So my friend's brother just started dating this girl. And he really likes her. The kind of "likes her" that makes him want to do special things for her: plan cool dates, take her cool places, et cetera. Except - according to him - he has a little problem, which is that in addition to being a romantic and sweet and thoughtful guy (did I mention he's handsome?), he's also a grad student, and thus dead broke.

My opinion about this problem? Not really a problem. Because I have always, always found that the amount of fun you have on a date correlates not at all with (or, if anything, is negatively correlated with) the amount of money that you spend. You know what's not especially fun? Getting all trussed up and sitting in a stuffy restaurant eating, like, French sauces and mousse. Or, okay, maybe that can be fun from time to time, but you know what's more fun?

A DRIVE-IN MOVIE.

[Contest is now closed and the winners have been notified via email. Thank you so much to everyone who entered!]

Carrying On has been out for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it was time to celebrate by putting together a little gift for you guys. The book is half-pregnancy-memoir, half-handbook for new mom style, beauty and decor, and contains some of my most personal essays ever (you can read an excerpt here).

Writing this book - much of which was typed out sitting at the little desk in our temporary apartment in the weeks before I gave birth to Goldie - was without a doubt one of the hardest and most rewarding things I've ever done in my life, and it means so much to me to see it out there in the world; thank you to those of you who have already picked up a copy.

 A couple of days ago I shot a news segment about makeup apps and whether they're actually useful. As part of my research I played around with a whole bunch of them, and...I mean, maybe I'm just super late to the party and everyone already knew how amazing they've gotten nowadays, but WHOA. (The one I used to create the three looks pictured above is called Try It On.)

 Every once in awhile I do a search to figure out what the most popular items out there are (meaning the things that the most people are clicking over to check out, not necessarily the ones with the highest sales), just so I can stay up to speed. And right now, this chunky cardigan is apparently the most clicked-on item on the search engine I use (ShopStyle). Huh. I'm mildly confused, but maybe it's been really well...advertised? I dunno.

 I didn't watch the Golden Globes because I needed to prioritize my new obsession (Making A Murderer), but this roundup of celebrity reaction GIFs is making me really regret this decision.

What I'm about to describe to you is like this, except the shark is me and Rihanna is cheese. 

I have this thing for Safeway's generic-brand string cheese. (Just stay with me here; I promise I have a point.) They're sort of like large, very mildly mozzarella-flavored plastic gummi worms, and I cannot stop eating them. I eat them for breakfast when I'm in a rush to get out of the house; I eat them for snacks; I eat them at in bed at 11PM (sneakily, though, so Kendrick doesn't hear me, because eating crappy string cheese in the dark is a sort of embarrassing thing to do). Mostly, though, I eat them when I'm watching my hour of bad TV that I watch every night (or, okay, sometimes I watch two hours, but in my defense The Bachelor is kind of a TV emergency. Also #Lace4Eva).

When I was pregnant, I decided to knit my daughter a blanket (still have a point, hold on). And then when I was finished with that, I decided to knit my friend's daughter a blanket. And then another friend's daughter. And I did this not because I especially love knitting (although I do), but rather because having something to keep your hands busy during the evening TV-watching session both makes you feel like you're being somewhat productive (as opposed to doing absolutely nothing save for slowly destroying your brain cells), and also makes you not eat twenty string cheeses in a row, because you can't when your hands have things that aren't cheese in them.

I saw a post on a friend's blog the other day about her best purchases from the past year. I can't link to it because I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw it, but I'm assuming that it must have been a friend's site because I tend to only read blogs written by friends (mostly because whenever I go on a professional blogger's site the only thing that happens is I panic because I start realizing that I am doing everything - like, everything in my life - wrong). Anyway, it got me thinking about what my own best purchases from 2015 would be.

The real best purchase, of course, was our house. I was standing outside with Goldie yesterday morning, just leaning against the car and waiting for Kendrick and Indy to come out so we could get started on our day, and I looked up at the foothills and the palm trees and whispered to her, "We live here." It never stops being amazing to me: the fact that we just changed everything, just like that. And now here we are.

But let's set all those grand, life-changing decisions aside for a moment. In no particular order, here are ten little (and sometimes big) luxuries that I picked up in 2015 that ended up being totally worth the investment.