Garden Geek-out

Our garden is progressing so nicely, I thought I'd do a little photo mash-up to track its growth. It feels like it's taken forever for sprouts to come up but I guess it really hasn't been that long (we finished the bed and planted on June 14th). I recently planted turnips, beets, spinach, and collards in the squares that weren't showing any signs of life and everything but the beets have started sprouting. No pics of those yet but hopefully soon when they get bigger!

Here's our "mortgage lifter" tomatoes:

Our european salad microgreens:

Bell peppers (still not yellow!! Liars!!):

Basil:

Pattypan squash:

Dingying's tomato plant gifts:

Pot o' Gold swiss chard:

And a close-up of our mucho nacho jalapenos!! These are exciting.

Our mystery tree's flowers are popping up all over, so pretty!

Jam Jar

I just picked this up from World Market, Jam Jar Sweet Shiraz wine. It's fruity jammy goodness. And I may have bought it for the font and the gingham. Love it!

Week 3!

Our homework from last week was to bring empty coffee cans to class today. I wasn't sure what we were going to do with my Chock o' Nuts coffee can but I figured it would be a cute little tied arrangement. We started the class by using floral foam glue to attach galax leaves to the outside leaving a little ruffle rim:

Margaret, the teacher, brought really fun field flowers and we were pleased with the results. Here's mine:

And Mandy's!

Cat vs. Human

From cat versus human.... funny stuff.

Jiff-Jerf

Check out Jeffy's latest press! I get a mini shout-out in the Hi Fructose interview. :) 

Hi Fructose Interview

Juxtapoz Interview

Norway in a Nutshell!

I booked the Norway in a Nutshell trip for Jeff and I to get from Oslo to Bergen because it looks AH-MAZING. You all are going to be so jealous by the end of this post... :) I stole a lot of the text from the website I booked the tour on: www.fjordtours.com.  


The trip starts with a five hour train ride from Oslo to Myrdal, and then another one hour train ride from Myrdal to Flåm. I love traveling by trains, especially when the views are this scenic. Jeff and I are going to be playing a whole lot of Uno on this trip I bet...

The Flåm Railway is one of Norway's major and most spectacular tourist attractions, and one of the world's steepest railway lines. It has 20 tunnels, 18 of which were built by hand!! The train journey provides some of Norway's wildest and most magnificent scenery. On the 20 km-long train ride, you can see rivers that cut through deep ravines, waterfalls cascading down the side of steep, snow-capped mountains and mountain farms clinging dizzily to sheer slopes. The Flåm Railway makes a photo stop at the beautiful Kjosfossen waterfall. Kodak moment! This is where my pocket poncho is going to come in handy.

From Flåm, we take a two hour boat ride down the Nærøyfjord to Gudvangen. The Nærøyfjord is one of the narrowest fjords in Europe, only 250 meters wide at the narrowest and more than one km at the widest. Surrounded by towering mountains up to 1,700 metres high, this arm of the Sognefjord is amazingly beautiful. On the journey, you have excellent views of small traditional farms on the mountainsides. If you are lucky, you will see goats grazing right beside the fjord and seals basking on rocks before the boat moors at Gudvangen.

From Gudvangen, it's a one hour bus ride to Voss and from Voss, it's another 1 hour train ride to Bergen where we check into our hostel and hit the town.

The whole trip is about 10 hours of travel so it's intense but you cram in so much in one day. Soooo cool, right!? Thank god for digital cameras, otherwise we'd probably use up twenty rolls of film on this day alone!

Hellllloooo West Elm!

West Elm just revamped their website and it is sassy. I like the font and the new feel. The new bedding is gorgeous too. I'm tempted to spree.

These are my favorites:

Organic seedling sheet set:

Imperial duvet cover and pillowcases:

Pom pom throw:

This ikat bolster pillow:

These Chevron floor cushions are awesome. Want both.

Copenhagen!

I booked a lot of our Scandinavian adventure hostels and transportation yesterday so I'm getting a little giddy with excitement. This put me over the edge:

Love it. Via lovelydesign, and found here for sale.

Flower class #2

We had our second flower class tonight and the theme was topiaries. I thought topiaries were only those green plants cut into balls on sticks or in the shapes of animals, a la Edward Scissorhands, but nooooo. There are flower arrangement topiaries. Made by clustering gerbera daisies into a posy, shoving them a couple inches into floral foam, and then building a low arrangement at the bottom of the posy stick. Not thrilled about this one, especially when the teacher busted out the ribbons, beads, and birds to stick in it, but I actually completed this one, unlike the mum poodle from last week. I gave it to Jeff. :)

These were my favorite parts of the arrangement that I'll probably do again. These green leaf bunches were nice filler, and with a billy ball or the yarro and spray rose in the center I think made them look like unique flowers.

