I wanted to get in on the action and do a gift guide for this holiday season. This is a quick roundup of my favorite things right now and things I’m coveting.
Invented Charm Posts
We are half way through November! I wanted to check in with how I’m doing on the fall I designed. Have you tried this out yet? I’ve written about it multiple times (here and here), but it’s a subject that I still really love. It’s a tip I learned from the Happier podcast with Gretchen Rubin. I get such satisfaction from making a plan and sticking to it.
1. Enjoy the season by going to an apple farm or pumpkin patch with my family.
We took Rory to a small apple farm in one of the next towns over. It was quiet and had a little playground, and was a quick and easy outing. We could have stopped there, but we upped our game and went to Apple Hill in Placerville, CA this weekend!
It is something I grew up doing and I LOVE IT. It allows me to go wild and buy tons of apples and apple products.
If you want to look at actually stunning Apple Hill photos (and not my quick, unskilled and unedited ones), check out this post about Apple Pantry Farm from Farm Tots and peruse the apple hill tag for other great posts.
Leave a CommentI’ve slowed down to almost a stop on blogging. Not because I had some plan to, but I suppose I’m just living the fall I designed. I’ve been busy with a toddler and a home that’s in a constant state of flux.
We traveled for Nick’s work last week, and that wore me out. When we got home from the trip Nick thought it would be a good time to drill holes in the wall to run the A/V cables properly. The house feels like a danger zone.
This week there’s Halloween, and I’m prepping to start National Novel Writing Month. Again.
I’m looking through my files and I realized I’ve participated since 2007 off and on. I think I missed 2014 and 2016. I was pregnant in 2014 and in 2016 we had our house on the market and were in the process of moving. I somehow managed to “win” during years I was buying my first house and moving, changing jobs, and facing health crises. I also participated but didn’t “win” for many years.
There’s no real trick to writing and completing a novel in thirty days. It’s simply a matter of math—knowing how much time you have to write and getting your words done—but there is magic. I always feel a kind of electricity when I’m writing, the flow of words to screen or pen to paper. Now that my life is fuller than ever I have gotten better about channeling that energy and turning it off and on. I used to spend so much time during Nano just spinning my wheels, not knowing what I wanted to say, and typing words simply to get to 1,667 per day. Some years I just stopped because I couldn’t get the words to come out at all or I wasn’t willing or able to find the time.
I feel like this year will be different. I have better tools at my disposal—ten years of novel writing experience, knowing how to work in fits and starts, a voice that’s ready to be heard, and the confidence that I can follow through and finish a project. November 1st is when I’ll start this new story, but November 30th won’t be the last day I touch it, and that’s a commitment I finally feel ready to make to myself.
Best wishes if you are participating! Come find me, I’m inventedcharm there too.
Leave a CommentI’m back with my fall bucket list! I really love this concept I heard on the Happier podcast (episode 67), and I had success with it this summer so I thought I’d do it again for fall. Having been born and raised in California, I’m not sure I’ve experienced a true autumn, but I love the concept of warm drinks, crunching leaves, and cozy nights.
I wrote about the importance of having a date night back in August of 2016, but more than a year has passed and I live in a new town, and a new house. Date nights look A LOT different now, so I thought I’d revisit the concept.
I never thought it would be time to say goodbye. Summers here are often long and crop up in place of spring and extend well through fall. But this year we seem to be having defined seasons. I wrote about spring in my spring capsule wardrobe post—it was mild and rainy, sunny and never hot. And then a switch was flipped and we had so many days of 100+ degree weather in a row. When I look at the forecast I don’t see anymore 90 degree days on the horizon. I feel like I need to mourn the season a bit, because I finally got used to summer.
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I’ve been at a loss about what to write lately. There’s a lot going on with me, with friends, with family. It’s hard to process everything, and maybe that’s the problem—I can only process it bit by bit.
I was listening to the new Lana Del Rey album and working on a project when I suddenly realized the song I most wanted to hear was When You Say Nothing At All by Alison Krauss. The music couldn’t be more different, but it’s a good analogy to talk about knowing what you want and knowing how to get it. For me it was as simple as acknowledging my feeling and switching a song on iTunes, but for everyone it will likely be a different process.
Leave a CommentI told you I’d be back with an update about our master bedroom progress. Right now we are in the process of painting, and boy has it been a process…
The previous owner painted the room green (sea foam? granny smith? double mint? it looks different in pictures and in person) with alternating stripes of flat and glossy paint to give the room a circus tent feel. It’s not great.
It’s been slow going at the Tudor House, but I’m finally back with an update. I have been mulling ideas over for our master bedroom and finally put together a mood board for inspiration. I decided that I want my room to function like a hotel room. It needs to pull double duty and be a place where I can rest and work. I don’t want the room to be cluttered, and I want everything in there to feel purposeful and peaceful. I came up with the concept of vibrant retreat.
I’ve been struggling to find time and energy to write. I have a bunch of half-assed posts that maybe I’ll revisit in the future, but for now they’ll languish in the drafts folder. Mostly, I’ve been really thinking about the quote, Slow progress is still progress. I saw it on the She Is Recovering tumblr.
Instead of fussing over the fact that I am struggling with writing, I’ve jumped headlong into things that make me feel good. So here are the things I’m obsessing over in the month of August:
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