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Five Good Things Friday (Including a Giveaway!)

This year is sure off to a batshit crazy start, isn’t it. I hope you’re holding up okay, that you’re out there fighting the good fight, that you and your loved ones are warm and safe. If you need, as I do, a break from the endless cycle of WHAT IS GOING ON, you have come to the right place as I have a few good things to share with you.

Good Thing #1: NICOLE’S BOOK IS OUT!!!!! Listen, I am pretty sure that everyone in our cozy blogland community is aware of this by now, but if you are somehow not aware or if you don’t yet know and love Nicole, here is the quick and dirty: Nicole wrote a beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, hopeful book called Inhale, Exhale and it is now out in the world for all of us to enjoy.

I would love to send someone a copy of Nicole’s novel. That someone could be you, or it could be someone you think would love Nicole’s singular brand of wry humor and warm wisdom (which, honestly, is everyone). Just leave a comment letting me know you’re interested by next Friday, January 30, at midnight Pacific time and I will randomly choose a winner. (I’ll email the winner for details about where to send the book.)

The giveaway is now closed.

Good Thing #2: Winter Wonders Wow, literally everything good pales in comparison to Good Thing #1, so I am jumping straight into a Good Thing that many people dislike. (Including my poor husband.) We are deep into winter, and I am LOVING IT. We have so much snow! We’ve already had one snow day and a cold day and we may have another cold day today and another snow day Monday! Listen, my child has most definitely NOT been in school enough so far in 2026, but if she’s going to miss school, I’m glad it’s for snow and not for illness (that is not an invitation for illness to find us; TOUCHING ALL THE WOOD). I do not mind the cold (although I am of course deeply grateful that I have warm clothes and a warm home, without which I might feel very different), and I love the snow. It feels like magic, the way it transforms the world into something gleaming and soft. I know cold climates are not for everyone, but I adore winter and I’m trying to enjoy every frosty moment.

Good Thing #3: Freezer / Pantry Meal I am working my way through all the goodies I’ve stashed in my freezer over the past eleventy hundred months, and yesterday I was able to whip up a batch of my favorite chipotle chicken tortilla soup with items I already had. I even had a Ziploc full of diced onion, poblano, and jalapeno waiting for me in the freezer! The only thing I had to buy fresh was cilantro. And now I have a huge Tupperware full of delicious soup to get me through these wintry days. (Yes, I also made another batch of cucumber salad. It is so good.)

Good Thing #4: One Fewer Couch For over two years now, we have had an old leather couch standing awkwardly in our piano room. It didn’t go with the space, it had a huge tear in one cushion, all the other cushions were worn past salvaging. And yet there it stayed. Well. The couch is no more! My husband and I finally arranged for the trash collectors to pick it up, and we moved it to the curb earlier this week and it is GONE. All that snow sure came in handy; it was surprisingly easy to slide the couch along the snow-covered lawn.

Good Thing #5: Cat Grandpa My family and I recently left town for a long weekend, leaving the cat at home. We hired a cat sitter to come feed him twice a day (he eats wet food for breakfast and dinner and has access to dry food [and water] all day long). But I was worried that my lovely Lenny cat would be lonely with such big stretches of his day unpeopled. So my father kindly drove 30+ minutes each way to hang out with the cat, every single day we were gone. He also sent me (and Carla) videos and photos of our kitty, because he knew we’d be missing him. Kindest of all, when the weather prevented the cat sitter from getting to our kitty one evening, and Carla sent a rogue text begging her grandfather to step in, my dad immediately got into his car, prepared to make the long drive a second time that day. I assured him that Lenny had access to plenty of fresh water and dry food, so he didn’t need to brave the snow and the dark. But he was at our house first thing the next morning to make sure the cat knew he hadn’t been abandoned. Is that not the sweetest?

Okay Internet, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I hope you have some good things in your life lately, or at least that good things are on the horizon. Sending you love and warmth and cat purrs.

