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.
Guy and I took a quick business trip to Philadelphia in late December to look at some equipment for his shop. And while we were in that lovely city, we enjoyed the food and art a good bit!
We had a very relaxed and delicious breakfast at the Coffee House, went to see the equipment, toured a historical prison (Eastern State Penitentiary) - which was surprisingly interesting, had a lovely lunch at The Belgian Cafe (best vegetarian burger I have had in my life and LOVELY desserts). 
I really should have paid attention to the name of the street because while Philadelphia has beautiful murals on many walls, the one on that street was exceptional. The mural appeared to be a garden! It was a full block long and wrapped around the end of the block. It actually looked very life-like! (Also, notice the cobbled streets. Aren't those awesome?)
