Trip to Florida

I leave for Florida in just a few hours. Both my family and my boyfriend's family have houses on the Gulf Coast, so I'm going to get a few days of relaxing and enjoying some beautiful sunny weather.

Trip to Florida by wanderingbean featuring a lip treatment

Philosophy fragrance, £32
Face care, $7.49
Eos lip treatment, $3.14
Philosophy beauty product, $60
L Space Stila Compact Make Up Kit, $18

One of my traveling rules is that I don't check bags if I'm traveling domestically. It seems like a waste of money to check a bag for such a short time, and after Air France lost my checked bag last summer going to Russia, I've become super aware of how often that happens.

Of course, one of the limitations of carry-on only is the 3oz rule. This means finding out how to pack all of my beauty essentials in one small Ziploc bag. Above are my travle-must haves for weekends away. Florida, here I come!

Out With the Old, In With the New

I have a weird personality quirk. Okay, I have many weird personality quirks, but I'm just focusing on one today. Despite the fact that my mom regularly tells me that I have the emotional depth of a robot (and not even like a fun robot like Rosie from The Jetson, she means one of those creepy ones from I, Robot), I get abnormally attached to stuff.

Two years ago when I had to get a new car, I got emotional over turning in my beloved red car that I had had for 10 years. I kept thinking, "I hope it knows it was a good car. I hope someone else gets to drive it for a few more years" even though I know in my normally highly rational head that it is just a metal object.

Last week, my six year old laptop started doing a really charming death rattle. It was taking up to 45 minutes to turn it on, and get properly running. As someone who is diving head first into the dissertation stage of grad school relatively soon, this was not a game I was willing to play. I have already had a computer crash once, I was not willing to go through that again.

So I now have a new Macbook Pro. It is fast. It is shiny. It has 750 gigs of space for me to fill up with dissertation-y goodness, and yet, I still feel sad looking at my old laptop. That thing has been all over the world with me-from Australia to Helsinki. It sailed on a ship with me for 3 months, and it did not judge me when I was seasick for a week straight. I'm happy to say that my old computer is getting a second life. My cousin is in high school, and would like a Mac, so I'm going to wipe the hard drive, spruce it up, and send it on its way to NJ. I'm really happy about that.

This also is going to serve as motivation to finally getting a home office set up. I'm turning my second bedroom into a guest room/home office. Of course, like any good book nerd, I have fantasies of what my home office/library will look like one day:

Via Elle Decor (it's like they jumped into my brain on this one.)
Of course, this one is far off in the future one day, hopefully.

For now, there's still plenty of cute ones that work for my current house.

I think something bright and airy is exactly the right combination to combat months of writing about gloomy Russian literature.

A Cville Weekend

It's no secret that I am in love with my town. It would be difficult to not love Charlottesville in the Spring, but as I'm gearing up to write a new article about my town, I'm trying to really pay attention to the things that make Charlottesville a special place. Luckily for me, doing this type of research is not a hardship.

The weekend started out pretty early on Saturday morning. My completely badass friend & colleague Kat ran her first half marathon, so I got up bright and early to cheer her on. It was my first time watching a half marathon/marathon, and I highly recommend the experience because it's such a cool atmosphere. It's so cool watching people run across the finish line because most of the people look so thrilled.* I loved listening to the announcers call out the names of the people completing the race & some encouragement to go along with it.


After the marathon, it was time for one of my favorite things about Charlottesville ever--The City Market. For me, that's pretty much how I know it's well and truly Spring. Saturday's market was the first one of the season, and I was blow away by how much was already there. Typically the first one of the year is pretty sparse, but there were so many starter plants & a surprising number of fruits and veggies ready to be purchased.



On top of that, there were loads of food stands and music acts to entertain the crowds (and it was plenty crowded).


The temptation to buy some starter plants for my porch was really strong because there were so many cool plants there already, but since I'll be away for a good part of this week, I had to resist temptation. Another great weekend. I'm looking forward to a summer full of them.