Thanks Mom and Dad!

We had such a nice and relaxing weekend with my parents this weekend. They came down on Thursday and we had lots of good meals (La Paralocchia! Yums!), went to the Art after Dark event at the Long Beach Museum of Art, went kayaking, farmers marketing, a little shopping, and lots of hanging and chatting and pleading with Lily Mae to come and let us pet her. Lovely. Looking forward to the next one!

 Ah Huntington Harbor... you were beautiful. And only burned me just a little bit.

Lily's chair

Lily Mae claimed this chair in our living room so I put her crocheted blanket my mom made her on it and now she won't get off it. Look at what creepy iPhoto did to her with the "red-eye correction" feature:

Scary!

Garden updates! July edition.

Our garden isn't looking too shabby... Nothing ready for harvest quite yet and we still have to buy a rain barrel so Jerod can set up our housewarming gift drip irrigation system for us, but it's coming along. Our herbs are flourishing in the kitchen (from left to right is garlic chives, parsley, and tricolor sage):

And rosemary, bamboo (not an herb but a gift from sister Jen), and purple sage:

Well helllllo baby lettuces. So nice of you to finally join us. You better get bigger.

This is supposed to be a yellow bell pepper. I guess their color develops later?

We have a bunch of hearty looking basil seedlings now so it'll probably be a winter of frozen pesto for us. 

These are the heirloom white pattypan squash plants. The seedlings I grew from seed inside and then transplanted kicked it so I planted more seeds straight into the bed which is what these babies grew into.

I'm so happy our gifted tomato plants from Dingying survived! 

I was worried about them because they weren't looking so hot when we first planted them:

Pretty big difference, no? 

We also planted all of the succulents that we stole from Grammie's yard and pulled a jillion weeds over the weekend. Jeff is trying a new lawn fertilizer to try to get our front lawns to grow back and it looks like it's starting to work. I'll post some before and after's in a bit.

La fleur class

Mandy and I had our first flower arrangement class together tonight! It was a lot of fun, despite the assignment of making poodles out of mums. I wasn't into gluing felt and bows to beautiful flowers so I defected and went with my own arrangement. The teacher brought beautiful flowers for us to use so it was hard for me to ignore them. Here's what I made:

The chocolate geranium leaves and purple oregano were new to me and I love them. Admittedly I was jealous though when I saw Mandy's finished poodle:



Creepy but cute. The teacher's was pretty awesome too:



Can't wait for next week!

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Art Haus

We're at a show right now that jeff is in, check out the sign!

Neat! He has his RVCA and Walt Disney pieces in it:






But this one by Tiffany Liu is my favorite:



Off to Wafu!

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A little test for the travels

This is so I can post from the road. Neat! Reason #184 why I love my iPhone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Thanks Marmie!

She loves it!

Mmm... want.

I'm still on the hunt for nice stud earrings to replace the ones those stupid robbers stole. These are small, lovely and perfect. I used to be way more into silver, but now is the era of gold for me. Made by Etsy seller Avlya.

BAH!

This is what I felt like today:

Too many errands! Nice to sit down, listen to my friend's band on KZSU Stanford, and catch up on internet goodness like Hyperbole and a Half. Too good. I feel better now.

Kanken!

I just bought this Fjall Raven Kanken laptop backpack from Need Supply, Co and I can't wait for it to come. I have a silly big laptop bag right now that I carry in addition to a purse everyday to work and I schlep them both around to meetings, the scanner, in the house etc so it will be really nice to have everything in one bag that I can wear and keep my arms free. They come in different laptop sizes so I got the smallest 13" one which will suit my MacBook baby just fine. It will be a perfect "around-town" backpack for our trip to Scandinavia too, while we leave our bigger backpacks wherever we're staying. I'm not going to bring my laptop on the trip (it's not really mine, UCI owns it!) plus I can upload photos and blog from my iPhone. It was great timing too because Daily Candy just offered a 25% off discount code to Need Supply (enter code DCNS) so that helped.

I love the arctic fox logo, all the pockets, and the handles on top to carry it like a tote too. The Kanken Maxi is pretty sweet since the fox logo is a lot bigger: