Two More

Living Room

This is the mood board for our large living room. Since our house doesn't have a fireplace, we have a lot of room to work with. The main inspiration for this room is "Cupidon" by Bougereau. I became transfixed by his painting--isn't it gorgeous? The couch you see in the upper-lefthand corner is the couch we ordered from Overstock.com. It's tan chenille (super soft). The walls are painted a soft, sky blue color. To set off the tan couch and blue walls, I want to go with a soft green for extra chairs in the main sitting area. I'm feeling more of a tug towards a chocolate brown rug (since the tile in the living room is light). I think the darker rug will really outline the sitting area and make it more cozy. If I go with a dark rug, I want a light colored "cocktail ottoman." The couch we ordered doesn't have recliners, so we need a place to put our feet up. To tie all the soft colors together, I want modern silver lamps and lots of candles and glass candle holders. Finally, at some point in the future, I want to replace the sliding glass doors with French doors, and will cover them up with sheer curtains to allow all the natural sunlight to float through. We don't really need privacy curtains since our backyard faces a hill.

Home Office

This is the mood board for our home office, which is the first room you really seen when you enter our house. I have always loved the combination of yellow and gray, so I went with it. Since this is space that Fernando and I will share, it can't be too feminine, so I'm sticking with a fairly heavy-handed contemporary feel. I'm pretty sure I'll be buying that L-shaped desk from IKEA--it's perfect. Modern and spacious. Enough room for our computer, as well as writing desk space. I want two different chairs. A black leather one for Fernando, and a softer one for me in white or yellow. We want to do a reading nook as well--a comfy chair with an ottoman. I want one entire wall to be taken up with bookcases for that "built-in" look. The art on the walls will be sitting on "floating" shelves. I want to have one of my architect friends draw a pencil sketch of our house from the outside, so we can frame it and mount it in there. And as a bonus, it becomes a lovely family heirloom. We can always remember our first home, no matter where we may roam.

~LOVE~

Inspiration

Ah, heck--I'm bored at work. So I feel like posting my "mood boards" for the three bedrooms in our house. Since we're not ballers, we have to buy little pieces of each room at a time. To keep myself on target with my ultimate goal for each rooms' decor, I created these mood boards. And without further ado . . .

Master Bedroom

For our master bedroom, we painted the walls Behr's "Classic Taupe." Our carpet will be white, and we have bright white baseboards. In the future, I want to finish off the look of the room with classic white crown moulding. Nothing classier in my opinion. For the color scheme, I see a mix of chocolate browns, creams, golds, sage and olive greens, and light browns. Some of the elements in this board that I am "stuck on" are mounting a flat screen TV on the wall, a tall chest of drawers, a photo collage, a sleigh bed, indoor plants/flowers, and ceiling-to-floor curtains.

Guest bedroom #1: The Sunshine Room

In the smaller guest bedroom, I painted the walls Behr's "Sweet Apricot" color. The choice of hue was inspired by the inside of a conch shell. I want the entire room to convey a feeling of a sunny day on the shore of one of the Florida keys. Colors include lime green, lemon yellow, orange, coral, white, and touches of tan. For artwork, I want to frame vintage travel posters, and mount conch shells in white shadow boxes. All fabrics need to be crisp--linen and seersucker. And how awesome would it be to have a surfboard leaning casually in one of the corners?

Guest Bedroom #2: The Ocean Room

In the larger guest bedroom, we painted the walls Behr's "Winter Surf" which is a dark teal color. While the Sunshine Room is supposed to be all about the shore, the Ocean Room is all about what happens beneath the water's surface. I originally wanted to go with just black, white, and teal, but I decided to add graphic pops of red after seeing these awesome pictures of red coral and red starfishes. This room will have a distinctly modern feel to it. I imagine black laquer furniture that is softened by a stark white, goose-down comforter and tons of black, white, teal, and red pillows. For the art on the walls, I see black and white photos of the ocean, and black and white ink and paper sketches of items found underwater like sea horses, coral, sand dollars, and the lion fish. Finally, I want my grandma to make me some custom curtains out of black and white damask with a border of that red and white polka dot print.

