"P.S. I Love You" Minus the Tragedy

Bonjour mes amis,

Read the title? Yep. That was my day today. Original plan to spend time with the boyfriend was to go around town, snapping pictures, just chatting. Little did I know he had a massive large setup for me in store.

Every day when we wake, we text each other good morning. This morning he told me to check my email before making coffee, so I figured O.K. he left me a cutesy message (as he does that), and jumped out of bed to go read it. Instead it has three attachments; one handwritten letter telling me how much I mean to him and how much I deserve a vacation, one handwritten letter with instructions telling me to go to the Western Union in K-Mart to pick up some money he left me, then go buy myself cough drops, gas, and a coffee, and one map showing me directions for something I'd need after coffee. I love handwritten things, I'm a sentimental person. And I love surprises. He's so sweet!

So I follow the instructions he's left me, and I sit down and enjoy my hot cocoa (I decided that I was so excited I was awake enough without coffee) for a while 'till it's 10:35 and he texts me saying it's time to meet a nice couple he knows. So I follow the directions on the map. Slowly driving down the small street looking for the house with the right address, I see a driveway with a big sign in the yard that read "Your Face, Your Body: Massage Studio." It turns out he didn't know this couple extremely well but they were indeed very nice people. I've never had a professional massage before but this was incredible. Something you have to experience to really explain. It was so relaxing and yet required so much trust and faith but.. Wow. It felt amazing though. An hour later, I dress and thank the wife, Ros, for the massage. She hands me an envelope with my name on it, and we say our farewells. I get in my car and read the handwritten letter inside.

I have a reservation for lunch at Buca di Beppo's. I've driven by it a million times to go to the Ortho and the mall and it was even right by the K-Mart from earlier, but I'd never noticed it till now. It was really cool inside! So many lights and art work and photos and awesomeness. The waiter was really nice too. I ordered what I wanted, and when I finished, the waiter went to take it back to box the left-overs. He comes back and says, "Lunch has been taken care of," and instead of a bill, there's another handwritten letter. I smile and thank him and read the letter.

I have an appointment for a nail salon in the mall! I've never had my nails done either but it's another thing I've wanted to do. I wasn't sure what all he had planned for me but I go there and I have a nice manicure and they paint my nails. They used a ton of different types of goos on my hands. I think the wax was the weirdest. Then for $5 I got a design on my ring fingers. It's really cute but the pictures don't do it justice so I won't even bother posting one here. This of course, came out of the $20 he gave me earlier, as my mother had insisted on giving me money for the cough drops so I had extra.

On my way home, I got to stop for gas so I have even more than I started with this morning.

My love, how every woman in this world isn't head over heels for you, I'll never know.

Á bientot,

Mlle Delphine

Painting My Face

Bonjour mes amis!

Non, before you flip, I'm not literally painting my face. Or caking on makeup.

The first part of my day consisted of anxiously awaiting my friend's phone call to say he got the gift. I was so nervous that, no joke, my palms were sweating. I mean, what if the painting wasn't as good as I thought it was? Or it was damaged during shipping? Or it gets there whole and he just plain and simple doesn't like it?

Boy was I wrong. He LOVES it!! I was SO relieved. He was talking about how it's the "nicest gift anyone's ever given me" and how it'll be the only thing he has hanging on his walls and how talented I am. But I think the best thing he said, was later when I told him I had just one more question that was important.

"Did it make you smile?"

"More than smile, it's nearly brought a tear to my eye. You made my birthday."

I think I did good. :) And as promised, here's the painting from a low-quality phone camera:

As for the second part of my day, my aunt came over to give us some free samples of Mary Kay products and talk about them, etc. It was actually really fun! The lip .. gloss, I guess? It's not super shiny though, that she had me try on looked really nice, and it's still on two hours later after I've drank and eaten a little bit. Same with the hand moisturizer stuff, and she said it also works wonders on feet. I really liked the foundation, but wish she had cover-up/concealer to try since mine doesn't work as well as I'd like. She had a lot more stuff she left at home, so my mother and I will have to visit her to try eye shadow colors and the like.

I don't know, typing about it here it seems silly, but this stuff just makes you feel good! And that's what make up is for, right? I'm crossing my fingers we can order the lip gloss, once we try one of the cover-ups, concealer, and moisturizer for my face. I have just normal Neutrogena cleanser that works really well but I can tell it dries out my skin. I know we probably won't, but maybe at least the lip gloss. Realistically you could probably get a cheap moisturizer at a department store, and my mother doesn't understand the importance of cover-up and foundation.

