Victory.

I called out of work today because it's a "feels like" temp of 40 below outside. Well, I didn't really "call out" - I worked from home and am going in tomorrow instead. I thought about it all night and finally agreed with my parents and boyfriend that it was best that I didn't go outside today. I'm so small and get chilled to the bone so easily - plus, with my commute, I'm standing outside waiting for the bus for 15 - 30 minutes! So, instead, I woke up and decided to attempt victory rolls again! I was inspired when I saw a pin on Pinterest for a tutorial that that girl from Sea of Shoes did a while back (although I'm not going to link directly to it because her blog is impossible to navigate/I don't want to search thousands of posts back trying to find it). It'd been a couple of years since I'd so much as even attempted doing victory rolls because they never turned out well and just made me all frustrated & angry at how uncooperative my hair is. After an hour of struggling, teasing, and brushing out my curls, I finally got two little victory rolls accomplished and looking relatively tidy! And after about 30 Youtube tutorials, I think I've finally got the motion & direction of the curl down and am already eager to try victory rolls again.
Because of this new hair accomplishment, I decided to take some photos so that I will always be able to remember the glory of my first victory rolls. Maybe I'll use these photos for my Christmas card next year - "Happy Holidays from Chloe & Victory Rolls! From my family to yours..." Seriously though, I'm ecstatic!
In addition to some photos of my victory rolls, my mind is also overflowing with thoughts. Thoughts on blogging, thoughts on February, thoughts on things I want to accomplish.... So read along to those thoughts or just look at the photos - or leave the blog entirely if neither option appeals to you.

The other day I booked my flight to go visit my sister in Arizona near the end of February. Arizona hadn't really appealed to me until I saw the weather report - 70 degrees & sunny! Jeez. That, and my sister has been texting me constantly asking me to come down. My sister and I are not close by any measure of the word and we have little sisterly bond between us. Most of our relationship over the past 20 years has been cattiness and criticism, and I regret to say that some of that is on me. My sister has rarely said anything nice to me, but the other day she sent me a long text which was somewhat nice (somewhat a crack at my boyfriend), to tell me that I'm a smart, beautiful, independent woman (!!!!) with a good head on my shoulders. Yeah, she then went on to say that I tend to date down and my boyfriend doesn't deserve me but whatever. My boyfriend just said, "Yeah, I have to agree with your sister on this one" so that's that. And so, after she seemed to like me all of a sudden, I booked a flight and she's been texting me all excited & such with what we're going to do for the 4 days I'm down there. I'm already excited - plus, 70 degrees & sunny!
My boyfriend and I are also planning a trip to visit his parents in Reno, where it's reportedly been in the 60s, and I'm already excited to get back to the mountains. I never grew up anywhere near mountains and didn't see my first until I visit Taos, New Mexico when I was 11. But ever since then, I've been in love and my soul yearns to be among the majestic creatures.
It will nice to get out of town for a little while. I haven't had a break since the middle of June when I got a week to visit some friends & family in Geneva and London. That little trip was sandwiched between May term and summer term, and then I launched into fall term and graduated, and have since been putting my all into my internship. Add onto that my boyfriend being in ill health since August, and I'm just wiped. I'm fully ready to get out of Minnesota for a few days and be able to focus, breathe deeply, and take things one little bit at a time.




In addition to those couple little trips, I've also been thinking a lot about launching a new blog. I'm so excited for this new page in my blogging life! I would love to get the blog up around the beginning of February and so I have hired my boyfriend to help brainstorm names for the blog. So far, he's been rather unhelpful, with suggestions ranging from "Rural Prude" to "Chloe: The Final Frontier". In my mind, all I keep thinking is "Tackling Adulthood". I keep trying to get out of that box and try brainstorming new names, but for whatever reason, "Tackling Adulthood" just seems to be it. I've gotten a bit of criticism for it and I understand why. It's not nearly as fun and trendy as "Urban Tease" but oh well. I don't want my new blog to be strictly a fashion blog and I don't want an artsy name with a flower or a bird or something French in the title. I want it to be slightly gritty, slightly straightforward, not too trendy or generic. I don't want it to just be another fashion blog where you can't even remember who writes it because the name sounds exactly like 5000 other blogs. 
I've spent a lot of time thinking about possible names and I always come back to "Tackling Adulthood". Maybe this means that I should go with my gut. Or maybe it means that I'm uninspired. This is a big leap! I don't want to be that girl who starts a new blog every few years simply because the title no longer applies to her life. (Though I think I'll still be tackling adulthood well into my thirties.)






