bye may! hi june.

herrroooo!

let's first discuss how much boston loves memorial day. 

they had 33,000 flags placed in the commons all weekend to represent every fallen service member from the civil war to the present. 

is this blowing your mind? this isn't even all of them. it's crazy to think how many people gave their life so that we can be free. 

i need you to know two things. 

1. i LOVE that little white house with that huge tree and pink flowers and i feel happy i get to walk past it everyday. 

2. i ate swordfish for the first time in my life and didn't hate it! not even a little bit. 

swordfish w/ banana rum chutney, avocado and tomato salad, and mashed sweet potatoes = a meal i still think about and it was like three weeks ago. 

okay i guess three things. 

3. natalie and i finally (after probably three months of trying) got our volunteer badges for the VA. 

we not only get to hang out with elderly vets but also get to feel like we are on alias. 

the last week of may consisted of lots of outside friend time, toscanini's ice cream, and this gal below:

but my face is sad because she moved back home to arizona which makes me SO sad. 

mel, come back!

can we talk about this guy for a second? 

i was cutting through harvard business school to go home around 10pm one night when the man above came up to me asking about where something was. he then somehow started talking about some app which then brought up something else which then brought up the fact that i am mormon which then led to us sitting at some outdoor table discussing it for over an hour.  he was kind of crazy and somewhat inappropriate in the types of questions he was asking but it felt nice to defend my faith and hopefully he listened to at least some of what i said. 

anyway.
the last week of may was graduation fest 2013 and there were SO many moms and dads and chairs everywhere. 

here is a story. 

so maybe one time i was trying on my one-piece swimsuit (trying to debate if it would make it's debute this year or not) when it started rain storming outside. i was so thrilled with this that i forgot i was in my swimsuit, immediately turned off my lights, turned on bon iver, laid on my bed, and just listened while i watched the lightening and pouring rain out my window. a few minutes later i looked down and thought it was the funniest that i was still in my swimsuit so i took these photos and awkwardly sent them to friend christine and am now posting them on this blog. the end. 

the temple is the greenest right now and it is the best. 

these houses are also the best. 

i was walking to my friend carly's catholic school kids pop recital and accidentally turned down the wrong street. i was way happy this happened because it was the most beautiful and lovely detour (and the best time of day i might add!). it was nice to discover somewhere new, it is one of my favorite things to do. 

one night i came home to find this. maybe i'm not good at those little sticky hangy things because they hate holding up this strand of lights. 

i walked into my boss' office to find three of our executives being match teams. so cute.  

one of my more favorite parts of spring = our parkway boyfriend is back! i need to not be in a car when i pass him one time so i can actually sit and talk with him. i just love him. 

can you spot the random spanish man asleep on our lawn? re-roofing our house is tiring i guess. 

the last night of may was spent with kristin, boston, and our bikes. 

if that is what my nights are like for the rest of the summer i definitely won't be mad about it. 

(and i don't know how many more times i can say it without sounding trite, I LIVE IN A DREAMLAND)

the next morning a few of us drove up to portsmouth new hampshire for lunch on harbor

then we drove a few more miles and BLAM! we were in kittery, maine. 

i think maine was born to be foggy and rainy, it was perfect. 

(if you look closely you can see a very iconic lighthouse on the tip of that land - there was another one too but i wasn't very good at taking pictures of them)

 

we only explored for a few hours but it was delightful. 

there is just so much to experience and see on the east coast! i'm glad i have friends who love to go and see new places just as much as i do because let's be honest, i've become an adventure addict. 

fall maaaagic

 just going through all these photos made me so sad. 

how did fall come and go so quickly?!

anyway. i could feel fall slipping through my fingertips so i requested that john and i have a saturday dedicated to doing fallish and new englandy things. saying he is a little burned out from all the summer excursions i dragged him on would be an understatement buuuut he consented and i was thrilled.

we decided i should just walk/take the t (subway) to his house since head of the charles (supposedly the world's largest two-day rowing event) was going on and traffic would be bad. this was actually a genius idea because then i got to walk through all of the head of the charles festivities and feel like i saw and did even more than originally planned for the day. 

somehow i missed the turn onto john's street and found myself at nathan tufts park. 

the thing about this park is that i drive past it every monday when i go pick up healthy snacks for my work and every time i pass it i tell myself i need to go there because it always looks great. well, it never happened until this day when i accidentally stumbled upon it and i was so happy to have the detour. the park is just magical. 

so two hours later (whoops) we were headed to an orchard i found that was on the way to our main destination. it was the prettiest drive with a million beautiful fall trees (and boston temple!), we couldn't get enough of it.

we then arrived at autumn hills orchard! there are lots of different orchards in massachusetts so i spent a good while researching which ones were better than others and i think we made a great choice. we were pretty much the only ones there since it was near the end of apple picking season so it felt like we had the orchard all to ourselves. one thing i liked about it was that it was set up on a hill so we could see a lot of northern mass (which is rare since it is pretty flat most of the time). i also liked that the trees were kind of wild and unkept, they felt very dr. seussish. it made for a picture perfect place to take a million photos/annoy john. he just loves it when i bring my camera places!

it turns out neither of us really like apples so after walking around we picked like two and then bought a few that looked nice and called it good. i also bought apple cider which was only $1.50 a quart! i also added in the picture above in case you wanted to see the last photo taken of me with a nice long pony because a few short days after the pony died. 

and thennn after apple picking in the woods time we drove up to new hampshire to attend the keene pumpkin fest - which happens to be the biggest pumpkin festival in america. our crazy friends we met at the topsfield fair told us about it and i decided right then and there that we were going to go because i guess i'm obsessed with superlatives 

anyway. we got there (by there i mean ten minutes away because we had to take a school bus shuttle into the town) and there were literally pumpkins eeeeverywhere. when we stepped off the bus i felt like i was in the town that hocus pocus was filmed in for some reason and just loved everything about this keene, new hamphsire place. we couldn't find any pumpkin themed food for awhile which made john thoroughly upset but luckily we found the guy some pumpkin chili, pumpkin cornbread, and a few other edible things which made everything right in the world again. give us food, festivals, and fall time and we are happy! 

 if everything else had failed us, seeing this gal would have been worth going

it was fun to see all the pumpkins lit up everywhere and now we get to say we went to the largest pumpkin festival in america! which we all know is the part i care about.

the night ended with us standing in line for a half hour to get back on a school bus to take us to our car. ..which i actually might have enjoyed and fulfilled some of my junior high dreams of sitting by a boy who liked me rather than some random person haha