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Tuesday Randomosity: Last Minute Edition

Today was a snow day and also my houseguests arrived, so you will forgive me for showing up so late to the NaBloPoMo party. I am wrung out from Being With People all day, even if those people are people I love and I just want to curl up in a dark, quiet room for awhile.

Here are a few very random things floating around in my brain tonight.

  1. My windshield needs to be replaced. On my brand new car. Well, the car isn’t so much brand new anymore (although it’s still pretty effing new), but the crack in the windshield started when I hadn’t yet had it a month. Due to the placement (central) and intensity (intense) of the crack, the entire windshield needs replacing, which means that I will be submitting an insurance claim for the very first time in my life. I called my insurance office, and the person I spoke to transferred me to some sort of claims call center, and the claims call center person took my information and said they would contact my “shop of choice” (the dealership, because this car is leased; they will only allow me to replace the windshield with factory glass). Then I didn’t hear anything for three weeks and today I got a voicemail and two emails and my husband also got two emails. All of which said that they had not been able to contact my “shop of choice” and I need to submit a bill or estimate. So… I just get the windshield replaced, right? Like, I don’t really have a choice, right? The insurance company will either cover it or they won’t; I can’t really get a second opinion when I am bound by the terms of my lease to use factory glass. I feel very out of my depth here. 
  2. I have finally learned how to wash my face without drenching my entire body. As with most things in life she chooses to comment on, Nicole has turned out to be right about face washing. (Elisabeth: look away.) Due to a combination of laziness and misplacing my stash of washcloths during the move, I have been resorting to washing my face with my hands for the past several months and I am not going back. It is so much better! The key, I have found, is to keep my arms perpendicular to the sink rather than parallel, as I originally thought. I was trying to wash my face with my elbows jutted out to the sides, to prevent water from sluicing down my wrists. But it wasn’t working. Turns out it was the arm position! In trying to prevent the cascading water, I was making it worse! Even though it’s counterintuitive, at least to me, a person who overthinks all things, keeping my elbows close to my trunk really keeps the water from splashing me all over. Today, I even washed my face whilst wearing a long sleeved shirt and my sleeves did not get wet. At all. And now I don’t have to deal with pesky washcloths! Woo!
  3. What is the best book you’ve read lately? I am listening to The Paper Palace in the car, and it’s interesting enough. The writing is good. Through no fault of its own, however, it is the third? fourth? book I’ve read in recent months that takes place at a beach house, and I’m a little weary of the whole situation. Adultery, swimming, complex family relationships, quaint cottages – it’s all kind of blurring together for me into one endless story and I need a fresh storyline. Probably doesn’t help things that all the names kind of bleed into one another: Happy Place, The Summer Place, Same Time Next Summer. Which book am I reading again? Speaking of books with similar titles: Physical book reading has been extremely infrequent since the move, although I did get a wild hare over the weekend to reread The Secret Place by Tana French and I am loving it even more on a reread than I did when I first read it in 2014. Anyway: what non-beach-house book should I listen to next? 

That’s all I can do tonight, Internet. Catch you on the flippety flop.

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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Friday Randomosity: Life Lately Edition

A bunch of random little things have been collecting in my brain, so let’s get them out of my head and into some bullets. 

