best blog award

Angie from Wildfire Memories awarded me the Best Blog Award! Go check her out!  This one works a little differently:

Rules upon receiving this award are 
1) Mention and link who passed you the award
2) Answer the following questions
3) Share seven facts about yourself 
4) Award 15 blogs. 

So here goes!

1. What's your favorite color?
That's a little tough, since I love colors now.  But I will always have a special place in my heart for highlighter yellow.  At the moment, I am really loving true orange.
2. What's your favorite song?
"Happy Up Here" by Royksopp.  It's my ringtone, too.  I listen to it on repeat when I work out and imagine my senior thesis collection walking down the runway to it.  Makes running go by a lot faster.
3. What is your favorite dessert?
CHOCOLATE.  But to be more specific, tiramisu has always been my favorite.  Up there with it is anything that combines chocolate with peppermint.
4. What's pissing you off?
Nothing.
5. Black or white?
White.
6. When you're upset you ...
get online and look at recipes for hours.  However I also do this when I'm perfectly happy, bored, or hungry.  Mostly hungry.
7. Biggest fear?
Here goes: spiders, drains, air vents, heaters, pipes, air conditioners, boiler rooms, big machines, clowns.
8. What is perfection?
I don't think perfection exists, but I saw a movie once where the characters were trying to describe the difference between infatuation and love (one character was infatuated with another).  Infatuation was described as thinking that person was perfect.  Love was described as knowing they're not, but finding them so anyway.  I think that is a way of perfection - just being at peace with everything, and still being blissfully happy.  Or if we are talking about a material perfection, knowing when to stop perfecting something and being happy with it regardless.  But it's different for everyone.
9. Guilty pleasure?
If we're talking about food, twinkies.  My neighbor used to slip them to me and my sister as kids and we loved them.  For someone who values natural, local food, I just can't give up a twinkie. 

Seven-facts-about-me time.  I hope I can come up with more!

1. I have always loved banana-flavored things.

2. When I want to spend some quality "me time", I paint my nails.  It's the perfect relaxation activity that's somewhat pampering, but doesn't take up a lot of time.  I do this while I watch the Food Network, almost exclusively, when Giada is on.  All other shows I'm on my laptop during, giving half-attention.  But Giada?  Full attention!  I plan to work my way through her cookbook one day that I got for Christmas.

3. I really want to try veganism but I could never give up cheese.

4. Today I am going to the botanical gardens of Park Slope!  So expect a TON of pictures.  Lately I've been fascinated with gardening (got some new vegetable garden blogs on my watch list - I'll include them below) and I would love to try an apartment garden.  You can get pretty creative with milk crates and wine boxes.  And it just seems so YUMMY.  (I've attached the book that I want below


5. I've been learning a lot about myself here in New York.  With regards to fashion, I've decided I don't want something big.  When describing it to my mom, I found the perfect way: like when Tim Gunn visits the final 3 designers at their homes, and they just work in one room by themselves and produce the samples for a collection.  That's what I want - a tight knit team, and I would love to be the designer (the preliminary research, sketching and swatching is my favorite part of the process.  Especially the research.)  The other thing I have learned is that I wish I could identify with a religion.  I never fully connected to Catholicism because I believe anyone can get married, and I am also not sure on how I believe the creation of the Earth went down - but a more natural process is in my mind (Big Bang Theory).  I took a silly online quiz that was actually quite informative, saying that I have mostly humanistic ideas (natural world, naturally created, actions guided by physics and reason) but I still gravitate towards supernaturalism in some ways (I do think there is something out there, but I just don't know what - if enough people believe they are unhappy, they become so, like an energy that overtakes them.  Maybe enough people just believe that something is guiding them, and an energy is created that buzzes around us and gives us security - but who knows.)  So I've been reading up on religions a lot.  I don't expect to ever find something and practice, but maybe it will help me solidify my own believes.  I have always wanted to take a theology course, I think it would be fascinating.

6. Since that one was so long, here's a short one.  I'm planning on knitting a blanket for real this year (I always say this).

7. My damaged, once-straightened-all-the-time ends are almost completely grown out.  I never thought this day would come.  It's amazing how it makes the entirety of my hair look so healthy now, like it's new.  And my ends are actually soft.  I'm telling you, if you are a slave to the straightener put it down and embrace your natural hair.  It quite seriously changed my life in a way.

My 15 blogs I want to award:

(I'm going to do a bad thing and possibly make this award die out because I've already recommended away EVERY blog I read in the past awards.  So I'll give you a few, bigger ones that I think you would like and maybe haven't seen because they aren't fashion blogs!)

Style Me Pretty - my go-to wedding blog.  The photography is amazing, and because budgets don't seem to be a thing for these couples they have the most incredible locations, clothes, accessories, food ...
Brooklyn Farm - quite simply, a blog from a community farm plot here in Brooklyn.  Beautiful photographs, short-but-sweet descriptions, and it's really fun to follow the farmers as they clean the garden, plant new seeds, and harvest/cook their crops for group dinners (plus Farmer No. 1 and Farmer No. 2 got married).
Local Kitchen - a favorite food blog of mine.  Recipes all include storage information, seasonal information, and just general deliciousness.  You can learn so much from this blog (check out her recipes section for the biggest compilation of amazing preserves you've ever seen).
Naturally Curly - because I mentioned "going natural" with my hair, here's the site from which I learned everything I know today.  If you have curly hair, this is your bible.
Taste Spotting - THE best recipe database, period.  This is where I get almost every recipe I use (Food Network and family recipes are of course the exception) because every recipe has been filtered through a panel and approved before appearing to you.  I apologize in advance for the multitude of hours in your life you will now no longer get back because of the time you will spend on this site.

Enjoy!