Another day

Thursday Things: Edition 9

Just a few quick things to share today:

1. Quick review of all the Marvel movies

This is exactly what I needed to get up to speed on the Marvel movies. I am the person who can’t figure out which characters are Marvel and which are DC Comics. My family mocked me after we saw the Avengers movie last summer and I asked why Wonder Woman wasn’t in it.

I’m sorry. I don’t know all the superhero lineage. I’m busy living my life.

2. house of wonderful electric sweater shaver fuzz remover

I recently went through all my sweaters as I put them up until next year and realized I was in dire need of a sweater de-piller. This one is the best one I’ve found and works like a charm. I even used it on some sheets that had gotten a little pilled in a few places and they are as good as new. It’s $33.99 which is less than the cost of replacing one sweater.

3. dermstore beauty fix box

There was the best deal on Dermstore earlier this week that I stumbled upon as I reordered my beloved Elta MD sunscreen. And I was so excited to share it with you and then it sold out and, well, SAD TIMES.

However, I didn’t realize Dermstore offers a monthly beauty fix box filled with all manner of great products. You can click over and look at what’s offered in May’s box along with what has been featured in past month’s boxes.

It’s $24.95 if you subscribe, plus it’s free shipping and you can cancel at any time. This is a great way to try out higher end products to see if they are worth buying in a full size.

4. 10 Things to Tell You podcast with Jamie Golden about skincare and makeup favorites

Speaking of skincare, Jamie Golden is one of my best resources for all things skincare and makeup related. You can follow her on Instagram here and watch her past stories about her favorites and her skincare regimen. And this podcast she recorded with Laura Tremaine about skincare and makeup contains a wealth of information to help us all not look like the crypt keeper.

Happy Thursday!

Thursday Things: Edition 8

Thursday totally snuck up on me this week. And, what’s even better, we have Friday off school so this is technically like our Friday. I wish all weekends could be three day weekends. It seems like a much more civilized way to live.

Here are a few things I thought I’d share this week:

1. tan luxe gradual illuminating gradual tan lotion

I saw someone mention this on Instagram and decided to give it a try. I was skeptical because I’ve always loved my Jergens Natural Glow but, let me tell you, this is amazing. It gives the best color, doesn’t smell like self-tanner and just gives you a gradual, natural tan. It’s $29 but the bottle is fairly large and I’ve already learned that a little goes a long way.

This will be my friend all summer long. It’s seriously the best of the self-tanners that I’ve tried and since it’s gradual, you don’t have to worry about streaks or missing a spot.

2. pioneer woman molten chocolate cake

I used to make these on a regular basis, but then forgot about them. I was cooking dinner last night and felt like we needed something for dessert because sometimes you just need chocolate. That made me think of these little lava cakes and how easy they are to make. I almost guarantee you have all the ingredients needed in your pantry. They are delicious and I’m so glad they are back in my life.

3. the ikat elephant 25% off flash sale

I love all the cute finds at Ikat Elephant. She always has some great basics along with original pieces for each season and you can also find her here on Instagram.

From now through Sunday, you can get 25% off everything with the code FLASH25 at checkout. I happen to love those slub tanks in the picture above for the perfect summer basic.

4. I Hate Green Beans Podcast by Lincee Ray

I was a guest on my friend Lincee’s podcast this week and we discussed one of my favorite romantic comedies of all time, Crazy, Stupid Love. Lincee is hilarious and we had the best time talking about love and attraction and chemistry.

You should also pre-order her new book, It’s A Love Story, for just $10.39 on Amazon. It comes out next Tuesday, April 30th and it’s the perfect book to kick off your summer reading.

5. Girls Night Out at First Baptist Navasota

If you happen to be in the Brazos Valley, Bryan/College Station, Navasota area next Friday night, May 3rd, I’m going to be the speaker at First Baptist Navasota’s girls night out. There are still tickets available and you can find out more by clicking the link above. It should be so fun and Ashley Rush is leading worship.

That’s it for this Thursday.

