We Went to DC this Weekend

Rob and I drove to Washington DC on Friday to visit my sister at her new place. She's been there for two months now. Here are some pictures I took during the trip.

Sister pic at brunch. We went to brunch on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Saturday we had an all you can eat, and penny mimosa brunch. The food was incredible but we were so full after and booze-tired on top of that. Also, Saturday ended up being very cold, so our original plans of going to an outdoor festival fell through. Honestly.... we ended up going home and taking a long-ass nap and went back out at 10 p,m. Kind of felt like college.

We didn't stop at the traditional DC monuments because we've all seen them before, but next time we come to DC I wouldn't mind walking the National Mall on a nice day.

These are cupcakes from a place called Sprinkles in Georgetown on Sunday. Apparently this is "the original" cupcakery. The top cupcake is a lemon flavor (Liz's choice), the middle one is called "triple cinnamon" (my choice) and the bottom is a carrot cake cupcake (Rob's choice). We each picked a flavor and split them all three ways to taste. Liz's friend who works at sprinkles brought us a s'mores cupcake after. We barely had room. Trust me, just one cupcake is enough.

The National Cherry Blossom Festival was only two weeks before this so we were able to see all the flowering trees.

More flowering trees. These were taken at Arlington National Cemetery where we saw The Changing of the Guard on Sunday. Also, Picasa automatically made this collage of photos when it noticed there were three similar in a row. I would not have cut my face off on the top one. Thanks Google.

I was very happy to see my sister, but also to see Jordy. She's being a watch dog here.

Jordy and Liz

Crappy quality selfie. I like it anyway.

Liz sleepin' on the subway at 1 am.

Rob wide awake on the subway at 1 am. Those are pizza takeout boxes from a place called &Pizza (and pizza) - best place ever. It's like Chipotle for pizza.

Liz and I both get sick on the Metro. She has more practice than me.

More Jordy. Sweet, sweet Jordy <3.

She likes to wait outside the bathroom door when Liz showers, even though I AM RIGHT HERE.

Jordy is a busy lady.

Super Late Super Pi Day

Guys. My boyfriend and I made a pecan pie on SUPER PIE DAY. Want to know something awesome? I turned my kitchen into a film set for the process and filmed the entire experience. What to know something super lame? That's ok, I'll tell you anyway. We bickered the entire time.

So now I have an hour long video// correction, two, one-hour long videos... two cameras, two videos//... Anyway, I have 120 minutes of my boyfriend and I bickering about pecans, and pie, and pecan pie. I honestly haven't watched any of the video, because while we are going strong, I just am not in the mood to watch a video of us fighting about nothing. Maybe one day I'll go through the footage and put together the non fighting parts, or a blooper reel of making this pie, or just post the whole thing because I'm real like that. Until then, you get pictures.

Here's the result of our labor of love and... frustration.

Not too shabby eh? The recipe we used is from the list of 25 Perfect Pies on MarthaStuart.com that I vowed to complete in the first ever post in this blog. Something unique about this pie is that we made it in a spring form pan - you know, the kind that looks like a regular pan until it doesn't? As you can see our pie was baked in a pan with removable sides. I am really digging the effect here.

Three of three tasters responded positively to the pie - with one of the tasters requesting seconds, and then thirds. Since pie day I have made an easter pie, and a strawberry pie. I'll tell you more about them in the next few posts.

Until then!

It's Time For a Poo Update

It's been two and a half months since I went no poo. In February I stopped using shampoo because my normal method of controlling dandruff was leaving my scalp feeling incredibly dry. It was also the dead of winter, so my skin felt like it was two sizes too small, and when I sat my butt and thighs got itchy. I was kind of a mess. Here's a picture of me from February:

I actually had a great experience going no poo. It improved the "health" (hair can't be healthy, it's dead) and look of my hair. Static that usually plagues me every day was non existent. My hair dried faster with a hair dryer; and it styled better and had so much more natural shine and body because it had a light layer of natural oils.

To recap: the goal is to use no product on your hair in the shower (not sure about styling products, but it seems like that would be a "no" too). However, going cold turkey on the shampoo can lead to a greasy mess for a lot of daily shampoo users whose scalp is used to overproducing oils to compete with the drying qualities of some shampoo ingredients. So during the transition period you can use baking soda and water to remove some of the oils gently. 

