2014 Favorites

In just a brief overview of some of the wonderful things I have loved this past year in terms of books, movies, tv shows, websites, and totally random things that are not work related. 

• Books
• Belly Laughs by Jenny McCarthy
• The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
• Seven by Jen Hatmaker
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Divergent by Veronica Roth
• Insurgent by Veronica Roth
• Allegiant by Veronica Roth
• Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Kingdom Keepers books 6 & 7 by Ridley Pearson
• totally juvenile fiction - however, if you are a Disney lover you should probably just read this series
• Movies
• Frozen (yes, I know it came out in 2013 but really we watched it more than I care to admit in 2014)
• Captain Phillips (yes, also came out in 2013, but I am behind the 8 ball and enjoyed this movie quite a bit)
• The Wolf of Wall Street
• The Book Thief
• 12 Years Slave
• Daniel Lee's The Butler
• Monster's University
• Mockingjay part 1

• TV shows
• Downton Abbey
• We are borrowing these seasons from a dear friend who owns them - loving this story
• Big Bang Theory
• Still love this show
• Bones 
• I realize this came out years ago, however, I am finally catching onto the wonderfulness of the whole thing
• Grey's Anatomy
• we are a season behind because we watch it on Netflix
• Call the Midwife
• I LOVE this series and wish there were 12,000,001 episodes - its on PBS.com and free to watch - go watch it
• Game of Thrones
• We stumbled upon this tv series after we caught up on Downton Abbey and ran out of seasons on dvd
• Several friends recommended it to us - while a bit graphic and the language leaves something to be desired, we surprisingly like it
• Miscellaneous Things
• Nikon D300
• I have fallen more and more in love with this camera this year, while actually using it quite a bit more and learning a ton about the different settings
• Pilot Frixion Ball Clicker erasable pens
• I found a few of these pens randomly in the church - who knows who left them and actually bought a pack of them - I LOVE erasable pens
• I Love This Yarn
• still by far one of my favorite yarns 
• okay I actually have other favorite yarns - however, this one I find wonderful in terms of price vs quality vs softness
• I hate that it is only sold at Hobby Lobby and Hobby Lobby online
• I don't like yarn shopping online - I like to hold the yarn in my hands
• The Project Life App
• A wonderful app for iPhones that allows you to create photobook pages right on your phone
• WORTH purchasing
• If you use your iPhone to take pictures and create photobooks it is worth getting this app - I LOVE IT
• Websites
• www.ravelry.com
• yay for free patterns to make sweet stuff
• www.facebook.com
• sooo wonderful to keep in touch with family and friends - while some days I hate facebook most days I come back to it and enjoy the ways it allows me to connect with those who are far away
• www.pinterest.com/sthomson/
• www.instagram.com/sathomson
• www.allears.net
• Yes I am obsessed with Disney and I love being kept up to date on what's happening in the parks
• www.youtube.com
• I love having some where that is easy to share videos with family and friends
• www.shutterfly.com
• the only way I will consider making photobooks/scrapbooks
• I also back up all of my photos here
• www.picmonkey.com
• love that this is a free website
• I use this for both work and personal stuff
• www.pandora.com
• I seriously listen to this every day at work

Do you have any favorites from 2014 that I should check out?

Eight Months as a MRS.

The Good:
-we got to take an amazing vacation to Mexico
-we are getting closer to getting people to come and work on our basement projects
-we have gotten through many books this winter due to the crazy cold
- we have been working our building our chicken coop - our chicks are suppose to arrive the first week of April
- being trapped inside we have great opportunities to try new recipes- lately I have been on a bake my own bread kick (delightful)

The things no one warns you about:
-two people can have very different understandings of what clean is in terms of the house (although we now are on the same page)
- we are dying to get outside and are crawling the walls (much like the rest of the Midwest) and we like everyone else get a little cranky when cooped up inside
- I hate running on a treadmill, please show up spring
- I fear my computer has died & we haven't saved up to buy a new one - suck! - now attempting several things to get it back up and running and also massively starting to save for a new one - we need at least one working computer - (confession - my beloved macbook is 8.5 years old)

The Misc. Things:
- Dakota is also going crazy not getting her good and long walks in (toooooo cold)
- I was in St. Louis for work last week and it was marvelous (post coming soon)
- the Olympics have begun - love them
- I am annoyed we have to save for a new computer when I was hoping to put that money towards doors or a bathtub/shower for the basement



How old is your computer?
What kind of a computer do you use?
How are you combatting this ridiculous winter?

That day our internet was limited....

We moved into this GORGEOUS house mid-December. We love it, and so far we love everything about it. It was the house I wanted to hate when we were touring houses, it was a whole 15 minutes from work, as opposed to the less than 5 I lived before. It is out in the country. It runs on propane. It only has two bedrooms, with a beautiful unfinished basement that will hopefully not be too hard to finish off with the potential of two more bedrooms, another bathroom, a big multipurpose room, a laundry room, a storage room. It is a split level, four steps up to the main floor and nine steps down to the basement. It doesn't have a fence.  It isn't in my top choice of elementary schools. Ahhhh, we wanted to hate this house. I told Marc as we were driving out to the house that this had better be good or else there is no way.....

