Twenty Ten in Review

So I was pretty sure my last post would be the last one for this year but then I came across  a post on Can You Pixel This? that reviewed 2010 via blog topics and posts. What a cleaver idea I thought!

So here is my past year in review via my two blogs...

January

• I came to terms with my place in the WIC and announced the launch of my event design firm Mismikado Creations
• I celebrated the one year anniversary of Mismikado Down the Aisle with a 13 day giveaway bonanza
• Luke and I had our engagement pictures taken

• I made my first silhouette design

February

• We went to cake tastings, picked the design and our cake toppers

• I sent out a cry for help for some engaged friends

March

• I designed the labels for our citronella torch "Jones Soda" bottles
• We booked our amazing wedding cake baker

April

• I launched the Mismikado Creations website
• I decided on my wedding hair style

• I contributed to Nonpareil Magazine

May

• We got our marriage license from Joy Loveless (True Story!)
• I dealt with some major stresses
• And after a year and a half of planning, Luke & I finally got married :)

June

• We took an amazing honeymoon to Veracruz City, Mexico

• I shared the evolution of our wedding table centerpieces
• I designed a custom invitation suite for San Fransisco wedding photographers Natasha & Mike of Choco Studio

July

• I trashed my wedding dress :)

August

• I participated in blogging Pay it Forward
• I announced the launch of Mismikado Down the Sidewalk
• I took the first steps "down the sidewalk" on MDTS
• I discussed our parenting plans and my experience with Purposeful Conception
• I started menu planning
• I took the Wardrobe Refasion pledge which I fell off of some time around Black Friday O_O
• And I shared with you all my office space

September

• Our wedding was featured on the Budget Savvy Bride
• I landed my dream job as an art teacher
• I started the friends & family monthly update email newsletter
• I spoke out about Banned Book Week via art

October

• I came up with my own jalapeño popper recipe

• I shared my dream vacation on Route 66
• I shot a trash the dress shoot in Deep Ellum
• I made a low calorie meal plan that would have helped me lose wait if I actually stuck to it :-/

November

• I shared my reading wish list (any of which would make great gifts for me *hint*hint*)
• Luke and I talked about naming our kids
• I made a 30 before 30 list
• And a 22 before 22 list
• I shared my love for the Montessori child bed
• I purged my closet

December

• I shared an itinerary for a weekend Boston getaway
• And recaped the past year in a survey

Saying Goodbye to 2010

Sorry for my lack of posting this month. It has been crazy busy and I will have so much to catch up on posting about here. But for now I wanted to take a quick moment to reflect on this past year and all that was accomplished.

YEAR-END SURVEY 2010

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
Got married.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't do resolutions but I do plan to accomplish most of my 22 before 22 list in 2011.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes a couple friends from the valley did and another is pregnant with twins :)

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My great-grandma dies two days before 2010 and Luke's grandma died early in January.

5. What countries did you visit?
Mexico 

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
A skinny waistline :)

7. What date from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
May 29th - The day I vowed to spend the rest of my life with my best friend :)

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Being a fairly decent wife.

9. What was your biggest failure?
NaNoWriMo

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Just the generic cold/flu

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Our Honeymoon in Veracruz!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Luke's - for snagging a great job and graduating college. Lani's - for organizing her affairs to spend next summer in Greece. 

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
I'm not passive-aggressive enough to answer that question :P 
14. Where did most of your money go?
The Wedding and Rent.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The Wedding, my new job, and Polaroid's PoGo Instant Mobile Printer

16. What song will always remind you of 2010?
Bad Romance - Lady Gaga's and the On The Rocks University of Oregon version.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
- happier or sadder? happier since this time last year was really emotional because my great-grandma passed away on the 28th.
- richer or poorer? richer
- thinner or fatter? fatter :( I hate the newlywed 15!

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Exercise and healthy eating

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Time Wasting

20. How did you spend the holidays?
Don't celebrate but spent the time off with my family.

21. Did you fall in love in 2010?
Already was in love by the start of the year.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Psych and Big Bang Theory.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No.

24. What was the best book you read?
Shug by Jenny Han, The Unwritten Rule by Elizabeth Scott, and Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

25. What was your favorite film of this year?
Despicable Me! and Megamind was pretty good too :) 

26. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
Comfy Eclectic

27 Whom did you miss?
My family and friends in the valley and Lani. 

28. Who was the best new person you met?
Too many to mention individually but there's some great new Dallas/Terrell peeps in my life :)

29. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010.
That I need to constantly combat negative feeling so that I can stay positive an upbeat in my life :)

A Whirlwind Boston Weekend Getaway Itinerary

So I got to thinking this morning that instead of waiting to take a week long New England trip next fall when Luke get's his time off. Why not take a weekend trip in the summer. This is just an idea and probably won't happen but I decided to come up with an itinerary of what all we could do if Luke took the Friday and Monday off from work...