For the first week or so I used the baking soda mixture everyday. I was too afraid to risk drying my hair and having to get back in the shower when I had somewhere to be. So I waited for a morning where I had plenty of time to fix greasy hair if necessary. Day one of true no poo was a complete success. Day two was great, day three was still pretty good, by day four I needed a little help from the baking soda spray, and on the cycle went.

The rest of my no poo journey was pretty uneventful, aside from the fact that I LOVED what it did to my hair. However, I'm sad to report that I am going to have to go back to using daily shampoo at least for a little while. You see, all of my expectations were either met or exceeded by only washing my hair with water, except for one thing. My dandruff came back with a vengeance. It's a huge problem, and I know ladies is pimps too, but I can't keep walking around the office brushing my shoulders off, so that's that.

How To Be One of Those Early Risers

I never thought I'd be the type of person to wake up earlier than absolutely necessary to work out before work. I also never thought I'd be the type of person to start a blog and stick it out for over 30 posts without really knowing if anyone is reading. This is really good news, because I usually have a hard time sticking to the tasks with extrinsic motivations or that I just don't feel like doing.

Three weeks ago a construction project started on my considerably minute highway commute to work that would route me, and a ton of other commuters, onto a bumpy two lane road. Dreading this change, I vowed to start getting to work on time, 7:30-8am, as opposed to my typical 8-8:30am arrival.

I started by setting my alarm for 6am that week. Monday my alarm went off and I went back to sleep until 7am, just to jump out of bed and rush out the door to beat the traffic. Tuesday ended up being a repeat of the day before. Wednesday I tried something a little bit different. I still didn't get out of bed at my 6am alarm, but I did force myself to stay awake in bed. I did the same thing Thursday, and I think by Friday I may have gotten out of bed as early as 6:30am. Through the weekend I "slept in" till I naturally woke up around 8am or so.

I was feeling pretty accomplished by getting up by 6:30am or so a few days in a row, so I had a crazy thought. What if I use the extra time to do something useful? What if I use the extra time to accomplish something?? What a novel idea. So anyway, all that week (week two) I woke up at 6am, got out of bed a little after, worked out till about 6:40 or so, and STILL got into the shower earlier than I had in months.

In two weeks I was a before-work-worker-outer. Outrageous. I still can't believe it. Honestly.

So what I want to pass onto you is this:

A) It took me about a week to become an early riser - I'm already kind of a morning person, so it might take you longer if you're not. I am also lazy as hell, so if you're not a slob, at least you have that going for you.

B) I have been putting myself into a lot of very specific categories for a long time, and now I'm sure I have been limiting myself. By saying "I'm not that kind of person" I ended up in a position where I had never even tried to be that kind of person. I am that kind of person. I'm all the kinds of persons.

C) By learning about how I am (generally slow to start) I figured out how to better handle a challenge. I have worked out, largely through writing in this blog, that I need baby steps to accomplish things I don't necessarily want to do. What kinds of things do you do to adopt a new habit?

D) 

This is What I Look Like Now

This is the third time I have started writing this post. I guess the reason is because I've been thinking a lot more about skin care recently - particularly anti aging- and before I go into telling you about it I want to have ALL the facts. But until then I'm stuck. I don't write posts just to get posts up, and right now this is very much on my mind. I'm not really doing many new things at the moment, just trying to stay on the tightest budget of my life, and being kind of boring about it. So I'm writing what I've got so far. I miss you!

I was inspired to pursue this topic because while a friend of mine was doing anti aging research for her blog she mentioned to me that the ideal time to start preparing an anti aging routine was in your mid 20s. This led to a lot of questions:

• says who?
• who is making money off of this belief?
• what are other people doing for anti aging?
• what are other people my age doing for anti aging?

I sifted through a lot (I really mean A LOT) of media to try to get more information on the topic. My first google search led me to countless articles. Most of them were very advertise-y, and my ears usually grow shut at the first hint of biased information so...

The majority of the results listed anti aging products and their active ingredients. Ok, It's great that you have this kind of acid, but what does that mean? I'll be honest. I know that good research goes past page two or three of google search, but this is not a dissertation, ok?