Oh, as a side note, I've noticed she's not only bad with technology, she's not the best with reading things in general. A few days ago on Facebook I posted about a few books I wanted to buy from Barnes & Noble and one of them was Princeton's ACT Review (2010 edition) and today she asked me why I'm thinking about applying to schools on the east coast because it's "so far!" Yeah, so far.. *cough* .. and then my mother told her I was thinking Québec. That was fun.

All in all, I've discovered that despite her bluntness, I really do like my aunt. What I don't like is my aunt and mother together. My mom gets much more, how do you say, aggressive? Attacking me for not doing chores well enough, making fun of the hair on my arm, saying I only want to go to Canada because it's cheaper, so on and so forth. Sigh.

Still, the reaction from my friend about the painting totally made my day. Maybe my week!

À demain,

Mlle Delphine

Surprise!

Bonjour mes amis,

I. Give. UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, it's not what you think, I promise. See, there's this birthday coming up for a close friend of mine that I've been working my butt off the past three weeks or so to prepare for. He, however, is very observant and knows me like no other, so I was terrified he'd realize something was up and the surprise wouldn't be as special. But he also happens to be the person I go to to talk about things when I'm sad or angry or happy and excited! You see my dilemma here? So, now I'm going to proceed to rant about how amazingly wonderful it is, and if it's at all possible that you (you know who you are!) happen to read my blog, you'd best be clicking a new link before I count to 10. Or I will be unhappy. You don't want to make me unhappy, do you???

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Oh my goodness, so at first I had NO FREAKING CLUE what I was going to do to make your birthday special. I have limited options seeing as you live so far away, and I wracked my brain for all sorts of different ideas, and yet nothing seemed fitting. Then one night on Facebook, I saw you mention wanting to get a new tattoo, a phoenix with Celtic knots. My readers, you don't know this, but I am an artist at heart. I've been drawing since I could pick up a pencil, but the past year I haven't managed to at all. Sure, doodles in my notebook, but nothing serious. I lacked motivation. And then I saw it: a bright red and orange phoenix shooting towards to stars with flames trailing behind its wings and tail, with the Celtic knots built into the bird itself. But it HAD to be in color, and I'm absolutely awful with my color mediums like colored pencils, markers, crayons, etc.

I also have a friend who has discovered she, too, is very artistic at heart, although she's been doing a lot of painting. So I decided that's how I would go about this project, although I've honestly never done much in the way of painting. Once or twice in elementary school, really was it. However, I get my visual artistic side from my father and he's always loved to watch that side of me grow, so when I was visiting him, I explained how I had this amazing idea for my new painting and I started telling him all about the colors and the design and everything. It worked. We ended up walking to my favorite art store ever, Wet Paint, and ended up spending way too much on paint supplies. We decided to settle on acrylics since I was pretty new to painting and oils take much longer to dry, not even taking into account how expensive oils are! There was also a big sale on canvas, so I got a box of ten for a great deal. (I love my stockpile of canvas sitting in my room, it's like it's waiting for me to get another idea.)

So then it began. Prior to this, all I had was a rough sketch. When I got home, I began working on transferring my rough sketch into a clean sketch to put on the canvases. Yes, canvases. See, I didn't exactly mention to my father I was planning on giving away this huge project of mine, so I'm making two. Sort of. I'll get to how that ended up later! (Edit: I never actually get to it later. Sorry, it'll come in the second post with the pictures!) But both sketches were on the two different canvases, fully complete about a week after I had started, only a few days before it was time to go to my father's house again. It was a grueling task, and I remembered why I hadn't found any motivation to draw anything in the past year. It's become too much work and not enough play. But finally, I got to start working with the paints.

I had to experiment quite a bit to figure out what I wanted to do. I had grown up hearing my dad talk about how it's better to have lots of thin layers than one thick layer, so that's what I tried to do. It was a slow process, although less painful than the sketching. After I had finished painting the bird's head, neck, and majority of its body, I was struggling to figure out how to give it a feathered appearance. Then I remembered what the woman in the art store had said....

*Wavey flashback*

She was still standing behind the counter, talking about the big options regarding different paints, "And Acrylics have some texture to them, you can really work with the paint."

*Wavey flashback ends*

That was it! I threw out my father's advice about the thin layers of paint and started mixing more paint together to get a small pool on the plate to dip the brushes into. I applied the colors with thick brush strokes, a little like Van Gough's Starry Night, and then would smooth out the edges to give it a bit of a softer, less dramatic look. This way of painting was fun. In a way, I sort of had my own impressionism revolution by breaking away from the rules about art I've learned. I was jumping away from drawing even though I was good at it, I was ignoring what my amazing artist of a father told me about painting, and I did what felt good to me. And you know what? It showed.

