Cheers to the Weekend

Ahhhhh... the weekend. There's nothing I love than sleeping later and rolling out of bed, only to walk next door to the coffee shop for breakfast.

 Sausage biscuits and grits for two, please! It's been a productive day so far, but I'll give a you a sneak peek at something my sister and I worked on yesterday...

 Our Save-the-Dates! We've got to address them now, but I'm so ready to send them out and for people to see them. One day, I'm going to do some blogs on our wedding process. This was actually one of the most fun and actually one of the least expensive items because we designed them and Paul got them printed through one of his sources. 

I've been growing my hair out for about a year now and now I'm even more on a mission to grow my hair out for the wedding. I got my hair trimmed this morning and afterwards I was still feeling in the beauty mood. I was next to the mall (which I NEVER go to), so I went to check out makeup. I've heard nothing but amazing things about MAC shadows, so I decided to give a few a try (not without a little sticker shock paying!).

 I had to run into Target for a few things and decided it was probably a good time to go through my makeup and get a new bag. (Who am I? I'm not really big into makeup!) I've had mine since freshman year of college (six years), so I think it was a good move.

Love my new bag (on the left)! The old one (on the left) was feeling pretty sad.

We'll be heading in about an hour to the Top of the Hops beer festival. I'll report back later!

Bravo!

This has been such a busy week for us! We've had something every night after work and I'm ready for a little break. I'm hoping that Sunday and be a day of rest! Until then...

Yesterday evening my office has our annual awards ceremony, which I worked during, live streaming the ceremony online, and operating Twitter, Facebook, and all that jazz while the program was happening. 

 After it was over, it was time to have some down time and go to dinner. We always seem to eat in the neighborhood, so I suggested another restaurant we don't go nearly enough, Bravo!

 A little limontini never hurt anyone...

 My favorite dish is actually not an entree, but the bruschetta appetizer. I always get them to add goat cheese and chicken and call it dinner!

 I could eat it every day of my life and be completely happy.

We were glad for a moment to relax!

Here's to the weekend (packed with community bike ride, a beer festival and more)!

Running

If you haven't noticed, it's hot outside. I mean, HOT. Paul and I went to Pub Run yesterday, put on my Fleet Feet the last Wednesday of the month. You can choose to run/walk either 2 or 4 miles (I chose the 2). 

All I can say is, after it was said and done, I needed water!

Others chose another beverage...

After waiting for quite a while, we had a tasty dinner with some of our running friends and Mary Grace even joined us. We got the "Down Under," a glorified shrimp BBQ pizza.

Pretty delicious. Hopefully the rest of the week I can workout in our air conditioned gym downstairs!

Chair Envy

Like I said in a previous post, I've had some chair envy lately. Thanks to Pinterest, I've been seeing pictures of Tolix chairs everywhere.

What's a Tolix chair? This:

... is a Tolix chair. A designer French bistro chair.

After pinning photos like this:

I started the search for some of my own. But, there was one problem... every chair I found was about $125-300 each. This wasn't going to work for me.

I began searching on Overstock (a suggestion I had from Young House Love) and found these pretty chairs. Silver, industrial, and (most importantly for our space conscious apartment) stackable.

Though (whaamp whaamp wha), they were out of stock. Signing up for notifications to let me know when they were back in stock, I got an email this morning telling me it was time to buy.

Now, as most of you know, I'm not going to stop there with such a good deal. I searched for coupon codes and look what my total ended up being...

Yep, that's right. Less than $200 for 4 chairs that would have cost me $500+ somewhere else. Not only did I find a $10 coupon code, shipping is always $2.95 on Overstock, no mater what it is! I call this a victory. Now let's get them here!

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

Like I said, I can't make heads or tails of all the baseball sized zucchini in the fridge. I'm running out of ideas.

Luckily, I have a website called Pinterest which has given me a lot of ideas. One I found this weekend was for Chocolate Zucchini Bread. I wanted this to be something I could eat for breakfast, so I left out the chips and it was the perfect sweetness.

It was really easy to mix up and I was surprised at how easily the zucchini grated.

This was a great recipe! We even brought it for desert to the concert series and everyone loved it.

Chocolate Zucchini Bread Recipe (I halved the recipe for one loaf)

Summer Concert Series

We're finally breaking through the rain! The past week was filled with rain and rained out a fun event we were supposed to go to, a summer concert series in our neighborhood. But, they rescheduled it for last night! So, we got Cary, David, and MG together and made a night of it.

A big spread of hummus, strawberries, cheese, dips, and meats on the lawn (including fried chicken because they were out of baked whole chickens, which is another story itself).

 For a rescheduled event, it was a great group of people.

Here with our buddies (Paul was off shooting photos for the magazine)!

Clever Recipes

I feel like we've really been hitting it out of the park lately with Pinterest recipes. Tonight I took a spin with Philly Cheesesteak Sloppy Joes, but I made it with ground turkey, wheat rolls, and Worchestershire Sauce instead of steak sauce. Instead of cheese sauce, we just topped with a little pepper jack cheese. Along with the casserole from last night that still won't end!

 This afternoon I was lucky enough to get to go hang out at Sneaky Beans to be a part of their training for their new coffee system they are trying out (Clever Coffee Dripper). I wrote a story that'll be up on the website/Facebook tomorrow.

Hope you guys had a great weekend!