~LOVE~

Welcome, 2009!

I never update this thing, but you should know, Fernando and I bought a house (with the help of my parents, of course). We haven't moved in yet because we're in the middle of renovations, but we should finally be living there in a few more weeks.

Vasquez Manor

~LOVE~

Feeling Great

So, I suppose it's time for a proper update. I've been feeling really good lately. It might have something to do with the new routine I've fallen into now that my tutoring has taken a dip in hours. I have more time in the afternoon to focus on myself--eating right, working out, reading, not watching as much television, etc. Fernando is currently taking a summer course and he doesn't get home until after 10pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. He's already in the third week of the course and it's only six weeks long, so it's not as bad as it sounds. Without Fernando at home, I am not tempted as much to just sit on the couch and veg out, drink beer, and mindlessly snack. With the arrival of my Wii Fit two weeks ago, I have a renewed interest in doing exercise and actually losing some of the weight I've put on since graduation from Cal Poly. I have a goal of thirty pounds and I've already lost five. I haven't exactly seen results in the areas I'd like (upper arms, inner thighs), but my waist has definitly shrunken. Also, without Fernando at home, I have no one to cook me dinner, so my dinners are simple, healthy things like turkey sandwiches on whole wheat bread or salads with a little tuna in them.

With the drop in tutoring hours, I've also been reading a lot more. I finished The Time Traveler's Wife on Saturday after a marathon four and half hour reading session. Now, I'm already thirteen chapters into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Once done with that, I have A Thousand Splendid Suns waiting in the wings. And after that . . . I suppose a trip to the bookstore is in order (unless somebody out there wants to let me borrow a good book they've recently read).

I've been watching a lot less television because most of my regular TV shows are on summer hiatus. The Top Chef finale is tonight, and after that, I don't have anything to watch until the next season of Project Runway starts in July.

Another reason I've been feeling good lately is because I have an honest-to-goodness job interview this Friday! The company is here in Santa Clarita and it is a non-public company that provides behavioral therapy to children and adults with Autism and other developmental disabilities along the Autism spectrum. The position I am applying for is Behavioral Therapist Level 1. It's an entry level job and it usually is reserved for people with Bachelor's degree in Psychology or a related field, but the woman I spoke to on the phone said that having experience working with children can compensate for the fact that my degree is in English. If hired, the company provides extensive paid training and I would be working under direct supervision for my first year. After a year of working for the company, they can promote you to Level 2, after two years, you can become a supervisor. The opportunity for growth and possibility of adding "work with persons with deveolpmental disabilities" to my skills set is definitely intriguing. The work would be traveling to different home or school sites and working directly with students. Milage and time between jobs is paid, and the company has health, dental, life, 401(k), and partial TUITION REIMBURSEMENT FOR HIGHER EDUCATION. This is possibly the most important incentive they could offer me since I do plan on pursuing a Master's degree.

My interview is on Friday at 11am. I have to fake a doctor's appointment to get some time off work to attend. Please send some positive thoughts/prayers/vibes my way on Friday. I'm going to be very nervous for this interview--I haven't gone to a job interview for almost two years! If hired, this will have some interesting reverberations in my current work life. I'll obviously need to put in my two weeks' notice here at ATM, but I will also have to quit tutoring for Xamaze. Both of the clients that I have lined up for summer school tutoring this summer are very clingy to me as their tutor. When they talk to me about tutoring, they talk as if I'm going to be a part of their children's lives until they graduate high school. I've spoken to these families many times about my limitations as a tutor (for example, I don't tutor math past Geometry), but they still seem to have a hard time imagining having another tutor other than me. I know if I cancel with them for the summer that they will indeed survive, but I still can't help but feel a little guilty for "leaving" them. Hopefully they'll want to keep me in their back pocket as their "emergency" tutors on weekends and such. I can make a lot more money per hour getting paid directly by my tutoring clients under the table.

