The Weekly

The Weekly is a Friday, Sunday... or maybe just about any day, round up. The Weekly is a processing and a record. It is a mix up of currently and around here with a look at the past and the future. 

Loving: baking, standing mixers, pinterest recipes and feeling like I can actually successfully make some/most of them

Challenged by: Gratitude for things that seem like a pain in the butt. Grace for people that cut me off. Grace for people I love including myself.

Learning: to love the process. I found my love for the process with baking recently and now I feel weird on nights that I'm not making/baking something. It's no longer a rush, it's a process and I don't even eat that many of the treats I make, I generally give them away. The enjoyment others get out of them makes it so worth it.

Adventures: I saw CATCHING FIRE with my younger brother, then Saturday Dan and I went to Sea World. 

Reading: Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist. She was a speaker at the conference I went to in Nashville and I finally picked up one of her books. It's lovely, and so necessary to my mindset right now. I have noticed a huge difference in positivity in the past few days since starting to read it. Funny how that happens.

Cooking:  Baked Donuts of all sorts like Ol' Dirty Bastard (plain donut with chocolate glaze, peanut butter swirls and crushed oreos) and Maple Bacon. I might try a chocolate donut with peppermint glaze at some point. Who knows. 

Also in the last week I have made: brownies, chocolate chip cookies, slow cooker creamy chicken, muesli bread, nutella hot chocolate with cinnamon whipped cream, slow cooker french toast, oatmeal chocolate chip pancakes
and tonight I am making slow cooker banana cinnamon oatmeal

Working on: Slowing down with my cooking. I get this way about a lot of things. When I'm in to working out I do it all the time, when I'm into cooking and baking I do it... well, all the time. Whatever I am stoked on I want to do just about all of the time and start feeling a little weird when I can't. I don't want to go out, I don't want to be social, I just want to read/cook/bake/organize/blog/whatever. I think I keep going because I don't want it to run out, or I want to do as much as possible of the thing until I burn out, because I feel like burn out is inevitable. At least with me. I still have more to learn with loving the process for sure.

Celebrating/Moment of gratitude: getting a lot of things done on a Saturday night. For the first time in a while ever in our relationship Dan and I spent the night at my place and had nothing that needed to be done in the morning. It was glorious. I made the poor guy entertain himself while I cleaned my room and put away clothes from the weekend and did laundry, I also made him breakfast for dinner, and then I cleaned a little more. He was also a great sport about going to two different Targets and a Bed Bath and Beyond in one day. The same day we went to Sea World no less. He's definitely a keeper. So basically, this whole weekend was a moment of gratitude... and Friday. Holy canoli, my new boss gave us all our Christmas bonus Friday. I was floored by her generosity. I was then able to buy some more work clothes that I've been eyeing, put some away for Christmas gifts, put some toward my credit card and the majority in savings.
As for the little moments... 

Random thought: It started with thinking about how a cafe in the Oceanside courthouse doesn't take cash. Then I thought maybe they just really had a hard on for the olden days which made me think that maybe they would get wooden teeth if they could which then led me to think of how a mouth full of wooden teeth would smell. 

Emotionally: feeling grateful and adored 

Lovely Links:

I've been allowing my brain free rain with the neurosis, I've been needing to remember this /// My Problems Aren't Your Responsibility
Two blogs/bloggers that get to my heart every post /// Allison Vesterfelt and (the aforementioned) Shauna Niequist

In closing, this week has been wonderful. I've crossed so many things off my mental to do list it's crazy. I'm so grateful for everything this week has brought my way.

xoxo

A Personal History of Mornings

When I was a very little girl mornings were my favorite. It didn't matter what time I went to bed, I was up with the sun, happy, and hungry as can be. If you had happened to be in the apartment at 6am on any given day you would have heard a cheerful call of "I want crunchies, I WANT CRUNCHIES..." coming from my room. I had a daily love affair with breakfast, specifically cheerios, and crunchies was their name.

My mom was not a morning person, so as soon as my motor skills could handle it, she would put some milk in a small cream pitcher before going to sleep and leave it on a low shelf in the fridge so I could get my bowl of cereal, pour my own milk, and enjoy my breakfast while she got just a few more winks of sleep. I thoroughly enjoyed this time, I would eat my crunchies, though I probably no longer called them that, and then I would read (as small children do, looking at the pictures and remember the story their parents told them many times over), watch cartoons, or play with my barbies until she woke up.

