Friendship on Monday

{downtown Petaluma, afternoon of Tuesday  2/25/14}

Let's face it-- Monday has a bad wrap. The start of a week usually full of work, school, business, life, and sundry other things. What's the like? But worst of all, Monday marks the end of the weekend; that glorious set of days, where we theoretically have a break from the normal crazies. As I'm sure you've noticed, this is not always the case. On the other hand, Mondays are often not nearly as bad as we make them out to be. Such was certainly the case for me, this week.

I knew my Monday was going to be hectic. Calculus in the morning, exercise ten minutes after calculus, an hour-long math lecture ten minutes after my body conditioning class, and then rushing home to practice piano before rushing off to a piano lesson, then coming back to school to do homework for an hour before meeting up with a friend. I wasn't overly excited about all the rushing. 

Thankfully, exercise class got out ten minutes early, it turned out the math lecture was canceled, and that gave me plenty of time to get home and eat lunch before driving to my piano lesson in Rohnert Park. All of this to say, eventually I made it back to the Petaluma SRJC campus to meet up with a lovely friend, whom I had not seen in a few months! We made our way over to Jamba Juice, and had an absolutely fabulous time talking about anything and everything, including our blogs. We also got in a couple of highly attractive photos of one another....

{we started out inside Jamba Juice...}

{but quickly moved outdoors because the weather was stunning}

After an extremely relaxing time sitting outside, in the mild, perfect California weather, we decided to prolong the date, and made our way back to my house, where we made dinner together (we were having too much fun to take pictures. Now THAT is a lot of fun), and also made plans to create gluten-free cupcakes in the near future. You won't want to miss that blog post. We're going to be wearing our most adorable aprons. 

*The Point Being -->*

We had an amazing time together. And after she left, I kept thinking about how much I love spending time with my friends. To be quite honest, this is something I ponder frequently. I have been blessed with the most amazing group of friends in the world. If you think I'm exaggerating {yes I do use extravagant adjectives rather often...}, I'm not. That was the most convincing argument you are ever likely to hear. ;) As I talk to more and more people out there in the world, I've come to realize that I have an abnormally large group of people I can call genuine friends. Friends who will be completely honest with me. Friends who won't see me for months because our lives get insane, or we live far apart, but then we pick right back up where we left off without any awkwardness whatsoever. The list goes on and on and on. 

With my personality, I love to have a huge group of friends. But, even the most "introverted" {please, beware of labeling yourself. more on that someday...} person among us ought to have a group of friends to spend time with, doing the things one does with friends. We weren't created to go through life alone. 

So, if you haven't had a friend date in a while{the kind of friend date where you discover a new restaurant, or hike some foresty mountain, or get massages together, or just sit in a coffee shop and talk for hours}, schedule it in! Life can be crazy. Trust me, I know that too. But taking a break from all of that "stuff," to spend quality time with another wonderful person is important. 

Xx

{P.S. You can check out my friend's blog, The Parlor & Co. }

*PPS: Addendum* 

Ali and I noticed that our phones do NOT have cupcake stickers in the list of text emoticons. As Ali said, we should write strongly worded letters, such as: 

"dear Emoticon Company, 

WHERE IS THE CUPCAKE, SIR? 

salutations,

Ali and Katherine"

Explanation {thorough, if nothing else}

{Walking. Blogging. Beginning. }

Since I began this blog four days ago, I've suddenly had a plethora of post ideas flooding into my head at all hours of the day, usually ridiculous hours, of course. However, I shall try to keep this post put-together and concise.

*Why* 

I was in such a hurry to begin writing before that I didn't actually explain much about anything. I began blogging because I recently (within the past year) have discovered that many of my friends have blogs, and I could never resist peer pressure.... But actually, I do enjoy writing things, and I do enjoy people, and blogs bring that together. 

*What*

One of my first thoughts was that this blog can be the outlet for my less prosaic writing, when I decide to wax eloquent {there it is!} about subjects near, and less near, to my heart. Basically, I'm saving the Facebook world from my extreme creative expression by posting it here. Brobdingnagian words aside, I should also warn you that there may be posts about my life, my makeup, my downtown adventures with friends, on top of more reflective musings on life, current events, and other issues that matter. I'm so extremely sorry for grammatical/punctuation/stylistic errors. I don't want writing to become a chore, so I'm not taking as much time as I could to revise my posts, in the hopes that this will preserve my enthusiasm, and allow me to post when I have a short moment, rather than waiting for huge blocks of time that may never appear in my life. Run-on sentence, much?

*Titled*

When I finally made the plunge, clicked the buttons, opened blogspot.com, I discovered that I needed to come up with some perfect blog title with which to draw in unsuspecting bystanders. Naturally, I went into my Instagram photos and began to look for inspiration. Obviously, there were lots of food pictures, but this is not a food blog {if I ever write a food blog, you should probably read it because it will be hilarious, and full of examples on how *not* to go about cooking}. I came up with several words that I wanted to play around with for my title: reflections, mirrors, window. And here we are, Reflections On the Window. Make of it what you will. Perhaps someday I'll do an entire post on the name, to explain how I see it.

*Proud Mother Moments*

This blog is my new baby. I haven't posted for four days because I've been researching different ways to customize the layout, and so I must share what I've done! Just in case you hadn't noticed all of the extremely snazzy, mostly subtle, changes.

• I've added a second page to the blog, called, "Quotations, Quotations, Quotations" check it out!
• The navigation bar at the top of this blog is gone. I hid it. I think it looks much more classy this way.
• If you're reading this on a computer, notice that there is a mini-me picture {the "rain in Petaluma" picture} up on your tab by the blog name instead of the orange B for blogger you saw the first time through. 
• After many attempts, I finally was able to position my HTML icons for Instagram and Pinterest right next to each other like lil buddies. If you put your mouse cursor above them, you'll even see an extra personalization that rather tickles me. 
• The comments section of these posts now also say "Post a Comment" rather than just "No Comments" or "Two comments" etc...
• My personalized signature, at the end of this post

And, I believe that's it for now! I'm still researching new things to do with the design, though. It's a much better form of procrastination than Facebook. Maybe. 

*For Now* 

You can now go back and read the paragraph at the top, which mentions conciseness. You can laugh. Because: 1) I'll never know. 2) It's a tiny bit funny. 

I'm excited to share some of the ideas I've recently been bombarded with. Soon. So until next time...

Ciao! Xxx

Midnight

I created this blog at least three days ago, and have been trying to think of an interesting way to begin it in my first post ever since. Unfortunately, I still haven't come up with it. So here I am, beginning my blog by explaining that I'm not sure how to begin. Pure brilliance, obviously. If this blog post was modern art, I would probably win an award, or money, or a stuffed teddy bear or something. Alas, this is not modern art, and I don't get any of those things. The other devastating thing that happened to me, was the moment I had already written this post, it was about 1:26am, and when I clicked publish on the little check box on my phone it gave me a notification, "cannot locate picture in your post," then POOF. My entire piece was gone. I promise I saved the draft, as well. Who knows what happened to my poor post. On the upside, that experience has given me multiple sentences to add to this replacement post, and hopefully made a more interesting read. Or a more depressing one, depending on how emotionally involved you like to become with your reading... (Honestly, it's seriously depressing to lose entire blog posts with one click. I wouldn't recommend it.) I started thinking about writing this post around midnight, hence the ridiculously creative title, but circumstances have definitely worked to make this a later, rather than sooner, publish.

It sometimes amazes me how I can say so much, when I actually have nothing to say. One of my close friends recently told me during a phone conversation, "I can always have such good discussions with you even when I don't say much because you just keep on talking!" I think I may be a bit more tickled by this than I ought to be....

I could keep on writing for while, especially if I started talking about how much fun it was to plan my brother's surprise party, which happened today, but it's much later than I planned to stay up writing (please never lose your blog posts, bad things happen), and I need sleep. {{Sleep is good for the soul}} I hope you'll stick around and read the more interesting posts (they should be more interesting, anyway...) to follow. I'm not entirely sure what happens when you click on the "friend connect" button in my sidebar on here, but you could definitely try that and find out. I know that adding your email into the email subscription box will make sure that you get an email every time I post, so that you won't have to keep checking back on the blog to see if I've posted. Obviously what you would be doing, without the email thing. So, this is the part where I get to feel like a super official blogger, when they say "like, comment, subscribe." Except that instead of liking, you'll just have to use Google+ to "+1," and to subscribe, you'll have to decide your favorite method. Anyway, ciao!!

<3
Katherine
Xx