sweater, slacks: thrifted
short-sleeve button-down: New York & Company
flats: Target
necklace: gifted (Kate Spade)
Welp, you're looking at a pretty close approximation of my outfits all this week: sweater, a layer under it, warm dress pants and flats that are easy to throw in my bag while I wear my heavier winter boots. Because all week, temps have been in the teens or single digits, with negative-degree wind chills. Yesterday morning, the actual temp was -6 Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of -22! It's not okay, guys. I'm too delicate for this bitter winter clime.
But I haven't been letting the chill get me down too much. I layer fleece-lined leggings under my pants for the walk home from the bus stop. (Matt, who works second shift during the week, is a saint who drives me to work every morning in his well-warmed-up car.) I have my rated-to-20-degree boots that perform well enough even when the temps are below 20. And I have a killer long down jacket I got at the end of last winter from Burlington Coat Factory. I'm even managing to make it to the gym most evenings! If you know anything about me, you know that's a feat even in nicer weather. So I guess I can't complain too much.
In other news (cue abrupt subject change), our wedding is exactly four months from today! I still have so much to do...cutting wine bottles for our centerpiece vases, making the flower-petal candle holders for our other centerpieces, assembling all the flowers we made, making my veil, doing my dress fitting(s), designing and printing our invitations and other miscellaneous stationery, doing final meetings with the few pros we did hire to confirm all the details...eesh. It's gonna be a very busy four months. I can't think about the big picture too much, or I get super stressed out and panicky. I just have to take things in baby steps: This weekend is devoted to bottle-cutting and editing some photos from a newborn session I had the other weekend. Keep it small and manageable, that's my motto :)
How do you deal with massive projects? And while we're doing the whole ask-questions-at-the-end-of-the-post-to-encourage-feedback thing, are the temps abysmally cold where you are, too? How do you even handle that? (I'm thinking of you, Sydney, up in what I can only assume is the frozen tundra of Canada. I'm shivering just thinking about it.)
button-down: New York & Company
colored shirt: The Limited
slacks: thrifted (Express)
shoes, bracelets: Target
So yeah, outfit posts have been rare around here lately. I've been repeating a lot to make things easier on myself. And a lot of my outfits that aren't repeats have been pretty simple: slacks or a plain skirt, a nice blouse and minimal jewelry. It's just easier, considering how all my stuff has been in various states of packed/unpacked all month. This is actually from pretty early in the month, before I packed up all my accessories.
So I have a handful of photos from the old house's backyard left to post, and I'm trying to get those ready to post so I can move on to shooting at and posting photos from the new house! And that will kind of fill up some time while Matt and I get the final boxes put away. I'm hoping to hang some art this weekend, but we have a wedding to go to on Saturday so I really have no idea how much I'll be able to accomplish on Sunday ;)
And hey, I just want to take a second to say thanks to you all for sticking around while all this shiz is going down. I know I've been really quiet around here, and I promise it's so justified. Most nights I'm up an hour or two past my regular bedtime, and I've been getting up 30 or 45 minutes earlier too. And unless I'm eating or taking 50 minutes to unwind before bed with an episode of Dexter, I'm go-go-go that whole time. (Yes, Matt and I are just now getting into Dexter. Cable and internet only just got installed at the house today, so we started watching the series from the beginning. He loves it; I'm still on the fence.)
Howdy y'all. Today I'm linking up to Audrey's One Piece Many Ways link-up over on Putting Me Together. If you've followed this blog for any amount of time, you've probably noticed that some pieces tend to appear and reappear around here. That's because remixing = awesome and it's the best way to pretend that your wardrobe is bigger than it really is, I think :)
For today's link-up, I'm featuring a plain white button-down-style shirt. To be fair, I'm kind of cheating here and using four different styles of button-down: a sleeveless, a short-sleeve, a short-sleeve with polka dots and a long-sleeve. Honestly, if you have those four pieces in your closet (or three, if you wanna nix the polka dots), you can create about a billion different outfits. Give or take. Here are my favorite ways to wear these:
As a plain ol' shirt
(original post: top, bottom)
Layered
(original post: top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right)
Layered...with a dress (yes, it's very different)
(original post: left, middle, right)
So yeah. One (type of) piece, nine ways to style it. I'm telling you, if you don't have a white button-down shirt in these three sleeve lengths, run (don't walk) out and get them now! I'm actually working on my color collection, too...I have a short-sleeve in a few colors, a sleeveless in black and a long-sleeve in a couple colors. Need...more...button-downs...
white shirt: thrifted
pink shirt, necklace: The Limited
cropped pants: New York & Company
flats: Target
I'm at a point in my life where time and finance have finally balanced out. For the first time in my life, I have nearly complete freedom to do what I want, even at the last minute. In college, money issues usually prevented me from affording fun trips or whatnot--and if it wasn't a finance issue, it was a matter of scheduling. And the same went for the first year and a half post-college. But now, I'm discovering this newfound freedom and I'm completely in love with it.
