pictures Archives • wholly margaret

busy bee

Oh hello there.

It has been a busy week!! How busy, you may ask? Well, all of these things happened in the past week:

I accepted a second part-time job {that I am SUPER excited about}
I worked a Christmas Eve closing shift at the coffee bar {people get a little, um, difficult to deal with around the holidays…}
Ben & I flew to DC on Christmas morning to see my family
We had a packed 3 day trip that included lots of food, movies, & sitting around the table and telling stories
We flew back to Dayton, & with delays, didn’t get back home until 1:30am
I worked the next day
We unpacked & packed up again…
Aaaand now we’re in Cleveland for 3 days visiting some of Ben’s family!

So yeah, just a little busy.

My mom & sister

Visiting the Arlington National Cemetery

I’m looking forward to starting my new job next week and hopefully finding a good routine to settle into. One of my favorite Christmas presents that I received was an Ink & Volt planner – I have loved planners for as long as I can remember – and I’m excited to use it in the new year. I have a gut feeling that 2017 will be a year full of change and growth and exploration. I think it’ll be a year of being busy and I just can’t wait.

The lost photos of Ireland

Two years ago, I was lucky enough to spend the summer living and interning in Dublin, Ireland. It was an unforgettable few months and I miss the city every day! If I could live there again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Being surrounded by the beautiful green countryside, friendly people with great accents, and a city full of life was incredible – I felt so alive in Ireland. But anyways, enough of me professing my love for the country.

After my program ended, Ben came to visit me for a week and we took trip allllll the way around the coast of Ireland, stopping each night at a B&B in a different town. It was magical. And what made it even more magical was that he proposed to me right in the middle of the trip, on August 6th, at the Cliffs of Moher! It was a complete surprise and he even hired a photographer to capture the moment. (another anniversary in August!)

Ben Margaret- 9 — Credit to http://michellebgphotography.com/

I loved having those photos of us, and I took photos with my DSLR the whole trip as well – it’s so nice to have those to look back on, and to have prints of them around the house. Like all millennials, we have lots of phone pictures too, but the quality of those just can’t compare. On top of all of those photos, that took me so long to go through, it turns out that we have even more Ireland photos – from Ben’s camera!

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TMAYW: The Venue

This is a part of a series of blog posts about my wedding and the planning process, called Tell Me About Your Wedding (TMAYW) – to catch up, view all of the posts here.

Personally, I think that the venue is a pretty key part to a wedding. Your venue will give off a certain vibe to your guests, and sets the mood. If that’s important to you, like it was to us, then you’ll want to put a lot of thought into where you get married.

For us, once we settled on the location, everything really started to fall into place. I can’t tell you how many venues I considered, but I’m fairly sure I came across just about every wedding venue in DC and Virginia (and even Maryland) during my search! I used WeddingWire, The Knot, Facebook, Instagram, numerous wedding blogs, and even plain old Google to look for wedding venues. I typed up lists, made a binder, and scratched out overview pages on every venue we were seriously considering. I sent tons of inquiry emails, got freaked out over prices, and in the end, only visited about four wedding sites. The tours were exciting, since they let us imagine all of the possibilities of each unique site, but I definitely felt the pressure of expectations from some of the event managers. Not to say we felt pressured into making any rash decisions, but they all clearly have deadlines and want to book their sites up as quickly and smoothly as possible. As it turned out, we had what was considered a short timeline for planning, mostly due to the time of year we got married (August) and the in-demand location (DC area). I mean really though – a year is a short timeline?! The wedding industry has a bit of a skewed point of view, but more on that later…

Continue reading “TMAYW: The Venue”

Summer adventures, continued

Some noteworthy that have happened since my last blog post:

Day trip to Connemara and Galway with friends

This included a lot of sitting on a very bouncy bus, with stops at a peat bog, Kylemore Abbey (so beautiful it looks fake), an hour long cruise from Killary Harbor around Ireland’s only fjord, a tiny little town where I got a handmade leather wallet, and an hour in Galway city (where we could’ve spent a lot more time!). Overall, it was a good trip! (PS – I haven’t edited ~~all~~ any of the photos from my nice camera, so a lot of these are just quick phone snapshots!)

Lots of legroom on the bumpy bus!

Selfie in a peat bog

Selfie with the Kylemore Abbey

Spent time drinking delicious tea and reading

Some days after work, I spent some time sitting in Bewley’s Cafe or in the friendly, hip Accents Coffee & Tea Lounge, sipping on tea and reading. While I’ve been here, I finished Looking for Alaska by John Green. It was a quick read and was well written for a young adult novel (his debut novel as well!), but I had a hard time connecting with the characters. I didn’t really like any of them, and felt annoyed with the narrator (a 16/17 year old boy) most of the time. The ending of the book was the kind that gave me goosebumps because it closed out the story so well, and the story itself was pretty gripping, but I just didn’t come away from the book with a great overall feeling. John Green gets a lot of praise for being a great YA lit author (and a lot of hate/criticism, some of which I really agree with), but this book just didn’t live up to the hype for me. It’ll be interesting to see the movie version of it! I am now reading It’s Not Yet Dark by Simon Fitzmaurice. It’s already incredibly moving and powerful!

At Accents with a vanilla chai latte – I sat here for a good three hours, just reading!

Tea time at Bewley’s

Went to Longitude Festival with my friend Sara

My boss was kind enough to let me take a half day on a Friday to go to the Longitude Festival out in Marlay Park! My friend Sara and I had looked at tickets for it earlier in the summer, since we both love Bastille and they were playing on the main stage, but had decided back then that the tickets were too pricey. One week before the festival, we impulsively decided to go! Bastille doesn’t tour around the US very often, so this was a great opportunity to see them. We left Dublin via coach bus around 2pm, and spent the day watching new (to us) bands perform and getting excited about Bastille. The set-up for the festival at the sprawling Marlay Park was awesome – there were different stages tucked in random wooded fields and there were tons of delicious food stands. It was forecasted to rain that day, but it was barely even cloudy – we lucked out! Bastille was excellent (aside from the tall annoying man standing in front of me) and they’re even better live than they are on their album. I also discovered Hudson Taylor, a brother duo from Dublin who perform folksy-indie original songs that make me very happy to listen to! It was a long day, and we got back to Dublin around 11:30pm after a lot of walking, but it was definitely time and money well spent!

Longitude main stage

Hudson Taylor!

Delicious veggie wrap

BASTILLE

Ben Howard

Me and Sara!

But wait, there’s A LOT more!

A little update – with photos!

What would a blog post be without a ton of photos?

I’ve been taking quick snapshots almost every day I’ve been here – of things that catch my eye in the city, of cafes I’m starting to love, of my lunch, a latte, or just anything I think would be worth sharing with those I love back home. I have been uploading them in big chunks to Facebook, but am realizing that there’s a lot of my time here in Dublin that hasn’t yet been recorded on my blog! Instead of slowly back-tracking and writing blog posts on things that happened two weeks ago, I’m just going to do a serious photo-dump, complete with lots of captions. Be warned, the photos were all taken with my iPhone, so they’re not great quality. Hopefully it will give you (whoever you are) a bit of an idea of what my month in Dublin has been like so far!

One thing that I had been really looking forward to trying out was the Dublin Unitarian Church. Here are some pictures from my first visit: