Monday, December 31, 2018

Musings - December 2018

Here's the round up of the December. And I wish you a lovely turn of the year!
Books: There were several business trips but somehow I got a bit of reading in. (Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia.) 
- The Art of Social Media: Power Tips by Power Users by Guy Kawasaski and Peg Fitzgerald   - which held up pretty well to the current social media landscape but was obviously made to be a digital book as it had constant references to links that don't work off paper.
- Crimson Death by Laurell Hamilton which was about 300 pages too long. (It doubles as arm weights.) She really really needs an editor to help her get to the point. Less than 200 pages of it were in the location which was the point of the book.
- Your First 100: How to Get Your First 100 Repeat Customers by Meera Kothand was a quick digital read. (Go Kindle Unlimited!)

Gratitude: Travel. Communication. Gorgeous scented candles. The 4 non-whiny children. Pictionary. Time off. Perspective. Creating pretty things. 

Listening: Holiday music via Pandora. All the podcasts. Dave Ramsey podcasts. Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Susan Hyatt's Rich Coaches podcast.
Perfume:  I've been wearing the Carolina Herrerra body cream and Les Perfumes de Rosine Majalis while traveling. I love the cinnamon rose/honey scent of it. Most weekdays continue to be Dirtyque's Ofresia, which I have decided is entirely too light for winter. I may finish out the Majalis and then come back to it. 

Recipes: We made a ton of things for Thanksgiving! So, for Christmas, I bought food. Seriously. Local restaurant had a holiday catering menu. Since we were just back from Philadelphia and I was tired from the trip/driving, it was the perfect solution! I highly recommend delegating things that could stress you out of the season, and for me, this was one.

 Alright, full disclosure, I did make the Freezer Cobbler for dessert! This continues to be a big hit in our household - even beating out the fancy chocolate eclair pie that came with our Christmas dinner.


Self-Care: The soap love continues. Seriously, Cellar Door Bath Supply is just phenonmenal. I ordered them for small gifts (a clean start in 2019) for an event I hosted. AND... one of my friends gave me soap from a new area soap place!

I continued to try face oils on a schedule. Yes, specific oils for evening and morning. Every day. And... I'm pleased to announce that we have achieved a change! Someone I've known professionally for several years thought I was a full 10 years younger than I am. Go oils!

 Here's the day and night routine:
- Day -I'm sampling Juice Beauty's Stem Cellular  Anti-Wrinkle Booster Serum around the eyes. And I've gone back to being totally Juice Beuaty for the day. Serum, oil, eye cream, CC cream. While I like to experiment - that pretty much is my standard and it serves me very well. 
- Night - I've kept using  the layer of Predire Eye Care Ant-Aging Night Serum. (And NO, I did not pay retail for it! I picked it up for about 1/10th that price on a Vegas business trip last fall.) I'm still using Little Barn Apothecary oil  plus 100% Pure Multi-Vitamin serum. It's very active but not super moisturizing, so the night oil helps with that.

And... I've been trying out different bone-colored shadows and highlighters for the last 8 or 9 months trying to figure out what I like best in combination of what I have and wear regularly and in different seasons The trio included: a swipe shadow (technically a 5-in-1 BB Advanced Performance Cream Eyeshadow) from Bare Minerals and a powder shadow (Soul) from Bare Minerals as well as an Ilia illuminator called Moombeams and Polka Dots. The last two are my favorites for looking close to natural and still giving a little gleam. I am absolutely sold on the Ilia Beauty highlighter. It's amazing!
Things 12 said: We pass a place with animal statues on the way to Petsmart. (Yes, that's it.) We often joke about the statues we'd like to put in yard to challenge the dog's sense of rightness with the world. It has cows. She said she'd like to put them in our yard to ride. 

 When 18 and I tried to point out the cows are stationary since they are statues, she mentioned a tornado would allow her to ride the statue cows. And then she said she'd like to move to Florida so with the hurricanes the possiblity of her riding them happens more often. We (18 and I) saluted her intrepid rodeo spirit.


