Wednesday, June 22, 2011

VA has my heart

Aside from the awesome plethora of shopping and restaurant choices, Northern Virginia will always have a special place in my heart. It's home. I love Virginia for so many reasons. For it's quick access to the city as well as horse country. For the convenience and for it's beauty. Definitely not for it's horrible traffic, but even that won't keep me away. I love it here. Going down every street had a hundred memories. I think it is the sense of belonging that makes me love it the most. That super comfortable, I'm-in-my-element kind of feeling.

This is what I've been up to this week:
Eating. Shopping.

My favorite bread store. Great Harvest.



Farmers Market.




Wine Festival.




Friends! When out at Icons in Fairfax my high school girlfriends ran into more high school friends. It was a mini high school reunion. Nothing like running into your high school flame when you're least expecting it.



This trip home is just what I needed, for so many reasons. I feel re-charged, happy and back to my old self. This trip has been so good for my soul!

So now we are packing up the car to go visit family in Jersey and then going to a cabin on a private island in Maine. Wifi is going to be hard to find! So, there may be a real break in the blog posts for a little while. But, don't worry I'll have tons to update you with when I get back!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

America the Beautiful

Oh, my apologies for slacking on the blogging. I had so much to blog about, but it all got put on hold for a bit because I've traveled to the States! Yes, surprise, I took a trip home to visit the fam and friends. I got home a few days ago and will be here for 4 weeks. It seemed like the perfect time to take a little trip home to relax and reconnect. I love the good 'ol U.S. of A.! I will never ever take what we have for granted ever again.

So far I've enjoyed a lot of American food and time with mom and dad. I've been going on walks with mom around the neighborhood, running around my favorite lake, working with dad in his workshop, hanging out with mom and dad on the deck around the outdoor fireplace, watching the fireflies come out at night and listening to the tree frogs. Getting used to driving back on the right side of the road was just like riding a bike, although I do tend to turn on my windshield wipers instead of my blinker. I was worried that my pup Sparky wouldn't remember me, but he did! He is getting so old, but he is still my lil baby.

Today was a really special day! My good friend had a baby 3 weeks ago and today I got to meet him! I'm totally in love. I just love friends that no matter how long its been since seeing them when you get together it's like no time has passed. Except this time she has a new baby! He is such a doll; he pretty much sent my crazy baby fever into overdrive. Congrats to my beautiful friend!

Tomorrow I'm going to the farmers market with mom and then heading over to a wine festival with my girlfriends. I love America!

Monday, June 13, 2011

Feeling down? Saddle up.

Photo by Donna Demari

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Thank goodness for good friends

This weekend my friends and I had a really fun day celebrating a good friend's birthday.

We started out the day getting pedicures at Cocok's.



Had a delish lunch at a cute sandwich shop near the seawall called Big Midows Sub Stand. I will be going back here. This sandwich was so good! We all got the herb chicken sandwich which came with coconut chicken soup and fries.



A bigger group got together for dinner at Me Kara Uroko next door to Transit on the seawall. They had a large menu with lots of yummy options. It was really fun to have dinner with so many friends, but it did make me miss Brad pretty bad.



We finished the day off going to see Hangover 2 and laughed our butts off. Thank goodness for good friends! What a fabulous Friday. I love birthdays. Happy Birthday Jess, so glad I could celebrate with you!

Friday, June 10, 2011

GHO Review

So, I'm pretty much in love. On Thursday 3 mamma-sans ushered me out of my apartment and preformed cleaning magic all over my apartment. That's right, I broke down and finally hired a professional cleaning service. I've wanted to do this for months (if you remember my spring cleaning post), but my feeling that I was just being super lazy kept me from doing it for a while. I mean, it's just me and Brad... and now it's just me in the apartment. But, we've been living in this apartment for over a year and that's the longest I've ever lived in an apartment since college. And, I could really tell. It really bothered me, and I'm not super in love with this apartment anyway, so it was incredible how uncomfortable I was becoming in my own space. So, cue the angels of cleaning.

I have a lot of friends on the island that have used Good Housekeeping and they rave about them, but I've never used a cleaning service before. After looking at their website and the service list I was sold. I booked a deep cleaning and it ended up being worth every penny. They completely surpassed my expectations.

GHO upgraded me for free from 2 housekeepers to 3 (totally awesome) and they were in my apartment for 4 hours so that's an equivalent of 12 hours of cleaning. In addition to the basic cleaning you would expect from a cleaning service let me tell you a few things these ladies did that just blew me away: organized the massive heap of shoes in my closet, organized the massive amount of crap magneted to my refrigerator, organized the books on the bookshelf, cleaned under the couches and beds, made the beds hotel style with the sheets and blankets perfect, took my massive amount of recycling down, cleaned the inside (and outside) of my trash can, and basically made my apartment totally sparkle. There is no dust anywhere. How to they do this?! Amazing. Part of the deep cleaning was that they would clean my stove/oven and refrigerator. They threw the microwave in there too. I don't want to use my kitchen because I don't want to mess up the perfection that's going on in there.

Plus, while they were cleaning I got to go out and do some shopping and had a totally nice morning. Then I got to come home to a perfect apartment! Bliss. GHO housekeepers were super nice, professional and I will totally be using this service again, shame free, because what these ladies can do is pretty amazing. I mean, they cleaned in that tiny crack between the counter and the refrigerator!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Because animals are always fun to blog about


A few days ago Brad sent me an email with the most amazing message:
"Guess what....I held a slow loris today!!!!!! It was so so so soft. And it was nomming some bread while I was holding it and kind of licking my hand. It was so nice and held my finger with its little hand. I attached some pics of that little cutie. You would have died. I so want one now." This might be my most favorite email ever. He got to hold a slow loris! Oh my god. You may remember me mentioning that I'm totally obsessed with slow loris and his email made me green with envy and made me kind of want to die from the over excess of cuteness. I pretty much told Brad that he's taking me there. End of story.

While the love of my life is away I've been spending lots of quality time with the other love of my life. My favorite horse, Makoto. He is pretty much totally amazing and I love him to pieces. I don't know what I would do with myself if I didn't have my work with the horses here. It's times like these, the first week of my husband being deployed, that makes me really appreciate the horses and my friends.



Makoto is so beautiful. He is so thrilled that I have my iphone in his face taking pictures. He even sticks his tongue out to just make sure I know how excited he is. Humm kind of like some husband I know. He started looking pretty when I started shaking the sugar cube box in his face to bribing him into putting his ears up and not look like he's half asleep. I kinda wish that worked with my husband.





Makoto and I had a fabulous ride today. I had a friend snap a few pictures on my iphone basically because I'm lame and can't think of anything else to blog about other than work right now. Yeah, I'm pretty much obsessed with him.

And it's been quite a while since I've updated you on my little monster. He is 8 months in a few days, quite a big boy now. I'm a pretty lucky girl to have all these great guys keeping me company!