Five for Friday

Hello and welcome to my Five for Friday! I am linking up with Cup of Tea , Bright on a Budget, Della Devoted, and BYBMG!

1. I'm sure you all have heard about hurricane Florence, and we've been watching it closely. We're in Virginia, so we are only expected to get a lot of rain, as well as some thunder and lightning. It's supposed to start raining about noon today and throughout the weekend. This is our first hurricane experience and it's so weird to be watching to footage and seeing what's going on just a state away.

My sister's birthday is this weekend so it looks like we'll be stuck indoors for the weekend. She wanted to go up to DC but it looks like we'll have to hold off on that until another time.

2. A couple of weeks ago we met up with my brother and explored Alexandria a bit! I didn't have my camera with me, so I just got a few pictures with my phone, but it's definitely a place we'll have to go back to and explore some more!

3. A couple of weeks ago we started to remove the wallpaper in my sister's bedroom. The entire room in papered in the stripes, but upon removing the striped wallpaper, we were not expecting the ugly baby car paper underneath! And unfortunately the people who put the car paper up put it directly onto the Sheetrock without any sort of primer or anything, so when we were trying to remove it it started taking off the Sheetrock itself!

So after lots of research it looks like we'll have to just leave the wallpaper, put some primer over the wallpaper, and correctly prep the wall from there. 

4. I made some minestrone soup earlier this week and decided to try to make some bread to go along with it. I usually make this rosemary and olive oil focaccia, but I really want to get better at baking a loaf of bread.

The first loaf I made (on the left) was a no knead rosemary bread and it did not turn out very well. It's just a terrible recipe. Bread needs to be kneaded! The texture was just way off (very spongey). 

The second time around I made this rosemary bread and it turned out way better! Much better texture and overall flavor. I mean, just look at the difference!

5. In case you missed it, on Monday I shared our itinerary from when we were in Washington DC for the day, and then on Wednesday I shared a Currently post!

Hope you have a great weekend!

Currently

Working on - Hurricane prepping! Since we're in Virginia Florence is supposed to come somewhat this way. It sounds more like we will just get a bunch of rain and probably some wind, but considering we are from the west coast this is new territory for us! We're fully prepared just in case, but I don't think we have anything to worry about.

Looking forward to - My sister's birthday is this weekend so we were looking forward to doing something for that. Unfortunately though, we can't really plan anything since we have no clue what is going to happen with the hurricane. We'll probably have to hold off on doing anything fun. But there will be cake!

Watching - There isn't much on right now, but we've been watching America's Got Talent. And we finished the newest season of The Great British Bake Off on Netflix. I'm looking forward to all of our fall shows starting again!

Trying - I made this bread the other night to have with some soup I made and was really disappointed with it. Since it's a no knead bread the texture was just really off. 

Listening to - I recently came across the Crime Junkie podcast so I've been listening to quite a bit of that! They cover a lot of interesting (and not as popular) cases.

What have you been up to lately?

Our Washington DC Itinerary

See the full post of our time in Washington DC - Part 1 & Part 2

So I started this post shortly after we were in DC back in April and it's been sitting in my drafts ever since. I figured I might as well finish it, so here it is finally!

This was our second time visiting Washington DC, the first time being 10 years ago when my parents took us on a family trip there. 

Since we had been before and we knew we were only going to have a day there this time, we had a little bit of an idea of what we wanted to do. 

The rain kind of threw our plans off a bit as we didn't get to do quite everything we wanted, but overall it was a fun day!

Hotels in downtown DC were quite expensive, so we opted to stay at a Mariott in Maryland for a couple of reasons. One reason being price; but also because we had a rental car and I didn't want to deal with driving and parking in DC. Parking is hard to come by and very expensive. This hotel was near a metro station (the Largo Town Center station.) that also offered parking. 

Just a note on the hotel: it was very nice, new, and clean. And the rooms were pretty big too! Great for a family with room to spread out. We would definitely stay here again. Prices, of course, fluctuate, so while it was affordable when we were there, it might not be so much in the future!

We had a bit of trouble figuring out the metro cards (the DC metro system is VERY different than what we experienced in Europe. Specifically way less efficient and way less easy to navigate!), but an employee helped us figure out and purchase them.

And since we were there just after the cherry blossom festival, we got these fun metro cards! And yes, I totally saved mine for my scrapbook.

Once on the metro we rode to the Smithsonian - National Mall stop. It was about a 20-25 minute ride and took us right to the National Mall.

We checked out the sites around the mall before walking over to get some pictures of the Jefferson Memorial. This was the only area that had some cherry blossoms left, so we made sure to get plenty of pictures! We decided not to walk all the way over to the memorial to save some time and it wasn't a priority to see it up close.

Next we walked over to the WWII memorial. While not a huge memorial, there is still a lot to look at. We spent a fair amount of time walking around here and taking pictures.

We then walked to the Lincoln memorial and then to the Korean War memorial. It was raining pretty good by the time we reached the Korean War memorial, so we just took a couple of pictures before continuing on our way.

It stopped raining for a bit as we walked toward the White House, but then started raining again once we got there. By the time we reached the front of the White House, the rain turned into a pretty good downpour so we hurried into a nearby gift shop to wait out the rain.

We were all pretty hungry by the time we finished walking around the gift shop (after picking up a few things of course!) so we decided to try to find a place to eat some lunch. I looked on my phone and found a Pret nearby, so we walked there. 

By the time we finished eating the rain had finally stopped. We made our way along Pennsylvania Avenue, where we had to stop by the J. Edgar Hoover building. My sister was very excited to see it!

We then headed to Paul bakery; a bakery we really enjoyed while we were in France. I got an almond croissant, which was delicious!

After our snack we walked to the National Air & Space museum. The museum was pretty crowded, so we just quickly wandered through the exhibits without spending too much time there.

After we finished at the museum, we weren't really sure what else to do as it was nearing 5 o'clock, so we decided to walk over to the Capitol building. 

When we visited back in 2008, we didn't get to go to the Capitol building, so it was neat to finally see it up close!

There was quite a few people around taking pictures, so we just took a few before walking around to the backside, where there was no one! So if you visit the capitol, make sure to walk around to the back as well.

For dinner we went to Good Stuff Eatery which was extremely disappointing. Despite having fairly good reviews, it was pretty terrible. The staff were not friendly, the burgers were just okay, (really nothing special), and the fries were just disgusting. They were so greasy and limp they couldn't even hold up under the weight of their own grease. My family loves fries, and we couldn't even eat half of them they were so bad! Definitely wouldn't recommend eating there! 

Overall though, we had a fun day in DC! If you've never visited it's definitely somewhere I would recommend visiting! There is SO much to see and do! And now that I live closer I'm looking forward to exploring all that it has to offer!

Five for Friday

Hello and welcome to my Five for Friday! I am linking up with Cup of Tea , Bright on a Budget, Della Devoted, and BYBMG!

1. Well, this week has just been the worst. SO MANY things have gone wrong. We've had issues with the contractors doing the repair work on our house, issues with the carpet people when we went to pick out replacement carpet, issues with my mom's car, then issues with the dealership who lied about a bunch of things and tried to scam us. Then we had major issues at the DMV when we tried to get new licenses, so now we have to go back and try again on Monday. Then I've tried to look into health insurance (since I don't have a job yet since we moved) and I apparently don't exist. I've submitted documents proving I do, in fact, exist, and they were supposed to email me back and they never did. So I now have to deal with that crap. And this is freaking the SECOND TIME I've had to prove my existence since moving. And yes, I already have run a credit check to make sure my identity wasn't stolen. And there are SO many other things like this that have gone wrong in the past few weeks that it's honestly too many to list. I am just so done.

(And yes, I spent way too much time picking out the appropriate gifs because why not.)

2. Anyways, on to more positive things. I got this really cute new dress from Amazon. I haven't had the greatest luck ordering clothes from Amazon, but I am really happy with this dress! The material is just the right weight. Not too thin and not too thick. I really like the polka dot print. And it has pockets!

The dress is a midi dress, but I'm 5'8" so the length is just past my knees, which I like. And I would say the size chart is pretty accurate too. 

(I've yet to find a decent place to take pictures in this house. It's so frustrating!)

3. I've made both caramel sauce and hot fudge sauce in the past couple of weeks and they have certainly been enjoyed lately! The hot fudge sauce is really easy to make (and definitely worth it if you've never made it!) and the caramel isn't exactly difficult, it's just temperamental. The recipe I use doesn't have the greatest instructions. Let me know if you're interested in making it and I'll give you some tips! Hot fudge and caramel sauce are way better homemade than store bought!

4. I finally got a longer charging cord for my phone earlier this week and I don't know why I waited so long to get one! I got this 6ft one from Amazon and it works pretty well! It does seem to charge my phone faster than the actual Apple one which is nice.

5. In case you missed it, on Monday I shared a review of my July Ipsy glam bag, and then on Wednesday I shared a currently post!

Hope you have a great weekend!