Crafts Catch-Up

So I've been making lots of random craft projects in the past couple weeks. Some are successes, others are OOC. Pinterest makes things seem so easy in life, but really they're not. Especially when I'm always deviating because I have a different vision in my head. Anyways, here are a couple items I've made that I like:

Simple scrapbook paper (in tones of gold, brown and teal) framed. The pictures are bad quality so you can't really see the colors but once this is up I'll take a picture of it on the wall. I'm thinking of hanging these three with some space between each one in a row on the wall in the dining area. I'm really liking the gold/brown/teal color scheme. 

Can't figure out how to rotate this picture! It obviously should be 90 degrees to the left though. This is simple fabric that I liked framed. Might center this above a bed with something to complement it on the two sides. Undecided for now. 

This is that teal ombre bottle I spoke of a couple days ago. Got it at Crate and Barrel. I love it so much. It's basically exactly the piece I want as part of the wedding centerpiece. For now it's chilling out on our cabinet in the entryway. 

I'll probably share some of the horrific pinterest fails one day. For now I'm learning from the mistakes and in the process of re-doing a few items. Glad to see things are starting to be hung up around the house though. I'm feeling much more optimistic about the May deadline of having everything together! 

Seeing Liam tonight after work. Excited! Hopefully I'll get some pictures and he won't be sleeping the entire time. I feel like I've only been able to visit babies when they're passed out. 

Tomorrow Varsha gets in!

Sketchy's FACE Exists Again!

So we're now 2 days after the Superbowl and it's finally happened! Sketchy shaved his godawfulcrazy beard down! Gah, can finally make those reservations for a nicer restaurant now. =)

Lucy: "WHO IS THAT in my bed?!" She keeps staring at him like this. It's hilarious. 

Snapped some pictures while he was watching TV. These crack me up because they look zoolander-esque

lmao. But look at how much more of his face you can see now! This vs. THIS madness.

Tomorrow we're going to visit Dorsa, Erik and LIAM! Very excited. All of his pictures on fb and such have been so fricking cute.

Friday Varsha and a couple of her med school friends are flying in for the weekend. She's actually in town for a conference, but that's really only 20% of the time she's up here. They'll be spending Friday and possible Saturday night with us. Super excited for staying in and hanging out on Friday (power hour!) and Cupid Bar Crawl on Saturday! 

Yay for guest room actually being useful =). So far we've been in the house only a couple days over a month and have had lots and lots of guests actually using the guest rooms which makes me feel validated about us wanting more space! So far we've had Kerry, Sam, Brenna, Diana, Joe, Jacob, AJ (although he's still sleeping on our couch which he usually slept on back at the apartment) and Melanie spend at least one night. Varsha will be the next guest and Mo is coming in March! =)

Restaurant Week: Bibiana!

Last night was extremely relaxing. We cleaned a little of the excess mess of Superbowl Sunday and then just watched lots and lots of HGTV! Awesomeness. 

Tonight I went out with Diana for our (what's becoming traditional) restaurant week bet. We'll place a bet usually on sports and loser pays for RW dinner while winner pays for drinks. Generally this ends up evening out with our drinking habits so everyone's a winner. 

Last year was fantastic. We did District Chophouse, started with a flight of beer at the bar (sneaky strong beer flights btw), then moved on to a bottle of wine with our dinner and capped off the night with a few rounds at RFDs. I very much look forward to these RW dinner nights. 

I've had a pretty good record so far (3-0) so I was bound to lose and the bet we made last season was basically all odds against me. To be clear, I suggested the bet and was also allowed out of the bed mid-season. Meh. 

We bet Giants vs. Jaguars straight record. Imagine my 2-14 season didn't merit a restaurant week win.  

This year we chose Bibiana. This restaurant has never been on my radar but when looking at places I realized it was an Italian place I had never tried AND it was owned by the same folks as Rasika (which is just delicious). I was actually excited to try some things off the regular menu instead of restaurant week menu. Once we sat down we found out that they only serve RW menu during RW. Meh. 

Either way the food was really good. I had rice fritters to start, cod with potatoes, tomatoes and capers as my entree and some ridiculous amazing dessert. I don't even know what it was but here's what it looked like: 

Diana treated us to some random bottle of red wine which was actually very good. Don't remember the name. Fail. 