My next search was youtube. That's where I get all of my makeup info. And why not? there are a ton of tutorials done by a ton of people of all ages and ranges of expertise. This search was not fruitful either. I could TELL immediately that everyone was trying to sell something, and if they weren't they were getting paid to sell something, and if they weren't they didn't seem to have any idea what they were talking about, and if they did all they listed was a bunch of products just like the google search. *deep breath* Not what I'm looking for, sorry.

Honestly, at this point all I had were more questions. And now I don't even really remember what I did next for research. I know I referenced some of my MVPs: Birchbox (aka Old Faithful), Peach and Lily (aka Korean Old Faithful), my friends (nobody cares about anti aging), Nordstrom (found a jar of $2000 cream).......... Here were my new questions:

• what are all of these active ingredients, and what are they used for?
• how do you take all of these active ingredients and create a routine that is right for you?
• if I'm preventing problems I don't even have how do I know if I want wrinkle cream or depuffing cream?
• DON'T TELL ME THE PRODUCT, TELL ME THE SCIENCE
• wait a minute, why eat clean, stop using shampoo, and then bathe in acids?

So here are the important things I've learned about anti aging so far:

If you start thinking a lot about anti aging - you will find problems with your face that you didn't see EVER BEFORE. I know the wrinkles under my eyes didn't show up overnight, like magic, after my first google of the phrase "anti aging." By directing my thoughts toward anti aging I immediately aged my face (in my eyes) by maybe five years. That is disappointing because why create hangups where there are none?

There are two types of exfoliation - and they are totally different! There's physical exfoliation and chemical exfoliation. Your face is a big factory that is always running, day and night. It's entire job is to make new skin so when the top layer of skin cells on your face falls off, all day every day, there's still skin on your face. Newer skin is deeper and as it ages it gets closer to the surface and by the time it's at the surface it's dead. The rate at which this happens is called Cell Turnover - which I've learned is a very important buzzword to salespeople. As people age, the cell turnover rate slows and so basically you have more dead, dull skin cells sticking to your face, drying out, changing colors (maybe) and wrinkling up. Ew.

Physical exfoliation is great IMO - your dry-ass legs will thank you for running a scratchy scrubby over them once a week. This strategy isn't the same for your face. Don't ask me why. So that's where chemical exfoliators come in. You've probably heard of a Chemical Peel - are things starting to come together here? Cell turnover! A professional takes a very strong acid and basically exposes the baby skin on your face. Ta da. The active ingredients in your at-home, daily-use products will not work at on the same scale of course, but they use the same ingredients; and they work best overtime.

And then there are a lot of other ingredients that work alongside the whole cell turnover thing, like ingredients that get deep into the skin to help the skin factory produce an excellent final product for when it gets to the surface, and ingredients that draw as much moisture to the outer layers of your skin to make them even more baby soft and wrinkle free.

Your skin changes and you should change too - My holy grail of skin care started out as a regimen of salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide. I would never be caught dead putting anything on my oil field of a face after washing with medication - including sunscreen. I was a golden goddess, invincible to melanoma, and sunscreen was for the birds.

Then, much more recently, I realized the real answer was to stop picking at my face, and eventually I arrived at a regimen of excessive exfoliation followed by excessive moisture twice a day. Scrape away all the dead and heal it up with a ton of lotion. My oil field had dried up and lotion was my best friend - still is. Also you. You are my best friend.

And now it's time to evolve again. I need to find a way to un-see a lot of what I've seen close up on my face, while also setting methods in place to help my skin to maintain a healthy and successful cell turnover - while still not worrying so much about the rate quite yet.

While I don't feel ready to get into the nitty gritty about the anti aging ingredients just yet, I promise I will soon. I never want to lie to or mislead you, ever. So far I've been working on finding out the truth about the following:

• retinol/retinoids/vitamin A/retin A (and what is the difference)
• hyaluronic acid
• ceramides
• vitamin C
• alpha hydroxy acids, beta hydroxy acids
• l'ascorbic acid
• peptides

Fyi, based on my findings I've been using hyaluronic acid, retinol, ceramides, and my sweet clarisonic for the last two weeks.  So, I'll let you know how that's going and why I chose those things. However, the biggest questions on the topic still remains.

Is this all necessary?

And

Is this all necessary NOW?