Watching: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel which is awesome but quite reminiscent of Amy Sheridan-Palladin's Gilmore Girls. (Plucky, pretty, blue-eyed heroine who comes from money and everyone's mysteriously amazed by her. Seriously make Lorelai a Jewish girl form the 1950's NYC and yes.) The Magicians is back and was a great holiday binge. Also, Travelers is back with Season 3! I'd thought it cancelled, so that was happy. 

 Holiday flash - We did a mini-movie marathon of the Pirates of the Caribbean. 


Random: 1) Guy and I know how to do a date day! (Envy us.) December the 22nd, we toured a closed factory to look for salvagable parts for his business, had a perfectly lovely lunch at The Belgian Cafe, then did a historical tour of an abandoned penitentary, and then to a science/history museum with dinner at a pub. Top that!
2) They might all be crazy. You may be the sane one. Or they might all be stuck in an old pattern that you are part of. You leaving may be the only way to change that. And, in the end, people who don't value you aren't your family anyway.


Take-away - Take a moment. Think about what brought you joy in 2018. Something that you can do more of. Make a plan, right now, on how to do that. Because, in the end, you are responsible for your joy.



Original musings posts you may enjoy:


All photos by moi! And you can tell...

Juice Beauty is a staple in my beauty cabinet. I stray, I try other things - but it's my favorite "foundation" (I used the CC Cream) and great skin care. If you like Juice Beaty too, here is a link. I do get a small commission (at no cost to you) when you use these links which helps support this blog.

- Skin Care by Juice Beauty
Follow my blog with Bloglovin  - A new way to follow!
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Sunday, December 2, 2018

Musings - November 2018

Hello! November is always my favorite month with Thanksgiving near the end. I hope yours was good!

 Ours was fantastic. I made all the things (pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, yeast rolls, corn muffins, yellow cake with blueberries and a lemon glaze, corn casserole, vegetarian dressing aka stuffing)! And then 12 made her famous deviled eggs and pigs-in-a-blanket. Guy took care of the roasted potatoes, ham, and turkey plus made something called "spicy tomato fritters". We also put out a bag salad which was fairly well-received- mostly because I felt like we needed more food without butter and bread as the main components.

 Books: It was a fantastic month for reading! I finished 10 books over the month, thanks to the holiday and catching "plague":

- The Colony by John Tayman   - this was the book I picked up from the Puerto Rican book exchange at the hotel last month. It was dense reading, as many good non-fiction books are! It was filled with personal accounts of the leper colony on Hawaii.
- The Divine Secrets of the YA-YA Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells  - which I'm late the party on and have never seen the movie. It was a very enjoyable read from my local Little Free Library and made me want to hunt down the other 2 books! (Which are sadly not on Kindle Unlimited.)
- Lynchpin by Shannon Mayer via my Kindle Unlimited which was not super exciting or illuminating but I'm a finisher.
- While I had plague, I ran through the whole Blood singer series by CT Adams after finding Book 5 at the local Little Free Library the week before. Thanks to the awesome digital option - I was able to download the others to my Kindle for instant gratification. (Blood Song, Siren Song, Demon Song, The Isis Collar, The Eldritch Conspiracy, To Dance with The Devil, and All Your Wishes.) 

With these books, I've clocked in 54 books for the year! And there is a month - with business travel and a week off - of the year to go! One of my friends suggested counting how much I read a year to see if I read one book per week, a common goal; I'd never done that before and my reading tends to ebb and flow as I have time. These results are surprising to me. If asked, I'd have said I didn't have time to read that much! 

Gratitude: Time with family and friends. New ventures. Guy's ingenuity. Family adventures. Remembering self-care. 

