Uniform

I've come to the conclusion that the preppy button down and khaki pants has become my uniform for work when I'm not sure what else to wear, or if I just want to be completely comfortable all day. 

Kira wanted me to show you her mini ice cream cone.  She's wearing her performance leotard from gymnastics and a penguin hat.  Stylin'.

Smiles!
Lori

Black and Blue

 

I like to read fashion magazines in the bathtub.  It doesn't work out well for the magazine because inevitably, it either gets dropped in the tub, or water drizzled all over the pictures.  Regardless, it's what I enjoy doing.  So, the other night, I was reading Marie Claire and they had a feature with Tim Gunn and he was discussing if it was ok to wear navy and black together.  He says "yes".  Last night, when I was pulling together today's outfit, I found the shirt/pant combo was missing something and I had this jacket hanging on the bathroom door.  It has black trim, the shirt is navy striped.  I remembered the article and thought, what the heck.  When I was getting ready this morning, I noticed the pants were black, not blue.  They were blue last night and the fairies switched them (that's my story, not that I wasn't wearing my glasses and I can't see!)  I threw my mismatched colors on and walked out of the house.  I was amazed at how well this outfit turned out and I never would have considered doing this before taking more risks since starting this blog.

 

Smiles!
Lori

Kira's Favorite Mom

Kira helped with my blog title.  Could you tell??

I love this jacket from J Crew.  I saw it online and really really really wanted it, but I refused to pay full price because full price was just insane.  So, I stalked it. Finally, around Christmas, J Crew had a 30% off if you spent a certain amount sale and I made my move.  Not even 7 days later, the jacket went on sale.  GRRRRR.  I calculated out how much I'd save to rebuy and send it back, and decided the savings weren't worth the effort.  But I was irritated and continued to stalk the website.  THEN, the jacket went on sale for an additional 30% off.  I took action.  I rebought the jacket and then when it came in the mail, I sent back the original jacket (which I had yet to wear).  I saved $50 from my original purchase price, so that was definitely worth the effort. 

This is my attempt at pensive.  I think I failed because I look like I'm being told something I don't want to hear. 

Smiles!
Lori

Upgrade

Dave gave me a fancy, new camera for Birthmas specifically to upgrade my blog photos from the iPhone camera.  Birthmas is when you want a big gift for Christmas, but it's more than what you'd ordinarily spend, so you combine birthday gifts and Christmas gifts to get a nicer Christmas gift.  Thus, the evolution of Birthmas.

I've been playing with the camera all week, but haven't felt well enough to do too much with it.  Yesterday, I went to the camera store and the nice people showed me how to set the timer since the instruction book doesn't have a lot of information in it.   The camera folks weren't surprised by that fact either, which has me a bit worried since I have no idea what I'm doing.  Dave got the thing connected to the tripod last night and I ran around setting the timer, running in front of the camera and taking stupid photos for fun.  Just for laughs, I've included a few of my practice shots in this post.

The camera is a "smart" camera, which means it has a built in Wi-Fi connection, which Dave specifically got me so I could upload pictures straight to my Skydrive.  However, the camera is way smarter than me and I can't figure out how to get it to connect to the server.  I could look in the instruction book, but that will prove pointless.  So, my auto uploads will have to wait until the hubby has time to see what I'm doing wrong.  I'm at least proud of myself that I got the things to upload to the computer.  Baby steps......

 Kira's not this tall.  She's standing on a step stool.

These are my practice shots.  It is super hard to run past the tripod without knocking it over and pose before the timer goes off. I'm surprised I didn't break a limb last night.

Smiles!
Lori

Snowpocalypse

Seriously, when did the Weather Channel decide it was necessary to name snowstorms.  Really?  Are we going to start naming thunderstorms in the summer too?  And why are the snowstorm names fearsome.  It's snow.  If we must name it, let's name it fluffy fun names like Sparklefrost.  Snow is fluffy and Sparklefrost is fun.  But nooooo, gotta name it something stupid like Draco.  If it's got to be fearsome sounding, how about Icezilla 2012?  Noone asked for my input when they decided to name these things.

Here's the Weather Channel's reasons for naming snowstorms:

Naming a storm raises awareness.

Attaching a name makes it much easier to follow a weather system’s progress.

A storm with a name takes on a personality all its own, which adds to awareness.