Overall good place. The prices are also realllyy reasonable so I'll definitely be going back to try those two items on regular menu that caught my eye -- the venison ragu and the black spaghetti with MD crab! 

No More Alliteration!

So yesterday was fun and a disaster all at the same time. Fun folks, great food and lots of drinks. Unfortunate outcome in the main event. =/ We're just not going to talk about the game. I didn't get lots of pictures of all the little details. Majority of pictures are actually taken by Brenna (who was a tremendous help yesterday setting up a lot of items and making sure beer was cold and restocked at all times! Thanks Brenna!) and after half of the items were already eaten! I did have some snazzy 49ers plates and napkins and such but not pictured =/. 

 Peanut Butter and Vanilla Yogurt fruit dip. I legit ate spoons of that after everyone left. 

cheesy bread came out well!

The taquitos did as well. Taquitos were actually probably my favorite thing! 

One of my favorite parts of last night was "Car Bomb Kickoff." Everyone (who wanted to) did a carbomb at the beginning of the game and the beginning of the third quarter. After the first round of car bombs I was informed that whiskey is an ingredient. Fail on me not realizing that. Good thing we got three bottles of whiskey as house warming gifts (thanks to all of you who did that!). Round two were proper car bombs! No pictures =(. 

We had so much left over food which i don't understand because half as many people ate way more for NFC championship as this group. Fail. Even after packing very large bowls of food for folks, our fridge is out of control unorganized and packed! We'll def be eating bar food/chili for the rest of the week! 

Thank you to everyone who came out to the superbowl and made it a fun night despite the game. Also giant thank you to all of you who got us housewarming gifts. You really did not have to but we certainly appreciate them! I'll be putting up one giant post of all the awesome house warming presents we've gotten at some point in the near future. 

Superbowl Sunday

Last night we ended up staying in and renting some RedBox movies. We saw Ted which was way more inappropriate than I thought it would be. That's my kind of humor though. There were lots of pop culture references which I found pretty amusing. The boys fell asleep during/right after the movie. Then Brenna stayed up with me til about 5AM making some wall art for the dining area. =) Will have to put up pictures of those some time this week. Successful night!

The long delayed -- Meet Brenna and Joe: 

Brenna and I have wayyyy to many pictures for me to have chosen just one. I thought this was perfect. This is a gift Brenna got me Freshman year of college. The pictures included are lots of random things we did for a list of 101 things to do the summer before I left Florida for college. The collage reads "Pictures of you! Pictures of me! Hung upon your wall for the world to see" -- a song from a band (The Last Goodnight) we really liked in High School. What the hell ever happened to them?

I've known Brenna since my Junior year of high school... blah that this keeps becoming more and more years ago! Anyways, we had a rough start where she thought I was a slacker and I thought she was the most awesome person ever since she was basically president of every club. Somewhere between her thinking I was retarded and me idolizing her, we found a nice balance of what I think is mutual respect which is the perfect foundation for our very strong, solid and durable friendship! Through multiple graduations, hards times, good times and a lot of distance, we have both made the effort to maintain our friendship. It is all too ridiculous that we, born and raised Florida girls, have moved hundreds of miles from home to the same region which is now becoming a forever home for the both of us! It's crazy the places life will take you and all the changes that occur but some things are meant to be.

Speaking of meant to be...

Brenna and Joe:

unintentional matching. cute.

one of my favorite pictures. 

I've obviously only known Joe for the latter half of last year, but I think they're such a perfect fit. He's pretty quiet but I'm sure that'll change in time by just hanging out more. I like what I've seen so far and look forward to getting to know him much better! They just make sense. Goes without saying that I approve. =)

Superbowl Sunday. Finally here. We should have about 30 folks over today. I picked up some fun niners decorations from the party store yesterday. The house is still very far from being put together but we've only been in the house for one month as of today. Brenna has been doing a good job of trying to tell me to just chill the hell out. I just get stressed when things aren't as they should be.

Super super excited for all of the close-ups of my Harbaughs!

Go Niners! 

Stressful Saturday!

