List 7: Fashion is Smashin

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Over at Yes and Yes, Sarah Von indulges in list making every Sunday. She also travels the world and is all sorts of awesome.

The List:

Fashion Trends.

1. Fifth Grade
Let's be honest. I didn't have the best fashion sense. For some reason, I decided I had to wear a dress for fifth grade picture day. Everyone else is in t-shirts and overalls. Then there's me. Bottom row. In a dress with a huuuuge collar and blue and yellow flowers. Keepin' it classy.

2. Sixth Grade
I had a track suit combo I loved. It was yellow and stretchy. Combined with tennis shoes (the big, white kind for running) and a stretchy tattoo necklace, I. was. so. cool. I also had a perma-ponytail. Everyone had a stretchy, fake tattoo necklace right?

3. Seventh Grade
My jr. high decided we needed to wear uniforms. However, some days, we got a free day to wear whatever we wanted. My mom bought me: a long sleeved Tommy Hilfinger shirt, a pair of Lucky jeans and Doc Marten mary janes. I also had short bleached blonde hair and wore a lot of white eye makeup. Nobody from elementary school recognized me. When I walked through the halls at school, a girl yelled at me, "Prep!"

4. Tenth Grade

I cut off my hair. It was supposed to look like Mia Farrow, but ended up looking more like a mushroom.

5. Eleventh Grade
My poor mushroom hair grew out. I decided that everything looked better with a bow and took long lengths of ribbon and tied them around the arm of my shirt and through the neckline. Big bows were always on my shoulder. Trend. Setter.

6. Senior Year
I had long, stringy bleached blonde hair, the result of a home highlighting gone wrong. I wore a lot of black eyeliner. Taylor Momson took inspiration from me. Kidding. Eventually, I got a normal hair cut and wore high heels. My teacher called me Barbie.

7. Freshman Year of College
Arrived in California with a whole mess of blonde curls. Scared my roommate and she thought I was a total weirdo.

Which I might be. :)

List Six: Favorite Teachers

The wonderful Sarah Von over at Yes and Yes makes a list every Sunday. She also travels the world and loves cheese. In my mind, we could be best friends. Here's the list:

1. Mrs. Kahmedoost


Pretty sure I spelled that wrong. But, she let me tutor the other kids in reading (yes I was am nerd awesome) and recommended plenty of books that I loved including Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.

2. Mrs. Hinton-Smith

Epic puppet shows made with paper-mache and light bulbs. Water colored fish kites. And she helped me improve my writing.

3. Mrs. Winter

Introduced me to Sharon Creech. I love you Bloomability, Walk Two Moons and Chasing Redbird. Also led me to read Julie of the Wolves and almost every book by Scott O'Dell and fantasize about living in Alaska and racing in the Iditorod.

4. Miss Westenskow

Made college look easy. With monthly reports, handcrafted castles we lived in for a week AND a musical performed entirely by sixth grade students, I'm surprised she didn't go crazy. She also read to us everyday after lunch.

5. Mr. Hall

Taught me how to write. Taught me to love art history. Also called my group of friends moles after we fell asleep repeatedly in his first period class. My friend Lisie responded by laughing so hard she fell off her chair. He then called us monkeys. He also made fun of people behind their backs and once told me to watch out for birds trying to land in my nest of extra curly blonde hair.

6. Mrs. Riley

Taught me to write. Hands down, would not know how to write without her. I still have my English notebook from her AP English Lit class. When my little sister asks me to borrow it, I will not let her.

7. (Okay I had to cheat) Dr. Colburn

I'm sure she hates me for coming late to her class everyday. She edited my senior thesis and took us to all the coolest museums. She's also an AWESOME cook and very smart. And patient. And speaks Italian. And French. And German. Bear would also like me to add that her use of four letter words was especially fantastic as well.

8. (Had to cheat again) Melia

Taught me about Hindu art and caused me to be soo obsessed with India I had to visit. She took us to a Hindu temple. She was so excited about art, it made me excited to learn. She also has cool tattoos.


Honorable Mention:

Nelladet, my internship teacher. She called me Barbie and my friend Willis Skipper. She let us talk during class. Once, she sent us out to evaluate customer service in places around the area. My friend and I went to breakfast and then to a used car super sale where we proceeded to test drive vehicles. While we should have been in school. When we were in no way old enough to test drive anything. Another time, Willis and I evaluated the customer service of a custom jewelry shop and tried on $9,000 rings after we told the owner our parents were divorced and started dating after we introduced them and were going to get married. Not quite sure if he knew we were lying. Thanks Mr. Fadel! Hold onto that ring for me!

Don't like Mondays, but I do like this:

But. I do like this stuff:

Keep Calm Gallery

Maker of the above image. And many, many, many more awesome prints including of course ones like these:

The Happiness Project

I think I've written about this before. Gretchen Wilson is pretty neat!


Shoo Jimmy Choo

I like the idea of this. However, I don't know how to feel about the fact that the website includes the words "vaca" (as in VACA! Let's all go! Roadtrip! AHH!) and the fact that it contains multiple references to SATC.
But, let's face it. I'm a sucker for shoes and pink. This book has both and I'm tempted to at least download a sample to Kindlegarten and find out what this is all about. It has five stars on Google Ratings and the Google Gods have never let me down. The website has a whole bunch of good links as well. JoHanna showed me Mint.com which has a whole bunch of really good tools for budgeting and expense tracking. Check out a sample here.

Last, but not least, I do like Sarah Wilson. Especially when she gives me reasons to like Mondays.

Not Great at the GRE

On Saturday, I woke up at the bright hour of 8:30 and sped all the way to my GRE class. I felt like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde when she goes to Harvard for the first time. I (dressed up, despite the fact that I had maybe...ten seconds...to get ready) walked into a classroom full of people bumming it in their hoodies and baseball hats. Don't get me wrong, I love to be comfortable, but I was surprised that basically everyone looked like...a "typical" college student! I tried to smile and make friends with a few people sitting next to me, but everyone gave the "Okay Barbie, let's get serious" look to me. I went to college in California. A small, Christian college where "bumming" it meant rocking your Juicy sweats and Uggs. Basically everyone, even the boys, got dressed up every single day. Not only that, people were friendly. Not just a little friendly, really friendly. Even after the initial "Hey-I-Don't-Know-Anyone-Here-So-Let's-Be-Friends" wore off. If fact, I think most of California was significantly more friendly than anywhere else I've ever been. Bonus points if you can guess which university I attended.

Anyways, after the initial shock of that wore off, I proceeded to be shocked in another way.

Guys. The GRE is hard!

I'm not sure I remember how to do 8th grade math. It's possible it has been manymanymanyyears since I have done anything more complicated than adding and subtracting. We went to take the Quantitative portion of the test and wow! It was not exactly what I was expecting. I have the Verbal skills of a very intelligent person (as you can all tell right?) , but the math skills of this person:

( this is me. as a very small child. eating vegetable soup )

But, I will not get discouraged. I am DETERMINED! If I can learn to stop making crazy faces, I can make friends with these people. I can crack the Awful Quantitative part of the GRE.



Okay, I might have lied about the first part.











baby steps guys. baby steps.


Hey! Good job B. You got your white coat today. Good luck future Dr. B!!!