so our dear friends asked us if they could throw a Lord of the Rings Movie Marathon Birthday Party at our house...

to which our response was obviously, HECK YES!

first of all, i love it when people have parties at our place. it's all the fun of throwing a party yourself, but oh so much less responsibility! :)

and secondly, being the geeks that we are, how could we not get totally psyched at the idea of a LOTR party?! oh, and did i mention that there would also be 7 hobbit meals...like they have in the shire?!

anyways...needless to say it was epic.
probably the coolest party ever. i wish i had thought of it first.

our house was totally transformed into middle earth...
once we started decorating, we all kind of got carried away and stayed up till 3:30am kind of having our own pre-party party. it was totally worth it. :)





our dining room was rivendell...





my friend april deserves the best wife award for making her husband this cake and for all her hard work!









fanghorn forest?



how about a little hobbit stew?



or shelob cookies...



and maybe some lembas bread? one small bite will feed a grown man for a day. i found this recipe online, and  it was definitely other worldly.



oh, and did i mention that there were costumes? i wish i'd gotten pics of everyone...





if you go to the bathroom, be careful as you pass through shelob's lair...





happy birthday kyle! thanks to you and april for letting us be a part of the fun!

ok, so the past month has been crrrrazytown!

not in a bad way. just in a busy way. in fact, there are probably a million other things i should be doing at the moment, but i feel the need to blog. i need the diversion. my brain needs to let off a little steam. :) so anyways...

remember how a couple months ago i found a pretty cool vintage capiz light at the habitat restore?

well. it is still sitting in our garage. forever waiting to be installed by my hubby.
but unfortunately for him, i've developed a new light fixture crush in the mean time, and this one costs more than $2.

that's what happens babe. :P

anyhow, i found an image of a gorgeous dining room on pinterest awhile back. check it out...



pretty, huh? i like the feel of it...that mirror rocks, and i'm a total sucker for moroccan inspired lighting!

so you can imagine that i fell pretty quickly when i saw this in world market's new lighting selection!



i think i'm in love. what to do!?

i could totally imagine a couple of these over our dining table! it's not cheap though, but at $69 a pop, it's probably not really more expensive than buying something like this in india would be. that's what i love about world market. a lot of their larger handmade items are actually priced really well...plus they give you sweet coupons on top of it all!

so what do yall think?
i love a global look. though i worry a bit about overkill, because seriously folks...i have an addiction! i think there's probably more indian/ethnic stuff in my house than in any place i've seen in india!
so how much is too much? what's the line between awesome and crrrrazy?! :)

how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?!

home decor blogs are my guilty pleasure. i like to breeze through them in the morning while i sip my chai.

so when a few of my favorite blogs (YHL, Bower Power, Style by Emily Henderson, and Making a House a Home) joined together to issue a Pinterest Challenge, it inspired me to make practical use of my pinning. :P plus, me and my friend Laurene had been talking about actually doing some projects for awhile.

we have lots of boob lights in our house...thanks to it being built in the 70s. and i have been on a mission to be rid of them. i got rid of one earlier this summer, and now i was on a mission to be rid of the one in our hallway. our hallway was in need of a little excitement for sure.

i love the capiz shell chandeliers that are so in style right now...but they're kind of pricey if you plan to buy one. fortunately though, there are about a million tutorials on how to DIY a wax paper version all over pinterest and the internet. i won't go into the details of how i did it since the formula is already out there, but i pretty much followed these directions, except i used and old busted out lamp shade as my frame, and i used a circle puncher to make all the wax paper shells. no way i'd have the patience to cut a million circles with scissors. oh, and i used fishing line instead of thread.

to hang it i just used 3 mug hooks, and since it was pretty big i just hung it directly over the boob light and didn't even bother to take it down. i figure protecting the wax paper from any heat coming from the light is probably a good thing.

anyways, our hall way is now officially fancy! (sorry, i forgot to take before pics..but who hasn't seen a million boob lights? i'm sure you can imagine. :P)











i love how it adds some texture and height to the hall.
this project cost a grand total of about $5...and some time.

ok, maybe a lot of time. but once i figured out how to make it work, and got into a rhythm, it probably took about 6 hours. of course those hours were spread out across many days though.

realistically, this is a very busy time of year for me, and fun DIY projects should have been the lowest priority on my list. but once i started it was almost therapeutic. it became my late night obsession, and my way to unwind after a busy day. almost every spare second i had (or didn't have) was spent working on this baby, so my husband will probably be glad to have me back now.

so...2 boob lights down, and one to go. any ideas on what i should do with the last surviving boob light in the entry way?

have i mentioned that it's hot in texas right now?
like crazy hot. like so hot that a friend of mine just left for india and was surprised at how much cooler it felt there!

i have a serious chai addiction, which doesn't go well with these temps. it's a problem.

so i took matters into my own hands and made a little summertime invention...chaice cream.
chaice cream= chai ice cream.

all i did was make my usual chai with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, boiled it in just whole milk, added sweetened condensed milk, and whipped it up in the good ol' ice cream machine.

and it's awesome. can i say that?



sorry for the melty pic. i just couldn't wait for it to finish setting before i had a little taste.

i love experimenting with ice cream flavors.
sometimes it's a total fail. but this time my friend, i say we have a winner! :)

hang in there friends, and have some chaice cream! it can't stay this hot forever...can it?

i know i'm a little late, but after hearing about it forever, i've finally jumped on the pinterest bandwagon...and it think it is going to change my life!

ok, so maybe that's a little dramatic...but seriously, for me i will say that this could trump facebook.
i know. that's a bold statement. and i've only been on it for 24 hours! :P
but i can already tell you that it's much more my style.

if you haven't heard about pinterest, it's basically a social network that helps you catalog all the things you love...and as a bonus you get to share with friends too.

so this is the story of my life. i stumble across something cool on the web, and it's probably not related to what i'm working on at the moment,  but i decide i must save the image for future reference. so i throw it in a folder on my computer where it (a) never sees the light of day again, or (b) when i do get around to checking it out again, i have no idea where it came from.

the concept behind pinterest is that when you run across something you like, you "pin" it (using a button that gets added to your book mark tool bar), and it goes onto your pinterest 'board'. not only is the image saved, but also the source link is referenced. which means that you can use pinterest for almost anything, from recipes, to diy, to shopping!



when you pin things to your board they also get shared with your friends, and vice versa. which means there is constant inspiration coming from all directions as your friends find stuff as well...which you can then re-pin for yourself! you can also specify your interest by choosing certain boards that you want to follow.

my job often requires a bit of creativity, so God knows i need all the help this little mind can get! (do you like how i'm justifying using this for work? hmmm...)

anyways, it's pretty self explanatory once you get on there. and addictive. beware.

oh, and i've added a link to pinterest on my little ol'blog here, so if you're on pinterest, click the button the side bar to follow my boards!
happy pinning!

so remember our great idea to take a dogcation? (=vacation with our dogs)
well, i still think it was a nice idea, but this year it was kind of a fail.

since it's a million degrees in texas, we decided to drive up to the rocky mountains to beat the heat with the pups a couple weeks ago!

however, word to the wise...make sure you get a vet check up before taking your dog to a high altitude! we almost lost a pup!

poor mowgli. our little old man.
what started off as lethargy turned into a cough and difficulty breathing, until his face turned blue, and we took him to the vet in colorado, who loaded him up with meds and told us to drive back to texas as fast as we could!

apparently our poor momo has congestive heart failure (and possibly a heart tumor, but we're praying it isn't!). the vet said that this is an underlying issue that had been building for awhile (though his annual check ups never picked up on it!), and is common for his age and breed.

the good news, hopefully by taking this trip we caught his heart problems earlier than we would have otherwise. with the right medication we will be treating him sooner, and hopefully still have him around for a good long while. say a prayer for him though!

i'm talking about it nonchalantly now, but this happened a couple weeks ago. i've been too traumatized to share before now. but mowgli is pretty much back to acting like his old self, so i'm able to breathe again!

i guess the vacation wasn't a total fail.
we did have a fantastic time before mowgli decided to almost kick the bucket.


look, the dirt matches my hair! (in route near amarillo)

bindi matches the dirt too. :P (and doesn't she look like she's heckling in this pic?!)


great sand dunes national park, co


yes. it's giant sand dunes randomly in the middle of the rockies!




i think mowgli was still having fun at this point too...


our little mountain retreat! it was a 100+ year old guard station. if you ever want nice and cheap vacation accommodations, be sure to check out the national forest service!






our good friend abhishek met us for a day, and we drove up into the mountains on the back roads with his subaru...and got a little lost too! ;) but hey, we're still alive. navigators extraordinaire.




it looks small from here, but that was a huge waterfall coming off the mountains!






ruins from an ancient city of cliff dwellers in mesa verde national park. definitely go and see this if you ever get the chance.


our cute little dog friendly B&B. this was a historic inn, and we actually stayed in the room that teddy roosevelt supposedly stayed in when he passed through the area!

unfortunately our vacation ended here. telluride and santa fe were still on the agenda, but we had too book it back to texas to get our sweet baby home asap.

but maybe another year. i'm sure there will be other summers that we'll need to escape the texas heat...just maybe not with the pups.