pictured right) but today I filled up on less carbs and more white meat with a red pepper vinaigrette that is totally addicting. My favorite part? The $.69 warm, fresh baked bread. I split it today with my lunch companions, Le Best Friend and Le Boyfriend, but nomnomnom it's good.
So now I'm heading to sleep, ready to wake up tomorrow and tackle day two of this challenge. All I know is by the time I get to UNT, I want to be able to walk to my classes without dying. Time to finish this episode of Firefly and hit the hay!
You may (or may not) have noticed in the postscript of my last blog that I am currently fangirling over Jane Austen. And pretty much anything related to her, her works, and the world she helped create.
So it comes as no surprise that one of my newest obsessions is this little thing called the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. What is the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, you may ask? Well, as any self-professed Austen nerd will tell you, it's only one of the best YouTube shows EVER. Seriously, just watch.
Maybe because this version of Elizabeth Bennet reminds me of myself (social media savvy, mass comm student with a crazy family, sounds about right), I relate so much more to her than to the book version, but this show had me literally rolling on the floor laughing at some of the outlandish things that happened. Despite reading the book, I was so not prepared for this version of Darcy. I finished the entire series in less than a week, and I have absolutely not one ounce of shame.
I just wanted a chance to share this little tidbit with you, my lovely readers. However few (or many) of you there are. If you have a series or show you think I should watch, leave it in the comments below!
As someone who grew up in a house full of books and DESPISING all forms of the English language (IE: writing, reading, and the limiting of the amount of which we speak it), I would never, as a small child, have thought "Hmm, I really want to be an author some day." If someone had suggested that to me, I probably would have told them to get a harsh reality check and maybe look at my standardized testing scores.
For those of you who know me now, but did not know me then, you're probably going "WHAT? HOLLY HATED READING AND WRITING?" I know. Shocker. But alas, it is true. Until about the fifth grade, I absolutely refused to pick up a book and read out of my own free will, despite my desperate English major of a Father's pleas. Then, the summer after 5th grade, I was asked to do just that by my school. Choose a book from a list of suggestions, and do a project over said book to present in my first Advanced Placement class of my secondary school career. So what did the pink loving, blinged out cell phone carrying 11 year old Holly pick out of the small selection of options?
A princess book, of course.
Princess Academy still is to this day one of my favorite books. It tells the story of a young girl from a mountaintop territory of a small country, who is chosen as a potential wife for her Prince and using her "quarry speech" learned as a child, manages to save the girls of her princess school from a group of bandits. It was the first opportunity I was given to imagine a world I was interested in, with my own interpretations and images.
From then on I was hooked. I soaked up every book I could, and in the 7th grade I read the most words out of anyone in the school (yes, we had those kinds of contests). I found my niche in fantasy novels, falling in love with the Harry Potter world after watching the movie and getting the okay from my slightly shocked parents to buy the book. And then, then came the fan fiction.
My introduction to writing was a silly one at best. It started out as an idea. A "what if" scenario, as so many fan fiction authors will tell you their best stories begin with. "What if the Mirror of Erised was never moved?" My serious Harry Potter lovers will get the reference. And so I started. And I kept writing. And I kept writing. And a few days later, I gloriously printed out my newly penned work and handed it to my dad to read. I kid you not, I think I saw him tear up.
Years later, and a few of my fan fictions have more words than most full length novels. I started blogging, still picking up any book I could find. And then the ideas came for my own works of art. So since Freshman year, I've been working on two or three different ideas for books.
Camp NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost at a close. I have not done as much writing as I wanted to, but I'm giving myself a little slack - there's a lot going on in this soon to be UNT student's life right now. But I'm hoping that sharing this story, my story of how I came to love words, love the feel of pen on paper, fingers on keyboard and the sight of my stories coming to life, would help someone else who's world seems a little small, become a little bigger.
And on a perfectly good sidenote, can I just say, THERE IS A MOVIE COMING OUT ABOUT A JANE AUSTEN STAY AWAY CAMP?!
Le boyfriend claims he wants to see this...but I get the feeling he will have no idea why everyone is flipping over Collin Firth in a clingy shirt.
And...end fangirling.
Stories of your own to share? Favorite books, stories, even movies from your expanded worldview? Share below!
