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DIARY

I Tried A Probiotic Cleanse, And Here’s What Happened

July 18, 2017

This image is pretty, but it's not the cleanse I did.

The cleanse I did was this one.

Cleanses and I do not have a very positive history. I've you're a long-time reader, you may recall the Great F-You BluePrint Cleanse post, in which I cleansed for about a day before giving up and eating pizza, and arrived at the conclusion (parts - but not all - of which I still stand by) that expensive, beautifully packaged cleanses prey upon young, upper-class women who already may have tendencies towards restrictive eating, if not full-blown eating disorders. Something about the rules; the precision of it all - I don't know if this happens to everyone, but while I was on the cleanse I could almost feel it poking at the ghost of my many-years-gone anorexia: "Hey, doesn't this not-eating feel kind of awesomely powerful?! LET'S DO IT AGAIN."

Eat

I Can’t Stop Eating Shrimp Rolls

July 18, 2017

It took me years and years to understand the appeal of shrimp rolls. I think this is because I tend to only encounter them at places where you can also eat lobster rolls, and...I mean...eating shrimp when you can eat lobster is sort of like eating white chocolate when milk chocolate is available, no? Like, why would you do that?

The answer, as it turns out: Because lobster is expensive, and lobster is really only great when it's fresh...but shrimp? Pretty cheap, actually - especially if you get it at Costco, ahem. And shrimp are delicious even when they've been frozen and defrosted, making them practical, as well.

I'm very particular about my lobster rolls - I need them to be juuuust the right combination of lobster meat and mayo, with very few other ingredients gunking up all that perfect simplicity - and it turns out I'm equally particular about shrimp rolls. Which means that when I tell you that the one that I have been making constantly these past few weeks is perfect, I mean it. It's perfect. (Did I mention that you can easily make it in large quantities for guests, as a much more swishy take on regular old hot dogs?

Style

Jump (Suited)

July 17, 2017

Every morning from April through September, during the blur of activity that happens between 730AM (when my kids wake me up; and yes I know I am lucky that they let me sleep that late) and 830AM (when I load everyone into the car and head off to my son's camp drop-off), there is one consistent:

I will reach for a pair of denim shorts. I will pause, because I am bored to the depths of my soul of wearing denim shorts, and I will scan my closet for something else to put on my body. I will find only various incarnations of misery (tight jeans, mostly; I cannot handle anything snug-fitting at all when it's ten thousand degrees outside) or things that I don't feel cute in, because I'm distinctly blah lately and nothing makes me feel cute.

And so I will put on my denim shorts, think about wearing something other than a t-shirt on top, then put on a t-shirt and go about my day.

Makeup & Beauty

Product Discovery: Truly Phenomenal Sunscreen

July 14, 2017

Summertime Splash (FYI if you're a Gray Malin fan: pre-orders for Escape just opened)

Over the past year, I've turned into an obsessive sunscreen-er...on my face. I'm extremely hit and miss with my body for completely obnoxious reasons, like not wanting to gunk up my necklace (and being too lazy to take the damn thing off and put it back on again post-sunscreen). Not wanting to get the tinted sunscreen that I use on my face on the edges of my shirt (and being too lazy to use different products on my face and on my body). Et cetera.

Then, as you may recall from yesterday's post, I went to see a skin specialist because I was 99.9% certain that my feet were going to fall off, and discovered that the tiny red bumps on my chest that I had assumed were bug bites of some sort (ohpleasegodnotfleas) were actually just...sun damage. Which shouldn't have surprised me, given that I've spent the past few months sort of actively ignoring the fact that my chest is starting to look, very simply...old. And wrinkly. And sort of rough in that way that people's skin looks when they've spent a few years or decades baking in UV light. This is also unsurprising, of course, because the chest is the part of the body (along with the hands) that usually ages the fastest on people, because it gets tons of sun exposure, and is rarely protected. I know all of this, and still did my best ostrich impression and pretended that the skin on my sternum would somehow, miraculously, inexplicably be...fine. Forever Young, and such.

Lifestyle

So I Have This Thing

July 13, 2017

This post has nothing to do with ice cream.

I'm just trying to make an unpretty story...prettier.

