Peaches = Summertime

All of the pictures below are from Instagram, because I love Instagram - DUH. And they were all from the past 4 or 5 days. I had a great weekend and here's a few of the things that made it great:

1. Watching the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics with Jeff and his family, while eating that amazing cobbler with the freshest Georgia peaches.
2. Lazily tubing the Bear Paw Creek/Chipola River with my Sunday school class on Saturday. And even though we lost my car key in the river, my awesome parents drove an hour just to bring me my spare. They really are some cool people.
3. Saturday night was an amazingly awesome worship experience at my church. Looking forward to the next one already.
4.  Spent some nice time cuddling, playing and watching movies with Jeff and his precious twins.
5. Had fun at our pool party with my youth, until we had to move it all into the garage because of thunder and lightning. Summer storms are such a bummer during a pool party. But we had fun anyways.

These are in no order whatsoever, but I did try to at least give a quick caption for each one! :)
Picture Dump, reeeeeeeeady, GO!

Keepin the nails simple this time around. For now at least ;)

Took some (lame bathroom) pics for the boyfriend

Doodled this with my new Sharpie pen to send Jeff the next morning

Jeff's mama made amazing homemade peach cobbler

"Awaken" worship experience at church on Saturday

Dressed up all festive for our youth luau!

These cuties came to the luau as well :)

Fresh Georgia peaches for snacks all the time.

Sunday school class tubing trip at Bear Paw

Such a good snack. Peach yogurt w/ Quaker granola.

Also, I've decided that this year, Peaches = Summertime. Usually I'm a huge fan of watermelon. And don't get me wrong, I still am. But this year, it's all about the peaches baby. They're delicious and sweet and juicy and yummy. And I'm eating them all the time. Delicious!

Happy summer my friends and loved ones! Keep enjoying it while you can :)

Penguins Laugh Too

My sweet friend Jenni thought of me when she saw this the other day, and posted it on my Facebook wall. And it is just the cutest little thing. It starts out kinda squeaky, but then it just get's precious. It made me laugh and coo and get all silly and giggly, and I loved it. Check it out...

I don't think I realized that penguins can laugh like people do, but apparently they can! And apparently they can also be tickled. This just makes me love those little black-and-white feathered birds even more. So stinking cute! Who wants to buy me one?? Please and thank you :)

Penguin love to my dear friends and family :)

Polka Dot Nails, Round 2

Painted my nails again last night! And attempt number two with my new nail art dotting pen thingy-majiggies went pretty good again. (HERE is my first polka dot attempt, but not with the new majiggies). I'm still only attempting some very basic designs and things, but I'm sure in no time I'll be ready to tackle something a little more complex and interesting... but for now, it was just a quick, simple set of polka dot lines!

I'll be in the water all day on Saturday, so I don't expect this to last very long, but for now, I'm happy with the bright, summery results! I think maybe I should have chosen something other than white for the polka dots to get more of a contrast, but oh well. You live and you learn. Now I'm wishing I would have tried to do a tiny sunshine or something, since the yellow is so bright and sunny! Next time maybe...

What should I try next??

Happy nails and much love :)

Oh, and this is what I did the other day, even though I didn't blog about them. These nails were my very first attempt with my nail art dotting pen thingy-majiggies... (don't y'all love that fancy term?!) 

Poolga

I found this fun new website for anyone with an Apple product. I personally have an iPhone (which I may or may not be completely obsessed with...), and I'm loving this site so far. It's called Poolga.

They have awesome artists who have designed their art specifically for these great products. You can download each picture in different formats, depending on which device you have, i.e. iPhone or iPad.

But they do a better job of describing what they're really all about, so here's a blurb directly from their website:

Poolga came to life in 2007 when we got our hands on the (then) revolutionary iPhone. Frustrated by the lack of decent wallpapers out there, we struck upon the idea of showcasing established and up-and-coming illustrators by distributing their work for use on mobile devices. Today, Poolga is one of the few online outlets flying the flag for good quality imagery - no cheesy landscapes, scantily clad babes or muscle cars here!