All in all, there is a lot of promise for good things coming in the next couple of months. I'm looking forward to this weekend--my cousin (on my dad's side), Michael, is turning 40 and his wife is throwing him a Las Vegas themed party that we will be attending. I bought a new dress and shoes and earrings for the event. It should be a lot of fun. Oh, I almost forgot to mention--my mom and dad are flying up to Portland today to visit my mom's friend, Connie for a few days. We'll be house sitting from tonight until Friday when my parent's get back.

~LOVE~

Birthday

***Originally written on 2/4/08****

It's my birthday. Yup, yup. So . . . 24 feels like . . . sitting at work--bored--sipping the coffee. All in all, a lot like 23.

Birthday plans are as follows: Monday, February 4th: My co-workers are throwing me a little lunch today. I got to pick the restaurant, so we're ordering in from Chili's. Mmmm . . . I love the black bean burger. So tasty. And after I'm done with tutoring this evening, Fernando and I are going out to dinner at South Point Grill. Their steaks are awesome. Fernando is also busy doing the laundry for me today. Usually I go to my parents' place on Sundays to do the laundry, but I was driving back from SLO this Sunday and didn't get home until the fourth quarter of the Superbowl. By that time, I wasn't willing to leave the house because the game was so good. Amazing even.

Friday, February 8th: My dinner with friends at Mojito. It should be a smaller crowd, maybe ten friends getting together for dinner. I'm really excited for this. Mojito serves Carribbean food and makes amazing cocktails. And on Friday and Saturday nights after 10pm they have live music for dancing. The food is a bit on the pricy side for dinner, but it's gourmet quality. I'm going to make sure we order plenty of appetizers for my friends. I'm thinking of ordering the paella. I've never eaten mussells before and I feel like trying something new on my birthday.

Saturday, February 9th: I'm going to make an appointment at a local salon to have my hair cut. I've been growing it since October of 2006 so that I can donate 10+ inches to Locks of Love. I picked my birthday as a good milestone time to make this big change. I haven't had really short hair since my senior year of high school. The past couple of months have been hard--I feel like ripping my hair out about once a day because it is so long, but now I finally get to get rid of it and pick a totally new style.

Sunday, February 10th: Dinner with my family--I picked BJ's as the place. We were originally supposed to go out tonight, but my dad is having surgery today to fix a hernia, so we just pushed it to this coming weekend. Since my aunt Yolanda's birthday is also getting close, I'm wondering if it would be better to combine our birthday celebrations together. We'll see. This weekend seems pretty far away at this point. Alrighty then, guess it's time to go back to work.

~LOVE~

The Past Month

It doesn't really seem like it, but in retrospect, the past month has been very eventful. Let's recap, shall we?

1. Fernando and I celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary October 19-21st. We went to Disneyland on the 19th. We both took the day off work and spent the entire day at Disneyland. We got home around 1:30am and we were both sore the next day from walking so much! Then, amidst the "firestorm" that circled the Santa Clarita Valley, we managed to go have a lovely dinner on the 21st (our actual anniversary) at The Vines inside the Hyatt. Fernando had the coffee crusted filet mignon, I had the salmon with a tasty olive relish. Our wedding cake held up in the freezer over the past year. The restaurant served it to us and the server commented that it must have been a beautiful cake--it was, but if only she knew that the bakery actually gave us the wrong flavor of cake on our wedding day. I guess the bakery felt bad about that even a year later, because even though we saved the top tier of our wrong wedding cake, the rebaked us two tiers of the cake in the flavor we originally chose (Banana Walnut) and sent it to us on our anniversary. We were swimming in cake that week--we had to go to my grandma's house and my mother-in-law's house to pawn some of it off on them!
2. The next big event we experienced was my family's dog, Gracie, had to be put to sleep on November 1st. She had been having breathing problems for the week previous, and I believe it was due to complications from some tumors she had. Either way, the surgery to fix the problem would have been very expensive. My dad asked the vet if he would have any problems with putting Gracie to sleep and he said no. She looked like she was in pain. So my dad had her out to sleep that day and took her up to "Gigi Canyon" to bury her. It has been difficult to get used to my parents' house without her (it's a lot quieter), but we're all doing alright. My parents still have the two cats to look after.
3. November 3rd was Sigma Omega Nu's FUSION celebration, hosted by the Delta Chapter. It was good to see lots of faces I haven't seen in awhile and also to see the Eta Chapter girls experience their first big, sorority-wide event. I actually went to FUSION despite the fact that I was coming down with a flu and was running a fever, but I'm still glad I went.
4. The week following FUSION was pretty miserable for me--I missed three days of work because I was hit really hard by a flu. I was so sick I even went to Kaiser to have myself checked out to make sure I didn't have anything more serious. Luckily, it was just a flu, but it took me almost a week to feel better!
5. This past weekend, Fernando and I went to a hockey game at the Staples Center. Fernando had won some tickets off the radio, so we went. It was the LA Kings versus the Phoenix Coyotes. I've never seen so many hockey fans in my life! Fernando and I were pretty unimpressed with the hockey goings on (we are not fans at all), but it was fun to get out of the house and see the Staples center for the first time. Hopefully, the next time I go to the Staples Center will be for a Lakers or Clippers game!

