Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.

Little bitty Etsy.com is a website that I've been obsessed with for quite some time now. You can buy and sell just about any kind of handmade good, including art, jewelry, stationary, music, furniture.... you name it! It was such a breath of fresh air for me in the midst of our wedding planning. I wish I had known about it from the moment he proposed, for I would have ordered EVERYTHING from here. You know what you're getting is unique and made with care, and best yet, you can work with vendors to personally customize projects for you.

For example, one vendor, Clayin' Around, made a customized cake topper for our wedding cake out of polymer clay of a groom and an eskimo woman... which was an inside joke between Ryan and I (he claims that I look like an eskimo... don't ask!). She sent me multiple photo proofs of the figurine, and once I approved it, I completed the payment and voila! I had our perfect cake topper. It was probably one of our favorite parts of the wedding... and Etsy can take full credit for that. Here's a few more wedding details that were ordered from Etsy:

Our ring bearer carried this little pillow, designed with coordinating patterned fabrics and embellished with ribbons in varying shades of brown. Vendor: bride design

Pear-shaped crystal, ballroom earrings, in smoky silver, with precision facets. The pendants dangle below Swarovski crystal rondelles on sterling silver wire and french hooks. I wore these for the wedding! Vendor: Made by Kalli

Handcrafted flower hair pins using ivory/cream silk hydrangea petals with a freshwater pearl, a white pearl and a Swarovski crystal beaded center. I wore these in my hair. Vendor: kris kreations

Wedding aside, this is my most recent purchase, just for fun! I love the design of the fabric: White with blue flowers silver plated pendant necklace. Made by hand embossing aluminum and then applying fabric to the embossed design. Vendor: Twist 21

As you can see, I LOVE ETSY!

I'm a freakin' addict.

My husband has the most ridiculous ability to get me hooked on his stupid phone games. This is the newest craze. It's called Pixelated.

God save me.

And in case you're curious: The object of the game is to change the color of the squares until the entire screen is a single solid color. This is done by using the colored buttons on the bottom of the screen to change the color of the square in the upper left hand corner to that of those surrounding it. Changing this square to the color of those around it allows it to slowly grow until it fills the entire screen. The ultimate goal is to clear the screen in as few moves as possible. In the normal setting you have 21 moves to clear the screen. You can download it (for free) for your BlackBerry here.

So.. I'm currently at 16 moves. Booyah!!

Bad Girls

-Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

To be frank, I am simply not one of the women that this quote describes. I'm actually, rather unfortunately, a very well-behaved woman. And I hate it. Ryan brought me home this bumper sticker one day thinking that I would love it-- and he was right. I immediately stuck it up on my fridge.

I don't have it up there as an expression of who I am, or as a "girls rock" motif. But I would like to think that it sits there as a reminder to myself of what people (including me) are capable of. I mean, who really thinks that they--themselves, alone, with their own two hands and single mouth--can actually make history? Be written down into the dusty pages of how they changed the course of what their town, county, state, country, or world has come to know as fact? The concept is such a large and intangible one that it overwhelms me to think that real women in our history have made such deep impacts on how our normal worlds appear to us today. And not to discount them or make this a selfish comparison, but it makes me feel so incredibly inadequate.

I do have the cognition to realize that I'm a real woman who will most likely never be quoted across a bumper sticker, nonetheless in the pages of a history book. However, our actions and impressions on others who are deeply rooted in our own little worlds can be our own way of "making history." Changing the lives of those we love simply by living and sharing our lives with them is history in itself. Our own personal history. And I can be happy with that.

I'll Get You, My Pretty!

So we're going to see Wicked this week... "The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz," which I'm STOKED about. The tickets were a gift in my Christmas stocking from my lovely husband... who had the ingenious plan to make the holidays last for six months. I've heard so many good things about this Broadway production, so I can only hope it lives up to my expectations. I'm a huge Wizard of Oz fan, so I can't wait to see a chummy Glinda and Wicked Witch of the West.

But what about the untold story of the witches of North Carolina? I could probably make a cameo in that one.

Chop Chop!

Hair cut! Woohoo! It's amazing how a lighter head can make you feel a hundred times better. It really took some weight off (literally and figuratively).