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.

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.

There are a lot of nice things about the digital age, and the age of digital cameras in particular. As examples: you get to take twenty million photographs of your child’s first year of life, and don’t have to pay to get all those photos developed in order to find the single group shot in which everyone’s eyes are open and no one looks like they’ve been awake for 60 hours straight. You can send your mom pictures of your trip to the beach while you still have your feet planted in the sand. Several years’ worth of family photos take up no more space in your house than the three inches required to store an external hard drive.

But the albums. I never get over how much I miss having actual, hold-them-in-your-hands albums to page through. There’s just something about them that’s romantic; that makes those memories you captured feel…I don’t know, more alive, somehow.

My parents-in-law have especially lamented the fact that they don’t have many hard copies of photos of us and the kids, and so for Christmas I decided to make them an album of some favorite shots from the past few years using Canon’s hdAlbum service. I’ve thought about trying out a program like this from time to time, but have always been a little intimidated by the process. But you guys? It was SO EASY. And SO FUN.