Loft Sweater | Vintage Prada Necklace (similar) | DIY-ed Cutoffs (similar) | Frye Boots
I have a confession: I am more out of shape now - a year and a half after the arrival of my second child - than I was immediately after giving birth.
It's not about weight or how I look - both of which are fine, I suppose, or at least fine by me. It's about how I feel. And how I feel is like a slug.
Two of my favorite things: puzzles + cooking memoirs
I remember the first book of Ruth Reichl's I ever read - it was Tender at the Bone, in theory a memoir but really an expression of her passionate belief that your meals (and the making of them) shape who you are in a very tangible way, starting even in the earliest parts of childhood. I loved it so much that I read her other books as soon as they came out: first Comfort Me With Apples, then Garlic and Sapphires, about her stint as the New York Times' food critic and all the subterfuge and drama (really) that job entails. Now I'm on to her latest, My Kitchen Year, about the shuttering of Gourmet when she was the magazine's editor-in-chief and her subsequent depression.
I don't always love Ruth Reichl - she can get a little treacly - but I can't stop reading her. And the biggest reason why I go back to her, over and over again, is the recipes; she essentially pioneered the memoir-peppered-with-recipe format that's so popular today. Granted, the recipes I've made from these books haven't always been the best ones on the planet - the matzoh brei was, in a word, a disaster - but when I'm reading her descriptions of how a dish didn't just exist in her life, but explained it somehow, giving her something that she hadn't even known she needed, I'm always desperate to try it for myself.
[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.
You know that ramen place I keep mentioning? The one with the line so insane that you have to show up an hour before it opens and get your name on the waiting list if you want to eat anytime in the near future?
We keep going back.
Every single time, we say that we're going to leave at exactly 10:10AM - the precise minute that would get us to the restaurant in time to have our name be among the first on the list. And then, according to this plan, we'll hang out at a playground or get coffee or something before heading back to the restaurant at 11:30, at which point the restaurant will finally opens its doors so we can eat our perfect, perfect ramen and go about the rest of our day all happy and full of soup.
Presenting: my grocery list for yesterday's trip to Whole Foods.
What. Is going. On.
I mean, kale? Almond milk? HEMP SEEDS? Who is this person, and what has she done with the cheese-puff-loving me I have come to know and tolerate? (Nothing, actually; I just eat organic Trader Joe's cheese puffs now. And I eat them for breakfast, so there.)
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.
Here is today's brutally true intro: I first got to know today's interviewee due to my lurking around on various sites that round up news on lifestyle bloggers of note...
Talked how far away actual book-writing is from the Grownup Writer fantasies I had as a child, exactly how I annoy my children, the truth about sponsorships and all sorts of other fun stuff in today's interview (one of my favorites I've ever done) over on Zulkey.com.
Read the whole thing here.
I'm sorry you guys, I really do try to keep things positive around here because if you can't say something nice et cetera et cetera, but I saw this photo and actually cackled. Like, out loud.
LOOK AT HOW MISERABLE SHE LOOKS. She's like "Hey Kanye, thanks so much for the holes in my clothing and my nonexistent ability to use my hands. Also I am broke because you charged me three thousand dollars for the pleasure of being bulky and cold and unable to hold a sandwich. Also I'm not wearing pants. And are those tiny leather patches on my shoulders?"
Kanye West should be declared a national treasure. He just gives me such joy.