We walked into the house, it is totally open on the inside, the living room flows into the dining space, which flows into the kitchen. It backs up to the Crow Wing State Park (which we love and adore). It is a quiet neighborhood. It had two bathrooms, TWO bathrooms, this is a big deal when we have all of our family over. It has a three stall ATTACHED garage. It was under our budget. It had beautiful details. Besides the guest room nothing absolutely HAD to be painted. (Mom has since painted the 2nd bathroom because I didn't like the color before, thanks mom, it was livable but now this is wonderful). The guest room is next on the list to be painted. The yard is huge. We love this house, we have adjusted and really don't mind the 15 minute drive. Propane isn't a big deal to us. We continue to grow into the house and figure out where stuff goes. But one thing that we have found we actually don't mind is the fact that because we are so far out in the country we don't have unlimited internet access, we had to go with a dish internet provider which only allows us so much internet each month.

Living/Dining/Kitchen before anything was moved in

We actually read more books, we talk to each other more, we don't have Netflix streaming endlessly, we don't sit mindlessly on facebook for hours. We have plenty of data each month to do what we want to do, we just don't stream things without end. We communicate more. We enjoy the silence more. We get lost in more books and magazines. We watch movies we already owned. We check out movies from what feels like a nearly endless supply at our library. We have disconnected some, and we love it. We aren't as tied to our ipads, iphones, laptops, and tv. We were just discussing last night what a welcomed change this has become in our lives. Yes, we still use the internet probably more than we care to admit but it has been seriously lessened and we love it. I still make photobooks on shutterfly, instragram, facebook, read blogs, write blogs, and my husband frequently looks up triathlon training plans and I look at half marathon plans but we have taken a step back from the technology that had gotten a grasp on our lives. I don't think we even had a clue how much we were absorbed in it until our data was minimized and while there are moments we miss it, the reality is we are actually enjoying the lack of data.

How much do you use the internet in any given day?
Do you enjoy the chance to step back from technology?
What are your opinions on technology?

Kingdom Keepers

The Kingdom Keeper book series is made up of seven books

1. The Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark
2. The Kingdom Keepers: Disney at Dawn
3. The Kingdom Keepers: Disney in Shadow
4. The Kingdom Keepers: Power Play
5. The Kingdom Keepers: Shell Game
6. The Kingdom Keepers: Dark Passage
7. The Kingdom Keepers: Future Installments

So these are definitely books intended for middle schoolers or high schoolers however one of my youth pointed them out to me and so I thought I would give them a shot. They are a quick read and I have picked them up at the library to read. I think they are ridiculously fun. For all those of you out there who love Disney and love to read these would totally be worth borrowing from your library for a couple days. It won't take you long to read but are super fun.

They basic story is the evil characters of Disney are trying to overtake the good characters of Disney and so they go throughout all the parks and even the cruise ships and they have battles. It was fun to imagine such scenes playing out. Ridley Pearson is a wonderful author and has very clearly spent a lot of time at Disney and had many a good detail in the book.

These books had me thinking and I was hooked on them once I started reading them.
Check them out - let me know what you think.


Do you have any random book series that you love?
What are you reading these days?

GIVE 500 update

I have not forgotten about this project and I am seriously LOVING this project. While at moments it is hard to think about going through another box or another closet of crap I am loving the space that it is opening up. I wonder WHY on God's green earth did I have all this stuff sitting around in boxes and in my closet aimlessly. I don't need this much stuff. I don't need a different outfit for every day. I don't need to hold on to everything I have ever been given.

This project has been liberating. This may seem strange but seriously somehow it has given me the permission I needed to be able to give stuff, that is perfectly usable, away. Now I am not counting socks with holes in them or stuff that is broken and needs to be recycled or thrown away, I am counting stuff that I seriously just don't need. This has been a wonderful project. This project has set me free.

I am not certain what my count is at and I am fairly certain I have long surpassed the 500 mark, I have hauled a couple loads of books to the library, a couple loads to the good will, and a couple loads to the church rummage sale pile. Somehow I had bought into the world, I had bought into the idea that I need to have more, I need to have a different outfit for weeks upon weeks and I couldn't repeat them in a couple weeks. (No one notices what I wear unless it is horrible - I have a bunch of clothes still don't worry but now the difference is I actually wear them all - and they get rotated between each other and have many combinations.) I don't have totes of crap just sitting upstairs in my attic "in case I need this stuff" - seriously I haven't missed it - I do still have boxes of holiday decorations but those are different, it is the crap I had been hauling around for years, for no reason.

