from sneeze to shining sneeze.

Somewhere between slaving over forty page papers and being in constant need of an entire box of Kleenex, we managed to escape to one of the greatest getaway spots of Western PA: Ohiopyle. It's more of a creek than a sea, but I couldn't resist making our blog comeback title as magnificent as Shane's face in the picture below.

It was too cold to swim, but staying dry isn't an option when rock hopping. Our final destination: the huge rock below. Try to wrap your head around the unorthodox amounts of fun that were had on this thing...

too much.

-christen

going cuckoo without us?

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Don't worry - we'll be back in health in no time!

martha stewart, can you hear me?

clockwise: anchor pendant, red lipstick, teeth paper clip, travel gnome, easy button, tide to go pen, mini sewing scissors, wooden matchsticks, tei-fu essential oils (which heals everything)

clockwise: drink umbrella, balancing game block, vintage gold chain, mechanical pencil, burt's bees lip balm, tennis ball keychain and keys, essie nailpolish in 'shorty pants', liquid eyeliner, votive candle

clockwise: chip bag clip, my wallet, nollie perfume, finger puppet from old boss, my toothbrush, sponge bob band-aid, gogo squeez apple sauce, push pins

Anyone who's still holding a grudge over 'camp cupcake' can go trash talk Martha somewhere else, 'cause she never stopped being my idol! Last time I opened up an issue of Martha Stewart Living, I literally tried to live on the page. I may or may not have gotten kicked out of the store.

This post was inspired by where is harriet?, who was inspired by the flickr group organized collection. I was so in my element digging for things in my apartment (I lose things all the time) - although the result of that digging isn't normally a nice and neat desk...I'd be lying if I didn't admit to putting all these objects back into their respective messy corners of my room to make space for a new photo. I'll have to work on that. Maybe Martha's up for hire?

'til next time,

christen :)

blame it on the weather man

I'm really not sure what this weather means for the world, but I know it can't be good. It's 70 right now, it's going to be 45 tomorrow, and then it'll bounce around between 49 and 68 for the following four days. How's a girl supposed to know how to dress?! Make up your mind, weather man!

h&m nantes trench, f21 sweater, delia*s black jeans, rite aid headband. that's right, rite aid.

Anyways, I love this place. It's perfect when in need of escape...it's this mysterious structure that simply looks like a big stone wall from the highway, but when you approach it on foot, you find steps on either side, leading up to a little castle-garden-type thing. And when you sit down, the passing traffic never knows you're there. It's marvelous. Even in the rain =]

-christen

what you see is what you get

new era A's hat, arizona long sleeve, bullhead flannel, levi's 511 navy blue, blue nixon supras

 It's your captain checking in and the sea is looking mighty fine today.  Chance of mermaid rainbows and stella-lunar dancing once the big yellow ball decides to drop.  I see my fellow sailors are rarin' to go so lets not waste any time shipping out!  

Its been a radical past few weeks with loads of great flicks seen, outdoor adventures embarked upon and at the end of it all I'm still intact and sporting my patented mixture of blue and earth-tone greens.  Water and nature remain two of my most prized possessions in this world and lucky me they're all over the place!  Wilderness meets its more shapely cousin, the city, in these two pinups and I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the results ;)

sonoma long-sleeve, levi's trucker jacket, bullhead olive jeans, classic supras

all hail is breaking loose

Lacy made a pun today, and that put me in the mood to make some too. Hence the title. 


I should have snapped some pictures of the ping pong ball sized hail (I refuse to succumb to calling it golf ball sized!) that fell over Pittsburgh earlier, but I was too busy playing umbrella tug-of-war with Shane on our treacherous walk to Taco Bell, to really care to document it. 
So then, I figured I'd find a breathtaking picture that somebody else in the world was courageous enough to take, and prove their dedication to magnificent photography over a shantily protected noggin by posting it on the internet...but apparently there is no such superhuman. And thus, I shall post pictures of other things that only sort of relate to hail.


Like this queen.

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And this queen-sized bed.

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And these pictures of me bearing extremely loose resemblance to a queen, on my queen-sized bed.*

express sweater, modcloth tutu

*it's secretly my couch. ;)


-christen!

kisses, not pinches!

Note: for some reason, the photos weren't loading when I tried to post this on Thursday. So I'm posting it today, instead!

finders-keepers headband courtesy of Ty, h&m shirt, h&m sailor pants, j.crew flats 

I put notes written in green pen under my pillow and tied green strings around my finger all week, and still I forgot to wear green for St. Patty's Day! Yet somehow, the only pinch I got was one I told a friend to give me (I gave her one and felt bad not getting one in return)...although now that I think of it I should've just held off and placed bets with someone on how long I could go without getting pinched. Winner gets a pot of gold. Now that would've been festive. I'll have to remember not to wear green again next year ;)

Instead, I dressed like a sailor...a bag lady sailor. Even my dad knows you're not supposed to wear wide legged pants with a slouchy shirt (he sometimes reminds me). Don't ask me what I was thinking. I must have accidentally been sold a circus mirror that makes me look all...not how I really look.