In advance we would buy 2 1-Day Go Boston Cards for $50 a person. This will save a ton of money on various tours and give us the option to do other stuff to. We'd also need to download and print a copy of the Freedom Trail Map.

So here is the schedule of events:

Fly in Thursday night after work

Friday:

Wake up early and drive down to Boston and park under the Boston Common

Spend day walking the Freedom Trail while listening to MP3 Tour ($15) and riding the Beantown Trolly (free with Go Card - $29 savings per person) 

The Trail includes the following historical stops:

USS Constitution (free with Go Card - $4 savings per person) 

Bunker Hill Monument & Museum

Copp's Hill Cemetery 

The Old North Church 

Detour for a stop at Mike's Pastry 

The Paul Revere House (free with Go Card - $3.50 savings per person) 

Faneuil Hall - Eat Lunch (historic talks ever 30 mins)

Site of the Boston Massacre 

Old State House (free with Go Card - $7.50 savings per person) 

Old South Meeting House (free with Go Card - $6 savings per person) 

Old Corner Book Store 

Boston Latin School

King's Chapel Burying Ground 

King's Chapel 

Granary Burying Ground 

Park Street Church 

The State House (call in advance for scheduled free tour) 

The Boston Common (15 min Swan Boat ride - free with Go Card - $2.75 savings per person)

After completing the trail, return to the North End for an early dinner.

After dinner head over to the Museum of Fine Arts for a quick tour before it closes at 9:45 (free with Go Card - $20+ savings per person) 

After museum head back to Beacon St for a drink and snack at Cheers 

Saturday:

Wake up and have breakfast at Parker's Maple Barn  

Have a casual morning in Nashua/Hudson

Grab lunch at Wally's 

Have a free evening with friends

Sunday:

Go to Hudson's meeting

Have lunch with friends

Head down to Rockport/ Glouchester to spend the afternoon and evening

Monday:

Wake up and head back down to Boston to tour Fenway Park ($12/per person) 

Tour Samuel Adams Brewery ($2/per person) 

Catch afternoon flight home


I love this schedule because it includes most of the main things I either loved doing or always wanted to do when I lived in New England. The only thing I might consider adding is heading down to Cambridge to stroll around Harvard a little. And with the Go Boston Cards we will end up saving at least $45 on all our tours not counting the restaurant discounts that come with it.


What summer vacations do you have planned?

Chronicle Books Friends & Family Sale

Chronicle Books has decided to reach out to bloggers to offer them a special friends and family discount. That's right, all my readers can get 35% off plus free shipping on any order from Chronicle Books until December 12th. Pretty exciting, right?

Simply enter the promo code FRIENDS at checkout to receive you discount.

Happy shopping!

And don't forget to comment on my Book Haul post for a chance to win my entire book wish list valued at $500.

A Wedding to Drool Over

So I am a little late to the blog party about the amazing wedding of Max & Margaux this past summer. Max is none other than the A-M-A-Z-I-N-G wedding photographer Max Wanger. Being the highly skilled artist he is, it is no doubt that he picked equally amazing photographers Whitney & Jesse of Our Labor of Love to capture his own wedding.

I won't repost the photos here but I highly recommend you see them for yourselves at Once Wed and The Flash Dance and the videos as well at 100 Layer Cake and A Cup of Jo.

What I really wanted to feature today were the amazing invitations Anna at Rifle Paper Co. designed for them. I am absolutely in love with this style of invitations and look forward to trying my hand at it.

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You can find more of Anna's work at your local Anthropolgie or Paper Source.

The Essential Wardrobe List for Women Who Frequently Wear Skirts

So as part of my fall cleaning project and to finally unpack and sort all of my clothes, I have decided to do a massive closet purging down to only the essentials. One problem... As a regular pioneer as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I spend about 6 days a week in skirts. No women's essential wardrobe list is designed for women who actually dress up that much so I had to use about 7 different lists on the internet to come up with the following list. This is what I will be using tomorrow to organize and sort all my clothes.

Beware! Do Not Buy From Adobe Education Store Tonight!

This is a warning of how I almost got scammed tonight by a company I have long respected. I don't know what the cause it, a minor glitch, a malicious bait & switch sceme, or a outside scam like phishing or hacking but the Adobe Education Store is experiencing some extreme sketchiness tonight!

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard on my Mac I have been in the market for Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended and since I am still a college student, I qualify for an education discount. But I am up in the air about biting the bullet and purchasing the full Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium since it's an excellent deal. Well tonight I decided to see if Adobe had any special black friday deals on any one of these softwares. And I found something that seemed like a miracle...

The Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard for $199 shipped in the box, the same price as Photoshop alone. Of course I instantly clicked purchase and was about to complete the checkout process when I noticed a startling fact. Instead of nearly buying the Standard Design Suite, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended was in my shopping cart for $199. But the really odd thing is that there was also a message saying I in fact added the Suite to my cart. What in the world!?


I decided to repeat this process, and it wouldn't repeat on every try but periodically it would and I took screen shots of the whole thing. I discovered that this changed price on a product page and switched product in the cart was happening with several different items.


I of course immediately wanted to call Adobe and see what gives but basically no one is available right now...

Adobe Education Store

1-800-585-0774

6am-8pm PT Daily

Product help for Acrobat and Acrobat.com

877-782-3623
Monday–Friday, 5am–7pm PST

All other product help

800-833-6687
Monday–Friday, 5am–7pm PST

Software activation

866-772-3623
Available 24/7

Installation

800-833-6687
Monday–Friday, 5am–7pm PST

Licensing, registration, web subscription services

800-833-6687
7 days a week, 5am–7pm PST

Omniture support

Omniture customers: Log into your Omniture product or visit the Omniture ClientCare portal.

Scene7 support

Scene7 customers: Visit the Client Resource Center.

TTY (Telephone Typewriter)

800-685-3573
Monday–Friday, 5am–2pm PST
Messages accepted after hours

But believe me I will be contacting them ASAP somehow. Until then try to make sense of what I documented in photo and make note of the product titles, url addresses, and time stamps. And steer clear of purchasing from the Adobe Education Store for the time being!

Is it just me or does this fall under that whole false advertising issue?

22 Before 22

Ok so I love the 30 before 30 idea but some of my to do items are impossible to even attempt for a few years so i wanted something more imminent. And since I considered a 3 month time frame for 21 tasks before 21 to be too tight I decided to just give myself 15 months to accomplish the following list in no particular order...

1. Give 22 gifts within 22 days
2. Create a photography portfolio website
3. Read the Bible in chronological order
4. Read 22 books
5. Update MDTS from 5 different Apple stores
6. Snag a literary agent
7. Build 5 different chandelier/light fixtures
8. Get my year's service time by mid-August
9. Complete 31 days to a better blog
10. Spend a weekend in Austin
11. Take a weekend workshop or community class
12. Teach my own e-course
13. Lose 22 pounds
14. Master cooking a gourmet 5 course meal
15. Research the publishing industry
16. Write a non-fiction book
17. Make a large format artistic self-portrait
18. Make/Finish our wedding video
19. Make 22 different kinds of cookies
20. Be a better housekeeper by creating a cleaning schedule and sticking to it
21. Finish our wedding/newlywed scrapbook
22. Grow my hair out

The Montessori Child Bed

So while writing my Penelope room decor post, I realized I never talked about my adoration of the Montessori child bed on here. Instead of writing a whole new post here, I will share an email I sent to a friend who is expecting twins. As a note, their family ended up loving the idea too and will be using these in their nursery :)
"So this may come across as completely random but I wanted to share something I found interesting about nursery ideas...

I have been doing a lot of research and studying in the Montessori Principles of education, partly for future parenting purposes and partly b/c I'm considering pursuing a teaching career in that sort of environment. Anyways, although I have been familiar with the Montessori method for a while I just learned about the "child bed" this past summer. Since Montessori is based on creating independent children who learn from exploring their environment, cribs are not encouraged. I know that must sound crazy! But it suggests using either a crib mattress or a regular futon mattress directly on a carpeted or soft rug on the floor. Of course the same safety precautions of very fitted sheets, no blankets, etc apply but this way children have the freedom of mobility and exploration of their rooms on their terms. And because the average crib or futon mattress is only 3-6" off the ground, there is really no falling hazard. Of course this means making sure there's nothing near the floor level that could injure the child but I've found the long term benefits to be amazing.

By opting for a floor bed, not only do you have to worry less about rushing in, in the morning to take them out of the crib or worry about the safety hazards of cribs themselves, but the bed literally grows with the child. Parents who have used futon mattresses, can just move their kids to a futon bed when they are old enough, which of course equates to financial savings.

I don't want to come across as "offering advice"or anything especially since we're not parents yet... lol... but I figured this was probably something you've never heard of either and wanted to throw it out there. I have done a lot of research on the topic, and Luke & I are completely sold by the idea. I just figured it's something to consider while you guys are running through all the big parenting decisions that you must be facing.

Here's a couple links that explain the "child bed" way better than I ever could :)

http://www.squidoo.com/Child-Friendly-Bedroom-Design

http://swissmama.momaroo.com/662173307/no-crib-for-a-bed-a-montessori-approach/

http://www.growninmyheart.com/the-montessori-floor-bedpart-1

http://sewliberated.typepad.com/sew_liberated/2009/04/finnians-montessori-room.html

Ok I just wanted to share :)"

Anyone here ever use the child bed? What were your experiences?

