What Type of Bitch are YOU?

Have you seen this yet?! My friend Veronica posted this link on her gmail status. I'm so glad she did because I probably would not have come across it otherwise. Apparently, it's made its rounds on the internets, so you may or may not have seen it. If you haven't, behold the hilarity of 3rd graders: a list of types of bitches.

Seriously. This is why I freakin' love kids. They're so real, so unforgiving, so I don't give a f*ck. Punk ass kids are the best. Let's be real, you were a punk ass kid once. I know I was. I've talked mad shit back in my day, acting like I could back it up. This list took me back to those punk ass kid days. Please, do yourself a favor and read them all.

{Images via the original post for this list}

I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm a combination of Bitch #25, #29, #37, #64, and #89. I really do love my hair (Bitch #25), but I only wash it a couple times a week (Bitch #64). I can get pretty cray-cray (Bitch #29). You're lucky if you can get me to wear something other than gym clothes every day (Bitch #37), and hey! I'm a shorty (Bitch #89). These kids were so on point. I love it.

Your turn. Humor me, pleeease. What type(s) of bitch are you?

Curtains Make All the Difference

The husband and I celebrated this Easter weekend by decorating (woo hoo!) In my last home improvement post I mentioned our boring white blinds that came with our home. They looked like this:

We no like.

Those blinds annoyed the hell out of me. I've been wanting curtains since for.ev.er. Actually, I would have taken anything over those pieces of fug. In the end, we went with the curtains.

The only problem is that this particular window in our loft is abnormally long. It's way longer than the maximum lengths that the standard rod sets come in. We had to get creative at Home Depot. It involved purchasing the wooden rods individually, cutting them to size, and screwing them together to achieve our desired length. The rest of the rod components were purchased individually.

We hung two sets of curtains: sheer white ones from Bed Bath & Beyond hang closest to the window, and more decorative curtains from Anthropologie hang in front.

Muuuch better.

La Boda: Getting Ready Time

The morning of our wedding was pretty chill compared to the night before. Sadly, I don't have any pictures of the mess that was our home the day before our wedding because we were busy running around like mad persons. Suffice it to say that I did not meet my DIY deadline, and ended up finishing our programs with Mr. Tortolito like at 11pm the night before our big day. Luckily, everything got done and the stress was manageable, but still. It was hectic.

We are forever indebted to our homies and day-of coordinator for their help the day before. My awesome friend Gloria came over and let us fill up her car with cases and cases of soft drinks and Jarritos (wait, did she come the night before our wedding, or two days before? Shiz..I'm already forgetting things!) Anyway, THANKS GLORIA. Our bar would have not been stocked with Mexican coca colas and Jarritos without your support. Our other awesome friend, Anthony, also came over to help us load our day-of coordinator's 4 Runner with loads of wedding crap. I really wish I would have taken a picture of that 4 Runner because, holy crap, it looked like they were going camping for two weeks.

{Note: Our day-of coordinator was aaamazing! Not only did she let us fill her truck to its capacity with wedding stuff, but she helped me assemble our macaroon favors and stored them in her fridge at her house all night. She probably had to empty her fridge because we had so many of those damn favors, but she made it happen. She exceeded all of our expectations. On the real: anyone looking for a day-of coordinator in the Southern California area get in touch with me for her info. She's just starting out her business and is really affordable, by the way.}

Anywho, after the insanity that was Friday Mr. Tortolito and I checked into our rooms at the Westin Bonaventure in downtown LA around midnight.

{Westin Bonaventure Hotel}
Foto courtesy of the ever-talented bro-in-law Tortolito who really needs to buy himself a nice camera so he can keep taking pretty pictures.

My sister and cousin came over to spend the night with me. Mr. Tortolito stayed all by his lonesome self. Oh, and we hadn't eaten a thing since like 2pm that day, so I snuck over to Mr. Tortolito's room shortly after checking in to take a bite of some crappy room service food which probably tasted like poo, but was heavenly after not having eaten all day. After getting our rooms, grabbing a bite to each, and kissing my groom-to-be goodnight, things were smooooth sailing.

I woke up with my ladies around 5am that morning. The hair and makeup ladies were set to arrive around 6am, but of course were late (due to my Mom having to get her hair and makeup done over in their city before they headed out to LA aaand of course my Mom was late to her 5am appointment). Thanks, Mom! No worries, though. We had scheduled plenty of time to get everyone ready and we didn't run behind schedule at all.

{First picture of the day! My sister and cousin are going to love that I just posted a picture of us in our I-just-woke-up faces.}

So basically, there was a lot of this going on (see below). We cuddled and ate oatmeal while waiting for people to get to the room. I wanted to drink coffee, but fought the desire because I was already a little nervous and coffee makes me even more of a nervous wreck.