In today’s social media world, a name makes it much easier to reference in communication.

A named storm is easier to remember and refer to in the future.

Really?????  You know, when I was little, there was the Blizzard of '78.  Yep, that was what it was named and you know what???? If you refer to it as such, people know what you are talking about.  OR, the tornado outbreak of '74, or the 1913 flood.  People around here also know what you are talking about if you refer to these three events.  Type of event...blizzard...year of occurrence.....'78.  Type of event.....tornado outbreak....year of event '74.  Type of event....giant flood....year of occurrence 1913.  Yeah, we know what happened without having to have some stupid name attached to it.  And it is even dumber with snow. I'll get off my snowplow soapbox now!

Smiles!
Lori

Scary

 A scary thing happened when I was leaving work tonight.  Keep in mind, I work in the middle of suburbia.  A man was hanging around outside the door and I just thought he was waiting to pick someone up.  I said hello and smiled and the man asked if he could ask me a question.  I thought "sure".  He then proceeded to ask if the company bought home notes and got a little too close to my personal space.  He actually scared me enough I took a step back and he realized he was scaring me, but he didn't stop.  I was literally 8 feet from the indoor guard shack and did they see any of what was happening??? Nope.  I finally firmly told the person I had to leave and hurried to my car.  When I left, security was finally talking to him.  More often than not, I don't get the heebie jeebie feelings from people, but for some reason, this man scared me.

Smiles!
Lori

I'm Gonna Play With My New Friends Zoe and Kira

That's what Dave and I heard while we were watching Kira play with her friend Zoe on the playground this afternoon.  Our city had their annual Christmas celebration this afteroon at the Civic Center and we ran into one of Kira's daycare friends at the party.  They started playing together and some other little kid they met on the play equipment screamed "I'm gonna play with my new friends Zoe and Kira" to his mom.  It was really cute. 

I also got to see the little boy who Kira says has a crush on her today while waiting for Kira's indoor soccer game to start.  The Leibold boys were in a basketball tournament at the same facility Kira plays indoor soccer at and many of Kira's classmates were playing in the game.  Kira doesn't reciprocate his "feelings", but he is cute for an eight year old.  Interesting thing, he did notice Kira on the sidelines and kept looking over at her.  Maybe there is something there??? Ahhhh young love.

 Horse drawn carriage rides. 

 Kira on the carriage ride.  It's 60 out and she wore her soccer shorts.

 Go horses go!

Kira on the playground.

Happy Saturday!
Smiles!
Lori

Happy Anniversary

Today is Dave and my wedding anniversary.  The romantics that we are spent it watching Kira's gymnastics practice, eating together as a family and then working on Kira's homework tag team style.  We stopped giving each other gifts on for our anniversary years ago because honestly, I'd rather spend time with him than give each other trinkets.

While it's an important day in our lives, the more important thing is spending time together as a family, being good parents and always being there for one another.  I married my best friend many years ago today and he's still the love of my life and my best friend to this day.

Kira insisted on taking my photo when we got home.  It's a bit blury and I looked like I got run over by a truck by the time we got home. 

Kira's famous jewelry shots.

Happy Monday!
Smiles!
Lori

Someone Should Stop Me

 You  may have noticed, I love polka dots.  Love love love love them.  I have so many pieces of clothing with polka dots on them that it isn't even funny even more.  Do I stop the acquiring?  Nope.  Enjoying my insanity!

Beach Week!



One of our business divisions is celebrating Beach Week this week and this year, they opened up the celebration to the entire Company.  So, the "Fun Committees" of both our locations were charged with the task of coming up with fun events for each location to join in the celebration.  I head up the committee in Cinci and we have an absolutely incredible group of people who volunteer on it. They decorated the Department while I was on PTO on Friday and they texted me some pictures of what it looked like.  So, when I walked in this morning, I was totally shocked to see this.  I'm in the porthole on the left and that's the picture from my ID badge.  This is located right at the base of the escalator so everyone who rides down to our floor will see it.  Thanks guys.  Enjoy your giggle.

 This is the space next to our copier.  Super cool!

 Leis were hand delivered to everyone this morning.  Ta Da!

The leis were itchy, so I wound up wearing it as a bracelet all day.  It was that, or wear it as an anklet and noone needed to see that!