30 before 30

So I decided to jump on this bandwagon of creating to do list of 30 things I hope to accomplish before I am 30. With just under 10 years to work on this, hopefully I should work through them all (given this system continues that long). So here goes in no particular order:

1. Buy a house
2. Have kids - Minion was born on 3/26/14
3. Expand our service/ministry somehow - Luke started Pioneering with me in 9/11 so that counts for now :)
4. Travel historic route 66
5. Travel Abroad - We went to Paris, Latvia, and Amsterdam in 6/13
6. Study Montessori and implement it in our home
7. Publish a book
8. Relearn Swahili
9. Create my dream office/studio
10. Kiss in the rain
11. Maintain better sleeping habits
12. Manage my depression & anxiety
13. Refinish and/or build our own furniture - Refinished a dresser for Minion to use as a changing table
14. Maintain my "happy weight"
15. Update MDTS from 30 different states/provinces
16. Take Luke to Rockport, MA - We went on 6/15/13
17. Adopt a large adult house-trained dog
18. Maintain an emergency savings fund with 6 months expenses
19. Buy/Pay off a new car - We bought and paid off the Jetta in 2013 and are currently paying off the truck
20. Master coding
21. Own the Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium
22. Live Simply
23. Build unique, cool, functional bookcases and shelves
24. Live in either Colorado or Round Rock
25. Go to South by Southwest
26. Teach a Bible Student to the point of baptism
27. Make a map/scrapbook, Elizabethtown style
28. Go cranberry bogging
29. Give 30 gifts within 30 days
30. Write a DIY book

Hairspiration

So I have been very restless about my hair lately :-/

I am really in the mood for a change or a goal of what I need done and I think I finally figured out what's got to give. I need my bangs back. My straight across easy maintained by myself bangs that make my hair look cute even when I wear it pulled back.

So my mission is to get my bangs back and grow my hair out so that it will wind up looking something like the lovely do's of Zooey Deschanel and Alexis Bledel. 

It's a style that I rocked for several years not to long ago and I think suited me well so it's about time I go back to it.

Any winter hair changes in works for you?

Penelope Inspired Bedroom

Remember my mention about how I believe a child's room based on the bedroom set in the movie penelope would be the cutest thing ever? Well I decided to find ways to actually execute my idea into the perfect child's bedroom based upon my own fantasies of a bedroom when I was growing up.

Setting aside my long standing belief that an attic bedroom with a barn door access in the floor and spiral stair case and fireman's pole as the coolest room setting ever, here are some neat real life applications of the penelope set.

Apartment Therapy wrote an article a couple years ago featuring some screen shots from the movie that are great for finding the elements that made Penelope's room so great.

The first thing I notice is the color scheme which while a tinge on the dark side features some amazing jewel tones. So using my favorite old color scheme tool Adobe Kuler, I created this color scheme as the basis for our room.

Starting off with a bedroom that features a lot of hard wood surfaces would be great...

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Then I would install an amazing bookshelf like one of these to hold all the books of my child's life without them ever having to get rid of one to make room for another (this has been a life-long problem for me).

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Now having a two-way mirror in your child's room might be a little creepy but what about a cute bench seat under a nice big window. I especially love the ides of using this bench to be a basket storage station which is also quite popular in Montessori rooms.

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Next I loved the furniture used in Penelope's room. You could totally find antique and similar style armoires and furniture pieces on craigslist that with a couple coats of white paint and some minor distressing would look stunning. Or even decoupage one of them with squares of origami paper a painted red trim like in the movie.

{$100 on craigslist}

{$75 on craigslist}

{$40 on craigslist}

Not crafty? How about this already finished armoire for only $200...

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And don't forget the gorgeous filigreed Victorian mirror painted glossy white...

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I can't remember if I've raved about the principles of the Montessori Child Bed here yet, if not stay tune for a post on that later in the week. Anyways we are planning on using a futon mattress directly on the floor for the first few years. But as our child grows what about setting it up as one of these amazing suspended bed?

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Penelope's art desk puts me in hog heaven as does this recycled wood desk. I think we could build something like this ourselves.

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Now for decorations and toys...

Who can resist a vintage style tricycle?

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Or an indoor bench swing hung from the ceiling?

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And what about all those terrariums that can also serve as a wonderful science project for home schooled kids? Why not use apothecary jars?

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Which you can get on the cheap from places like Save on Crafts, Sears, or even make your own with dollar store items.

I especially love this grass terrarium or the bottle ones.

Lastly, what about that gorgeous red tree in Penelope's room? I researched various ways to create your own and the best idea I found was to make a tree sculpture out of something that was in fact once trees: coffee cups!

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Don't you just love the idea of creating a drama filled wonderland playground for your children while still teaching them valuable lessons on recycling and reusing items in their bedroom?