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The Accidentally Right Choice

July 14, 2014

Went back to Santa Cruz. Couldn't help it.

I think the boardwalk there may be one of my favorite places on the planet, and I am certain that it is one of our son's: he just (like, this week) made the leap from "rides are kind of scary and I may or may not panic at the idea of either getting on one or having to get off, ever" to GIVE ME ALL OF THE RIDES AND GIVE THEM TO ME YESTERDAY. We bought him an unlimited ride bracelet because we're suckers and because his reaction when we said we were going back to The Place With The Rides was priceless, and it was worth every penny. (The four-dollar Dixie cup of watered-down root beer I could have done without, but that's my fault for forgetting the golden rule of carnival-going, which is Bring Thine Own Food Or Pay Unconscionable Amounts Of Money For Stale Pretzels With Neon Cheese.)

You guys, I am having so much fun.

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Eat

Lemon Pappardelle With Potatoes & Haricots Verts

July 10, 2014

The summer after my junior year of high school, my friend Thomasin and I spent a couple of months attending art school in Paris (which sounds ridiculously fancy for a couple of teenagers, and kind of was). We lived in dorms that were filled with college students during the regular school year, and while we were technically supervised, we really…weren't. Which meant we did our best to get into as much trouble as possible, and when that turned out to be not very much trouble at all (because we were both a little more "nervous good girls" than "madcap European bon vivants"), we hung around the dorm with our friends, essentially playing grown-up.

Our favorite weekend activity: trucking down to the grocery store on the corner for cooking supplies, and then using the tiny kitchen in our dorm to make what felt, to us, like sophisticated meals...but were actually just the most rudimentary pasta dishes ever. We ate them with chopsticks, sitting in a circle on the floor around the one big cooking pot we shared, because we hadn't thought to bring things like bowls and forks. We would have told you that we didn't just go out and buy bowls and forks because we "couldn't afford them" or because we were "too lazy to go to the store"…but neither of those reasons would have been the truth.

The truth was that we didn't buy them because we didn't want them, because the very best part of those meals was that we ate them crowded around a single pot with friends we thought we'd have forever, laughing until we couldn't breathe.

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Style

Fringe Benefits

July 10, 2014

8 1/2 months pregnant + first West Coast dr appt = as good of a reason as any to break out the fringe booties.

{ Follow along on Instagram @ramshackleglam }

I wasn't sure about bringing these boots with me out here; I figured it'd be a zillion degrees and I'd spend 99.9% of my time in my favorite sandals (these in black, which if you do not own yet, you should probably go do that; nearly every single one of my friends owns a pair at this point and I swear: everyone who has them rhapsodizes about them).

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Lifestyle

Paradise On Toast

July 10, 2014

So this "corporate housing" thing? Kind of weird. And cool.

I've lived in pre-furnished apartments before (the first two summers that my ex Rob and I lived in Los Angeles, during my breaks before my freshman and sophomore years of college, we lived in a place called Oakwood Apartments that's known for Murphy beds and more out-of-work actors than you can possibly imagine in one spot) but this is different.

Basically, where we're living is an ordinary apartment complex - the kind people rent independently, furnish independently, et cetera - but a company came in before we arrived and filled it with furniture from a warehouse. And there are odd little hotel-y elements like a cleaning service that comes every couple of weeks to replace the sheets and towels…which is GREAT…but even better?

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Style

Unique Engagement Ring Ideas Under $1k

July 9, 2014

My engagement ring, from a pawn shop off of the Vegas strip, might be my favorite possession in the world. I think it's beautiful, of course, but it's less about what it looks like than the story it tells about who Kendrick and I were and what we were doing at the exact moment that we discovered each other. We bought that particular ring because it was what we could afford at the time…but if I had it to do all over again? I'd probably get something almost exactly the same.

Which is all to say that solitaires are pretty, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with choosing something a little different for your ring, whether it's because "something different" is more in line with your budget than a huge rock…or because it's more in line with what you want. When it comes to a symbol of your partnership, there are no rules.

Some of my favorite unique engagement ring finds (all under $1k), above.

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My Looks

Playing Hooky

July 9, 2014

These photos were taken a couple of months ago, in preparation for an event I hosted at the Crocs flagship store (if you visit any of their U.S. locations, you should see a couple on the in-store displays), and I just realized that I completely forgot to post them prior to our departure.

This spot in our town is so pretty: it's a little brook that runs adjacent to the lakes near our house, and there are always dads and sons fishing along the banks. On this particular day, Kendrick had just gotten out of school for the summer and it was terribly hot and humid (you can tell by…my hair), and Indy still had another couple of hours of camp, so we decided to play some grownup hooky and go see X-Men: Days Of Future Past all by ourselves.

Which taught us two things: 1) X-Men movies are so, so good (and this particular one happens to include what I think might be one of the very best scenes of all time, starring that guy from American Horror Story who I have an inappropriate crush on - because I think he may be, like, twenty - and Jim Croce's Time In A Bottle); 2) the occasional Mom and Dad hooky moment is good for the soul.

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SNAPSHOTS

(Not So) Lost Boys

July 8, 2014

Years and years ago, I was hanging out in a bar in the Valley with a friend who was visiting from Santa Fe, and decided to play the jukebox. I punched in the numbers for one of my all-time favorite songs, The Doors' People Are Strange, and about ten seconds after it started playing Keifer Sutherland walked through the door. He ended up buying my friend and I shots of Jack and playing darts with us for hours, and was extremely drunk and extremely nice, and that night remains one of my favorite L.A. memories to this day.

Now, I tried to tell this story to a couple of friends the other day, and they were totally lost as to what that Doors song might to do with Keifer Sutherland, and when I tried to clear it up with "you know, the opening montage from The Lost Boys?"...that didn't help. And then it turned out that they didn't know Lost Boys, and didn't know who the two Coreys were, and hadn't seen License to Drive, either, so…I don't know. Maybe my friends need a primer in 1980s cinema, or maybe I'm showing my age. In either case, I have to concede that this particular film may not be quite the earth-shattering cultural reference for everyone that it is for me.

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