Have a good one.

Thursday Things: Edition 7

I totally forgot to post anything on Thursday last week. Or maybe I just didn’t have anything to post. Either way.

But here are a few things I thought I’d share with you today just in case you’re interested.

1. Easter eggs dyed with silk ties

I read about this last year and thought it sounded intriguing. Dyeing Easter eggs is one of my favorite holiday things to do and I require complete family participation even if people think they are too old to dye eggs. Maybe this year we’ll cut up a couple of the four ties that P owns and try this out.

2. Dots pretzels

Did I pay $11 for a bag of pretzels because a fashion blogger I follow said they’re delicious? Yes, I did. Were they worth it? Absolutely. These are so delicious and we ate the whole bag in two days. Now I’m just hoping that my local Central Market carries them and I’ve just never noticed it because now that I’ve found them, I can’t live without them.

3. st. tropez self tan express bronzing mist

This is my very favorite of all the self-tanners because it works fast compared to a lot of others and I think it gives you a really nice natural color that doesn’t look orange. Ulta is having a big sale right now and this is normally $40 for a bottle, but is on sale for $24. I highly recommend using a tanning mitt to apply so you don’t end up with tan palms.

4. corkcicle arctican

My friend Bri McKoy mentioned this on her instastories this week and I knew immediately I needed it in my life. It’s $19.95. You freeze the core and then it gives you 3 hours of cooling for cans and bottles. This is a summertime must in Texas. I can’t tell you how many bottles of Topo Chico that I give up on because they get too warm before I can finish.

5. wayfair 36 hour sale

I am not currently in the market for any kind of furniture although there is a green velvet couch on the Wayfair site that makes me wish I needed a new couch. But Wayfair is having a huge 36 hour sale with free shipping on everything and it also includes flash sales on various things. So if you are in the market for any type of home decor, you may want to check it out.

That’s it for today.

Happy Thursday!

Thursday Things: Edition 6

I missed Thursday things last week because of Spring Break, but look what’s back.

Here are a few things you might want to know about:

1. John Mayer singing How Great Thou Art

If you listen to the Big Boo Cast, you might remember that we had Erin Moon as our guest and discussed John Mayer at length. Specifically, that we all feel he is in search of the meaning of life. So I was understandably thrilled by his cover of How Great Thou Art during his time in Australia, both because it is beautiful and because I hope it means something to him.

2. The Resident Chef Spinach Parmesan Dip

When we were at Honey and Big’s over Spring Break, she made this dip and it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. The secret is this mix and then you add in mayo and sour cream. So it’s super low fat, but it is delicious. The mix is $4.65 for a packet and I already bought all of the ones that were still left on Amazon so this is where I found you can get it online.

3. Color by Number App by Impala Studios

This is another discovery from Honey’s house. Gulley’s Aunt Diane had introduced her to this Color By Number app and I am completely addicted to it. It is the perfect mindless activity to do while you watch something on Netflix. I’ve been staying up late at night trying to finish writing my book and it has helped me immensely to color by number to wind down before I try to go to sleep. You can even upload your own photos to color by number.

4. The Popcast and Big Boo Cast Live in Texas to benefit Amarillo Angels

I couldn’t be more excited about this. Sophie and I will be in Amarillo with Knox and Jamie from the Popcast on September 14th for a live show to benefit Amarillo Angels.

This is the mission statement of the Amarillo Angels: “The Amarillo Angels mission is to walk alongside children in the foster care system, as well as their caretakers, by offering consistent support through intentional giving, relationship building and mentorship.”

More information about the work of Amarillo Angels can be found at amarilloangels.org

5. NYX butter gloss in creme brulee

If you are looking for just a good, inexpensive neutral lipgloss, I am loving this one. It looks much pinker in the tube than it is once you put it on so do not be afraid. I think it’s a color that would work for just about anyone. And it’s just $5.00.

That’s it for today.

Happy Thursday.