Finally, Isabel (my hair lady) and Connie (makeup lady) arrived and they got to work. Mr. Tortolito's mom was first. She really had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Mr. Tortolito's little sister (and our junior bridesmaid) was next:

Some of the other bridesmaids opted to do their own hair/makeup. Again, there was more lounging going on.

My little sister (and maid of honor) is a diva and had her own hair lady come in to do her rockabilly hairstyle. Luckily, we had two bathrooms in our suite and they did their hair thang in there.


Soon enough, it was time to get my makeup done.

Sooo, I kinda have a confession to make: I wasn't in love with my makeup and I sorta wish I would have invested more time in looking for a professional make up artist. I slacked on this area of the planning and booked my makeup lady based on a personal reference. She was a friend of a friend, and I felt bad not booking her. I did a trial with her and everything, which I also didn't love. I trusted that she would do a better job on our wedding day - which she did!- but I still didn't love it. On the bright side, I saved major dinero by not booking a professional. Plus, she was a really sweet lady and had a really fun personality. Really, in the grand scheme of things it did not matter. At all. No one else noticed that I didn't like my makeup. No one told me that it looked bad. But of course I am my worst critic, and I know I've had better makeup days. Oh wells! It didn't take away from the happiness of this day, so I guess it doesn't matter much. Just thought I'd put it out there.

Up next: Isabel works her hair magic. My hair lady is the shiz. I've been going to her for all my important hair days for the past 9 years or so, and she has never let me down.

Before leaving, she showed my sister how to secure my veil in my updo. We still had a couple hours before leaving to church, and Isabel had to leave before that.

{The end result.}

Note: we didn't have our professional photographers arrive during the entire getting-ready time because we had such a big gap of time between getting-ready and getting to the church. All of the pictures shown here are from our own personal cameras. Not to fret - I've got some prettier pics coming up in the next installment.

Overall, we had a great morning. I was more excited than I was nervous, and was surrounded by people that I love. Can't ask for much more, right?

Ghetto Stiletto

My thighs are on fiiiire today! Why? Cuz I spent last night droppin it low at dance class. In stilettos.

Have you ever danced in stilettos? It's not all that bad right? At least not for the first couple hours. It's a little tricky, but manageable. How about performing choreography in stilettos? Well, it's a bit more of a challenge. Fun, nonetheless.

So, the instructor for this class is a full grown man at a level of fabulousness that someone like me can only dream of achieving. Observe:

{Apollo Sadeek}

He can also work a pair of 4 inch heels better than me or my friends.

The class started out with basic stretches. Also in stilettos. Try bending down to touch your toes wearing those 4 inchers. Yeeeah, not so easy anymore. Warm-up continued with across the floor walks. Apollo showed us how to do the "business walk," "model walk," "ghetto walk," and "come & get it walk," all of which he executed flawlessly. I, of course, nearly suffered from a sprained ankle when I almost lost my balance doing the model walk. I have so much to learn from you, Apollo. Check it:


{Note that this is not our class, just an example that I found via YouTube}

We learned some choreography to Telephone by Lady Gaga and Beyonce. The class was taught super fast, though! I spent most of the time in the back row trying to follow Apollo and the better dancers' leads. As much as I sucked, it was really just a fun experience. Apllo emphasized mostly on the performance aspect of dancing. It wasn't about hitting all the right moves, but enjoying yourself and working it. It's not like I dance for a living anyway, so really it was just for fun. And we had a blast!

Wanna check out the vid? Note how I am in the back row trying to keep up and be as fab as Apollo.



What do you think of being ghetto in stilettos? Would any other dancing types out there try this type of class?

Pintando La Casita

This past weekend and the better part of this week was spent taking on a home project that we've been dying to get done: painting our casita. We actually wanted to paint when we got the place a year and a half ago, but our time and budget was already stretched to its max with the whole wedding planning going on. We decided to postpone painting indefinitely. During this whole time I hated our white walls. They were so boring! We needed color, personality, style.

Finally, we decided that it was time. I had Spring Break coming up, and Mr. Tortolito had some vacation days to use. It was the perfect opportunity to tackle the painting project. When we first started looking for colors, we were leaning more towards bold, earthy tones. We def wanted some mango, browns, maybe some red. Then the hubby found this color palette from Sherwin Williams. It's so "us" - we loved it:

{via Sherwin Williams}

With these colors in mind, we headed to our nearest Sherwin Williams to stock up on paints. We made one more pit stop at Lowe's for supplies and we were good to go! Except, we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We don't have any experience painting walls or homes, or anything like that so we had no clue how labor intensive this project would be. And let me tell you - it was a lot of freakin' work! I'm not complaining; it was really a fun experience more than anything, but we were completely drained after 5 days of taping walls, trimming, painting a first coat, painting a second coat, removing tape, re-taping, fixing mess-ups, moving furniture, cleaning up etc. Ay ay ay... It left us with zero desire to repeat this process anytime soon, but we love our casita so much more now.