Photo cred: friendly dudes walking down the street, whose names have now escaped me. Sorry, guys! I hope apartment hunting went well!


-christen

post-war sci-fi bunkers

 I came across this article while daydreaming about the beaches of Normandy and what became of all the defunct structures still dotting the coast.  The pictures are cooler than I imagined and are a slightly creepy reminder of what lies in once tragically wartorn areas.  I can't help but wonder what they'll be used for in the future if this group of wildcats are already holding bizarre climbing events up the low stone walls of bunkers in Holland.  They call it bouldering and quite frankly I found it a little wack.  I can dig the fact that its fun to freeclimb just about anything but seeing the fun up close and personal is funky.  Let us know if you could see yourself going bouldering anytime soon and we'd love to tag along!

-shanetrain

sharing different heartbeats in one night

explode on screen. twist volume knob well past ten. let the noise be your smell and see with your eyes

while all you cheery kids hang loose under the sun there is a far darker world waiting for you in the North.  Dismally wet and windy, it's been a day of zones and 1 dimensional vibes.  The rain never stops, the drips never cease falling..trick, trock, blip blooop but have no fear. Being the masters of our own biology we can reside in the warm dry recesses of our nature-dominating structures and longingly reminisce over a time we may never have experienced.  This music video is a combination of iconic visions of the 70's best coast and sounds that I may have known in a time before.  It's oddly nostalgic and utterly joyous to watch.  The ass-kicking electrons fronting the wonderful tunes are Swedish pop duo The Knife.  Their album Deep Cuts is a walk on the wild side between funeral and rebirth; taking you to places your brain mysteriously claims you know...It takes two to groove so grab the knife by the blade and delve into a scene we all can dream about.


-mcshimmey shane

scabs & hags

You wanna know the best part about Iceland? That it exists. And it has people standing within its borders that have enough valuable mush in their skulls to broadcast that. Look! (Open it up and make it full screen.)

Tyler said that the two "girls at the beginning = Scabs and Hags"...which would be me & my girl Lindsay. I just saw curiosity flicker in your eye. Hers (Hags) makes sense because it comes from her last name, but mine...well, mine has no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. I happened to have the faint remnants of a scab in my nose leftover from wintertime when I got the nickname, but that's about it. The way I see it, the more unflattering nickname, the more flattering girl. We'll go with that for now...

Anyways, we learned the dance the girls do (it's our new secret handshake), and I don't know about Hags, but I have full intentions of getting an Iceland-inspired sweater in the n.t.d. future. To wear during the summer, of course. Hmm..?

-christen

the eye patch

I was going to open up this post with a golden picture of me in a seaworthy pirate stance on this couch I swashbuckled (I turned that word into something new), but it ended up rather Lindsay-Lohan-getting-out-of-a-car, and I didn't want the tabloids all over me, so instead you just get me plain old standing on a nasty abandoned couch. Just what you've been waiting for!

aa dress, j.crew striped tee, aa tights, f21 legwarmers

Man, my skin really blends in with that paint...I guess now I know if I ever need to hide I can just take off all my clothes and stand by that wall.

Hiya! Okay, now here's the eye patch in action ^ and really, it's true, I do very much have only a half-view of the world with that thing on.

And now for a statement (because if I call it a confession, it'll give it more of a negative overcast than I'd prefer): Today is Day 22, my self-declared final day of the 30 for 30. Say what you will, but with a fresh new month of springiness dangling its good vibes in my face, I'm too eager to tell you all about nail-biting adventures instead of standing around in the same old clothes around my apartment everyday. Ya know? Maybe when I'm no longer a student (so soon...why did I remind myself?!), I'll give remixing another go, in another season. Cool? Cool.

Goodbye, winter 30 for 30! It's been real, it's been good...but has it been real good?

<3 christen

you know what it is

There are two things to be excited about:

1. I moved from off my fire escape!

2. Best jacket everrrr! And since there's a story behind absolutely everything that has anything to do with me, I'll spare you this time and just leave you knowing that I spotted this jacket in a magazine a long time ago, but never thought I'd find it or be able to afford it if I did...and then I found it on extreme sale at ModCloth a couple years later and voila! It's on my body right now. 