I got rid of stacks of books and movies (I love both of these things) and I have kept some of my favorites and the ones that I like to re-read and re-watch but the ones I have no intent of watching again any time soon are gone, I just don't need them, if I want to watch or read them I can check them out of the library or get it off netflix. There is freedom in no longer being bound to stuff and needing more stuff. I have realized that I am not justified by what I own or don't own. I am not justified by what stuff I have or don't have. (deep down I have always known this but.... my actions had me held to another standard)

By no means am I promoting getting rid of everything you own and living in a tent - more I promote evaluating what you have, using up the excess stuff that you have been storing (I apparently was a hoarder of reams of paper and shampoo) I have more than I need still and have less to dust and less stuff sitting around and I couldn't be happier.

• Anyone else have this type of experience when getting rid of stuff? 
• Anyone else have tips on how to keep my stuff to a minimum so I don't just revert back to acquiring tons of stuff?
• Do you like to have stuff around?
• I must confess there is a piece of me that still says... what if I need ___________ - How do you sort out what to keep and what to get rid of without going crazy on either end of the spectrum?

134 items & counting

I am slowly but surely making progress on my commitment to the Give 500 challenge. My current goal is to have 500 items given away by March 1 (I figure it will get me through the winter and it can seriously be a winter project). I am in love with the process of going through everything, seriously before I moved to first call everything I owned (I owned no furniture other than my beloved papasan chair and didn't have a dog) fit into my car. It was freeing to know at any given moment I could pack up and move. Although now that I have a house (and copious amounts of furniture - or really enough to fill my house - this way of moving is impossible) and have acquired lots of stuff (some justified some I just don't need) I am realizing how easy it is for junk stuff to build up. So I have committed to downsizing. Not to mention in June Marc will be moving in and I should probably have some space for him to put his stuff too.

Count so far:

• 91 books (seriously I have way too many books after undergrad and grad school not to mention I LOVE TO READ) - I gave a bunch to the library (librarians were jazzed, or at least faked it if they weren't) and a ton of graduate school books to an old camper/camp staffer/friend who has just entered seminary (seriously nice to be able to pass the books off and know they will be used again)
• 4 pairs of shoes (why I have been hanging onto these shoes is beyond me, they were uncomfortable and I hated wearing them and still attempted to wear them when I forgot how uncomfortable they were - so I finally got rid of them)
• 38 pieces of clothing (seriously I owned way too much clothing - and some of it didn't/doesn't fit. Why in the world am I holding on to it?!)

Updated count: 134 items given away, 366 items to go

I will succeed.

Side note: I am also taking into consideration things I buy or acquire, so if I bring something new in the house 2 must go. I don't want to have this much stuff, more importantly I just don't need to have this much stuff! I must stop living in such excess! I am only donating stuff that people would actually want, I am also throwing some stuff away that just needs to go in the garbage. I am not donating things like socks with holes in them, throwing them away and those are not going in my tally.


Do you go through your stuff often?
Any tips on how to prevent crap stuff from building up in your house?
Where do you like to donate your stuff?

May the odds be ever in your favor.

This post will be rambly for sure. Feel free to read on and enjoy the craziness of my mind this morning.

Confession: I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Hunger Games, I was drawn in instantly, and I would like to note that I read them long before they became popular. The movie is good on its own as well, yes, I know there are lots of differences between the book and the movie.... however they must be viewed semi-separately. They can't include all the glorious details of the book in the movie it would be 65 hours long!Anyways... I love the books and the movie. I was captivated and drawn in.

Anyways... The phrase "may the odds be ever in your favor" frequently runs through my head. I text it to a few of my friends the morning of rally Sunday (kick off of Sunday school and really the fall church year), as I begin a run (in my head) I say it and everyone I pass I pretend is competing against me. When I get on the treadmill at the Y (which I try to avoid treadmills) I am totally racing the person next to me, it doesn't matter how long they have been on or if they are even walking, we are racing. Somehow this foolishness motivates me. Seriously. I am a strange duck I think.

I know the phrase doesn't work fairly quickly, no I am not out to kill everyone around me and I am not trying to be the last one standing, however some days the phrase just carries me. Yes, there are lots of other phrases that carry me that are probably much better however, I still love this one. I love the drive and the determination of Katniss to beat the odds and rise above when no one thinks she will. I love the way in which it is assumed she will not return and death will be the victor, I love that she faces the impossible and overcomes. I love that at the end of the day death will not be my victor either, I know that death (while still really really painful for friends and family of those who have died) does not have the final say rather life and life and life abundantly in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. There rests my hope, in the triune God, who continues to mold me and transform me, who continues to transform the world around me.

Totally unrelated: a dear friend of mine took some pictures of my fiance and I on Sunday (she supposidly isn't a professional photographer but rocks and could be if she wanted). Yesterday I got a cd of teh pictures and they are super fun! We had brought Dakota along and she played along really well. We had a blast hanging out at the arb and taking photos. Here are a few for you to enjoy. I love my sweet puppy and my fabulous fiance. I love the photos. It was hard to pick which ones to put up here, they all turned out amazingly. You may end up seeing a few more because I love them so much. Now to pick out which ones to hang in my house.

Do you have any phrases that motivate you?

What are your favorite books?