Yesterday after work, I went into the Crate and Barrel outlet (newly discovered, after working in old town for at least 4 years now -- smh!) that's two seconds away from my office in Old Town. It was magical. Evidently the update the stock once a week so it's always new and exciting. I was really surprised how deeply discounted most of the things there were. They even have furniture pieces! I got the most amazing teal/blue ombre bottle that is exactly what I'm thinking for center pieces at wedding! Didn't take a picture of it, but will share later this week! 

Last night was also successful at IKEA in that we saw something we liked and purchased. Loading all those boxes in the car and carrying them up the uphill walkway wasn't so fun but I guess I can't complain too much since I hardly did any of the lifting. 

I'm going out shopping for a few more items for the house and also going grocery shopping for tomorrow. I feel like I have a long long list and not enough time! Things are slowly looking good in the house as things get built, but that also means tools and a mess everywhere! 

I'm going to try this ridiculous "cheesy bread on crack" and homemade buffalo chicken taquitos for tomorrow. Excited to see how those two items in particular turn out. 

Tonight we're hanging out with Joe and Brenna. Either going to U street or hanging out at the house watching a movie and drinking. Either way, it'll be fun since we haven't really seen Joe in a while! They're going to spend the night regardless of what we end up doing. It makes me happy to have guests -- also makes me feel like the 'guest rooms' aren't ridiculous and unnecessary. Speaking of which, Varsha will be up this weekend and then Moe's heading up in early March! =)

Alrighty, hear's to hoping today is productive in life. 

Superbowl Sunday TOMORROW! Getting nervous but also very excited about sketchy being able to shave his face!

Furniture Friday

Last night we went to dinner at Ristorante Piccolo (always good) with Hirsh and his wife (!!) Pratibha. They just got married in November. 

After dinner we headed around the corner to Mr. Smith's. I've actually always wanted to go there on a night when the piano guy was playing. He was! You can request songs and such but he basically plays what he wants. It was quite entertaining. 

Meet Hirsh and Pratibha: 

I've known hirsh for a couple years now. We met at Kramers in Dupont. He was dining alone. I was out with a couple friends. I asked if I could steal the stool next to him, he said yes and eventually pulled up HIS stool to our table. After some good light-hearted and friendly conversation we exchanged numbers and have been friends since! Lesson learned: sometimes it's okay to talk to the creepy guy eating/drinking at a bar alone, lol. 

Looking through pictures, I realized how many awesomely funny pictures I have of Hirsh:

And now to be fair, I guess I should put up a couple normal ones: 

And now... Mr. and Mrs. Singh: 

As I mentioned, they just got married a couple months ago. Pratibha had been living in India and has just recently moved to DC. I met her just once before their wedding back in September and instantly liked her. She's so very easy to be around and comes off so simply genuine. I can honestly say that I've never seen Hirsh happier and that makes me happy to say. I very much look forward to hanging out with and getting to know Pratibha better! 

Looking through pictures for this post I realize how frequently I saw hirsh when we first became friends compared to recently. Gotta fix that!

Alrighty, enough about last night. 

Today we're going to IKEA. We still have a few items we need -- dining set and some sort of entertainment center. 

Dining Set -- I think we've found a dining set that we like, but we're going to wait until President's Day Weekend to see if there are any sales. If not, then we're going to get a nice wood 7 piece set that I've seen. It has an amazing matching wine cabinet/buffet too! 

Entertainment center -- the man cave is still kind of bare and in desperate need of some entertainment sprucing up. We definitely need to get it done before Superbowl (two days!). Sketchy tends to like the built-in looking entertainment centers with storage below and above the TV. The only issue with that is that we also want to set up a few TVs on the wall for a sports bar effect and for football season. Having too much entertainment center on wall may interfere with being able to put up TVs. After looking at some of IKEAs pieces, I thought of a way to combine both. 

The best part of this idea is that IKEA sells each piece separately so it's really easy to customize and make it all fit your space. Additionally, for now since we only have one TV we can just buy a little now and get the rest of the entertainment center as we put up more TVs! 

This is basically the inspiration we're going with for shopping tonight. Excited to see what happens! 

Happy Friday folks!