Happiness is...

• crackling campfires 
• burnt hot dogs and ooey gooey smores
• amazing starry nights with soft breezes
• sipping wine (or any adult beverage) from travel mugs 
• watching birds you've never seen before 
• taking pictures of flowers you've never seen before
• late nights and lazy mornings
• citronella candles and sunscreen
• warming up the sleeping bag with hand-warmers
• playing round after round of card games and ladder golf 
• floating in a boat on a lake
• hiking til you get blisters and filling your pockets full of rocks
• falling asleep to the sound of... nothing

Brian and I will soon be going on our first camping trip of the year (finally!) and I. CAN'T. WAIT.

(photo by Brian on our very first camping trip together)

Feeling Catty

Aren't these vintage cat-eye sunglasses just the cat's pyjamas? I especially love the little star details.
(I wonder if you could put prescription lenses in them, hmm...)

This entire Etsy shop is filled with amazing vintage glasses, specializing in cat-eyes!
(Again with the stars, I also really like these and these.)

Ciao for meow!

Antique Awesomeness

This antique Egyptian revival bangle is pretty amazing...

Oh, and Antique + Locket + Skull = all the things I love...

The necklace is gone now (sad face!) but these skull studs are pretty sweet too.

There's lots more awesomeness in the Antique Jewelry section of Alexis Bittar's website (who designs awesome jewelry himself, but I'll save that for another day).

Cut & Paste - Volumes 13 & 14

I haven't shared a "Cut & Paste" post on this blog yet, but over the past few months my friend Ashley and I have been sharing our art journaling adventures together on the interwebs. (My previous pages were posted on my old blog.)

Thinking about courage, and my roots - having fun with a leaky white paint marker, and free-form cutting out letters with a dull razor blade (good times!)

Don’t forget to go check out Ashley's pages!

{These art journal pages were created based on the Art Journal All Year e-course from Red Velvet, found here.}

Sunday Nights on the Couch

One of my newest favourite tv shows - Breaking Bad - starts back up with Season 5 this Sunday, and I can hardly wait. I say "newest favourite" because, although it's been on for 4 seasons already, I had never seen it up until a few weeks ago when AMC re-aired the entire series from the start - 3 episodes a night. Let's just say it's a good thing I don't have much of a social life, because it would really have gone down the shitter once I started watching this show every. single. night. It is seriously one of the most well-written shows I have ever seen, with GREAT cinematography to boot! It's addicting. Brian and I would literally rush home after work each day to start watching it. And after talking about it at work so much, I convinced my boss and a co-worker to start watching it too, and got them hooked as well. We were all like a bunch of meth-heads that couldn't wait until their next fix. (Ahem... see what I did there? ;)

I'm sad that this is the final season of Breaking Bad. I heard a rumour the other day that this season might be split into two - this summer and next. While I'm no stranger to painfully long hiatuses (hiatus? hiati?) - I'm looking at you Mad Men and Dexter and Boardwalk Empire - I'm slightly comforted by the fact that it will be around for one more year. (Sad, but true.)

I don't watch a ton of tv but I do have a few shows that I really enjoy and luckily they are all on Sunday nights, when I don't usually want to do anything more than snuggle on the couch for a couple hours. What's great is that usually when one series ends, another one is beginning - so I always have my favourite shows on the same night.

A couple weeks ago a new series started on HBO called The Newsroom - I'm really enjoying it so far - GREAT writing. (Can't usually go wrong with Aaron Sorkin.)

Hooray for Sunday nights on the couch.

Bye-Bye Butterfly

I saw this poor dead butterfly on the sidewalk on my way home from work the other day...  It was so pretty I almost wanted to scoop it up and bring it home!

It reminded me of when I was little, I had this collection of found butterfly wings that I kept in a photo album - those ones from the 80's with the sticky pages. Years later, the wings had all turned to dust and eventually sprinkled out of the album over time. Kinda gross - yes - but I like to think of it as butterfly dust, that I left a trail of, throughout my childhood.

Charmed

I'm a sucker for most charm bracelets, but... THIS  antique/gold/figa hand charm bracelet is stunning!