Not only did the painting start looking much more awesome and artistic, but I worked on it much more often and for longer periods of time because it was enjoyable. I finished about two weeks after I started, and I had spent an estimated 13 hours painting. During the process, I'd gotten paint quite literally everywhere. I had it smeared across my palm and elbow, I had paint on both of my cheeks, on my shoulder, under my nails, on my thighs and all over my clothing, carpet, and pillow that I'd been sitting on. But it was so much fun.

And now? The painting is finished. I bought his birthday card on Thursday, and mailed the present off on Friday. The expected arrival date is the 19th, which is perfect. The 19th is a Thursday, so it gives them two days for error before it could be late since his birthday is the 23rd, the following Monday. I am SO EXCITED! I love surprises and I really hope he likes it. I've shown several people a quick shot of the painting I took on my phone, and they've all been rather impressed, so I have a good feeling about this. Now I just have to hold up a little bit longer. I'm so tired of answering "pretty boring" or "I worked on some projects (implying homework projects. I don't like to lie!) today" when he asks how my day went. The painting is currently "IN TRANSIT TO E. SYRACUSE, NY US" and it's just a matter of waiting it out. I can keep my mouth shut a little longer... just a little longer.

And thank you, for rekindling the sleeping bed of coals into a living, breathing, raging, artistic flame.

À demain,

Mlle Delphine

P.S. I'll post a couple pictures here after I know he's gotten the present.

Mission gâteau individuel de paradis

Bonjour mes amis,

If you are not currently drooling at the image of the gâteau individuel to your left, you certianly should be. My friend, E, over at Upon A Whim has been mentioning this little bakery called Sweets Bakeshop she saw for a while now and has been wanting to stop inside. Unfortunately we weren't able to make the trip together because she left on her vacation today. I did, however, stop by with my father just a few minutes ago.

This cupcake is the one I tried, titled the "Peanutbutter Cup" quite simply, and the ones my father and brother had, "Black and White" and "Triple Chocolate" were also bluntly named. But why would you need to be creative with the name when the cupcake itself is heaven?

Now, I've had good food before, the kind where as soon as you see the chef you look to see if they're carrying the famous dish with them (alas, they usually are not). But these cupcakes have an entire league of their own. They also, unfortunately, have an entire price range of their own. Each regular sized cupcake is $3.00 a peice, and you can get mini-cupcakes for $1.50 each. As you can imagine, the mini-cupcakes are bite-sized.

This of course, has spurred me to go on a mission. I must find a way to recreate these divine wonders! The first thing I noticed was how fluffy and soft the icing (frosting?) was; it was sort of like the consistancy of whipped cream. I think I'll probably start with that.

E, when you get home, we have a lot of baking to do.

À demain,

Mlle Delphine

Money =/= Happiness

Bonjour mes amis,

While I realize this isn't the smartest idea, ranting here on this blog, as I have a link to it from my Facebook and my family has access to my Facebook... But I promised I'd write more and this is the only thing on my mind.

My family is big on bonfires. My mother and step-dad, anyways, and they decided that we were having one tonight. So at 7:30 when the sky was still bright blue, Jeff goes out and starts the fire and then drags us (my little sister and myself) out as well. Soon enough everyone has eaten and then is getting a little bored, so the little sister whines for someone to toss beanbags with her, and of course my step father agrees. Meanwhile, my mother and I get on the topic of college.

You see, I don't really run fresh ideas through my parents, I wait until I've thought them well over and they're pretty solid first, because I generally end up fighting for my ideas. Except, you know, I figured they'd be fighting about the Québec/Canada part... not the following-my-dreams part. Yep. My mother disapproves of me wanting to be a choir director. She thinks I should choose a job so I can be rich and "support myself." I understand this worry she has about me being poor, I mean, she's pretty much lived it her whole life and I see the way it stresses her out, but I'm also not going to be nearly as irresponsible with my money as she. It makes me thankful my father was the one who raised me.

Dad always raised me saying it's all about how happy you are with the job, not about the money. He wakes up every morning, hating his job SO much, but he always goes so that he can support not just himself but his four kids, two of which live with him even though they're adults. Don't worry, they pay rent. Or at least, one does, but that wasn't always the case. For a while my mother was out of the picture and he had to raise us on his own. God bless that man, raising four crazy children by himself!

I guess what I'm getting at, is this reminds me of a promise I made myself when I was younger. I told myself I could chase after any job in the whole world that I wanted, as long as it made me happy.

"Tout le monde m'avait dit que c'était impossible; moi, je leur ai répondu qu' « impossible n'est pas français » et puis je l'ai fait." (Everyone told me it was impossible. Me, I responded to them that "Impossible isn't French" and then I did it.)

And that's exactly what I intend on doing.

À demain,

Mlle Delphine