We painted a wall and it leaved me tired (pun intended)

Well, we had a nice Spring Break. I’m only sad that it didn’t last about a week or six longer. Caroline and I went to Austin to spend the night and shop on Sunday and Monday and then we had big plans to paint her room the rest of the week.

(Side note just because many of you have asked: The MRI on her foot showed that it’s not a stress fracture, but she did manage to bruise every single bone on the top of her foot. She’ll be in a boot for a while, but might be able to play soccer during playoff games so we’ll see. Thanks for praying. We are so relieved it’s not a stress fracture because her recovery time will be much shorter than it could have been.)

Anyway, I’d mentioned on the podcast a few weeks ago that Caroline and I planned to paint and stencil a palm leaf design on one of her bedroom walls. And I have never gotten so many emails or messages from people who wanted to basically hold an intervention for me. It was like I’d casually suggested that I was going to attempt to walk on a tightrope across the Grand Canyon. Some of you were legitimately concerned for my sanity. And that was probably fair.

Her bedroom walls were the same light gray (Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter) that we have throughout the rest of the house, so we knew the first thing we needed to do was paint them white. We spent most of the day on Tuesday doing that and used Benjamin Moore’s Simply White. It’s what I have on my kitchen cabinets so I knew it was a good true white that doesn’t yellow. I’d planned for this to be a project she and I did by ourselves, so I was understandably thrilled when P got home from work early on Tuesday and basically told me that everything we were doing was wrong. Apparently you don’t use plastic as a dropcloth for the floor and I needed to stir the paint and I hadn’t taped off the white trim. He told us the proper preparation is 97% of a job well done and I hated to tell him that I purposely hadn’t taped off the trim because it was white and the new wall paint was going to be white and why bother? If anything sums up the differences in our personalities, it’s the way we approach a home improvement project.

However, he did help us get the room painted white in a record amount of time and I’m sorry to have to admit that he was right when he told me we were going to need two coats of paint to cover the existing gray. That second coat around 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday night almost caused me to lose my will to live. What a sweet, naive time that was because I had no idea what was coming the next day.

Caroline knew she wanted a palm leaf design and we’d originally looked at wallpaper. But because the walls in her room are slightly textured, it was going to require a lot of prep work. Plus, the pattern of the wallpaper meant we’d have to order quite a bit of it to make the pattern work even though it’s not a big wall. All that to say, it was going to be pretty expensive to have it wallpapered, especially since the palm leaf pattern feels pretty trendy and not like something we would necessarily want for a long time. I’d rather spend that money on things like shoes and cute tops. And I also wanted Caroline to have to contribute to the end result because I’m trying to turn her into a productive, hard-working member of society .

So I started looking for other options and found this tropical wallpaper stencil by Dizzy Duck Designs on Etsy.

I figured it was worth a try because it’s just paint and if it looked terrible, we could always just paint over our attempt. And here’s a secret, there is some part of me that really enjoys the challenge of a craft type project. I can’t explain it because I’m not a normally crafty person, but every now and then I want to attempt something artsy. The problem is that it unleashes some facet of my personality that becomes a little obsessive.

I googled “How to stencil a wall” and found a couple of posts that were really helpful. You can find those here and here if you’re interested.

And I also had this guide on the Dizzy Duck Etsy page that showed how you line up the pattern as you paint, which was extremely helpful. If it had been left up to me to properly measure and line it all out, I think this would now be a post about how we painted Caroline’s room white. The end.

The night before we went to pick out paint colors for the stencil design, Caroline almost changed her mind about the color scheme when she saw this picture on Pinterest and decided maybe she wanted a multi-color wall.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am that we didn’t go this route. The beauty of doing it all in shades of green is that it allowed much more room for error because, like I kept telling her, nature isn’t supposed to be perfect and symmetrical and all the same shade of green.

She picked out four different shades of green to use on the design and the beauty is that you use such a small amount of paint that all we had to buy were the small cans they use for color samples and we still had more than half a can left of each color when we were finished.

