QUICKMAS

Just a quick post. I'm writing this because I can't sleep even though it's Christmas day now (technically) and if I sleep morning will come faster! (Deep breath here.) So this is just going to be a wee tiny post. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

(If you don't celebrate Christmas, please take away from those two words all the well wishes and perpetual love you want this time of year! And if you don't want my well wishes and perpetual love, get the hell off my blog.)

I want to talk about my family's Christmas traditions BUT I took pictures which will at least make the content more palatable at a later date, so we can wait for those. In the meantime: OUTFITS.


The best part is, I think everything except the boots, jacket and hat were thrifted for this outfit.
Hat: Zellers (LOL)
Jacket: Fairweather
Boots: Aldo
I wore this to go to a karaoke evening with my friend Justin last Sunday. I had to wait for a little snow fall to wear the hat without looking like a crazy person, but it was WORTH IT.
I sang Somebody To Love by Queen, which I BOMBED hard from nerves. Then I sang Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, which worked out better. Sometimes when I sing my voice has an old time country June Carter lilt to it, so that one was a little easier.

I dunno if it's fashionable or stylish even, but I like it. Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

Here's what I put at the VERY VERY TOP OF MY LIST THIS YEAR:

The Night Before BFFmas

BFFristmas AKA BFFmas. A time when two friends celebrate Christmas ahead of the actual date. Rebekah and I celebrated BFFmas (Biffmas?) this passing weekend. Friday night, after I worked and she finished at her workplace Christmas party, we got togetha' for a little yuletide cheer. With one weekend to go before the actual day, it was our big chance to get our gifting on and spend time together! We've been busy with work and other stuff lately, not having had a lot of time to see each other.

SO IT WAS TIME TO PARTY HARD!!!

We started out with scrabble.
This was followed up by hot chocolate with marshmallows and gingersnaps while watching this season's Community Christmas Episode. (Taran Killam + the regular Community people mocking GLEE? Sign me up. All the way up.)

The next morning I was extremely pumped to give Bek her gift: a functioning, 1960s vintage rotary telephone, with a handle done by Birks, and a copy of Velvet Goldmine. (A biographical parody of the relationship between Iggy Pop and David Bowie, as played by Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. YES? YES !)

And she in turn got me a HUGE poster for "Les Amours Imaginaires", a film by French Canadian director Xavier Dolan. Which is purple. And FABULOUS. It's something I would never buy for myself, but I love the hell out of it. (That's the sign of a great gift isn't it?) It will look GREAT on the wall of my future Montreal apartment.

Then, she surprised me with a second gift: A hand painted Matryoshka doll, all the way from Russia. REAL RUSSIA. She's beautiful... I have to admit it: I almost cried when I opened this one. It was so thoughtful and totally unexpected.
I can't go into each and every detail of the day because there was a LOT of day to talk about. But it did include: breakfast at Cora's. Thrift store shopping, chicken fingers, and a poetry slam!

The only unpleasant thing in a the whole day: a HUGE unexpected, accidental parking ticket. (Next episode of Life of Wiley: I go to court to fight with the establishment!)

Forget my two front teeth.

OVER THE TOP, DREAM WISHLIST (Just for fun...zies. Yeah I went there.)



1. Black Milk Cathedral Leggings. Robyn wore these on SNL last week and my face melted off at their complete awesomeness. Unfortunately, they're not $75 awesome. Whatever.

2. Purple Doc Martens. UH. THEY'RE PURPLE DOC MARTENS. I don't even have to justify this one.

3. Smashbox O-Gloss Gold. (Golden peach.) It's a metallic (ish) gloss that turns a little peachy, but leaves a gold shimmer behind. Considering I have a complex spending 5 bucks on a lip balm, this counts as a big purchase. When I first found out about this, I went through a period of white noise where the first instinct I had was to run to the nearest Sephora to see if they had it. But when I got there, I thought it was made by a different brand, so I thought they didn't have it. Good thing.

4. Canon Rebel DSLR. I'm not picky, I'll take basically any make and model. I just want a basic DSL with a decent lense to take cool pictures/outfit pictures/do more recipe posts. True story.

5. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child [Box Set] Why? Because I like cooking. I like French food. I like classical recipes. Basically all of these things come together. I believe that anything worth doing, might just take some time. So. A prep intensive beef bourguignon or some light pate a choux is my idea of a DREAM.

6. Mod Cloth's Coach Tour Dress in Vert. This dress rocks my socks. Straight up.

Christmas Special

Remember how I told y'all about our Christmas lights incident? The epic intentions of myself and my Jill? Well here's a picture of what our lights look like this year.