Like this week, a spur-of-the-moment half-plan turned into a full-fledged trip to the New River Gorge in West Virginia. And, like our last two trips to the Red, it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I kind of wore myself out on routes that were a bit beyond my skill level on the first day, meaning my attempts on the second day were a bit of a letdown. But I always like to have a "project" to return to--some sort of vendetta I want to carry out on a wall, to motivate me to return. So there's the upside.
I also did a bit of deep-water solo climbing. That's where you climb without a harness or a rope over deep water, and when you fall or reach the top, you just jump in. I'm not a very strong swimmer, and I have a pretty healthy fear of heights anyway, but I did do a bit of climbing and even jumped in from a (very, very short) height. Mostly I just swam around in an inner tube, though. Matt jumped off a 25-foot ledge and said it was pretty terrifying.
(For anyone who's wondering, the fear of heights thing is one of the reasons I like to climb in the first place. It's all about getting out of your comfort zone and conquering your fear. Still, doing it in a harness with a rope is very, very different from doing it solo over water. Maybe next time I can conquer that fear a little more. We'll see.)
We got back late Sunday afternoon, and after a quick nap and dinner, I went to the Tegan and Sara/fun. concert. I'm not a big T&S fan--I don't really know any of their music--but fun. put on a pretty sweet show. It was nice to be able to hang toward the edge of the crowd, sit on a blanket and chill or get up and dance around, instead of being squished in the sweaty front-of-the-crowd area the whole time.
And now it's Monday, and I'm exhausted. But it was totally worth it!
shirt: thrifted
skirt: The Limited
shoes: Payless
necklace: Express
belt, bracelet: Target
America! I don't have any red, white AND blue outfits in my queue, but this one is red and white, so...good enough?
So sometimes, my work outfits are a little more casual. I've mentioned before how lucky I am to have a pretty casual work environment. But every once in a while, I like to really dress it up. And for that, nothing but a pencil skirt will do!
Of course, a fitted button-down shirt and kitten heels help, too! I love the kind of edgy touch that the spikes add to it, too.
Well, I'm off to run a few errands before Matt and I head over to a bomb-ass Fourth of July party. Matt's boss throws this shindig every year, complete with a rented food cart and a bouncy house for the kids. It's pretty rad. Here's hoping the rain holds off for fireworks tonight! What about you all? Any plans for 'Murrica day?
t-shirt, necklace: Old Navy
short-sleeve button-down: New York & Company
skirt: thrifted
shoes: Payless
I read somewhere once that our brains are hard-wired to reward us for procrastinating. That must be true, because I always find myself in a tizzy the week before a deadline, scrambling to get everything together at the last second that I refused to do back when there was time.
This week is that week for me. But I've already sent in one project, and I just have one more three-story assignment to get through before July 1 before I'm able to get back to normal. And then I probably won't take on anything new for a while ;) But until then...I have a lot of work to do.
blazer, button-up blouse: thrifted
cardi: The Limited
pants: really old, don't remember
flats, necklace: Target
Okay first, I'd like to address the elephant in the room/on this post: Holy crap these photos are freaking awful. I was in a rush, I was probably tired, and I'll be honest, this sweater mysteriously shrank and I was ready to get that straightjacket off. So, sorry for the terrible quality. Hopefully you can look past it and imagine this outfit in its IRL glory. Cause I liked it a lot, aside from the whole compressing-my-arms-and-torso-into-sausages thing.
So anyway, do y'all remember my Pin-spiration Monday posts that I was doing for a while late last year/early this year? No? That's okay, I pretty much forgot about them too. Until now... So anyway, I've seen a few bloggers do this look before, most recently Audrey over at Putting Me Together. Please note how much better it looks on her, probably because she doesn't decide to replicate this look at the last minute, realize the damn sweater doesn't fit but wear it anyway because she spent the last 10 minutes sitting in front of her closet pouting, unable to think of something blog-worthy to wear, and she has to put on some form of clothing RIGHT NOW or she'll miss the bus or worse, not get her coffee. Not like that's what happened to me or anything...
Also, this is the first time I've embedded a pin on the ol' blog since they updated the embed functions, and can I just say that I really hate it? Because I really hate it. I just want the image, not the description and the name of the board I pinned too... :/ Plus, now you have to embed the JavaScript on any page the embedded pin appears? Wtf?
