Monthly Archives

January 2020

books, Uncategorized

3 Great Books

January 28, 2020

Have you read any good books lately? I’ve slowed down on my reading lately, but I do have a few great reads that I wanted to pop in and share with you all. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I never know what to pick when I’m searching for a good book. I like to bookmark it when my friends share books they enjoyed so I have something to refer to when my book-amnesia hits.

First up is this sweet little book called Inward by Yung Pueblo (Amazon). I bought this book because I wanted to support his work after really enjoying his instagram and I’m really just pleasantly surprised by how much this book is touching me. It’s already totally dog-eared and on its way to tattered status. Here a few quotes I loved:

progress

is when we

forgive ourselves

for taking so long

to treat our bodies

like a home

-yung pueblo, inward

and…

if you spend too long

not letting yourself be creative

you can literally start feeling sick

you were born to create

let it flow, do not overthink it

-yung pueblo, inward

It’s full of these very wise snippets. I find it’s the perfect book to read before bed or before you meditate in the morning.

I also really enjoyed reading The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Amazon). It was a beautiful, lyrical, gripping novel. You know the kind of books that just propel the pages to turn? That’s this book. Coates writes about slavery and the underground railroad and Virginia and magic with such vividness. I learned so much reading this book and I’m so thankful that it exists.

Educated by Tara Westover (Amazon) is another book I can’t stop raving about. What an incredible memoir. She writes about growing up in an uber conservative evangelical Mormon community in Idaho where she never went to school and spent her days working in her dad’s junkyard. This book documents her coming to terms with her upbringing and her eventual separation from her family whens she went to college and took a different path than the one laid out by her family structure. While her experience was way more extreme than mine, I identified with her story in so many ways. I went to a liberal arts college many states away after growing up in a conservative Christian home. I had to negotiate so many different worlds and understand where my roots still fit into my life and where I needed to chart my own path. I didn’t do it with nearly the grace that Westover did and I still feel like I’m finding my way, but reading her story helped me to understand some of the turmoil I went through in my early twenties.

Okay, those are my latest books. What about you? Reading anything great?

Uncategorized, weekly meal plan

Meal Planning Tips and Tricks

January 27, 2020

This upcoming week is going to be a doozy. Can you believe I will not be at home for one single meal this entire week? We have our National Sales Meeting at work this week, so I’m staying in a hotel Monday – Wednesday and then we leave for Hawaii on Thursday morning.

I seriously cannot wait to feel the sun on my face.

Anyway, because I literally have no meals to plan this week, I thought I’d switch things up a bit and share a few of the fun tips and tricks and insights I’ve learned since I seriously started Meal Planning a few months ago….

  • Be realistic: set your meal plan against your calendar for the week and plan every single meal. Take into account the way you’re going to feel and plan accordingly. If I have a big meeting at work, I plan something super simple and comforting for dinner that night like grilled cheese + tomato soup. The nights I have dance class at 7:45, I plan something really simple like a bagged salad + chicken. You get the idea. Plan for the person you are, not the person you want to be.
  • If you want to stop getting takeout or going out to eat, cook food that’s better than take out. Both of these tips might sound a bit ‘no-duh’ when you read them, but they were serious a-hahs for me. I love food so much, yet when it came to meal planning, I wanted my food to be as healthy and simple and quick to the table as possible. I would plan to eat grilled chicken breasts + asparagus for dinner five nights a week and then wonder why I was opting for Thai food take-out instead. When I shifted to planning the most delicious, epic recipes that I literally couldn’t wait to eat, everything changed for me. I looked forward to cooking during the week.
  • Remember that eating out takes time, too. I just realized this the other day, but I often opt to go out to eat or order take-out because I perceive that it’s easier or quicker. It’s actually neither. It’s a pain in the ass to schlep to a restaurant (plus you have to deal with strangers and act human) and take-out seems like it takes forever. I can usually a get quick meal on the table faster. I just blast the music and get in the zone and it’s over before I know it.
  • Great dinners make the best lunches. I said this in an earlier post, but it bears repeating. If you cook something you love for dinner, it’s a lot easier to pack your lunch the next day. I’m not the biggest fan of leftovers past day one, but day one leftovers can be epic and save a chunk of change.
  • Develop a fool-proof system. Basically any habit change requires a new routine. Here’s my meal prep routine: when I’m mindlessly scrolling instagram, I save any recipe post that looks remotely delicious to me from any number of food instas I follow. I love Smitten Kitchen, Bon App Basically, How Sweet Eats, NYtimes Cooking and Shutterbean. Then, Sunday morning I wake my ass up and write my weekly meal planning post while sipping my coffee. I scroll through those images, poll the family, look at the calendar for the week and lay it out. As soon as I lay the week out, I get on my Safeway app and order my groceries. Do you do use a click-and-collect service?? I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my Safeway app because they are consistently out of a couple of the most crucial items I need. I also hate my local Safeway store because I have trouble getting them to answer the damn phone when I drive up to click and collect. Nevertheless, having that system is crucial for me. I honestly hate grocery shopping, so online ordering is the only way I’ve found a way to be consistent with my meal planning. I order everything we’d need for our recipes and in general. Even with the fees they charge, I am saving a TON of money because I’m not buying unnecessary impulse purchases anymore. Most weeks, our groceries cost $75-120 depending on what we’re cooking. That’s hella cheap for living in the Bay area. Then, when it comes time to cook I have another random routine. I don’t let myself change into my pajamas until dinner is cooked. For some reason, if the pajamas come on, my will to cook goes away. I just come home and autopilot that shit. Blast the music, take deep breaths, put everything in place and get to it. I forget how much I love to cook until I’m in that creative zone. It’s the way I show love to myself and to my people.
  • As always, be gentle. That’s my motto in life. Be gentle with yourself! Don’t expect perfection. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to plan an entire week and it’s going to go out the window because you get hit with the sads and can only eat mac and cheese. You’re going to try a recipe that’s going to taste like crap. Things are going to come up that you don’t expect. You’re going to waste food because you bought too much. It’s all learning. It’s all growth. It’s all part of the process of change.

