Redneck Riviera, here I come!!

I just found out that, starting this May, Southwest is going to fly to Panama City Beach. And I mean the good Panama City in the heart of Florida's panhandle (more lovingly termed the "Redneck Riviera"), not that foreign city in Central America.

No other beach can compare to this glorious location! When I think of beach and summer vacation, I think of Panama City. Sure, others may think of air-brushed t-shirts, booze, and MTV's Spring Break, but not I. Panama City has been our family beach vacation spot for as long as I can remember, and nothing beats it. Spending a week at the family-friendly Portside Resort, walking across the street to the beach in the morning, spending the afternoon at one of the three pools, planning our week of usual restaurant visits, cruising the strip, running in and out of various Alvin's Islands, and visiting the now-defunct Miracle Strip Amusement Park. I have so many memories there that it's not a real summer beach vacation if it's not in Panama City. The Atlantic Coast just can't compare to the warm, blue waters of the Gulf.

Panama City, we will meet again in Summer 2010...Northern beaches be damned!

Nothing's changed.

I'm up to the end of season 3 in my re-watching of Buffy, and I just finished The Prom. This episode aired in 1999 when I was a mere 13 years old, but I watched it over and over and over and over. I seem to remember this being my favorite episode for quite some time [I can't remember if another episode ever took its spot or not]. Before watching it last night, I barely remembered the details at all. I didn't even remember that this was the episode where Buffy and Angel broke up (shame on my inner fan-girl)! But the second it started, I realized I could pretty much quote the entire episode word for word. Eleven years and I still remembered it that well. Eleven years is almost half my life!

Anyway, I'm having very different opinions of the show now than I did at age 13. I think if this was my first time seeing it, when I'm a little more mature and have a little more life experience, I would like/support different characters, different story-lines, and different relationships than I originally did. I just get it more now, and it's just as empowering (which is what I loved so much about it back then).

This is fun. I'm getting back into it. It reminds me of high school so much that it's hard to watch without getting nostalgic. It's my inner-geek coming out again, which I think has been hidden for so long. Sometimes I feel like college was a blip in my existence as I tried to forget about and/or change a lot of my personality from back from high school. But now that college is in the past-tense as well, I can blend the two versions of me and kinda start anew without starting over.

Cheekwood memories

Not much interesting has happened this week besides going to see a play on Tuesday with Colin called "This." It was actually a pretty busy week at work, which left me less time to stall with things like photos and blogs. So since I haven't posted anything in over a week and I still don't have much to say, it's photo time.

Cheekwood is one of my favorite places in the world. No matter how many times I go there, I can never get enough of it. I think it started in high school as a place we'd go to feel cultured and run around in nature. And I always took photos [I must have 48392432 photos of the flowers at that place]. Cheekwood does this really cool thing in the summers where they create a themed project for their botanical gardens. In summers past, they've had mazes, treehouses, or birdhouses designed and created by local artists or architects scattered throughout the grounds. One summer, they had dinosaurs lurking amidst the foliage. I think this may be my favorite photo I've ever taken at Cheekwood.

The Black & White Ball Update

As I may (or may not) have mentioned, my friend that threw the Black & White Ball this past weekend set up a photobooth in his bedroom, complete with a picture frame and masks (aha, so that's where the masks were!). The picture total came to around 842. This is the result.

When I own a house...

One of the things that absolute excites me about growing up is the prospect of decorating my very own HOUSE. This time last year, I was excited to decorate the bedroom in my apartment, but I quickly learned that did not fully appease the decorator in me. Money and space were major restrictions, so I was left with more ideas than I had the capability to do.

At this point, I have determined my style preference is mostly vintage country. I love finding new uses for old things. Or rather, reading about them, because I unfortunately seem to lack the creativity I was sure I possessed. I subscribe to Country Living magazine, because I [not so] secretly can't wait to live somewhere in the country (or more preferably, the suburbs). I hate modern, angular decor; it seems so harsh. I prefer cozy over gigantic, previously loved over brand new, patterns over plain. I love the detail that can go into the small necessities, like coasters and cocktail napkins and sugar bowls. I can't wait to have the space that allows these kinds of things to be sitting on a table, making a statement, rather than hidden somewhere in on a shelf or in a cabinet.

This apartment from Apartment Therapy's Small Cool Contest of 2009 features my ideal style. Apartment Therapy is a good site to read for ideas. Even though it's not always my style, it usually deals with small spaces like NYC apartments, giving me good ideas for furniture placement and storage.

I also read Design*Sponge, which features sneak-peeks into the homes of interior designers and includes lots of do-it-yourself projects. My all-time favorite, which I WILL do someday when I have a screened-in porch, is this project that uses mason jars as a light fixture. Southern bliss!

The Black & White Ball of 2009

After a day of painting Colin's bedroom [a color we can't exactly pinpoint aside from the following descriptions: wheat, Sahara gold, peanut butter, spicy mustard], we went to a party thrown by one of my friends from work. The party was out in Brooklyn...way out in Brooklyn. Way out to the point where I don't know where they buy groceries, because it is absolutely in the middle of nothing. Anyway, the party was a Black & White Ball, inspired by Truman Capote's famous party of 1966. Though we were promised feathery masks that never seemed to materialize, everyone was dressed fancy in black and white—everyone except Michelle and George who decided on a more casual look.

I would like more excuses to dress up and pretend it's pre-1970.

Sweet sixteen

Seeing as how I have absolutely no family north of the Mason-Dixon line, I've been really lucky in connecting with a family here that treats me like one of their own. The history: I started tutoring for their daughter my junior year of college when she was 13. She also has a brother who is four years younger. Tutoring turned into babysitting which turned into friendship. I've gone on month-long vacations with them (paid!) and I spend a fair amount of time at their house, sometime babysitting, sometimes just enjoying a family dinner.

This week was Emily's sixteenth birthday, and tonight I went to her party at a laser tag place in Queens (which was nothing like Laser Quest!). There, I noticed some very big differences between being sixteen in upper-class New York City and being sixteen most anywhere else. First of all, though they live in NYC, I've never met such sheltered kids. Some that have lived their entire lives in Manhattan don't know how to use the subway because their life is contained in a ten-block radius. Parents are still omniscient and a close eye is kept on the kids. I was thinking back to my sixteenth birthday party, in which I drove myself and my friends ice skating where we paid and no parents were present. These NYC kids can't take public transportation without supervision, so the freedom that comes with a car would be out of the question. They do have the education thing going for them. At one point, Communist governments were brought into conversation, while I bet my sixteenth birthday included a lot of talk about shows on the WB.

Ah, high school. I never feel that far away from it until I hang out with a bunch of high schoolers.


My sixteenth birthday, 2001.