28 | Some of My Favorite Things

Last week, I turned 28. It was not as traumatic as I expected it to be :) The world kept on turning, and I let out a huff of air on my birthday morning and was glad that I was waking up in a verrrry soft, comfortable bed with yowling, hungry cats pawing at me for their breakfast, instead of the alternative (waking up for my old state agency job, or some other terrible combination. By the way, I’d forgotten to post this month’s “working for yourself”… which is unfortunate, as my standing desk experiment failed when it broke. Don’t put all your eggs in the IKEA basket, kids).

But that is neither here nor there! I’ve sadly neglected this blog for the past week as I bustled up trying to get everything I need to get done before our 5-day weekend. So now I want to share all the fun that’s been going on over here in the past week!

Please excuse the terrible quality of these photos, as they are all taken with my iPhone.

I got new glasses! I’m still breaking them in, but I think my transformation into a cat lady is pretty much complete. I tweeted the photo on the right with the words, “Cat lady with cat-eye glasses holding a cat while wearing a cat dress. That’s me.” (If you’re interested, they are the “Love” glasses from Coastal in tortoiseshell. I don’t get any money for telling you this — I’m just sharing the love.)

Every once in a while, you meet someone on the internet through various channels (in this instance, it was twitter) and said person decides to travel to Austin to visit a high school friend, and somehow you end up taking this person you’ve never actually met before and have conversed with in short, 140-characters-or-less phrases out to show her around town, and it turns out to be awesome! I picked Liz up from a bus stop and we went on an Austin bonanza — dinosaur bones at the Texas Memorial Museum, sandwiches from Thundercloud, ice cream at Amy’s, the view of the city from the top of Mt. Bonnell, looking at the peacocks at Mayfield Park, a quick jaunt to Toy Joy, and then a little downtime with chamomile tea at Thunderbird Coffee. Phew!

Liz took a photo of me enjoying my first milkshake in… four years? I discovered Toy Joy’s vegan “ice cream”… that is some amazing stuff. Chocolate peanut butter shake! Heaven! WordPress shout-out! (On the left is my cat Powerfist enjoying the fact that he can sit on my lap again, now that my standing desk is dead.)

The next photo is a juxtaposition of unfortunate and awesome. My friend Matt (not pictured) was in town and rented this jazzy Mercedes SLS. I was very apprehensive about the passenger door, but I braved it for some Korean food. On the left, the tiny cube of tofu that seems to permeate Asian food restaurant miso soup in America. Do not be afraid of the tofu, Asian restaurants!

And finally, library books and baking! It’s Thanksgiving week, which means coziness (and sweatpants, if Texas weather will cooperate)! I’m excited about my newest picks — a little bit of everything: humor with Tina Fey, history with Bradley, and drama with McEwan. The Nutella/banana cookie recipe can be found here.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! We’ll be back next week with an amazing engagement session on Tuesday, hopefully a working-for-yourself post (month 3? month 4? hmm…), and maaaaybe some photos I’ve been hiding for half a year. We shall see.