  • Inspired by NGS, I am wearing a scarf today. It’s one of my favorites – and something I “inherited” from my husband’s grandmother, who was stylish until her final day. I don’t know that I am quite pulling it off the way NGS does, but sometimes you have to fake it til you make it.
  • I just spent… well, far too long trying to photograph myself in the scarf without getting my face in there. That leads to some very unappealing angles, so you’ll just have to picture whatever it is you think I look like with a royal blue scarf tied untidily around my neck.
Here it is, on my bed and not on my person.
  • Carla has begun keeping a list of license plate numbers when we drive around. I do not know why, except that I think she finds them interesting? I didn’t know she was doing this until the other day when she asked to read them to me. “Sure,” I said, figuring that she’d copied down interesting personalized plates, like U R L8 or GZUS LRD. No. She read me off a series of letters and numbers. RDP 7791. SST 9494. JTI 0138. You get the idea. Then last night she asked me if she could read them to me again, and – not wanting to express any less enthusiasm than her newfound interest deserves – I said, “Why don’t you read me the ones you’ve written down since last time?” She was amenable to this plan, and read each series of letters and numbers off with gravitas. I am not quite sure how to respond, or how she expects me to respond, so I tried to say things like, “Oh wow, that’s a good one.” or “Nice! You don’t see X very often!” 
  • If it is not clear, I find Carla’s license plate obsession as adorable as I do perplexing. 
  • We are (maybe?) getting the dinner situation under control. It works like this: I make a “real” dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe Saturdays and Sundays, too, who knows. But Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we all kind of fend for ourselves. For me, this means making a big batch of soup on Sunday or Monday and eating it all week. Or a pot of black beans, and then making tacos for myself. My husband asked me to buy him ham and bread, for sandwiches. We’ll see if this works better than me trying to cram a crockpot meal in every other day. 
I may make this enchilada soup next week. It’s such a perfect fall soup.
  • (Things have been different since we have visitors. I have been making more Real Dinners for us to eat together, although our guests seem a little flummoxed by how varied our eating schedule is.)
  • Speaking of food (which I always am), the Guinness beef stew I made this week was SO GOOD. First of all the recipe includes instructions for how to make it in the slow cooker, so I did that. But… those instructions basically say throw all the ingredients together in the slow cook and I did not do that. I seared the meat and cooked the onions/garlic as well, before adding those things to my crockpot. I don’t know if the flavors would be the same without, but maybe I’ll try it next time because I really hate searing meat. It takes forever and my arms, stove, and floor get speckled with hot oil. The recipe calls for carrots and potatoes. I used baby potatoes and I didn’t chop ANY of them (which may have been a mistake, but oh well). My husband also requested parsnips, so I added a couple of those. And since he was getting parsnips, I also added a container of quartered mushrooms, for me. Then I think I panic-poured a cup or two of chicken stock into the crockpot, in addition to the quart of beef stock, because I was afraid I had over-veggied. My only complaint was that it lacked salt: I poured in a big glug of soy sauce toward the end, and then I had to salt and pepper my bowl of stew. But no one else felt it was under-salted, so maybe it was a Me Thing. The leftovers were better than the initial night. This is a keeper.
  • Also, I made a green bean dish to go with tacos one night, for our family member who is pre-diabetic. It was a HUGE hit. Not with me; there is an entire tomato in it. Not Carla; the veggies were cooked, and she is a raw veggie purist. But everyone else loved it. Bonus: it was extremely easy to make. So it will definitely be something I make again.
  • Our guests are staying until next Friday, when their local airport reopens, which is conveniently the day that our next set of guests arrives. (So far, it seems like the hurricane spared their home, which is extremely fortunate. They were so smart to leave when they did.)
  • Carla just walked into the kitchen and said, “WHAT are you doing?” Um, making breakfast? “No, I mean, WHY are you wearing a SCARF?” I can wear a scarf. It’s a perfectly normal accessory. “But it’s so BLUE. And it doesn’t go with the navy.” (I am wearing dark jeans.) Oh, who knew the critical eye would develop so early! 
  • Do you want to see the cute little challah Carla made? She did all the work – rolling out the separate strands, braiding the strands together, figuring out how to stuff it into a six-inch cheesecake pan I have. It was light and delicious and super adorable, even though we clearly used a much-too-small pan for it.
  • Despite the fact that I have lost my list, I have been chipping away at it. I’ve even made some of the phone calls on the list, which I hope you know by now is A Feat. But the problem with phone calls is that sometimes that’s not the end of the task. One call I made was to our bank, which is just… the most frustrating bank in the WHOLE WORLD. And I left a measured (I hope) but irritated message on the guy’s voicemail, and then he called me back at the exact moment I was in another call, so I couldn’t answer. He left no message at all, so I guess I have to call him back. ARGH. 
  • Speaking of phone calls: I had a very perplexing set – yes, set – of phone calls with Dairy Queen. My husband wants an ice cream cake this year – or, at least, that was one of two cake options he offered me and it was the one I didn’t have to make, and you know that cake baking is one of my love languages, so I think this is a good indication of the current stress/busyness level around here. So I asked Siri to call Dairy Queen while I was driving from the grocery story to pick up Carla from an activity. The person who answered was unintelligible, so I asked, “Is this is Dairy Queen on street and street?” and she said, “Nah.” So I hung up and looked up the number for the DQ I wanted (when I was parked), and oh look, it is the same number I just called. So I called back. Same person answered, still unintelligibly. Did Google simply have the number wrong? Had the DQ closed without my knowledge? “I am trying to call Dairy Queen?” I said hopefully. “This is Dairy Queen.” Phew. “Oh good, I would like to order an ice cream cake.” The person asked if I could hold on for a moment. Sure. I sat on hold for 56 seconds, and then the call disconnected. I called back. “I am just trying to order an ice cream cake!” Another brief hold, and then finally I was able to place the order. Then the person said, “What time do you want to pick it up?” I said sometime in the morning? Eight o’clock? “Oh, you can’t do that.” Oh, okay. Nine? Ten? What time do you open? “We don’t open until eleven o’clock.” Okay great, eleven o’clock it is. “You can’t do that.” WHAT TIME SHOULD I COME GET THE CAKE. “Well, we open at eleven but the cake won’t be ready until one.” Great. See you at one. 