The Christmas Pie Post

You've read the title. You know what's coming. Ok listen. This is what happened. Right after Christmas time I went into a food coma and then promptly started a diet in January. You probably know the story because you are such a loyal reader. So I just, you know, couldn't risk writing a whole post about pies because I was in such a FRAGILE state.

Its fine now though, so in honor of SUPER PI DAY it's time to show you how the Christmas pies I made almost three months ago turned out. I made four pies for Christmas day. The first and best pie was the Spiced Apple Pie with Fluted Round Cutouts. Guess which one is mine.

  

Here is the Chocolate-Pecan Pie which actually turned out to be the same as a Kentucky Derby pie. Who knew? It's a ton of sugar plus a ton of corn syrup (liquid sugar) plus chocolate. I think it needed to be cooked much longer because the chocolate chunks never melted. This pie was very disappointing. IMO.

 

This pie was actually not on the 25 Perfect Pies list. It's called a Vanilla Bean Cream Pie and I made it in the spirit of Christmas per my little sister's request. It was amazing. Now one place I did screw this pie up a little bit was I mixed up this crust with the pecan pie crust. If you look above at the pecan pie crust might look a little dark. If you look below at the vanilla bean pie crust you will see that it is a little light. That is because one of the crusts needed to be pre baked and the other did not. The pecan pie crust was basically already done before it went into the oven for the pie filling to bake, and the vanilla bean pie crust did not have to be baked after I poured in the pie filling. Luckily the extra light pie crust turned out ok. Like I said, the filling was awesome. Thanks Liz.

 

Lastly we have Alexis's Sweet Potato Pie. This pie was good, but most people at Christmas seemed disappointed that it wasn't a pumpkin pie - including me. As you look at it on the fork on its way to your mouth, based on the way it looks, you expect the spices and flavor of pumpkin pie. But the flavor of sweet potato is much more mild, and the pie just falls short for something that looks so much like pumpkin pie. This pie was actually so unimpressive, I don't have a picture of it by itself. In the photo on the right you can see the sweet potato pie in the background of a photo of the real star of the day - spiced apple pie.

    

Oh, and also I made this gingerbread house!

Thanks for putting up with this insanely late post. You are the best.

What Do You Call A Week-Long Hobby?

I think you could call that a project!


Behold last week's project: The type A person's dream makeup case.

Okay. Now that you've seen a picture of it, you can probably guess what my project was. I decided to change the way I organize my makeup. My existing system was good except for everything was put away and out of sight, so most of it went unused. I know this organizational "solution" won't work for everyone - ie: those with way more makeup than me or those who prefer a more organic storage solution. Aka: SLOBS. For me, this is a solution to specific makeup concerns I am/was having:

1) I own a lot of makeup and end up using maybe 10% regularly
2) Using makeup "regularly" to me is like once a week on date night, maybe
3) I've been getting acne like a 13 year old recently that I want to cover
4) I have the desire to wear a light amount of makeup more often to look a little more alert and put together
5) I already have/had an organized system for makeup storage, but the "out of sight, out of mind" principle applies heavily here
6) Packing makeup to go to my boyfriend's house once a week is getting annoying

About two years ago I was working with a woman at the Nordstrom makeup counter on an easy daytime look. Turns out a 30 step morning makeup routine is not right for me. Who knew. As I was checking out I saw the makeup planner. Jesus. It was like OCD love at first sight, but I had already committed to purchasing way too much makeup, and this planner was/is on the pricey side, so I resisted.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and something reminded me of this makeup planner. Not sure why I thought of it, but a fire had lit under me. I started looking at planners and planning for my planner. I planned on what colors I would buy if i ran out of eye shadow - this never actually happens. I calculated how many pages all my makeup could fit into. I had to choose a size of planner too. A small one would be nice, but I had decided one of my goals was to hold as much of my makeup as possible in this planner so I could use more of it more often. Long story short I chose to go with the mid size planner.

From left to right you can see the small, medium, and large cases. They have been scaled to the same size, but if you look closely, you can see a difference in the amount of makeup each can hold. Also each case can hold a certain number of pages according to their product descriptions.