{Mr. Tortolito hustlin'}

Wanna see the results?

{Kitchen: before}

{Kitchen: after}

{Hallway: before}

{Hallway: after}

{Bedroom wall: before}

{Bedroom wall: after}

{We threw in a red wall, for good measure}

The best part of it all was how little it cost us to do the job ourselves. Mr. Tortolito had some Lowe's gift cards he got hooked up with at work that covered the cost of nearly all of our painting supplies. We spent about $250 on paint and extra supplies we ended up needing. Compared to the $1,500+ that we had been quoted by other painters, we saved a considerable amount I think! Not to mention, we got a good arm workout for 5 days straight. ;)

Now that our walls are all painted up it's time to move on to more exciting projects: decorating them! Up first is changing those hideous window blinds that came with our loft (I hate them!) But that's a project that will have to wait for another time.

La Boda: Rehearsal Dinner

I'm gonna go ahead and start on these wedding recaps before I really forget all of the details. It's been 4 months since, but better late than never no?

Confession: Mr. Tortolito and I were late to our own wedding rehearsal. We had just sent out an email to our wedding party a few days before asking them to please not be late and give themselves enough time to navigate through LA traffic, and we had the nerve to show up late. We were mortified as we walked into the quiet church while everyone was sitting, waiting patiently for the soon to be bride and groom to arrive. EMBARRASSING. It wasn't entirely our fault, though. Things happen. We were ready on time and had every intention of not being late. We got picked up from our home, I gave my driver bad directions, we got stuck in traffic, and, well, it was just one of those things. I will forever be embarrassed about this, but I think our wedding party still loves us cuz they showed up to our wedding. And they got pretty gifts from us that night, so there.

We had our rehearsal and dinner the Thursday before our wedding because we wanted to give ourselves Friday to take care of last minute things. After a late start, the rehearsal went fine. The church coordinator gave us instructions, told us where to sit/stand, people practiced their readings. Nothing too exiting. Afterward, we headed out with our families and wedding party to the nearby Bacaro LA, a wine bar.

{Inside Bacaro LA. Foto from yelp}

Of course, I was too occupied with other things to even think of taking pictures (boo!) Luckily, bro-in-law Tortolito took pictures that night, so all the pictures I have here are courtesy of him.

{Ceiling made out of wine bottles}

The rehearsal dinner was awesome, thanks mainly to those joining us and the atmosphere of Bacaro. The restaurant is pretty tiny, and we had it all to ourselves. The service was great, the food was deelish, and the wine was flowing.

I don't have very many pictures of our food, but trust me. It was GOOD. Everything was served tapas style. We had assorted Crostinis, caprese salad, grilled honey thyme chicken, hanger steak, and margherita pizza (pictured below). For dessert we had a Nutella Panino with strawberries - yum!!


After enjoying our dinner, Mr. Tortolito and I walked around and mingled with our peeps, gave toasts, and celebrated the fact that we were getting married in two days.

{We laughed}

{We hugged}

{We posed for pictures with our loved ones}

I realized that I never got around to writing about the gifts we gave to our wedding party. For the dudes, we gifted them a humidifier and cigar set, complete with a bad ass cigar torch (the tool-looking thing on the right)

For my girls, a pearl necklace:


Overall, the night was a success. I wish we could party and get together with our loved ones like this more often. I guess that's one of the best things about planning a wedding: having these type of opportunities and sharing special moments surrounded by the most important people in your life.

Lazy Sunday

I've been swamped with school and home projects lately, and this weekend was no exception. I'm in the middle of midterms so I spent most of the weekend studying. Just my luck, Sunday was such a gorgeous day here in LA (albeit a bit cold) that I couldn't resist taking a study break. So we threw on our jackets, grabbed Lola's leash, and headed out on a family outing.


One of our favorite things to do in the city is go for walks. There are so many cool spots to see in downtown and I think that walking is one of the best way to experience it all. On Sunday we took a stroll through Little Tokyo, and then headed north to the Placita Olvera (aka Olvera Street). I've loved visiting this place ever since I was a little one. This little Mexican corridor is so quaint and has so much character. It's def very touristy, but it's nice to visit once in a while. You can also score some good Mexican food on the cheap. Had we not given up meat for lent, Mr. Tortolito and I would have for sure indulged in some tacos de carne asada.


We ended up sitting at the plaza doing our fair share of people watching, all the while wishing we were in Mexico at one of the real plazas. I can't wait to plan another trip to our beloved Mexico sometime soon.

We enjoyed some horchata and tried to keep Lola from running after strangers.

Lola was quite the attention-grabber throughout our little outing. Makes sense, though. How can you not love her adorable pug face?