On Wednesday, we got all our supplies and brushes ready because I remembered P telling me that preparation is 97% of a job well done. Everything I read said you should start with the stencil in the exact center of the wall you plan to paint and go from there so that’s what we did. If you think I actually measured instead of just eyeballing it, then you don’t know me at all.

We taped the stencil to the wall and each grabbed a small stencil brush with a different color of green and began to paint. Honestly, I had no idea if it was going to look okay when we pulled the stencil off the wall, but it turned out great.

I felt so proud and accomplished until I remembered that this one stencil had taken us about thirty minutes and we had an entire wall left to do. That’s when some of the shine wore off. But Caroline had made us a playlist that had everything from Post Malone to James Taylor and that got us through the next several hours as we painted and then untaped the stencil and then lined it up and then retaped. Rinse and repeat times infinity. On the upside, you use such a small amount of paint that it dries quickly and you can keep moving the stencil and painting, especially because you can alternate working from the top and from the bottom of where you’ve just painted.

We learned pretty quickly that the leaves were all easiest to do with a combination of large and small stencil brushes, but that one large palm leaf proved to be our nemesis with all its many fronds and sections that never seemed to lay flat against the wall, especially as we had to do the edges of the wall. So we discovered that using a small foam roller worked best for it and also a handful of Xanax.

By 6:30 Wednesday night, we called it for the day because I had a girls’ night out planned with some friends and we had lost all feeling in our arms and possibly our will to live. We scrubbed green paint off our fingers and put everything up for the night.

Thursday morning we repeated our preparation process, put on our playlist and got started. I was determined we would finish before the night was over because I was so ready to be done and we were leaving for College Station the next day. Since Caroline is in a boot, she couldn’t help with the high spots on her wall so I had to figure out how to hold the stencil, paint, and not get it all over the ceiling. It was at this point that I began to have a deeper appreciation for Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. We are practically the same.

Eventually, it was all finished except the sides of the wall on either side of her closets. We decided it would be easiest to cut the stencil in sections and just alternate which leaf patterns we used since those sections of wall are so narrow. By this time it was almost 8:00 p.m. and P had grilled burgers and brought me a cocktail while I painted. I may have used the phrase, “As God is my witness, I will never stencil another wall again.”

Caroline worked on one side, while I worked on the other.

And right around 8:45 p.m., it was finished. P helped us clean everything up, including the green specks of paint on the floor that were there since plastic isn’t the right material to cover the floor. We took the tape off the trim, I touched up a couple of spots where paint had splattered, and I have to say that we were pretty impressed with ourselves.

I’m not going to lie, it was A LOT of work. But we did mostly have fun doing it together and it’s easy to get your teenager to talk when they’re preoccupied by working on a project. There were a few low moments when I thought we’d never finish, but the end result is worth it and we did it for about a third of the cost of having it wallpapered. However, I’ve told Caroline that someday twenty years from now, my grandkids are going to ask her, “Why does Grandma keep that wall with those outdated palm leaves painted on it?” And she’ll have to tell them about that time we spent Spring Break 2019 painstakingly painting those leaves and how I vowed then that they would be on that wall FOREVER.

The next morning we left for College Station with Gulley and Jackson to see Honey and Big and to watch the Aggies play Vanderbilt, which felt like the perfect reward. When we got to their house that afternoon, Honey informed us that there was a water main break at Olsen Field which meant no working toilets or concession stands, but they were bringing in portable toilets.

Um.

No thank you.

Big and the kids decided they still wanted to go and Honey offered to take Gulley and me to Christopher’s for dinner. This felt like a win all the way around. And when we got to Christopher’s and the waiter took our drink order, he asked, “Are we celebrating anything?” to which we all laughed and said, “Yes, Big’s 70th birthday!” except he wasn’t there. But we did celebrate it with him on Saturday night after watching the Aggies come from behind 7-2 in the eighth inning to tie the game with Vanderbilt and then win 8-7 in the bottom of the 9th so there’s that. It was a pretty perfect day.

