a bad week, bachelorette party, beach day, and weekly wishes.

so, let me tell you a little bit about the kind of week we had last week:

james was working out of town for the entire week, which automatically meant that our normal routine was going to be somewhat disrupted since i was taking care of alice by myself without any breaks. obviously i spent the entire week exhausted and frazzled (i believe i told my mom i was already completely over this week on tuesday morning). 

and obviously alice took full advantage of my weakened state by making some kind of huge gross mess for me to clean up every single day. im serious. james was gone for five days and i had five big gross messes to clean up. which honestly by the end of the week was kind of funny and not at all what made the week so bad. 

the bad part was that for the entire week (from some point on sunday all the way until friday afternoon) we had NO HOT WATER. none. at all. and our building manager didnt even notify anyone about the problem until tuesday evening (at which point i had already called her supervisor to find out what was up, because hello? were kind of paying for this apartment to have hot water). it basically turned the whole week into alexanders terrible horrible no good very bad day. 

but instead of spending this whole post talking about how much this past week sucked, lets talk about all the nice things that happened. 

like how on sunday i tried my first recipe from a beautiful mess:

this asparagus risotto was FANTASTIC (and a really great use for my homemade stock concentrate)

then monday alice had her last ballet class and it was adorable, as always:

but honestly im really happy that its over because this session she wasnt as excited about it and spent a lot of the classes being bad. not this last week though, she was pretty good about participating:

on wednesday i finished up my color theory class at the homeschool co op, and all the kids made awesome color wheels:

then james came home early on friday so we went out to lunch and the hot water came back on and everything was better. 

well, until the next day when i almost forgot to go to my friends bachelorette party. im serious. we all woke up saturday morning and lounged around watching pokemon and then i got bored and started finishing all the quiet, sit-down things i couldnt do while james was out of town and then james put alice down for a nap and went over to the card shop and i started doing some little cleaning projects and suddenly it was 4:30 and i realized, crap. i have to be at a bachelorette party in exactly one hour. i wasnt even dressed in real clothes. so i called james to have him rush home and hurried to put together an animal print themed outfit (as per the theme of the party), and some decent hair/makeup. i had about 20 minutes. i think i did ok:

(quick outfit details: top: hot topic (very old, from my 16th birthday), skirt: poverty luxe, shoes: h&m, bag: vintage, glasses: zenni optical)

and yes, i did make it to the party on time, and even though it was a total lady party (and ive never been a big fan of lady parties) i had an absolutely wonderful time (with the exception of accidentally eating half a french fry that had a suspicious coating and panicking that i might have a gluten episode, but i didnt, so every things ok). 

then yesterday after church we went to the beach:

because, well, it was all kinds of hot and NONE of us wanted to be at home. it was beautiful. and apparently the dolphins agreed:

and of course alice did that thing where she befriends some stranger kid and basically joins their family and eats their food and plays with their toys because she enjoys making me extremely uncomfortable:

and that was our week. 

thankfully this week james is working in town, and im not working (at all!) this week, so things should be a bit more mellow around here for a while. 

and now its time for weekly wishes:

this week i did make some progress in our monthly goals, i did make and freeze one batch of beans, and im pretty sure ive figured out what i want to do about my job (spoiler alert: its not any of the options i discussed earlier). this week id like to get my financial aid forms done and take them in AND go to at least one running shoe store to look at shoes (though ill probably end up actually buying the shoes online so i can get a better price), which i hope wont be a problem since, you know, ive got the week off. 

so those are my goals for the week, what are yours?