October Recap

After several weeks of rain the sky has cleared and the temperature has dropped. If the forecast holds, we are looking at pretty perfect conditions for trick or treating this Thursday…

With the drop in temps I’ve been craving a bath at the end of the day. I love a straight up epsom salt bath or Dr. Singha’s Mustard Bath…

Beanies are back in the mix and I’ve been wearing my favorite Everlane cocoon coat, Clare V Midi Sac and pink Nike Blazer sneakers on repeat…

I love this Nordic Ware skull cakelet pan and I’ve been playing with different glazes. The perfect chocolate cake recipe comes from Simple Cake…

Our little studio project is also progressing!

I’ve been making chicken stock and big batches of soup weekly. This crazy easy tomato soup and this celery root, cauliflower + fennel are still two of my favorites. I store the soups in wide mouth mason jars with these new leakproof lids from Ball…

Both soups mentioned above are also pureed which means they are perfect for sipping out of a mug (which comes in handy if you want to deliver something hot to your rad construction crew on a cold day)…

I have a pair of black patent leather Loeffler Randall boots from a few seasons ago that I would like to put into more regular rotation. I just ordered these white Everlane straight leg crop pants to create the look below…

One of my clients told me about this No. Green deodorant from Corpus which is my new favorite. It smells amazing, works like deodorant should, and has no white residue…

These little Mighty Patch hydrocolloid patches are amazing. If I have a blemish that needs extracting (or I pick at my face more than I should) I put one of these on the "wound” before I go to bed. They prevent unsightly scabs from forming and they speed the healing process…

Those little patches work so beautifully I added these hydrocolloid bandages to our first aid kit…

I’ve been creating more time to read these days and recently finished Deep Work by Cal Newport. I first learned about Cal several years ago when he was an MIT student and wrote about deliberate practice on his blog. Deep Work is full of well articulated ideas that you’ll want to write down and think more about like this one…

“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy.”

I also just finished Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity and cannot recommend it enough. I mentioned Esther here after listening to her On Being conversation. Her podcast “Where Should We Begin?” is incredible too…

July 23

Last week we broke ground on a long-anticipated dream project, the building of our backyard studio, which will be a work/art space for my husband. Our little one car garage was demolished to kick it off…

While watching the demo I made Pamela Salzman’s grain-free chocolate zucchini cake (which is crazy good by the way). My happy version of multi-tasking…

Speaking of cake, Simple Cake by Odette Williams is a wonderful book and one I’d highly recommend for your library whether you consider yourself a baker or not…

I’m really enjoying this turmeric tonic from Further Food. I blend a scoop of it with cold water and a little honey syrup (recipe for honey syrup here) and then drink it over ice with my favorite glass straw…

I’ve had a lot on my plate the last few weeks and my advanced food prep has been lagging. Thankfully I’ve found a go-to protein powder that I love and helps me get by if I have nothing to grab before walking out the door. I mix one scoop of this Amazing Grass Protein Superfood and two scoops of Vital Proteins Collagen with 12oz of orange juice and whip it up in the Vitamix for an easy and satiating breakfast. And on really long teaching days when I don’t have a break between clients I will make a double batch and bring it to the studio in this 32oz insulated Klean Kanteen…

This Tony's Chocolonely Almond Sea Salt bar is my absolute favorite chocolate and I always have a few bars on hand…

I just bought several sheets of these beautiful Ellsworth Kelly stamps…

My husband and I both carry around this Memento Mori as a daily reminder to be present and focus on what really matters.

“Meditating on your mortality is only depressing if you miss the point. It is in fact a tool to create priority and meaning. It’s a tool that generations have used to create real perspective and urgency. To treat our time as a gift and not waste it on the trivial and vain. Death doesn’t make life pointless but rather purposeful. And fortunately, we don’t have to nearly die to tap into this. A simple reminder can bring us closer to living the life we want.”

I am a big fan of Stoicism and recommend signing up for The Daily Stoic which is put together by Ryan Holiday (he has a book by the same name). His other books The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy are also worth a read…

Wendy Whelan’s line to live by is one I live by too…

“Energy produces energy.”

Photo via La Ligne

Lastly, Esther Perel’s On Being conversation is a delight to listen to…

Photo via On Being

One of my favorite parts near the end of the conversation:

When I say, “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives,” it’s because I do think that the bonds and the connections that we forge with others give us a greater sense of meaning and happiness and wellbeing than just about any other thing — when it’s good, because it can be exactly the opposite, huh?

“And now it’s like, how much are you investing in your relationships? And I find that, often, people don’t. They talk about “my partner is my best friend,” and they treat them like shit. They talk about “my friend,” and they haven’t seen that person or talked to that person in years. It’s like, no, you can’t just do it like that. You can’t be lazy. You can’t be complacent about this and put all your energies at work and bring the leftovers home — and all of that stuff.

Or I have this question I’ve been playing with lately, and I just asked it in Sydney. I was like, “How many of you go to bed, and the last thing you touch is your phone? OK, stand up. And how many of you, the first thing you stroke in the morning when you wake up is your phone? Please stand up. And how many of you are doing this while there actually is another person lying next to you in bed?” That’s ambiguous loss, by the way. I’m like, seriously? Seriously?”

So that’s what I am trying to address at this point; it’s like, interestingly, we don’t look at relational health enough. We don’t connect it to mental health. We don’t connect it to our overall physical health. And we certainly don’t connect it enough to our societal health, if we want to really go bigger. It’s not the freedom that is our problem. It’s not the fact that we have choice, but they have always gone together with responsibility, with accountability.

You can see more of Esther Perel in her TED talk from a few years back and read her book Mating in Captivity.