Listening: All the podcasts. Dave Ramsey podcasts. Chalene Johnson's podcast. Bacon Marketing podcast (yes, by the guy from last month's book.). Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Susan Hyatt's Rich Coaches podcast. Hirsh Marketing (which I ended up unsbscribing to due to lack of meaningful content).

Perfume:  Diptyque's Ofresia. It's  reminiscent of a garden but I'm not sure I like it for "winter" . And I've been using that Carolina Herrara lotion, Good Girl, for quick days. (I'm so stuffed up I can't smell. So, I've been careful about using fragrance sparingly.)

Recipes: We made a ton of things for Thanksgiving! (See above for the list - here's a quick shot of the stove the day of as I baked.) I didn't create anything new but we tried vegetarian stuffing (dressing but not in the bird) and yeast rolls - those were new and well received.

Earlier in the month, we made Day of the Dead bread due to 13's interest in his Spanish class. I had not worked with yeast in a while. He did not realize how patient he would have to be. It was good exercise for him. (And why we had yeast rolls for Thanksgiving - I had left-over yeast packets to use up.)

 And I made up "bottom of the refrigerator salad": shredded broccoli stem, cut up raw brussel sprouts, shredded carrots. Topped with chickpea crumbles, red pepper and tomato. Dressing: orange juice, ranch dressing and a bit of horseradish. Super nutritous and filling!


Self-Care: Last month I mentioned my slight soap obsession (hello, Villainess Soaps). Well, I opened up the full sizes with Pearl Diver in September and Krakatoa in October. This month I popped over to a different brand, Michigan-based, Cellar Door Bath Supply Company. Let's start with awesome ingedients, beautifully packaged, and the hands-down BEST confirmation email I've ever seen. (I loved them so much - and they are such a great price point - I gave a number of them away as gifts.) 


And this month I finished out my favorite  (sale) mask and the Lumene cream while I continued to try face oils on a schedule. Yes, specific oils for evening and morning. Every day. It's a continuation of last month with just a few additions and a switch out. For the month. I grouped them in the top photo by day and night:
- Day -I'm sampling Juice Beauty's Stem Cellular  Anti-Wrinkle Booster Serum around the eyes. And I've gone back to being totally Juice Beuaty for the day. Serum, oil, eye cream, CC cream. While I like to experiment - that pretty much is my standard and it serves me very well. 
- Night -Same as last month until I ran out of  Lumene Vitamin C night cream mid-month. I've kept using  thelayer of Predire Eye Care Ant-Aging Night Serum. (And NO, I did not pay retail for it! I picked it up for about 1/10th that price on a Vegas business trip last fall.) And I'm still using Little Barn Apothecary oil. The  substitution is the 100% Pure Multi-Vitamin serum. It's very active but not super moisturizing, so the night oil helps with that.

And I'm loving Kismet's Country Roads lipstick for color!


Things 12 said: Well she didn't say much funny because she was sick for a bit - but she kindly passed it on! And it took me O-U-T for better than a week. 


Watching: 007 is back on Hulu. (Hello.) And I hadn't caught up with this year's Criminal Minds. But now I have! I also found the perfect "plague" binge - Schitt's Creek is light and funny. I'm 2 seasons in!

Random: 12 and I were supposed to go to a glass class but she had basketball (she's trying out for 7th grade basketball, even though she's only in 6th grade) so, I took 13 to the glass class. After he got over being the only male in the class, we had fun. We made some awesome ornaments!

Take-away - Let it go. Because whatever happened, it wasn't about you. It was about them. When you hold it, you allow them to anchor you down. (See post from my book on the left.) 



Original musings posts you may enjoy:


All photos by moi! And you can tell...

Juice Beauty is a staple in my beauty cabinet. I stray, I try other things - but it's my favorite "foundation" (I used the CC Cream) and great skin care. If you like Juice Beaty too, here is a link. I do get a small commission (at no cost to you) when you use these links which helps support this blog.

- Skin Care by Juice Beauty
Follow my blog with Bloglovin  - A new way to follow!
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