You like how I said I wasn't going to tell you the story, and then I did? It's inevitable. Just be thankful I gave you the abridged version.

modcloth jacket, delia's blouse, uo jeans, i.n.c. shoes

Mmm, so I'm thinkin' the only thing Wiz Khalifa and I have in common is that we both did this gangster thing in front of these old steel mine smoke stacks. That and we both rep Pittsburgh 'cause it's awesome...

'Possum. -christen

hair day

Once upon a time, mi madre introduced me to a curling iron. I assumed it into my possession and wore my hair curled every single day. I loved it, it was my thing, therapeutic in a way. But because it was too much slaving away to actually curl it every day, she also introduced me to a satin pillowcase so that my curls would slide around on it overnight instead of getting messed up on a cotton pillowcase, and I wouldn't have to wash and redo the whole thing again in the morning. Princess treatment back in the day. 

Now I still enjoy curling my hair, but I realized it's really not necessary to do that often, so I just blow dry it and forget about it most of the time. I still use the satin pillowcase (who would forfeit a thing like that?), but clearly a curse has been put upon me, because it doesn't do its job anymore. And I wake up with cowlicks everywhere.

I used to consider big-cowlick-days bad hair days, but now I'm so used to them that cowlick days just 'hair days.' Definitely not good, but since I was blessed with the inability to see the back of my head, not particularly bad to me. Today, like many days, I had a hair day. So I did this:

target flannel shirt, free people sweater, citizens of humanity jeans, j.crew boots

And afterwards it looked like this:

Not too shabby, eh? I look completely unhappy, but I'm not sure why 'cause today was a fine day. Disregard my face and just focus on my hair. Normally I would tell you the opposite, so take advantage of the opportunity at hand (at hair).

Above is another creation of Aunt Kim's, isn't it cool? It's wood, in case you couldn't tell. 

My posture is just screaming some sort of cheesy down home phrase, so I might as well just give you one...

Thanks for visitin' us down at the woods, y'all, come back again real soon now!

-christen

business casual

...since I work in an office and everything. NAHT! I'm just running out of ideers for these outfits, so I have to take on different personas in order to come up with more ideas.

This is outfit #19 (I'll be doing a lot of catch up posts today!), and it's because 19 is the aliquot sum of two odd discrete semiprimes 65 and 77, and is the base of the 19-aliquot tree (thanks, Wikipedia) that I'm looking so BA in the picture below. I couldn't help it. There was too much cool mathematical crap going on to look chummy. It actually kind of looks like I'm sleeping standing up. I can't say I've ever done that, but I also can't say I'm not verge on narcoleptic...it's a real struggle to not be napping at all times.

Below is a closer look at the necklace I'm wearing, A. because it's cool, and B. because Aunt Kim made it. I'm pushing her site again now that I'm actually wearing some of her jewelry, as promised. It's all so pretty. And BA. She's BA too...

 But she's not narcoleptic. -christen

snow white

I mean my outfit is snow white, not my skin. Okay, my skin is too, don't remind me. This outfit feels particularly remix-y to me because I already wore this sweater with this skirt, but this time I pulled the skirt up like a dress! Wild! It was kicky, fun.

I've noticed that people in catalogs who wear random shoes (like the many-shades-of-brown ones with an otherwise all all pale outfit that I've worn) tend to pose in some kind of unnatural position...but the point is to pretend like they just happened to be doing that when the picture was taken. I'm thinking some of the edgier issues of J. Crew, although I may have taken it to an extreme ;)

i.n.c. sweater, anthro skirt (worn as dress), i.n.c. shoes, kookai belt

-christen

christen on ice

Today when I ventured out onto my slippery, snowy fire escape in platforms, I instantly became a ballerina. Cue Tchaikovsky.

When wearing a beret (authentic, from the streets of Paris!), how can one resist?!

j.crew tee, aa skirt, modcloth shoes, Parisian beret, vintage scarf, thrifted gold chain, anthro bracelet

Below is a closeup of my scarf. It was my great grandma's babushka! And don't go thinking I didn't wear it as a babushka while riding in the cart at the grocery store as a kid. 'Cause I definitely did.

And here, a look at my bracelet, which snags every sweater it comes across:

I thought I'd end it with a graceful bow of my own kind ;)

-christen

flat lacy knows best

Lacy was telling me the other day that when she was younger, every school night she would lay out what she was going to wear the next day on her floor, and when her mama came in to kiss her goodnight, she'd say goodnight to 'flat Lacy' (the outfit on the floor) too! Too adorable for words.

Last night I made a flat Christen with this outfit, and...she was cuter flat. Everything was a little bunchy when I actually put it on, but hey, ya win some, ya lose some. It was all made up of earth tones anyways so I was pleased enough :)

modcloth shirt, uo sweater, free people skirt, j.crew boots, gifted (from ma!) hat, f21 leaf necklace

-christen