Something has been going on with my skin these past few months, and I haven't written about it because...well, because I've been freaked out about it. And you know how when you're freaked out about something you sometimes actively try to ignore it and just hope it'll...go away? That's what I was doing.

Lifestyle

Back To School (With Kids)

July 12, 2017

Graduation Day, 2015

Both my husband and I went back to school "later in life" - for me, it was an abortive (but still hugely impactful) stint at NYU to study hospitality management, and for Kendrick, it was Yale Business School. Making the decision for him to attend a school located an hour and a half away from our Westchester home and spend days at a time away from his two-year-old son and pregnant wife (and later infant daughter) - not to mention move from being a two-income family to a one-income family for the duration - was, as you can imagine, a big deal.

But we did it. And we'd do it again.

Lifestyle

Cognac And Champagne

July 11, 2017

These diamonds aren't "brown"...they're cognac. Which sounds WAY prettier.

When I took my engagement ring into the jeweler a couple of weeks ago, we played around with some different ideas for what to do with it. I knew I didn't want to just replace the missing diamond - at the very least, I wanted all three stones to be the same size, which none of them were - but ended up deciding that I wanted to replace the three little diamonds with something more...interesting. I also knew I wanted to deal with the ugly black spots that had popped up on it, and had resigned myself to dipping it in a fresh coat of gold (thereby eradicating the tiny 1950s-era handmade etches all over its surface).

The jeweler shook a few colored gemstones out onto the countertop, but none of them seemed right; all the colored stones felt too...sweet. Like I'd get sick of them. So I started flipping through a book, and landed on a page covered in pictures of brown diamonds. "Those," I said. "I love them."

DIARY

New Again

July 10, 2017

Us, at the beginning

If you've been reading here awhile, you've already heard my engagement story, so I'm going to apologize in advance for telling it again - but I started out writing this post about what I did to fix up my original engagement ring, which had kind of fallen apart...and then felt like I had to say a sentence or two about our engagement...and then I got all mushy and just kept writing about it and including lots of weird little details that I'd never included before, and now, well...

I'd just like to leave this here. For posterity, you know.

Decor

I Bought An Island

July 7, 2017

(Spoiler: that is not my kitchen up there. That is a kitchen belonging to a person with much, much better hydrangea-cultivating abilities than I will ever have. If you ever see an alive hydrangea in a photograph on this site, please rest assured that I had nothing to do with it.)

When we were house-hunting (both times), the big thing that I really wanted - that I would not compromise on - was one of those kitchens that everyone can hang out in. And to me, that means a kitchen with a center island and a couple of bar stools. Our kitchen is sorta open - at least, it's more open than the kitchen in our last house, which could more accurately have been described as "completely and utterly isolated from the rest of the house and anyone who might be in it." But it's still missing that sort of breakfast-y hangout area that I've always fantasized about.

I can't install a *real* island in the middle of the kitchen because the space (which you can see here, in my kitchen makeover post) is too narrow, and I can't install one off to either side because there are doors in both spots - but one of those doors is a glass slider that doesn't open anyway, so I don't mind having something blocking part of it so long as that thing can be moved.

Lifestyle

Flashy

July 6, 2017

me, about to live-shop with you

If you happened to be on Instagram yesterday around 11:30AM Pacific Time, you might have seen a live video of me bopping around and checking out July 4th sales items at Sears. (I definitely got some weird looks from other shoppers - who’s the crazy lady talking to her phone about elliptical machines over in the fitness equipment aisle? - but perhaps I made their morning more…interesting? Maybe?)

I was at Sears to talk about their July 4th Sales Event, which has been extended through 7/8. The sale (up to 40% off) covers items in virtually every department, and sale prices are available online, on mobile devices, in stores - wherever you want to shop, whenever you feel like shopping. My personal suggestion: take advantage of these prices to pick up a big-ticket item you’ve had your eye on for awhile - a canopied gazebo, maybe, or a new washer/dryer. (Delivery is free on items over $399, if that helps push you over the edge.) There’s also a new pop-up item featured each day for a special price that day only (today’s is the Craftsman 4-Piece Lithium Combo Kit), so check back on Sears.com daily.

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