When I was a little older still, motor skills fully functioning, I would pour my own cereal (and milk, straight from the carton) and then I would sit on the couch and read until my mom was awake. I was always happy in those quiet times. I had a book, and I had breakfast, let the others sleep through the morning. This was my time.

My grandpa and I bonded over our mornings when we were together. He would get up, look outside, talk about how it was going to be a nice day, and then go make some oatmeal for himself and some cereal for me. If we were at the lake house, we would sit out on the deck, watching for jackrabbits and other woodland creatures. If we were at their desert house, it was hummingbirds, and when breakfast was done, checking on watermelons or strawberries in the garden. I have so many great memories of him, but our mornings were my favorite. I was his early bird.

Then something changed, maybe hormones, maybe after seeing people sleep in and talk about how wonderful it was, I started to do it to. One day I woke up after staying at my grandma's house, thinking it was maybe 8am at the latest, it was 10am. I was excited (and probably a little nervous, my anxiety about doing things right started young). Finally I could do what others did. Little did I know that this would be the start of my battles with the morning.

My relationship with mornings ever since that fateful day, have changed. Through middle and high school sleep was my new thing. On weekends I would stay in bed as late as allowed. Maybe I was trying a new personality on for size, maybe I wanted to be more like other people. I don't know. But it has carried on to the current, and sadly, I think I've spent a greater portion of my life not being an early bird.

The mornings are something I wish I loved but have a hard time waking up for. I've been thinking, planning and lazily goaling to change back into a morning person. One that wakes up with time before work. Time to read, or write or maybe even work out (if I get really ambitious). I don't want to feel rushed but when the alarm goes off I just keep hitting snooze, hazily calculating the amount of time I will have to get ready. There's no time for reading or writing this way, there's barely even enough time to get properly ready! Something has to change.

These past few weeks I've been getting up earlier on a more consistent basis and I looking for ways to get more time. I've been going to sleep earlier most nights, never hitting past 12, rarely hitting past 11:15. I've been thinking of things that I have to get up for, this morning it was to turn off a slow cooker that I had started in the night, it had been cooking french toast and I had wondered how it would go. I don't have great reasons ever morning yet. Sometimes I still sleep until the last possible minute and then throw myself together and leave for work just making it on time. Those days don't feel as good. And I'm trying to remember that when the snooze button seems like the best option.

I want to get back to my early bird ways. I want to rise with, maybe even sometimes before, the sun and be happy about it. I want to eat my breakfast, write a few words, or maybe read a few, stretch and slowly introduce myself to the morning.  I want to feel productive, or at least calm before work so that after I'm not rushing to fit everything into my night. Baking, writing, reading, blog posting, watching Friday Night Lights, and who knows what else. That's what keeps me up late, the feeling that I still have more to do. I get inspired at night, by maybe that's just something I've trained myself to be, and it can be reversed again. Little things are coming together to make this happen. I get myself in bed by 10:30pm on good nights, I think of things to do in the morning so I don't press snooze until it's rush time and it also helps that the man friend goes to bed early during the week. By 930pm our conversations are done, so I have no distractions there.

I want to be an early bird again, I want to feel the peace of the morning daily. I think the morning has a lot more to offer me than the depths of night.

xoxo

photo credit: Frederic Poirot via photopin cc

On the Empty Page, Loving the Process and Baked Donuts

It seems that lately I have had a big of blogger's block. Really quite frustrating. I think about this space and know I want to write, I might even open up a webpage and type in blogger, I might even stop myself from being distracted by bloglovin and click on New Post, but then I just sit and stare. Sometimes I start typing things, and then delete... write some more, then delete again. It's been this way since Nashville. I still don't know what to write about that experience. Maybe I'm in that place where I think everything has to be perfect again, where I can't just write to document, but this has to be a blog that will one day generate income.

I put a lot of pressure on myself in just about every aspect of life, this one is no different. Maybe I should start a challenge, a 52 in 52 blog posts next year maybe. Sometimes that's not so hard, but other times it is. That one would have to be week specific, unlike this year where I've been catching up with my 52 dishes in leaps and bounds for the last two months.