S is for special.

Surprise: My Hometown Doesn't Suck

For a long time, I really thought Waterloo had nothing going for it as a place.

Moving back here felt like a huge retrograde after college. I was born here, raised here with my parents. In he same house, same street, same everything.
However, it wasn't until I moved away to school that I feel like I did a lot of growing up. Living away from home, on your own, you find out a lot about everything from your own eating habits, sleeping patterns, house cleaning (or messing), and your own personality. You begin to know who you are as an independent, instead of part of your family unit.

So moving back to the town where I lived for 18 years felt like a pretty big setback. I've had a couple of big anxiety attacks concerning it. I've had all over grey days where I just felt as though I was stagnating here. "What am I DOING WITH MY LIFE!?" Style panic attacks.
The pattern of work. sleep. work. gym. computer. coffee was okay, but I'm like the Little Mermaid. I want more.

Well, recently, I found more. I've re-friended my buddy Dave, who I was tight with in the old days, all the way back in primary school. Then, we were in-class friends in the final years of high school. (Like work friends...but in Media and Writer's Craft instead.) Now we've started hanging out in real life, which is cool. Dave's world is world I didn't know existed in my boring home town. This is awesome for me, because it means I get invited to do cool things. Folks, I have officially gotten a life. Or maybe, half of a life.

Thursday, Bek and I ended up in Café Pyrus, a local vegan cafe. We watched four different bands rock the house. (One of them was Mark It Zero, Dave's band!) I've dabbled in listening to punk music in highschool, but the awesomeness of seeing it live is way better. Watching people do something they enjoy, and being really good at it... That makes me happy. The hardest part was being psychotically self aware that I was A) New on 'the scene' B) Psychotically self aware. I'm sure no one was paying me any mind, but I felt like I was standing outside of a big fish bowl. A big hip fish bowl, not yet swimming. The music was good, if nothing else! Eventually the tension rolled off and I was able to just sit back and enjoy.

I took 20 pictures, but this one of Junior Battles is the only one that was useable!

I bought two tapes and got a 7" album for free. (The guy selling Merch asked me if I had a record player like it was totally normal. Even my PARENTS think having vinyl is weird. I knew I was more or less home at that point.)

The very next night, we ended up at Comedy Night at the Princess Café. (Just assume we is Bek and I, because...well. It is.)

The Princess Cafe and Awkward Comedian Extraordinaire Ben Stager
For five bucks, we got to see a bunch of comics do stand up. Some of them were hilarious, others just chuckle worthy, but we had a good time all around. Nothing quite like laughing your butt off in a room full of people. I have such huge respect for live comedy, because I know it's SUPER hard to make people laugh. The pressure would probably make me barf.

ANYWAY, that's what I've been up to.
Also: going to the gym.
Also: wrapping gifts and watching Christmas specials. (Elf, Home Alone, Santa Claus is coming to Town...)
Also: ending this blog.

Blue Christmas

With the snow JUST starting to come down in Waterloo, I might not be happy about that cold, but I'm feeling more excitement because of it. I can finally stop dreaming about a white Christmas and get into the spirit of the season.

If that's an excuse to bake cookies, wrap up in huge scarves, sing carols REALLY loudly and watch my favourite Christmas movies on TV, I'm all in. If that means getting to see my friends, get closer with my family and celebrate the one time of year where we actually seem to have traditions, count me in x100.

So if a little cold weather brings me closer to that holiday feeling, let it snow, baby.

The other day, Jill and I tried to bring a little more Christmas to the house. It was like the Life of Wiley pre-Christmas special sitcom. We had talked about just how our sad, single string of Christmas lights was NOT cutting it in terms of spreading holiday cheer. In fact, that lonesome line of coloured bulbs somehow just made us seem more sad about the whole thing.

Jill of course, has two modes: one being ALL-THE-WAY and the other being totally below zero. So she went out to the store and bought 90 bucks worth of Christmas lights, and we tag teamed decorating the outside of our house.
I think we, (she maybe more than I) had epic notions of what the lights would look like. We have a huge pine tree in the front, and in her mind in was filled from top to bottom with white lights, sparkling in the December darkness.

The front of our house has two Roman style columns in the front, and she wanted badly to wrap them in cascades of bright Christmas lights. First, we tried to wrap them, and the cords were not long enough. So we ended up using the column lights on this stumpy pine bush next to the porch that is shaped like the Grimmus. Then it was time to look after the tree.