Poolga (pronounced "pool-gah") is the nickname that a friend used to call her baby before she was born. In Spanish "pulga" means "flea." The baby is now called Sofia.

So last week when I found these, I downloaded and saved close to 60 or so of them! I also picked out special ones and sent a few to my boyfriend, and picked out a few for my sister. And now I have TONS of awesome pictures to use as my backgrounds! Here are10 (although I had a really hard time narrowing them all down for the blog...) of my current favorites on the site. That man with the ocean beard on the top row is my current lock screen wallpaper, and the ice cream in the bottom left corner is the inside wallpaper! Both are fun and summer-y but in different ways, but I like that about them.

I really don't know anything about Android phones, but if you have one, you should probably check this out, just in case you can use them too. (Then let me know so that I can spread the word to those folks as well!) They have hundreds of pictures on the site, so I'm pretty positive when I say almost everyone should be able to find something appealing to them! So pop on over to Poolga.com for some pretty pictures on your pretty iPhone :)

Love to y'all on this extremely long Thursday...

Punishing Penn State

So last fall, I wrote a post about all the CRAP going on within the Penn State football team. It was disgusting. And guess what? It's still disgusting, and it just makes me so angry!

I will only summarize what's happened this week (partly because you don't really care about all the details, but partly because I don't even know them all myself.) THIS article however on the Sports Illustrated website is a really good one, and I recommend you read it if you want to know what's going on with the whole thing...

NCAA sanctions:
1. The school has been fined $60 million, which is apparently roughly equal to one year's revenue from the football program.
2. They are also limited in the amount of scholarships they can give out
3. They have been banned from postseason games for the next four years, and (seperate from the NCAA sanctions) the Big Ten banned them from sharing in the conferences bowl revenue during postseason games.

And now I'm going to get up on my soap box for a little bit...

I think sexual abuse of any child or minor is about as sick as you can get. Period. I have no tolerance for it. I work at the Department of Corrections, and I see it all the time, and it makes me sick to my stomach. And I'm pretty sure 99% of you reading this would probably feel the same. What I cannot comprehend is how someone, anyone, could turn a blind eye to actions like this, and ignore it. Much less ignore it for 14 years!!

So as perverted and nasty as Jerry Sandusky is/was, I'm just as disgusted with Joe Paterno (and three other top officials at the college) for ignoring it. Because they did nothing about it, it went on for far too long. If something could have been done to prevent anymore harm when Paterno first found out, we will never know. Although, I'm definitely on the side of "YES - things could have been different". I believe Sandusky would not have gotten away with it for so long, he might not have harmed near as many precious children and ripped their innocent childhood and away from them.

For years Paterno preached "success with honor" as a motto for their team... I have no words to even convey how I feel about this hypocrisy.

In addition to all of the punishments handed down from the NCAA, they also stripped away all of Paterno's wins since 1998 (when he first found out apparently), taking away 111 wins from the past 14 years. With this, it strips his title as the most successful coach of all time, and now our beloved Bobby Bowden will be credited with that title.

Here's the thing though FSU fans - as much as I love Bobby (and I do love him a lot), let's try not to celebrate this title for him. Of course it'll be great for him to be credited with this honor, but it was a horrible way for him to get it. Little children were still abused and hurt and that's not fair. Bobby himself said he wished the title could have been earned, rather than receiving it this way.

I could go on and on about nonsense like this, because it just baffles me. But for now I'll close out this rant, and move on. Just continue praying for the victims and their families of not only this one predator, but of all sexual predators. And please, I beg you, do something if you have the chance.

Prime Time with Friends

Have I said recently how much I love and adore my girlfriends from St. Augustine? I don't think I have said much about them since our girls weekend, but they're always on my mind and in my heart. They are literally some of my favorite people, and I love when I get to have random visits with them!

Last Friday, Kaley happened to be passing through town, so I took off the whole day to hang out with her. We just did some random things, but we had a great time. We first went to Angelette's for breakfast, and enjoyed a little bit too much cajun breakfast. So yummy. Then we made our way over to Old Navy to start our shopping time. Everything in there ended up being way more expensive than it should have been, so we left there empty handed.

