A lot of my frienships have come and gone over the years due to circumstances and physical distance. A few frienships have stayed strong in particular my best friend in France (we still typically message once or more throughout the week) and a college friend with whom it feels like time hasn’t passed when we get together even if we have seen each other for several years. I have mourned other friendships which I thought were strong but busy life and distance took their toll or I felt I shouldn’t be the one to always reach out. I moved to our present house 6 years ago and it took a…

Three years ago, I shared my Nativity Scene collection with you on the blog (here). Since I added a few and some of my readers were not around 3 years ago, I decided to share them again today. I have added one each year I think. My dream Nativity is the Willow Tree one (the complete set is $299 on Amazon!) or one very similar like this one which is less than $200 (I can’t tell if it is a Willow Tree one). Until I buy one second hand though, I will continue to add to my collection. I still remember visiting a Nativity scene museum in Italy at Christmas…

Welcome to the most exciting part of my honey adventure. Last week, I shared some information about bee hives and frames. Today, I am sharing the process of slinging honey from the frames. Susie and her husband Phillip use a manual centrifuge machine and I got to use it too! But first how did we get the honey out of those capped frames? Remember the frames were covered with a layer of wax. Before putting a frame in the manual centrifuge machine, you must slice off the top layer of wax so the honey can come out. Using a sharp knife, Susie showed me how to do this and I…

Have you ever wondered how the honey gets on your breakfast table or in your tea? I had the privilege of visiting my running buddy, Susie at her home and learned about how her and her husband Phillip harvest the honey out of the hives and frames. Phillip is a 3rd generation bee keeper. All I knew about the process is that bees go in a beehive and make honey and we eat it, so I was excited to join her for an hour or so and learn as much as I could. I love to eat honey and have bought honey from her the past year or so and…

For the past month and a half my bestie and I (she lives in France) have been baking bread. She has been experimenting with different recipes and shared them with me and I have learned several lessons about good bread: it takes time! All of the quick recipes are disappointing. The first lesson I learned was that either my bread machine does not stay warm enough or it doesn’t work well so I finally donated it after my last quick 3 hour bread in it. I was also using old yeast which probably didn’t help but the bread was very dense and had no air bubbles. I then tried a…

This past week was my blog’s 3rd year anniversary! I have now blogged 3 times a week for the past 3 years minus a few breaks here and there for family vacations. I have written about shopping, budget, fashion and family subjects. I shared trips and weekend adventures and hopefully have been an inspiration for all of those subjects. I have made online friends through my blog and met a couple of you and hope to meet more this year and next. Today I just wanted to say thank you to all of my readers and friends to take the time of the day to read my posts and to…

If you follow me on Instagram and read my blog regular, you might have heard me mentioning our local running club and me starting to meet up twice a week with two friends to run at 4:45 in the morning. Running club meets once a week at 6PM and both of those times are dark, especially the morning run. I have been wearing a reflecting belt but many in our group have been wearing and/or purchasing a Noxgear Tracer2 visibility vest. The vest is made of multi LED fiber optics with a reflective belt. There are quite a few color settings and the 20 hour battery is rechargeable with a…