Category Archives: Everyday Life

The 26th Birthday

Posted on June 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

Two weekends ago, I celebrated my 26th birthday. I think it will take a little time to grow into this age as it still feels a little odd to say that I’m 26 years old now.

Physically, of course, there are no changes (unless you count the white hairs on my head that seem to be suddenly tripling in numbers by the day). Emotionally though, it’s a little terrifying to know that it’s official that I’m closer in years to age 30 than 20.

Here’s to another four years before having to go through that milestone!

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I was in Florida for my brother’s graduation right before my birthday and flew home on Saturday afternoon just to make sure that I could spend my actual birthday (Sunday) with Mister E.

After picking me up from the airport, Mister E said that he would be taking me out to dinner that night. But it turned out that he planned a surprise party for me with a close group of friends at Cuvee, a food, wine, and champagne bar in West Hartford!

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Although a little pricey, Cuvee has a great selection of drinks and very tasty appetizers. Champagne cocktails? Don’t mind if I do!

To top the whole evening off, there were presents! Can you see the blue earrings that I’m wearing in the photo below? They were a gift from Lydia (who’s also in the 26-year-old club with me). And Mister E really outdid himself by getting me this Kate Spade weekender bag that I had been pining over.

Since we stayed out past midnight on Saturday night (which is impressively late for me), Sunday, my actual birthday, was a little bit more low key. Mister E had made reservations for us at the Pond House Cafe for brunch. The cafe is located in the middle of Elizabeth Park, and as the name suggests, is situated on the shores of the park’s pond.

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Having brunch at the Pond House Cafe has been on my Connecticut “bucket list” since last summer when I first spotted it. The atmosphere was very relaxed and there was a wide mixture of cliental from families celebrating special occasions to girlfriends getting together to gossip over mimosas. The cafe also has a large banquet hall. While we were there, we saw guests arriving for an engagement party that was taking place there.

We requested to be seated outside so we could enjoy the sunshine and mild temperatures while we dined. After taking an exceptionally long time to peruse their menu, I settled on ordering the Pond House Benedict which was two poached eggs served over a crab cake and cornbread with hollandaise sauce. It was certainly the most unique spin I’ve seen on the classic eggs benedict dish to date and it did not disappoint! I’m not sure if I can go back to eating my eggs with English Muffins after having them with cornbread now!

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Mister E ordered one of the specials which was a Short Rib Omelet served with roasted potatoes and cornbread. While the omelet wasn’t something I would have personally ordered, it was perfect for Mister E who was looking for a heavier meal with lots of meat.

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Partly why I took so long making up my mind on what to order was because another dish was calling my name – the French Toast with Strawberry and Rhubarb Compote and Whipped Cream. After much indecision, I decided to order both dishes and split the French toast with Mister E. It was my birthday after all!

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After finishing our meal, we walked around the park for a while taking in the beautiful weather and lovely gardens. I wish we had the forethought to bring a blanket and reading material so we could have stayed and entertained ourselves longer there.

To continue our low key day, I suggested going to the movies. There wasn’t anything playing that really captured my interest, so I offered to go to The Avengers which I know Mister E was dying to see. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie and isn’t a superhero buff, I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with the back story of Thor. I already knew the general story of the Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man. Thor was the only one who I kept whispering questions to Mister E about throughout the entire movie.

While walking out of the theater, we found that our beautiful weather had disappeared and had given way to a massive thunderstorm. Before retreating home, we made a quick stop at Ganache to pick up a half dozen of their cupcakes to enjoy later in the evening.

I’m pretty sure I skipped dinner that night in favor of eating half the cupcakes. When else can you have cupcakes for dinner if not your birthday?

I am so grateful to have such a thoughtful boyfriend who would plan a special birthday for me and am doubly grateful for the wonderful friends and family that celebrated it with me!

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Turning Two

Posted on May 1, 2012 | 5 Comments

Would you believe that today this little blog turns two? Where has the time gone? Last May, I was in the midst of making move preparations, so I never even celebrated my one year blogiversary.

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It seems like just yesterday I was picking out a name for my blog and drafting up my first post. This blog was started partially out of a desire to become active in the healthy living blogging community, and partially out of boredom and the desire to find a hobby to help occupy my time.

Even though I categorized myself as a healthy living blogger, the blog didn’t have such a clear direction when it started and I think it showed. Wanting to emulate some of my favorite bloggers, I adopted the 2-3 times a day posting schedule and documented everything I ate like a food journal. I cringe every time I look at some of my early posts and am always tempted to delete them or set them to private. It’s very clear that I didn’t have my own voice as I mimicked other bloggers and used phrases like, “good morning, Daffodils” and “I got my snack-izzle on”. See? Cringe-worthy. Who was that person writing because it sure doesn’t sound like me!