Wearing my new dress from Forever 21+ that I talk about in next paragraph... :)

Then we went to the mall to continue shopping. I got a super cute new dress from Forever 21, (and by the way - I didn't know they had a Forever 21 + section, so I found lots of things that I could actually fit into, when their clothes are usually the tiniest things ever). We browsed through a couple of other stores, then we both tried on a ton of clothes in Gap, and Kaley ended up getting two dresses.

Then we went to our cheap theater and saw "Think Like A Man," which was a decently funny movie. Then we just went back to my house to hang out for a bit before her dad got off of work. There was then some confusion with her and her dad and picking her up and staying in one place and it was some craziness. But it was still good, because that just meant I had some extra time with her! So glad that worked out Kaley!

But she wasn't the only one I've seen recently, because on Monday night I got to have dinner with Nicole! She lives in Pensacola, but was working out of town for a while, and was only a short drive from Tally. So Monday night we met half-way, and got to have dinner together! We ate in Quincy, Florida, at the West End Grille, which was a pretty yummy restaurant for being in a tiny, country town. :)

We sat talking for the longest time, and had so much to catch up on, and also reminisce about the old days as well. We had so much fun and it was so convenient to get to do this only 30 minutes away! Jeff also got to come to dinner with us, and it has been nice for him to get to meet my friends lately. So I'm so glad he could come too. Then we went on over to McDonald's for a little after dinner treat. We got ice cream cones and hung outside attempting to eat them faster than they could melt.

The three of us definitely had a good time together, and I wish it could happen more often! So any time you're close again Nicole, feel free to let me know, and then we can make dinner at the WEG totally become a "tradition." :)

I literally have some of the best friends, and I love them all so much! Looking forward to the next time I get to see some of them again! (Which I think should be the Lake House Extravaganza in August, and it is going to be amazing I'm sure, just like it always is!!)

Kaley and Nicole, thanks for coming to hang out with me in and around Tally. I'm so glad I got to see both of you! Love to you both in Auggie and P-cola. See you again soon!

Happy love to everyone else as well! :)

Polishing My Nails

I'm really into this whole "nail art" craze right now. Like, a whole lot. And I'm having so much fun with all the different options and things you can do! Sometimes they can be extremely elaborate, but sometimes it can be as simple as putting glitter on only one nail per hand. And then you're done. And it's still so stinking cute!

Check out these 4th of July nails I was rockin' for Independence Day a few weeks ago. This was actually super easy to do, and I was a bit obsessed with them, and also impressed with myself for making it look so nice. (At least in my own opinion I thought they looked pretty dang good!)

I also like to do some fun things on my toenails as well that correspond with my fingers. Like with the 4th of July nails, I just did red on all my toes, with white polka dots on the big toes. And for the ones below that are silver with big silver glitter, only the big toes got glitter, but they got a LOT of it. My big toenails kind of look like disco balls, and it's amazing and I love it. So here are just a few other examples of some of the "nail art" I've been proudly wearing lately...

These are older, and I think I've already blogged it, but oh well.

And just a couple of weeks ago, I ordered some simple nail art pens on Amazon. I got a set of five, and each one has a different sized tip on it, so you can do a variety of things with them. I can't wait to get them in, and get to try out some new things! I've been really wanting to do some stripes, but that's close to impossible without having the proper tools for that. Polka dots are super easy with a cut-off q-tip, but stripes are not so easy with only a q-tip!

My goal is to keep up with my nails, and not let them get all scraggley and gross looking. And hopefully I can re-do them every week or so, because I just have so many colors and combos and tricks I want to try! Can't wait to get my nail art pens in - maybe I'll get lucky and it'll be soon! (They're coming from China and they're suuuuuper slow...)

Happy days and pretty nails! Love to you all. :)

Panama City Beach

Hi there, and welcome back! Who likes my new background image and colors? Because I'm a bit obsessed with it. I'm loving the birds, the doodles and all the blues! So cute. And I'm glad to be back to blogging, even though I'm sure it will be crazy catching up with everything. Upcoming posts might include: TML 2012, hanging with some of my favorite girls from Flagler recently, my 30-day shred workout, some of the sister's wedding stuff, nail art, and some general life stuff that I haven't shared while I was taking a blog break...BUT enough of that, and on to this current post now!

