Bits of Life

I have many disparate thoughts to share with you this morning.  Grab a cup of coffee and take a gander at what's bouncing around in my head today...

For one, I had to share a couple lovely treats from my Mother's Day weekend.  Is that a butter dish and a lip gloss, you ask?  Why yes, it is.  Two great gifts for this food and product loving mama.  Let me explain... first about the buttah dish. One fun thing about the house-sitting we've been doing is seeing the inside of other people's homes and lives and getting great new ideas for our own. Case in point: do you leave your butter out on the counter?  I never have, simply because that wasn't what was done in my childhood house, and it just never occurred to me.  We also don't use enough butter to justify a whole stick hanging out on the counter for that long.  The food safety-obsessed gal in me worries about freshness. However, in our last stint of house-sitting, we discovered that our friends kept just a smidge of their butter out in this adorable butter dish.  Voila!  Just enough perfectly softened butter for your toast or a bowl of noodles for the baby, stylishly contained on the counter.  Loved it.  So the hub, who knows that I am a sucker for things such as perfectly softened Vermont Butter and Cheese Company Cultured Butter (a life-changing product if ever there was one and worth it's own post), made this magically appear for Mother's Day.  Thanks, B!

And as for the lip gloss, somewhere in our move, I lost my bag of lip products.  Yes, I had a small bag of  lip products.  I love the story of when I got stopped in airport security with it and had a convo with the TSA guy that went a little something like this: "What's this?  Lip Gloss.  What's this?  Lip Gloss.  What's this?  Lipstick.  What's this?  Lip shimmer," until I finally broke down laughing at myself (he didn't think it was so funny).  It was probably just as well the Lip Bag went missing... I had been accumulating it's contents practically since college and that stuff has a shelf life, you know.  However, this loss left me with nary a lip shine to my name, and being that I rarely get fully made up anymore, a little swipe of lip gloss is the kind of thing that can save me from feeling like a total shlub when I leave the house.  So, my mama and I made a pilgrimage to one of the best stores ever, Making Faces, in Portsmouth, NH and a cute young thing in her early twenties helped me find just the go-to lip product.  Say hello to Smashbox Lip Enhancing Gloss in the the aptly named shade of Baby Pout.  It looks pink here, but just goes on light, sweet and shimmery.  It isn't too sticky or shellack-y, and I love it.  I am actually happy the Lip Bag is gone.  I am all about simplifying life these days, and having just one perfect gloss in my bag hits the mark.  I think this shade would be perfect with just about any skin tone if you are looking for a light, daily gloss.  Check it out!

What else... let me introduce you to my newest internet girl crush/blog obsession, a photography blog called  From Me To You.

I tell you, each post over there is better than the last.  I love her photographic eye, and am smitten with the shot above. It makes me feel like part of a world-wide sorority of coffee-drinking beauties, each of us gathering information, by newspaper or laptop screen, as we push back the morning cobwebs and caffeinate. (Note her Lip Bag... makes me a little sentimental.)

 I also adore her series called Food Diary of a Brocavore (which she defines as a "young urban male, interested in cooking and the local food movement. Attempts to eat seasonably, drinks craft beer, tap water and wine."), where she follows an adorable friend of her's (pictured above) as he shops the local farmer's market and prepares gorgeous, seasonal dishes.  The recipes are delicious and easy to follow, the photography is stunning, and their local market just happens to be NYC's Union Square Greenmarket, where my sister and her honey do most of their shopping, so somehow spying on that world makes me feel a little closer to her as well.  Hop on over to From Me to You and take a look... I promise you won't be disappointed.

Finally, I must update you on my half-marathon progress, or lack thereof.  An extremely painful case of Achilles tendinitis and my sinus infection kept me off the roads for 3 weeks in April, giving me a serious setback in my training.  Combine that with the fact that our move-in date for the new house is just days after the date of the race I picked out, and this whole June half-marathon thing no longer seems like a good plan.  I don't want to hurt myself rushing to catch up with my training, and I must be able-bodied on our moving day... soreness or re-injury is a non-option.  So, I've decided to just savor my 3 and 4 mile runs right now, and perhaps revisit the idea of a serious race, maybe in the fall, once the dust settles for us in Boston.  Life is all about rolling with the punches, right?