So, that's what the past month has brought us-- what's coming up?

• Thanksgiving this week at Fernando's sister's house
• Hopefully, some good shopping on Black Friday
• Eta Chapter is hosting their first event on Wednesday, November 28th--The Nu Dynasty
• Susan (my lil sis) will be celebrating her 21st birthday on November 30th
• I'll be "baby-sitting" for Elena on December 7th while my parents and Skip and Jeannie attend a church dinner. I want to take her to Color Me Mine . . .
• December 8th is the holiday party for Xamaze Tutoring
• I need to start working on my grad school applications again!

It Was A Labor of Love

Please welcome to the Sigma Omega Nu familia the Eta Chapter Founding Mothers at California State University, Northridge established on October 13, 2007:

H.F.M. 01 Ana Luna - Ace
H.F.M. 02 Patty Mendoza - Magnetic
H.F.M. 03 Maritza Flores - Show Stopper
H.F.M. 04 Susan Ruiz - Wicked
H.F.M. 05 Scarlett Herrera - Digitz
H.F.M. 06 Xenia Zamarippa - Xtreme

~LOVE~

Bullets

They're good things . . .

• The kids are back to school. I have two VERY regular clients, leaving me with about 2 1/2 hours of tutoring a night. That's a good 8-10 hours a week of tutoring money. A nice $120 to $150 a week.
• Mona signed up for Gmail specificially so we can Gchat during our boring days at work. We keep each other entertained.
• I had my one-year review on Friday--it went well. I've been promoted to "Office Manager" and my payrate got a nice little bump--went from $12 to $14 an hour! That's an extra $320 a month! All going towards the savings! I'll have a little more responsibility here at the office, but I'm sure I can manage. If I can manage my current work load, plus have time to write Blogger entries during the day, I'd say I was desperate for more responsibility.
• Saw Superbad on Saturday.
• Neda's Birthday Party on Sunday was good times. The drinks were flowing, the food was abundant, and I got to hang out with some of my old friends from high school and junior high that I haven't seen in quite some time.
• I have a new little sister from the pledge class that I am currently pledging as pledge mother. She doesn't know it yet, so I can't say who it is, but come September 8th, I'll let you know who it is. I'm super psyched to have her as a little sister!
• Having a slumber party this weekend with Mona and the pledges as a chance for our pledges and their pledge mothers (Mona and myself) to get to know each other better.

~LOVE~

Saturday Morning Re-Cap

We recently received a visit from my sister-in-law, Naomi, and her son (our nephew) Ryan. I threw down a mini photo shoot and here are some of the best shots.

Seven months and already crawling like crazy!

Uncle Fernando with Ryan

He's pretty much one of the cutest babies I've seen. Half Mexican, half Armenian is a good combo.