With my life in balance now that my boyfriend is back home and showing so much improvement, and now that the big special event at work is nearly here and over with, I'm starting to think about what I can do for myself. I've been so focused on work and catching up with my boyfriend, I haven't given much though to what I want. It's easy for me to forget about myself and put the needs of others first. I find it very difficult to breathe and let go of other people's expectations for me, but sometimes I just need to put myself first and do what's best for me. And so, since I take joy in the small things in life, I've decided to begin putting together a small list of things I want to accomplish this spring.
1. Learn to drive. I took driver's ed and got my permit when I was 16, but then my father would never teach me to drive. My mom doesn't have her license and my sister was not 21 (or sober ever, really). After I turned 18 and you no longer have to have a parent sign that they've driven with you or whatever it is they have to do, I started telling myself that I'd save my money and hire a professional to teach me. But then the idea of getting into an empty car with a strange man I don't know didn't really appeal to me. So I put it off. And I've kept putting it off. However, now I'm going to learn. My boyfriend has been offering for a few months now and I'm finally in a place where I feel like this is a possibility. I'm a nervous driver but my boyfriend is so sweet and has never ever once risen his voice at me (or been angry with me, really) so I feel comfortable driving with him - even though I'm terrified to drive!
2. Make pretzels! I've pinned dozens of pretzel recipes on Pinterest and now I finally want to start making them! I started simple last week and tried to make pretzel rolls, but my boyfriend forgot they were in the oven and got them out 20 minutes late. It was more like eating a pretzel breaded with rock, but oh well - first attempt only!
2. Master the victory roll. I want to get victory rolls down to a tee so that I can do them in a few minutes early in the morning and wear them to work and such. They're such a fun look and I'm starting to get bored of my hair which is not a good sign!





I'm so excited for February and feel a boost of creative energy and ambition coming with it! For tonight however, I am going to cuddle down and watch some TV, drinking tea and snacking on cookies. I'm also going to clean the fish tank because my fish Myrna just died a tragic death at the hands of a parasite and I'd really hate for Bubba & Vincent to get sick also. I've already killed 3 fish in 2014, and let's keep it at that!
I think this week I'm going to attempt making pretzel rolls once more and maybe go out for my first driving lesson with my boyfriend - yippee! What type of small goals have you made for yourself this year? Or big ones, too! But, big goals are accomplished in small steps.

Christmas Decorating

I've been busy decorating the house for Christmas. Over the years, my family has built up a lot of Christmas decorations, many because of me, as you might imagine. One of my favourite parts of Christmas is decorating the tree - something that my mother assigns me to do as it's tedious and we have so many decorations - because it's like greeting all these tiny little memories year after year, displaying them and recounting them annually, then packing them away until the next merry December when you can take them back out and hold them like precious pieces of your life. A lot of the ornaments on the tree are hand made by my mother, aunt, grandmother, great aunts, and yes, even a few that my sister and I crafted. A tree wouldn't be complete without those glittery stars with pre-k photos pasted on them haphazardly.



I wanted to share some of my favourite ornaments and decorations on the blog. It's Christmas Eve and a good time to remember some of those little memories and take delight at the ornaments hung with care for a few weeks of the year. My family has collected some classic ornaments, some delightful ones, some pretty tacky ornaments, some that are only beautiful if you know the story behind them. I have several favourites that I hang each year - the tin man, the deer on the iced over pond, the Play-doh boy decorating his Play-doh tree, all of the Snoopy & Woodstock ones (we have 3!) - and it's nice to share those - and others - on the blog.





































