Spring Forward

Happy Monday! I'm sure I'm in good company when I say that I am DRAGGING today, "spring forward" kills every time! I guess it doesn't help that I stayed up much later than usual last night with my brother watching funny YouTube videos, BUT I'm all for March daylight savings if it gives us a later sunset. I definitely get sad when the sun sets so early in the winter, it gets to the point that it's dark outside before I even leave my office at 5:00pm, and by that point I feel like my day is over and find it hard to get motivated to do anything!

Did you have a good weekend? I had Friday off which was really nice, it snowed but didn't really affect the roads, so it was just pretty. I got breakfast with a friend at our favorite bakery downtown, and then came home and baked my favorite thing... a lemon pound cake! I used this recipe and it was really good; I added a little lemon extract to cake because I can never get enough lemon.

My lemon cake among the mess it took to make it feat. bunny ears from my dad, haha!

Friday night my brother was going to come home from school for spring break but he didn't so my parents and Kenny and I had a low key night and made cocktails, the pretty in pink cocktail that I posted about a couple of weeks ago! My dad hadn't tried it the first time I made them and he really enjoyed it, which kind of surprised me but I was really flattered that he loved it!

"Pretty in pink" in the background, and a mocktail for Kenny up front! the mocktail was actually really good, I combined tonic water, cranberry juice, and lemon and lime juice.

My brother got home on Saturday morning, and we spent the majority of the day running around town as a family. We stopped for lunch at a local Mexican place, and then prepped to host dinner for my grandparents at my parents' house. It was really nice to see my grandparents without an "occasion," typically we only have them over for dinner for birthdays/holidays, or if someone's visiting from out of town. I'm so lucky to have all of my grandparents living within 15 minutes of me, and to be able to spend time with them so often.

On Sunday, my parents and Stuart had a salamander hike that they were going on with a group of Virginia Master Naturalists. It was a great day for it because the weather was beautiful, it got up to almost 70 degrees! Kenny and I got ready, cleaned up our respective heaps of clothes that had accumulated over the course of the past week or two (don't judge, you do it too), and set out to get Kenny a black suit for engagement photos and upcoming weddings and other events. There's a place right outside of town that does custom orders, so we stopped by there and found one that he liked. After that, we spent some time running around downtown and taking some outfit photos. Our original mission downtown was to stop by the health food co-op and pick up some Beyond burgers on the assumption that my parents would want to fire up the grill out for dinner since it was such a nice day, and luckily they did! We also ran by the grocery store to get some essentials for the week (plus a completely nonessential bag of blaze Doritos that we completely finished that evening... whoops). After dinner, we all just hung out and Stuart and Kenny and I got watching a bunch of funny YouTube videos, which led to us getting to bed way too late, ha. It was a really great long weekend, and I wish that I had EVERY Friday off!

It was SO WINDY on Sunday, I tried to use it to my advantage haha.

In unrelated news, I read this article this morning about a great white shark that has been found preserved in a giant formaldehyde tank in an abandoned Australian wildlife park, how creepy?! (Happy ending spoiler alert: the awareness of its existence going viral caused another wildlife to take the shark into their care so it can continue to be enjoyed without further damage/vandalizaton.) It sent me down the wormhole watching the videos from the guy who originally went viral revealing the shark, and then I just started watching other abandoned exploration videos. My dad and I love learning about abandoned places and urban exploration, there's something so interestingly eerie about it! And the fact that there's an actual giant shark there makes it even freakier to me... similar to the preserved animals found at the abandoned Disney waterpark, River Country. Ew!

Anyways, I hope you have a great Monday and a great week, and don't let daylight savings keep you down!
xoxx, Laura