A Collection of Loves

If you have come to this post expecting any sort of wisdom or profound thoughts, you will be sorely disappointed. I have no such words to offer as of late. Some things just take awhile to percolate, and I've learned never to rush such thoughts.  

I do, however, have a collection of things I have been loving lately - podcasts, books, food, music, products. Just a little bit of everything. I've been reading books like a bear coming out of hibernation, searching for food. I've just been gobbling up one book after another. And I've been trying all sorts of new foods and recipes, some good, some not-so-good.  I offer this collective list merely as a means of recommendations and a peek into my wanderings lately. Perhaps you'll find a few will make it on to your own list of loves. 

• "Escape to the Chateau". This show has been on for years and I am only now just discovering it. I love Dick and Angel. I don't have cable, so I can only blame PBS for sucking me in.

• "Just Want You" by The Belonging Co, featuring Sarah Reeves. I cannot get enough of this song.

• Webcam at Turpin Meadow Ranch. I stayed at this ranch the first time I ever went to Wyoming. I LOVE this place and I just discovered there is a webcam there. I am hooked. I'm also obsessed with the webcam at the National Elk Refuge.

• The Spatty. Say hi to your new best friend. I've known about this product for awhile, but never bothered to buy one. But then I had a few lotion bottles and tubes that I wanted to clean out. Enter "The Spatty." I've used it nearly every day since I got it.

• Rebol. Such.good.food. This place is my guilty pleasure. Just minus the guilt actually because all their food is ultra-healthy and follows the mindset of functional medicine, which says, "Food is medicine." And their Paleo cookies? I had one over the weekend and it was a magical moment.

• Shrink Art. It's like magic. Equally entertaining for children and adults. I had done shrink art before but rediscovered it after thinking through what activity to have for a women's ministry I've been volunteering with. I just bought whole sheets of it, traced some images I found online, colored them, baked them and voila! 

• Whole30. This has literally changed my life. I started doing it several years ago and it has been a total game-changer. I started a round at the beginning of this year and I feel so much better. The wonder of good sleep is incentive enough to follow through with this approach.

• Harvest Sheet Pan Dinner. In the midst of Whole30, I've been exploring new recipes. I've been loving this one.

• Bacon. I know, I'm late to the game on this one. I'm not a huge bacon fan. (You can now pick up your jaw from the floor.) I felt kinda 'meh' about it. I had never bothered to purchase bacon at a grocery store, on my own, as an adult, until the last two weeks. And now I just want to eat it all the time. 

• Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me by Ian Morgan Cron. This book. It had me laughing so hard I nearly peed my pants. I gobbled it up in one night. It was both sad and hilarious all at the same time. I also read The Road Back To Me by Cron, which I likewise recommend.

• Happy Rant Podcast. I'm not much of a podcast listener, but this is the one podcast I listen to faithfully, and routinely laugh out loud while doing so. And Ronnie Martin's Twitter feed - I wish I could write half as well as he does. He is a fabulous writer. 

• The Doctor's Farmacy Podcast. I don't listen to this one quite as faithfully, but I still listen to it a fair amount.

• Breath by James Nestor. Who knew there was a history to breathing. SO fascinating. I learned so much from this book.

• Hoopla. I use this app pretty regularly to access and stream music, but I do it for free through the public library. It's not like Spotify or Pandora that shuffles songs based on a few 'seed' songs. This gives you much greater control and lets you just straight up listen to entire albums of your choosing.

• Internet. I know, it's about like the bacon situation. I just got legit, hi-speed internet for the first time in my life. Go ahead and re-read that sentence again. I'll wait until your head is done exploding. Yes, I have gone my entire adult life without ever actually having internet. I would either use my phone, go to the public library, or use a mobile Wi-Fi 'Jetpack,' which really couldn't do much. I now have 5G, wired, unlimited internet and it is uh-mazing.

• Macadamia nuts. Add these next to bacon and internet. Clearly I've been living under a rock my whole life. How have I not discovered these before now?? The price tag on these little suckers is the only thing stopping me from eating my body weight in macadamias. 

• Fed Up documentary. Very enlightening.

• Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? by Mark Hyman. Can you tell I'm a fan of Mark's? (See also the Doctor's Farmacy podcast above and the Fed Up documentary, which he is in.) 

• Sanditon. I first watched the series on PBS. It was Jane Austen's last unfinished, unpublished work before she died. Spoiler alert: the guy does not choose the girl. Which annoys me. Greatly. But Theo James is just way too good-looking for me to be upset with him for very long. I also read two different versions of the book. Austen had only written eleven chapters before she died. One book took Austen's original chapters and then the author finished the book as she imagined Austen would have. The other version was just the book form of the TV series. (I also re-read Pride and Prejudice and re-watched both the Kiera Knightly movie version and the BBC series. I was clearly on a Jane Austen kick for awhile.)

Despite all of these things I've been loving, there are a few things I would not recommend:

• Sardines. I can't. I just can't. I thought I'd try to branch out some in the food department. This was a branch too far.

• Seaweed snacks. Again, trying to broaden my horizons and be a bit adventurous in the food department. It's a definite 'no'.

• Hazelnuts. I love Nutella, but I'm less of a fan of the raw nut. Kinda boring. And chewy.

• Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan. It's on the life of William Tyndale, the man who translated the Bible into English and was persecuted for doing so. Obviously, Tyndale's life is fascinating, but the book itself was a bit dense and the writing style left a little something to be desired.

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. I was pretty excited to read this book because the plot summary sounded so intriguing, but I wound up pretty disappointed. It is no doubt wildly imaginative and creative, but it had several sex scenes that I just didn't care to read, and quite frankly, really great stories can be told without those elements