Okay okay okay, Gogo isn't a Christmas decoration, but he was a good little helper to have around!

Christmas Crafting

I've been busy getting ready for Christmas. I've spent the last three days in the kitchen, making candles (which, if you follow me on Twitter, you got live tweets of the exciting process) and assembling these water-less snow globes that have been all over Pinterest because Anthropologie was trying to sell them for way too much money and they're actually super easy (and cheap!) to DIY.



I don't have a lot of money (being an unpaid intern generally doesn't make you very rich) and so I decided to make presents this year instead of buying them. My aunt brought over a whole bunch of candle making goods for me and I bought some inexpensive wicks from Amazon. I bought inexpensive tins and jars from the thrift store and Michael's (which I am in absolutely no way endorsing considering that I hate hate HATE that store), so it was a very cheap project. I hadn't made candles since I was about 5 years old (isn't it funny that 15 years later, I'm still broke and making candles as gifts for Christmas?), and I had no recollection of how tedious of a process it really is. It takes forever to melt the wax, and then after you pour it it has to cool and settle for like 5 hours before you can do a second layer. I had to have a constant rotation of Christmas movies playing to keep me sane.







I made 4 different scents and colours. I started with blue (one of which I've already wrapped up and mailed off), which is supposed to be vanilla-sugar cookie scent, but I personally think it smells a bit berry-ish. I was melting down all different chunks of leftover wax, some of which may have been scented and thus tampered with the scent. The next day I made pink-red bayberry scented candles. I used two different brands of bayberry scent and so these ones are very strong and smell wonderful! Yesterday I tackled Christmas tree/pine scent, which was maybe not as powerful as I would have liked. The scent in the jar was very strong, but when I put it in the wax, it didn't really smell. Granted, I was trying to cover up the scent of Crayola crayons for all of these candles, so that might have had something to do with it. After my foray into pine scented candles, I still had a few more tins left, so I decided to make coffee-vanilla scent, which turned out pink and not very coffee-like.



While the long process of melting and cooling candle wax was under way, I was busy assembling some water-less snow globes! They're really easy to make and tutorials are all over Pinterest (shameless plug of my Christmas Cheer pin board, but I swear, I've pinned these babies like 20 times). I used jars that I picked up at the thrift store and my mum's cupboard (free!) and bought fake snow and little fake trees/bushes on Amazon.

I almost had a heart attack after hours of searching for tiny deer figurines on Amazon and having no luck, dreading that I'd have to make a trip to one of those horrid craft stores that make me want to become very angry and violent (yes, even at Christmastime), but when I mentioned the project to my mum she scurried to her closet and pulled out boxes and boxes of little deer. Some of them were these really sweet little wooden ones, and others were these horribly tacky plastic ones from the '60s. I painted those gold, which made them 100% less terrifying and tacky. In my mum's Christmas craft box, she also had loads of little ornaments and even a Santa and an elf which I glued to make it look like it was climbing up a tree. I stuck some little pine cones in there and some extra glitter and voila! Tiny winter wonderlands held captive in old canning jars. I used E6000 which is a crafter's delight and hopefully will keep all the little pieces glued down, even if they're being shipped cross-country.











These are super enjoyable to make and I am going to make a few more in the next couple of days. I'm feeling very crafty! I'm definitely going to keep my eyes peeled at garage sales this summer - people are always trying to sell old crafting bits and silly Christmas ornaments. I definitely want to make some wacky ones next year!



I have loads of photos of my Christmas tree/other Christmas decorating that I've been doing that I will share tomorrow - on Christmas Eve! In the meantime, I'd love to see what Christmas crafts you guys have been doing. Send me links to your blog or photos of your DIYs! Keep warm and keep crafting xx