It only took a few months for me to realize that the food journal style posting was not really for me nor was posting multiple times in a day. I floundered a bit as I struggled to figure out what to do with the blog. Should I abandon it? Should I try to write about something other than healthy living?

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I don’t know if I would still say that I’m a healthy living blogger. Sure, I try to post healthy recipes from time to time, but they can also be unhealthy too. I suppose I would call myself a food blogger now since that’s what most of my writing focuses on, but I’m hesitant to put myself into a niche since I also enjoy writing about other topics as well.

If someone asked me what style blogger I am, I guess I would like to say that my style is ME. This blog is the best representation of what I like, how I feel, and what I do. It may not fit into one particular category, but that’s ok.

The question still remains though, why blog?

I blog because it’s a creative outlet for me. Writing is something that I’ve always enjoyed and this blog gives me the chance to do that multiple times a week. I like having a “journal” of my life that I can come back and read and that someday my children might come back and read.

I blog because it has led me to discover new interests and hobbies like photography. A few years ago, photography was something that intimidated me and didn’t interest me very much. I would have never imagined that I would have a “fancy” camera and would look forward to taking pictures and editing them.

And I blog because it has been so wonderful interacting with all of you. From the people that I actually know in real life to the people that live on opposite corners of the world, it’s fun to “talk” to you all and hear your thoughts and opinions both on the blog and on Twitter.

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I would like to think that I would still write this blog even if it was just my mom reading it, but it really is so much better knowing that you are reading it too. Yes, you. So thank you all for visiting my little corner of the internet and making this blog a fun and happy place.

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Out and About: Thomas Hooker Brewery

Posted on April 29, 2012 | 1 Comment

  1. Yesterday, I went on a tour of Thomas Hooker Brewery in Bloomfield, CT using a Living Social deal I had bought a while back.
  2. Mister E and I aren’t huge beer lovers, but still enjoy it from time to time.
  3. We got to see the entire operations of how the beer is brewed. I don’t remember much, except that you start off with barley and water in fermenters where you add the hops and yeast. Do you know that they can reuse the same yeast for multiple brews? The machines in the picture are the brighteners. I think that’s where they add the carbonation.
  4. This is Steve, our tour guide. He was pretty awesome and taught us cool facts like how beer never comes in contact with oxygen during the brewing process. And also that beer originally didn’t contain hops. Hops weren’t added to the beer until Europeans started making long sea voyages and were looking for a way to preserve the beer. This beer became known as Indian Pale Ale (or IPA).
  5. Did you see Steve’s shirt? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me…
  6. …until I saw the back.
  7. During the tour, we were given a chance to taste the beer straight out of the fermenter. I didn’t particularly care for it, but I suppose a true beer lover might have.
  8. Thomas Hooker brewery runs all of their operations out of the one building. This machine is what they use to fill up the bottles.
  9. There were stacks and stacks of bottles everywhere.
  10. Likewise, boxes ready to be filled were also everywhere.
  11. I have a feeling that Mister E and the rest of the guys from our group did a better job of paying attention to what was said during the tour. In my defense, I had already sampled four beers by the time the tour started.
  12. With our admission, we were given a wrist band with ten tabs. Each tab got you one beer sample. The sample glasses were a little large in my opinion, so I only ended up using five of my tabs before calling it quits.
  13. The first beer I sampled was the Watermelon Ale which tasted amazingly like Watermelon. Steve said the sales of the Watermelon Ale alone was enough to sustain the entire company.
  14. Their second most popular beer is the Chocolate Truffle Stout. The beer had a delicious chocolate-y, coffee taste, but was quite strong. I managed to finish my sample, but don’t know if I would be able to finish an entire glass of it.
  15. The Nor’Easter Winter Lager was my absolute favorite beer so much so that I actually got a second sample of it. It was very light and smooth and didn’t leave me with any sort of aftertaste.
  16. It was a little unexpected, but Hooker Brewery had two XBox Kinects set up for people to play while tasting the beers. Jennifer and her boyfriend totally killed it.

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It’s Saturday

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 2 Comments

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  1. I really miss North Carolina. Especially the hiking part.
  2. Nothing has tempted me to break my shopping ban like this necklace that I found in North Carolina. It was hard. And I pouted for a good hour over it.
  3. I finally gave the Hunger Games a chance. And then I read all three books in the course of two and a half days. I feel like I fit in with society now.
  4. There’s a French bakery in Connecticut that sells French macaroons. I like to stop in there on the weekends to buy a few as a little treat for myself.
  5. Spring is in full force which necessitates raspberry lemonade and dresses.
  6. Although the fifteen hour drive from North Carolina to Connecticut was miserable, nothing says quality time like 15 hours in the car together.