This past weekend, I attended the baptism of Julia Ruby Barba, my cousin Jason's baby girl with wife Grace. This was the third baptism I attended this year! After the actual ceremony, it was back to Jason and Grace's house for food, drinks, and a mini-reunion with my cousins. I regret not taking more pictures. My uncle Jesse and aunt Esther were there, along with all three of their sons--my cousins "Little" Jesse, Michael, and Eric. It was actually Little Jesse's birthday on Saturday. His 40th! Michael came with his lovely wife, Claudia (I love her!) , and their kids Jacob and Briana. Jacob is ten years old and TALLER than me. The last time I saw him was at our wedding shower. He was short and pudgy. He has totally stretched over the last year. Briana is in the "losing teeth like crazy" stage. She's such a cutie, and really takes the job of taking care of her little cousin, Matthew, very seriously. Yes, Eric was there with his wife, Laura, and their son Matthew, who has also done a lot of growing up since I last saw him. It makes me happy to see how happy and successful my cousins have become. I can't wait until my brother and myself move into that tier of our life-- successful marriages, home owners, careers, and kids. The one thing that put a damper on the event was seeing my cousin, Sal. It was awkward as all hell because I didn't know he was out of prison yet. Yeah, Jason's brother, my cousin Sal, has spent the last several years in prison. He looks a lot older than his 27 years. I feel like I don't even know him anymore. I haven't seen him since he was a teenager and we had to stay a week with my Nana. Overall, though, I was happy I went. I spent most of the evening just talking to my aunt Esther and Claudia (and my mom) who I went to the party with. Here are the only two pictures I took that day:

Baby Julia with Mom, Grace

The priest, Jason, Grace, Julia, and Godparents. My aunt Linda was the Godmother (she jockeys for the position of Godmother for all the girls in our family--she's my Godmother, too). The Godfather (I forget his name) is a good friend of Jason's.

On Tuesday night, Fernando and I took his sister, Melissa, out for dinner for her birthday at The Olive Garden. Again, I was lax with my camera and only caught these two sub-par pictures:

Melissa looking embarassed because the staff was singing to her--that's her hubby, Clement, next to her.

Blowing out the candles on her huge chocolate cake! She's 27, which means my wonderful husband is soon to be 26.

And finally, here are two pictures of the hub and I last night at Acapulco's in Northridge. Fernando with his grande margarita and me with my mojito.

~LOVE~

I Love It

I haven't written in a long time. I suppose it is time for an update.

The summer is whizzing by me with no regard. To put it in perspective: My summer class will be over today after I take my last test. Summer school (and summer school tutoring) was officially over on Monday night. I begin tutoring again next Thursday for the school year. Fernando starts school in about two weeks. Also, it's August! Crazy.

The past several weeks have kept me very occupied. Working (we got rid of the first bookkeeper we hired after Charlene left because she--the new bookkeeper, not Charlene--sucked and consequently hired a newer, much better bookkeeper). Tutoring summer school for a girl whose parents think she needs 8-10 hours of tutoring a week. Reading, taking quizzes, completing assignments, studying for and taking tests for my Psych class. Slaving away at making sure pledgeship is both organized and well executed for my wicked awesome pledges. And somewhere in there, finding time for family get-togethers and spending time with my husband.

I keep tripping out on the fact that one year ago, I had just moved back to the SCV from SLO, was living at home, planning a wedding, and looking for a job. My one year here at work is on August 30th. Nuts. Can't wait for my promotion.

This month--Fernando's sister, Melissa's, birthday was on Saturday. We took her and her husband out for dinner at Olive Garden last night. Fernando's birthday is on the 15th. He wants a Wii for his birthday. I'm not even exactly sure how to go about getting one of those. But my mom already told me she was going to give Fernando some money for his birthday because she wants him to put it toward a Wii. Then it's Neda's birthday on the 24th. She's having a little poolside soiree at her brother's house on the 26th. Almost forgot to mention I'm traveling up to Sacramento next weekend for the Sigma Omega Nu National Conference with the pledges in tow. Yeah. I'm pretty hardcore.

By the way, can I just say how much I love my pledges? They want to have a Harry Potter themed Big Sis/Lil Sis dinner. I'm debating what to dress as-- Professor Trelawney or random Gryffindor student. And when I assigned the Famous Latina Biography project, one of the girls asked if she could write about La Malinche. Yeah. Nerds. I love it.

~LOVE~