It took about forty five minutes, an extension ladder, some freezing toes and lots of amputated pine tree twigs, but we finally got the lights up on the tree. By we, I mean I did a little bit, carried a ladder and watched Jill and my dad struggle to get the lights onto the branches high above our heads.

The end result was a little disappointing. It turns out 90 bucks buys you about five strings of Christmas lights. Not when enough to cover half of the GIANT ASS PINE TREE which is actually taller than our house. We managed a zig in the tree, even a ZAG, but it looks like a big S. We decided the S in the lights stands for 'Special' or 'Santa' depending on who you ask. Brilliant.

Maybe next year?

After that, we went out to the mall, but right before then I got Jill to take outfit pictures. You can even see the LITTLE TREE! (Which I now am calling The Grimmus. Forever.) I really like the brown in the boots and the the blue in the rest of the ENSEMBLE. (Fancy ass word, folks.)

Beanie: H&M
Dress: H&M (I bought it for 10 dollars. HOLLAH.)
Scarf: Thrifted
Cardigan: My mom's closet.
Tights: Who cares, they're black tights...
Boots: Aldo

And if you haven't seen it already, I'm still writing for Travis Magazine. Somehow, they think I know things about fashion (or at least STYLE) and continue to let me write my little column- Fashion Friday: Go Elf Yourself!

What are y'all doing to get ready for Christmas?

Rules and Regulations

It feels really good to be back here blogging and having conversations about life with y'all. I do love me some NaNoWriMo, but I had so many ideas and so much happening that it was hard at times to not update to keep my faithful readers in the loop.

FIRST THING'S FIRST, the most exciting news, I got a job as a freelance writer for The Magazine. That's right. I'm about to be paid for writing things. I'm going to cross the line between, "I'm going to be a writer" and "I write for a few magazines." You know how awesome that is? REALLY AWESOME. The fact that it's for kids makes it even more cool. My first assignment is to write a list of the top ten teams of superheroes. How cool is that?! That is the line between pretension and success. Between talking big and playing hard.

SECONDLY, Jill and I have made up a big system to help me get on the physical fitness track. In three weeks of November alone I lost 6lbs! Basically, my secret is every single weight loss tip you've ever heard. I work out a minimum of 3x a week, alternating between running and yoga to keep it interesting. I eat healthy 6 of the 7 days as much as I can, but I have a cheat day/meal once a week. I drink water and snack on veggies and whole grains and blah blah blah. I have weekly weigh ins and we're taking pictures once a month to photograph the process.

Either way. I know you all didn't come here to read about my writing or my goals, you probably came here to check out my sweet style.

So here it is. Recently, I worked for 9 days in a row, but in between, I got to head into Toronto to see some of my friends, FINALLY. It was a night of magic (literally, we went to a charity magic show) and Thai food, and staying up really late only to get up early.
All the outfit photos were taken by my darling friend Josh, who is as excellent a photographer as he is a quoter of things, a finder of good deals and an eater of delicious foods. Thank you Josh!

Blazer: My mom's closet.
Crop Top: Forever 21
Jeans: Forever 21+
Necklace: Forever 21
Boots: Aldo
Bag: Matt and Nat "Karen O" bag

Notes on this outfit:
I know there are certain fashion rules that some people like to abide by. As a current 'plus-sized' or as I say, curvaceous lady, I feel as though sometimes more of these rules are supposed to be applied to my body. Supposed to be are the three key words there.

Among these rules are the idea that I'm not supposed to wear cropped tops or jeans that aren't dark wash. Part of the reason I love outfit (besides James Dean's beautiful face being right next to my boobs) is because it flips the bird to both. I know what my body looks like, and I'm dressing how I want to, not to disguise it.

This is important to me right now because one of the things I've been fighting lately is being able to like myself at the size I am while still being on a self improvement path. It borderlines on hypocritical sometimes... It bothers me to read profiles of people who have lost tons of weight in Women's Health or SELF and they're suddenly buckets happier. I'm sure when I get where I want to be, I'll be happy as hell, but I'm going to still have moments of wobbly insecurity, just like always. This is a band aid fix for confidence. I won't be a gung-ho-calorie-counting-perky-as-hell chick. I will still eat whole eggs instead of just egg whites.

I'm getting really off track here but the point is that...I know I'm not unfortunate. I have lots going for me. (If you're staring at my ass in the second picture instead of reading this, I don't blame you.) But it's hard to find an identity or a home for yourself when you're still traveling down the road.