Awkward and Awesomes!

So, you know.

It's kind of been one of those weeks. The ones where by Thursday you just want to lay down on the floor next to a used kleenex and have someone throw their dirty t-shirt on you.

Awkward
-Having to explain to people that the reason I am not on Spring Break is because I am in fact, not a student. Yes, I work at a university. Yes, full time. Yes, I graduated. Yes, I am older than 21. Again, not a student.

-I very rarely get up the courage to play my Glee Pandora station at work, as there seem to be pockets of quiet that extend all the way down the hallway into everyone else's office, and though I want Darren Criss's cover of 'Teenage Dream' to be a part of my work day, I'm not so sure they do. However, this past week my office has been a wasteland, so when I found myself alone at the front yesterday, I decided to go for it. I made it through one particularly long rendition of 'Defying Gravity' (Rachel & Kurt's version) before a professor walked in and started asking me a bunch of questions. He did his best to ignore the underscore of a 'A Whole New World', but did let me know that his toddler 'loves that movie' when he left. I am the most grown up of all the grown ups.

-The past two episodes of Once Upon a Time. Ok, all of Once Upon a Time. I love this show. I really do- and not just because I am its target audience so I have been culturally conditioned to love this show from a young age. But, the dialogue. THE DIALOGUE.

Teetering on the brink between Awkward and Awesome:
 -Craigslist, now and forever. I found a listing yesterday for a woman selling a "SASSY red table", which turned out to be a very broken picnic table she had spray painted red and wants you to put in your child's bedroom. Sassy!? Seriously? Broken shards of wood should never be used synonymously with sassy. Unless of course you are discussing Lolita, in which case-- sure.

Another favorite listing this week was for a "Beautiful Vintage 80's Chair", which was in fact an oversized pink floral patterned arm chair with lots of stains and tears, and a big cat plopped down in the middle of the seat. Ok, listen: I'm not sure anything from the 80's counts as vintage. Or beautiful for that matter. And of all the adjectives you could use to describe an oversized pink floral patterened arm chair, did 'comfy' or 'large' not enter your mind? Even 'sassy' would have worked better here.

Awesome
-Mexican Martini's from Trudy's. I am usually a wine and beer type girl, but goodness gracious those things are incredible. Word to the wise: Do not go to Mexico and order a Mexican Martini. They will just bring you a regular martini. Mexican Martini's are a Tex Mex Austin creation. Or at least, that what we claim... so it's probably true.

-The Walking Dead. I have not had mind blowing television in my life since Lost, and sometimes I think Lost just blew your mind by stockpiling secret mystery intrique plot lines and then revealing them so very very slowly that your mind had no choice to be blown. But slow moving farmer Zombies? Apocalyptic discourses on the nature of man? Unhinged regular joe's trying to kill other regular joe's in cold blood? I can't get enough of it.
 
-Speaking of Zombies (and I usually am), I need this t-shirt in my wardrobe. I am not generally an ironic T-shirt wearer, but I could change (change in this context meaning 'change my mind' and not 'change into a Zombie').

-I enjoyed a 13 minute commute to work this morning instead of a 35 minute one thanks to the grand departure of 50,000 students from the UT Campus. Thank you, Spring Break.

-The absolutely heavenly bouquet of lillies that has been sitting on my desk for over two weeks now. I can smell them the minute I walk in the building.

Nooks and crannies

When I was little, one of my favorite things to do was grab a couple pillows off my bed, climb up onto the shelf above the clothes in my closet, and read. This daring feat would last for about ten minutes, at which point I would get a crick in my neck from trying to fit upright within the18" opening between my perch and the shelf above me...but for those ten minutes, everything was perfect. And private. And uncomfortable, but grandly uncomfortable.

I don't know when secret passages and book cases with ladders and reading in the hay loft went out of fashion (though I am guessing it was around the time Belle's great grandkids had an estate sale and everything good and precious in this world was scattered to the winds like that contemplative daffodil she picks at the beginning of the movie), but my future home is definitely going to have at least one legitimate book nook..and not just a chair in a corner next to a bookshelf like I have now.

Reading The Chronicles of Narnia may have given me unreasonable expectations about my closet (to this day that shelf sags a bit in the middle), but perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree. A window alcove perhaps? Safer, closer to the ground?

 
via
Perfection.


via
I can just imagine how this conversation went...
"Honey, I can't think of a thing to do with this dang spare cupboard!"
"Well sweets, we are always saying how much we need a spare bedroom for when your sisters come to stay..."

No but seriously, it's like a rich man's Harry Potter and I love it.

 

via
The pillows, the wallpaper, the slanty ceiling!? I want to be there right now.


via
Hmmm, turquoise ladder + tall bookshelf = What I would look like if I were a room.

And then just for fun:  

via
 I want to have breakfast in the attic!

Virginia is for lovers... and foam.

                                                                                                                                                           












Ya'll.

Welcome to Foamhenge. Population: you + the guy who built it (don't worry, he's hiding in the bushes.)

Oh, M. Cline. Nothing you do could surprize me....

I spoke too soon. I give you... Foam Merlin. Foam Merlin's face was taken from a mold of a local fellow (a friend of M. Cline I imagine) who is now deceased. How do I know this? There was a plaque, of course. A memorial plaque. Foam Merlin serves as a structure that will forever immortalize the aforementioned local fellow. And when I say 'forever' and 'immortalize', I mean 'for as long as foam lasts' and 'seriously?'

We will never forget you, Foamhenge! 

And just for reference, here is me at real Stonehenge. You can tell it's the real deal because of the gray sky (proof you are in England) and the rope fence (M. Cline was not there to protect it so they had to take other precautionary measures). 

Just one more word on foam while we're on the subject: My first few weeks of college, I was invited to a number of 'Foam Parties' via flyer/frat boy/word of mouth. They were a very big thing, these foam parties-- and in my head, the way a foam party went down was that a bunch of people went into a room with big pieces of foam (like the foamhenge pieces) and I don't know, hit each other with them? Or jumped on them? Whatever they did with those foam pieces, it sounded AMAZING, and I would have gone to one had I been able to convince anyone I knew to accompany me to a party that I had found out about via flyer taped to the back of a bathroom stall.

It wasn't until my sophomore year that one of my friends gently explained to me that the foam was like hand soap foam, not like real pieces of foam. And somehow, that just sounded icky. So in it's own way, my trip to Foamhenge was like my very own semi-private Foam Party. And that-- that is the stuff dreams are made of.