Now we’re back in the school routine and not even that wall of palm leaves makes Caroline any more excited to wake up in the morning. But I keep telling her summer is right around the corner.

In two and a half months.

I thought last Monday I might use summer as a time to paint the cabinets in our master bathroom, but that’s not looking like even a distinct possibility at this juncture.

Thank you for understanding and happy Wednesday.

Thursday Things, Edition 5

Spring Break officially starts for us on Friday and we are limping to the finish line. I supposed it’s because January and February were each about 164 days long and that just begins to wear on a person. Then I had to take Caroline to the doctor yesterday because we think she may have a stress fracture in her foot and now we’re going to get an MRI later today to try to figure out what’s going on. If you think about it, you can say a little prayer that it’s nothing too bad. I know it’s a small thing in the whole scheme of life, but it means she’d miss the rest of school soccer and track season and it’s just kind of yuck.

Anyway, here are a few things I thought I’d share this week:

1. Zeiss lens wipes

P and I currently own about 35 pairs of readers between the two of us and Caroline got glasses right after Christmas that she has to wear when she’s at school or studying. This means we have a lot of lenses to clean at our house. Especially because I tend to put my readers up on my head when they’re not in use and they collect a lot of hair product residue.

P has used these Zeiss lens wipes for years for everything from his sunglasses to his binoculars and now we are all converts. I love that they come in little individual packages that I can throw in my purse or the glove compartment of my car. And they are also great for cleaning off my computer screen, which I have to do on a regular basis because Mabel likes to try to lick the blinking cursor on my screen when she sits next to me when I write.

2. In The Category of Incredibly Terrible News, Luke Perry is Dead

This week was a sad one for all of us who loved Dylan McKay. He was the original Tim Riggins, the misunderstood bad boy with a heart of gold. And I was sad that when Caroline saw his picture on a news site after he died, she said, “Oh yeah, Archie’s dad from Riverdale died.”

It just goes to show that no matter how cool you once were, you ultimately just end up being known as “somebody’s dad”.

3. ACT vs SAT: Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Test

I can’t believe that we are already at this point in life, but I spent some time this week reading all about the differences between the SAT and the ACT and which one is best. It turns out that a lot of it is dependent on your child’s strengths and weaknesses. This article was one of the best I found and I thought I’d share for any of you who are going through the same thing.

Also, Caroline was super excited when I wanted to have a whole pro and con discussion about this at dinner the other night. And by super excited, I mean that I’m pretty sure she wished she could eat dinner in her bedroom.

4. Hummingbird Farms lavender oil

I believe that my love of all things Hummingbird Farms lavender is well documented, but as the weather begins to warm up it feels like a good time to mention that this lavender oil is the best for shaving your legs and other areas that may need shaving once you can’t cover everything with sweatpants and sweaters.

And my other absolute favorite is this lavender dead sea salt treatment. You can use it to give yourself the instant look and smoothness of a manicure and pedicure on your hands and feet, use it in the shower to exfoliate everything, or dump a handful of it into a bath. It is the best and it’s normally $24 but is on sale right now for just $12.

5. gaia herbs sleep thru vegan capsules

My friend Bri McKoy (You should totally follow her because she is darling and a great cook and posts a lot of great recipes and cooking tips.) mentioned this on her instagram stories the other day and I sat up straight when I heard her mention something that helps her sleep deeply through the night and wake up feeling rested. This is what I currently need in my life. It doesn’t help that I’ve discovered I really get my best writing done from about 10:30 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. and then get in bed with my mind still racing. What I’m saying is that I am in need of sleep.

These all natural supplements promote restful sleep all night long and healthy adrenal function. I can’t tell you how much I worry about my adrenal function as of ten minutes ago when I realized that was an actual thing.

And if you know me at all, then you know the fact it contains Ashwagandha, Passionflower, Magnolia bark & Jujube to help promote healthy stress levels is a legitimate selling point. I am a sucker for some herbal ingredients that sound exotic.

That’s it for today.

Have a lovely Thursday.