For those reading this through an RSS Feed service or email, you might not have noticed that More Fruit Please got a little bit of a makeover this past week. For the past few months, I really haven’t been loving the look of my header and have had changing it on my to-do list for quite a while. I finally bucked up this week, and with the help of this tutorial, came up with something much more fresh and happy looking.

Out with the old…

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And in with the new!

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Do you remember the Pinterest party that I hosted last Fall? The CBS This Morning show did a great story on the boom of Pinterest among women and one of my pictures from the party made a brief appearance! When I say brief, I really do mean like a brief millisecond, but it’s still neat to appear on national television! You can see the group shot from my party around the 1:15 mark representing the state of Connecticut!

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It’s Saturday. And it’s beautiful outside. And I have a feeling that it’s going to be a great day!

Enjoy it!

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The Shopping Ban

Posted on March 29, 2012 | 2 Comments

So for the past few months, I’ve been holding out on you guys about a little experiment that I’ve been doing. At nearly three months into the year, I haven’t bought a single item of clothing, a pair of shoes, a piece of jewelry, or any sort of fashion accessory (belts, bags, scarves, etc.).

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This really all came about in December of last year as the new year was approaching and I was thinking about resolutions. You should know that I’m not good at setting goals since I tend to set them too high and end up feeling overwhelmed by them to the point that I give up. Instead of setting goals for this year, I put my focus on coming up with “lifestyle tweaks” that I would like to make.

One aspect of my life that I was thinking could use some revamping was my shopping habits. I’m not sure where to place the blame exactly, but in the second half of 2011, I had become a major consumer. There was a constant feeling of “want” from my end. Packages were showing up on my front doorstep too frequently and I found myself justifying more and more purchases with the “sales and deals” that I was getting.

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I did quite a bit of reflection on this in December and narrowed in on some contributing factors to my problem:

  • I was being bombarded with emails from at least ten different retail stores letting me know about their 20-50% off sales. It really became too much to bear around the holidays as each store was sending me daily emails. Enough already!
  • Pinterest had opened up a brand new world of clothes, shoes, and bags that I just absolutely had to have. I never knew I needed a pink ruffle pea coat until I saw it on Pinterest.
  • I was spending more than intended just to qualify for free shipping from websites. So many sites offer free shipping once you spend $50-75, meaning that I would have to find something else to add to my cart if I wanted to get my $40 sweater shipped for free.
  • Facebook must have given me a celebrity complex, because I hated the idea of photos popping up on Facebook that would show any evidence that I wore the same outfit to two different events. Baseball game? Birthday party? Thanksgiving dinner? They all required new outfits in my mind.
  • Catalogs and magazines were constantly telling me that I wasn’t hip if I wasn’t staying up with all the latest trends. How dare I try to wear my bubble dress circa 2008 when maxi dresses was the new dress of 2011!

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I’ve always enjoyed shopping, but I could tell that it had really started to get out of hand in the Fall of 2011. I had bought into every single trend that I saw. Leopard print everything. Red everything. Lace everything. I realized that I owned enough trendy items to carry myself all the way through Winter without buying anything else. And with that, an idea was born.

Could I cut myself entirely off from clothes shopping until the summer?

So that is how my “lifestyle tweak” was born. Starting January 1st, I wouldn’t buy a single piece of clothing, a pair of shoes, or any accessory. To mark the occasion (morn? celebrate?), I planned a last hurrah of sorts. Do you remember my shopping trip to the outletswhile I was in Florida? Well, that was all to mark my last shopping trip for a long while.

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Now, how long is a while? Well, here’s where things get confusing (and my blonde roots start to show). My birthday is at the beginning of June, so I thought that would be a good milestone to end my shopping ban at since (as previously said) I had enough trendy clothes to get me through winter and part of spring. By lifting the ban in June, I would be free to get in on whatever the latest trends were. Knowing that June is the sixth month out of the year, I began to tell people that I was going on a six month shopping ban. Well, considering that my ban will end at the beginning of June, it’s technically a five month ban (which I didn’t realize until two months into this experiment – I’ve never felt like such an idiot before). I considered going the entire six months, but most likely I will end at five months.

So now that it’s been three months and I’m over halfway through the ban, how am I doing? Well, I haven’t broken down and bought anything yet, but it hasn’t been easy. Stay tuned for next week when I’ll cover all the unexpected side effects of the shopping ban and what has been helping me get through it!

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