clementine candles and four other things

last week when we should have been cleaning the kitchen, aria, kenyan, and i decided to make a candle out of a clementine.

so.cool.right?!

here’s the how to:

☀take a little paring knife and cut through the skin around the clementine. don’t just cut the whole thing in half; it won’t work right.

☀peel the skin off. this is the hardest part because you can’t rip it. it helps to run your thumb around the inside of it first, breaking it away from the majority of the actual fruit.

☀do the same thing to the second half. the second half will be easier.

{see the little tear? i don’t really practice what i preach}

technically this is where you should let it dry out. if i were to do it again, i’d let it dry out. but i’m impatient and i wanted to see if it would work so i just went for it.

☀pour in some olive oil.

☀cut out something fancy in the top.

☀light that sucker up.

☀brag about it, put it on facebook, distribute as christmas gifts, do whatever you wish.

bam. whaddup.

and four other things:

1. my turtles like to sunbathe on top of each other.

2. my dog sits like a girl. not that girls really sit with their legs splayed, but for some reason it seems girl-ish to me.

3. my bedroom has christmas lights. straight pimpin’.

4. aria made a couch cushion into a horse. oh the boredom creativity of long summer days.

oh, envision

what my kitchen looked like most of last week:

the things i made, aside from a mess:

{i brought these cupcakes to a birthday dinner where the entire wait staff gushed over them, stashed them in the fridge without me even asking, and openly begged to try one. win. jace’s contribution to this endeavor was the owl with the eye patch}

{while i can’t say that i made this girl in my kitchen, she was the lovely recipient of more than one of these creations and i really like her}

{get it?}

at the end of it all my feet hurt and my back hurt. i’d watched an entire season of how i met your mother. my eyes never wanted to pay attention to detail again. my brain was exhausted from trying to calculate, create, reason, and troubleshoot. makin’ cupcakes is harder than you might think. i give myself a solid three days before i feel the urge to start baking again.

[title from uncanny by anberlin]

the earth she hums

i have excellent news. it appears that my cultural appreciation has expanded, encompassing texas and all the boot-wearin’, southern-drawlin’ things that come with it. i’m not sure when it started, but the other day i was [completely unintentionally] driving my truck down a dirt road, listening to sara evans, with my jeans cuffed up and my muddy shoes on the floor. i was stopped at a stoplight next to a man in another truck wearing a cowboy hat and i realized we weren’t all that different. it was a weird feeling.

as if that wasn’t bad enough, i went country dancing thursday night and came home wanting a pair of cowboy boots and another round of country dancing. it’s freaking me out a little bit.

everything about texas has been slowly growing on me. i’ve figured out the intricate, weaving, confusing highway system, grown accustomed to everyone being nice [even to strangers!], acclimated to the big skies and brown fields. i’ve been playing sand volleyball with people that don’t hate me, coming home with my knees raw from diving in the sand. my mom and aria take walks and bike rides around the neighborhood every evening [they wait until the sun goes down and the temperature cools off to about eighty. yuck]. i actually enjoy runs through the night, feeling like a miniscule figure against the broad fields of nothing and the black dome of the sky, the infamous West Texas Wind always blowing against me, no matter which direction i’m headed.

driving a truck is still awesome. it’s a good little [big] truck and it hold its own as i wind around the stately highways, wind whipping through the windows. the only down fall is my terrible, horrible parking jobs that bring a great deal of amusement to me [and probably no one else].

[i realize that in some ways i might be upholding the stereotypes of women being bad drivers but seriously guys. this truck has an extended cab and an extended bed. it’s really long. and that is my justification.]

i experienced a drive in movie in the back of said truck, and it was a little bit life changing.

it’s something that everyone needs to experience once in their life; the oppressive hot air of the day gradually being chased away by the night’s cool breeze, the way it feels to lay in the warm bed of a truck underneath a thick blanket, not really paying attention to the movie because the skyline and the stars are more profound entertainment. it all works together to create an absolutely magical experience.

loving things is a cyclical act; the more you love the more you have room to love. i’m coming to terms with the fact that this will never be florida and it can never feel the way florida felt. but it can still be its own form of safe and comfortable and it can do so without encroaching the florida’s territory or diminishing the validity of the things i loved there. i can love texas just as much as i love florida. and it’s about time i figured this out, ‘cause texas has been really good to me.