Speaking of that, if anyone were to wonder what I've been up to, I would have to say it's one of three things... working at the new job, spending time with my man or cooking. But when I say cooking I mostly mean baking, and when I say baking I mostly mean donuts. I found myself an obsession it seems. It started in Nashville, I had a delicious pumpkin donut from Ellie's Doughnuts and I wanted to see if I could recreate it. So I searched pinterest for a recipe, and decided baked was how I was going to have to go (one day soon I might dive in to fried, but until then, I have a tin for the oven). I made them and shared them on the first day of my new job. I had a pretty warm welcoming. Later that week I brought buttermilk donuts with cinnamon and sugar on top, and then the next week Cinnamon Roll Donuts.

I've gone on to other donuts since then, figured out the perfect base donut, worked on several glazes, taken suggestions, and thought of possible christmas presents... it's been an adventure. Like most of my obsessions, I thing this one might die out somewhat soon, there's only so much I want to do with a donut. But there's some good, no, great, that has come out of this. I've fallen in love with the standing mixer. We have one at my house and we have one at my dad's house and I'm so ready to use it every day. Not only this, but I've found a love of baking. What use to be a wild hair occasion has become an almost nightly ritual. This week I even got up early on a Monday to bake. Me, early... on a Monday. It's  some sort of amazing and I'm really liking it.

I know that sooner or later I'll have to cut back a little bit, I have other things to do after work, I have actual dinner/meals to be made as things made with heaping amounts of sugar don't count. But I'm happy, because I've found my love of the process, at least in the baking kitchen.

I'm hoping to find a way to learn to love the process with a couple more things, like working out maybe, and even writing here. Maybe then I won't get so caught up, maybe then more posts will make it out. It's time to experiment, I don't have to know exactly what my blog's going to be. I can let go and just write.

xoxo

Lately I've Been...

I'm taking some time (probably again, maybe I have always been taking time) to figure out what I really want to go here. What I will be motivated to share and update. Until I have a better idea of a schedule or even what I want this space to look like, I will be posting sporadically. But that's not really anything new.

Lately I've been:
working on... a new blanket, super excited about this one because it's black, white and gold!

learning how... to be in a relationship. I tried to think of a better way to say it, but that's what it is. I'm learning how to shift and communicate and do anything but pout. I'm learning how to bring down some barriers that I didn't even know were there. Being in a relationship is turning into a humbling thing. I'm not perfect, and I'm not always easy to be with. That doesn't mean I'm not worth it (which is what I use to think) it just means I have to remember that it's a two way bumpy road.

also learning how... to enjoy the process. I'm learning this with cooking and with the aforementioned relationship, and just about everything. Not everything needs to be done fast, nothing needs to be rushed through. Enjoy it, the process isn't so bad when you learn to enjoy it. Everything gets a little better when you develop a respect and even an affinity for the process.

baking... donuts like a woman on a sugar driven mission. Pumpkin spice, blueberry lemon, buttermilk with cinnamon and sugar topping, cinnamon roll... and who even knows what's next!

acclimating to... my new job. I now have a 9-5, monday through friday job and it has been overwhelming because it is in a field I have not been in, ever, but the people I work with are pretty awesome and the boss is generous and caring... so I think I'm in a pretty good spot. AND I was able to put my availability at the job I was so tired of, on hold. I might need some extra cash on a weekend or two in the future, but for now, I can work my 9-5 and spend the weekend exploring and stuff with the man.

brainstorming... possible ideas for side jobs, one of which may just be teaching booty bounce classes. Another idea... holiday card photo shoots.

reading... Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and re-reading Catching Fire. So excited for the premiere!!! Mr. Penubra's is really, really good, stoked I picked it up. I've been taking a break from self improvement books lately, I wanted to give myself some time to acclimate to the new job, which can be overwhelming. But I will be back in the thick of those sooner than later I am sure.

enjoying... going to bed before 12, generally before 11:15 (!!!) and waking up semi early. I'm even thinking about asking to come in 30 minutes earlier each day so I can leave earlier. Old Corey would NEVER have thought about that.

realizing... in bits and pieces that I have made progress this year. Sometimes it felt like I was taking giant steps back, but somehow it's been working out. This is definitely been a year of (sometimes painful) learning.

Well, I'm falling asleep sitting up so I must sign off for now.

xoxo