Who knew I had so many thoughts about meal planning!? If you made it to the end of this novel, thank you. Now, it’s your turn. Do you meal plan? What’s your routine and process? I’m still a total newbie at meal planning, so I’m open to all tips and tricks!

Uncategorized

My Currently 2020 Workbook from Shutterbean

January 24, 2020

I’ve said it once, but I’ll say again and again. Connecting with myself creatively is super important. I held myself back from expressing myself creatively for way too long. Now that I’m allowing myself to explore my creative side, it’s rushing through me like a flood. I’m dancing, I’m writing, I’m watercoloring and I’m taking photos and it all feels so, so, so good.

I’m a huge admirer of Tracy at Shutterbean. I love how she explores her creativity as a practice and how she encourages others to do the same. A couple of years ago, she launched the Handwriting Club on instagram, which has now expanded to a full line of products including her Currently workbook. This workbook encourages people to reflect, set intention and document their lives by chronicling every month of their year. It’s really cool.

Obviously, I bought one and that’s the subject of this post. I want to share my spreads with you all here because I truly enjoyed this process.

I had purchased a watercolor set more than a year ago and I never used it because I knew I was going to be bad at it. Do you ever do this? I’ve held myself back from so many interests over the years because I didn’t want to be a beginner. As a recovering self-conscious perfectionist, that shit gets annoying. I’m working on being okay with not being good at something for the first or second or millionth try and still moving forward with it because it feels so good to create and to learn new skills.

Even with this workbook, I almost just used crayons because I didn’t want to ‘mess it up’ with my sloppy watercolors. But then I just watched a little youtube tutorial and committed to doing SOMETHING. I love my results. Doing all of those little dots was so soothing and I loved how cohesive my final pages are.

Seriously, creating is the best. When I wrote in my journal that night, I just wrote ‘I LOVE MAKING SHIT’. haha. So, I encourage you to explore your own creativity and pick up one of these workbooks. I’m so pumped to work on my January spreads while we are on vacation in a couple of weeks.

Without further ado, here’s what I made:

I loved reflecting on my favorite sounds and colors and words. I don’t think I’ve ever done something like that before.

You know your girl MeeshyD couldn’t be constrained to more than one word this year. I’m still going forward with Surrender, but I also added Believe and I love it. Intention setting was also really fun. It doesn’t feel like as much pressure as a list of resolutions.

I finished it out with a little letter to myself. It was refreshing to speak to myself with kindness. 2020 is on like Donkey Kong!!

Thanks for letting me share my Currently workbook with you all. HUGE thanks to Shutterbean for developing such a cool workbook. Interested in getting one for yourself? They are $22 and available on Amazon. Let me know if you decide to do it so I can follow along.