  • I rarely go to Target these days because it so unpleasant inside (the latest time was no different; they clearly do not have enough staff to fold/tidy the clothing areas or to work more than one register at a time), but there was additional unpleasantness awaiting me in the parking lot! (Confidential to Nicole: LOOK AWAY.)
Someone left their cart not just in a parking space, not just in a parking space RIGHT NEXT TO a cart return, but also touching my car. No damage except to my sense of humanity’s capacity for good.
  • Did I tell you about the bees? We have a nest of bees in/on our chimney. Currently, so far, the nest seems to be on the outside of the chimney, but I can hear them buzzing while I am inside, which is Very Worrisome. Also, they are technically yellowjackets. And also also I want them to GO AWAY.
  • I have been in sort of a fiction lull lately. I am in the middle of a book, but I’m not loving it. I’m not disliking it, either, but it doesn’t pull me. I have been reading some non-fiction lately though. Most recently, I’ve been enjoying The Family Firm by Emily Oster. (Thanks to Lisa for mentioning it in my post about extracurriculars!) Oster just seems so soothing and balanced and her advice seems to great. The book is about making decisions for your family (when to give your kid a cell phone? is this extracurricular worth pursuing? etc.) the way a company would make business decisions, and I really like it. It makes me want to go back ten years and have some of these conversations with my husband BEFORE we had Carla. But I guess sometimes you plan ahead and sometimes you just muddle through, and we’ve really been doing a lot of muddling in the realm of parenting choices. Anyway, I am finding it really eye-opening and I hope I can remember to apply some of her advice to future major decisions. 
Every surface of my bedroom features similar piles of books.

  • Fall is upon us, and the trees around here are very very slowly beginning to don their autumn finery. We’ve had a ton of rain (though no hurricanes, for which I am thankful) but today we have sunshine, and I think we’re supposed to have sun all weekend. I hope we can spend some of it outside! Carla would be happy just sticking around our neighborhood; one of the neighbors has a new puppy! 

  • Related: OCTOBER BEGINS TOMORROW!
  • Have you gotten your flu shot yet? I haven’t, but I want to. Carla has a doctor’s appointment today and I’m going to see if they can sneak a flu shot in as well. She will not be pleased, but it sounds like we’re in for a nasty flu season and I want our family to be as protected as possible.

That’s all I’ve got today, Internet. I need to go make yet another phone call. I hope you and your loved ones are safe and dry, and that you have a happy weekend ahead of you.