[title from i just wanna see by smash mouth]

some people stay, some were born to run away

my life is a little confusing right now.

i feel like i’m twelve: trying to win over boys & make friends with girls [and not embarrass myself doing so], getting my feelings hurt and dreams crushed by insignificant things.

i feel like i’m seventeen: driving my teenager car to work at my summer job, staying up too late and desperately trying to balance saving money with having a social life.

i feel like i’m twenty seven: done with college [which i’m not] and trying to figure out what i want to do and where my place is in the world, trying to pretend that somewhere, somehow i actually learned to be an adult.

i feel like i’m thirty three: trying to teach the younger ones how to clean, how to tell if a cupcake is done, how to speak kindly and considerately.

i feel like i’m forty two: like my mom and i are just two great friends in a golden stage of life, just contentedly enjoying how far we’ve come, wondering if there’s much excitement left in life, not minding the way life has calmed down.

i feel like i’m eighty: reflecting on the things i’ve seen and done, the heartache and happiness i’ve felt, knowing that i’ve loved and laughed. feeling content to die {in a non-suicidal way, guys}, anxiously awaiting the day i get to see jada again.

one thing i don’t feel like is a twenty year old. though i’ve heard this is what it should be like. ‘the twenties’ is less awkward than puberty, but barely. it’s an abstract stage of life where you’re not anything. you’ve come from somewhere and eventually you will go somewhere, but right now you’re nowhere. and “nowhere” is a natural breeding ground for defining yourself, making important decisions that in some cases will be unchangeable. it’s a good place to figure things out, to float through a dark, empty space until your feet touch the ground again. here’s to a decade of deciding who i’m gonna be for the rest of forever.

and to a beautifully overcast sky:

[title from amelia jean by jack’s mannequin]

blood.

one time, through a series of events that i don’t remember, my sister and i ended up in boston. we must’ve been headed somewhere else, as we had no warm clothes with us. our money that day went to gloves, hats, and scarves from tj maxx, a huge cup of hot cocoa from starbucks, and the best dang clam chowder i’ve ever tasted, served in warm, toasty bread bowls. we went to some yellow square that has to do with some song involving birds or benjamin or something and that is really all i remember.

i take that back. i remember laughing all day and freezing to death and having one of the best days of my life. come home, fool.

what happened here

I’ve never understood people that are busy—too busy to answer texts or that come away from weekends more tired than less. somewhere in the last six weeks I’ve started having a life [read: I can’t sleep as much as I want to] and suddenly…I get it. spoiler alert: having a life is not all it’s cracked up to be. friday at work I sat down and made a thorough list of everything I might want to accomplish this weekend. I think I got through about two percent of it. luckily I’m not at the maturity age level where things like that bother me. I just run around like a crazy person, not sleeping and trying to keep everyone fed and entertained {and I mean everyone}. it was a grand ol’ weekend anyway.

today I drove to church in my truck LIKE A BOSS. I pulled in, tried to back into a parking spot, and realized that I don’t really know how to park such a long, wide, beast of a vehicle. I swung too wide and then not wide enough and then I was up on a curb and then I was stuck. stuck. like I couldn’t pull forward or backwards because I somehow managed to wedge myself between two curbs. yep. my truck also happened to be blocking off the entrance to the parking lot, so I just sat there like a helpless fool {dying of shame} while a boy who couldn’t get in sat and laughed at me and some sweet, sympathetic lady tried to guide me. my face was flushed and I was burning up with embarrassment. and then boy-who-i-blocked told me I was a girl and therefore I have a handicapped exception. that was the cherry on top.

{jace and the cowboy checkin out the dusty engine}

I made eight dozen cupcakes yesterday. frosted, decorated and delivered them. {more on that later} I took some leftover, plain boring cupcakes to my neighbors across the street. they’re just some college boys, so I thought cupcakes would be a big-ish deal to them. like, “hey, we’re boys and we don’t make cupcakes, so thanks” kind of thing. wrong. they headed back into their kitchen and came out with a bag of oreo truffles that they’d made for me. they have no idea what they just started, but this means war.

early saturday morning I woke up because I just couldn’t get comfortable. I woke up and realized that the discomfort was that I couldn’t breathe. my throat was closing off and my whole body felt like there were microscopic scorpions clawing their way out. sometime in during the night I had some sort of allergic reaction to something. the good news is that I’m alive and [after a groggy, pajama wearin’ run to walmart] am fully re-stocked with life savin’ zyrtec.

I finished reading the fault in our stars by john green. and now I’m experiencing that sinking, empty feeling of ending a story—I still feel like I’m living in the book and that I’ve just lost contact with my good friends {who are actually fictional characters}

it rained this weekend. if I were a normal girl, I’d probably put a little heart thingy here. cuz I love me some rain.

here’s to having mondays off. I will either have a wildly productive day or I will finish another season of how I met your mother. it’s gonna be a toss up.

[title from skinny love—the beautifully haunting version by birdy]