So once I was done obsessing over which planner to buy I went to the mall with my friend Meghan. We stopped at Sephora first, and this excellent makeup artist there recommended this Laura Mercier concealer for my acne coverage. She said when covering raised or textured (scabby - let's be real here) imperfections its best to go with a very hard, tacky product for coverage as opposed to a creamy formula. This concealer gets mixed on the back of your hand with a makeup brush to warm and blend the two colors of the product before you apply it to your blemishes with a tapping motion. Next we went to Nordstrom and I actually ended up buying this product there because I like my Nordy Notes (Nordstrom credit card rewards). Sorry, Sephora.

After shopping we went to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner AND cheesecake. YAAAS.

When I got home I was dying to assemble my makeup palette, but there was one problem. I've never "depotted" makeup before. That is how you get your makeup out of the container it came in and put it into a magnetized container to live forever. The Trish makeup comes ready to drop into your planner, but I don't want to use just Trish makeup because it's expensive and I already have a ton of product. So I made a new rule. I would depot and add all my current makeup into my planner with the goal of using it up before ever buying more. If you're like me... actually using up anything is rare. I'm flaky like that. Usually before a product gets used up I've either forgotten about it, gotten a new one, lost it, or it was stolen by an elf named Liz.

After watching a handful of youtube videos I felt ready to attempt to depot makeup. I decided to start on the cheaper makeup first and see how it went. I started with the top left and top middle palettes you see above. They are both Maybelline eyeshadow quads that I don't think I've used since high school (no lectures on bacteria safety, please), so I felt like if I ruined them it was no big thang. 

It was actually surprisingly easy to depot them. The worst part was cleaning off the glue that was stuck to the bottom of each one. Then I went for the bottom right, which is a sample of highlighter called Mary Lou-manizer made by The Balm I got from Birchbox. That was a cardboard container, and since depotting often involves an open flame, I needed to come up with a different strategy. I ended up just ripping the cardboard apart to free up the highlighter. No problem. 

Next was bottom middle, which is also a sample from Birchbox. It's dark brown MAKE eyeshadow but I use it to fill in my eyebrows. The MAC blush on the bottom right was relatively easy to depot as well. Then I went for the CARGO eyeshadow at the top right and unfortunately those pans were not made out of metal with magnetic properties, so I had to glue little magnets onto the backs of them. No big deal. Lastly I went for my Laura Mercier concealer that I had just purchased, and it was also a success, although now that I was an expert, I got a little overzealous and bent one of the pans. Great.

So you might think my projects stops there. You would be partially right, because I did too. Over the next few days I used my new makeup case every day and was loving it. However, the one thing I was missing was all of my fabulous lipsticks. I usually only wear lipstick if I am going for a bright, dramatic look, so I really only have bright, dramatic lipsticks. Here they are below. Since watching all of those depotting tutorials, I also came across strategies for paletizing your lipsticks too. Of course, I had to do it.

So basically your lipsticks start out looking like the picture above. Standard stuff. Then you twist them all the way out of the tube, chop it off, scoop out the stuff still in the tube, and put the nub you chopped off back into the tube. It's very simple. Some people cut off the lipstick and melt it down like crack on a spoon and pour it into the awaiting wells. This was too complicated IMO and I liked that the method I went with resulted in my lipstick tubes remaining useable. The photo on the right is the lipstick tube after being... harvested. The photo on the left is all five of my chosen lipsticks in one portable compact. Sweet convenience.

So here is what my planner looks like zipped up. I put it next to a tube of lube for reference. Jk I know its a jar.

This is what the planner looks like when I first open it.

The zipper pouch is removable, which is nice but I wish it had velcro because the darn thing falls out a lot.

Oh and I forgot to tell you, I got a second page later in the week for more of my makeup. I depotted some bright mac eyeshadows (that I will never wear) when I heard that you can trade in 6 empty MAC containers for a free lipstick. I have 5 so far.

Here are both of my lovely palettes.  

So yeah. I feel like I accomplished a bit with this project. For one, I pacified my extreme desire to get this darn makeup case. It cost $73 and another $20 for the extra page, which is why I put a lot of care and effort into stocking it the way I did. I also wore makeup to work every day last week - which was nice. Then I used it at my boyfriend's house over the weekend - also very convenient. However this week I have only just taken it out of my car today from the weekend. I'll do better next week.

I always do.