Our usual beach of choice is St. George Island State Park. And we love it so much. We love it so much in fact that we bought a year-long Florida State Park pass to go whenever we want. But with this fancy pass, it works not only at St. George Island State Park, but it works at every state park in Florida! That's over 150 parks for us to visit with our State Park Pass. So, we decided it would be fun to visit as many as we could until May 2013! And so we finally visited a new place together.

Last Saturday we went to Panama City Beach to go to St. Andrew's State Park. We left real early in the morning and got Chick-fil-A for breakfast. So good. When we got there, we got all sunscreen-ed up, and hopped on our bikes that we had brought with us. Our plan was to just ride around a little bit exploring PCB casually and find some place to eat lunch while we were doing it.

Before we realized it though, we had ridden much further than we thought we had. It felt so nice outside, and we had a strong breeze was behind us, so we were just flying along a great speed and pace. We stopped to buy more water, then headed back to a place we had passed on the way out that looked like the perfect beach atmosphere restaurant. So we locked up our bikes out front, and shared some grouper and fries at Schooner's.  And I mean hello?! That is the best view I've probably ever had for lunch time. Everything was open air and it felt great, and it was a great place to eat lunch in your swimsuits, in the middle of a bike ride. Lovely.

After lunch, we stopped at a few of the "local" tourist shops to do some browsing and shopping. I love Ocean Potion brand sunscreen and aloe lotion, but can't ever find it around here. But you can always find it at the beach. So I stocked up, and it was just in time too, because the one I had brought ran out while we were there! But the more important purchase was some matching BFF bracelets that Jeff and I picked out to wear together. I half-way suggested getting some, and when he agreed he would be up for it, I was totally psyched. This is only one small reason why I love this man so much! :)

After hanging out in a town a bit longer, we rode back to the state park. Total, we ended up riding around 9 miles on our bikes that day! We had fun, and got some exercise too. Back at the beach again, we tried to set up our chairs and umbrella, but it was sooooo windy!! When we left for our bike ride in the morning, it was a yellow flag. But by the time we got back, it was red, and it was serious. The wind was blowing too hard to even leave the umbrella up, so we immediately put it back in its little bag. We got out in the water, and holy cow was the current so stinking strong! We were literally fighting the current and the little waves so that we wouldn't get swept out to sea. In the midst of all that though, we had some time to play around with my water camera :)

(Side note about the water pictures... I took a ton of him jumping and playing around in the water, and got quite a few keepers. There are even more that I didn't put up of him. However, when it was his turn to take my pictures, he kept saying that the camera was messed up and it wasn't working right and blah, blah, blah... but obviously I was able to get it to work, soooo...I'm just saying - operator error...)

I still love you even if you can't work my water camera dear! :)

After we had collected some shells and sand in a mason jar (We're keeping a collection of all of our beach trips together. Maybe I should do a blog post about that?!), we loaded all of our stuff back up in the car, and  got dried off and into fresh clean clothes. We decided on the way home to drive the whole way back up highway 98, which for you non-Floridians is also "Coastal Highway." It's the more scenic route, but it's a lovely drive! We stopped in Mexico Beach at a random little seafood restaurant that was (I think) called The Fish House. And it was quite yummy too! I was sooo sleepy after dinner, and fell asleep in the car on the way home.

It was a great day at the beach, we had fun exploring a new town and a new state park, and I had a great day with my wonderful boyfriend! I can't wait until our next adventure together!

Happy, sunny, warm love being sent to everyone. Love yall!

P.S. - Our great philosophical debate in the car was centered on what citizens of each state are called. (I.e. - if you live in Florida, you are a Floridian.) Some of them are sooo confusing and difficult, and we never could figure them all out. We're still talking about it four days later! So feel free to let me know some of the more difficult ones if you happen to know. Like: Connecticut, Iowa, North/South Dakota, Maine, etc.... I could list a ton. It's quite tricky, but I'm so curious now!

P.P. S. - There's a couple more pictures over on my "photography blog" from PCB too...