High Five for Friday!

Hello Friday!  As always, I welcome you with arms wide open!

Linking up with Lauren from The Lauren Elizabeth for my high five of the week:

1) This pretty little gem arrived at our house on Wednesday evening!  My old phone had tons of cracks in the screen but I refused to replace it (again) because I knew I was due for an upgrade soon.  Well, over the weekend I received a text from my provider saying that upgrade was finally available.  Happy Dance.

2) My main office had doughnuts on Tuesday while I was working elsewhere.  I joked about how I would naturally be away from the office on a day such as that and "Tada!" when I returned on Thursday there were two fresh doughnuts waiting for me.  Such a treat because we practically never almost ever buy doughnuts. Ever.

3) For Christmas Aaron got me a FitBit Flex.  It's a bracelet style activity tracker and I love it so far.  Not only does it track your activity but it can track your sleep as well AND wake you up with a silent alarm!  I wake up much easier to the vibration on my wrist than I do to a traditional alarm and Aaron doesn't have to put up with me hitting snooze a million times.  To top it all off I got 8.5 hours of sleep on Wednesday night.  That's pretty much unheard of for a weekday.

4) On Thursday night this dream really happened.  If it has a meaning I'm pretty sure I'm better off not knowing. Sidenote: Apparently getting your PhD involves learning massage, if I report a broken bone next week you'll all know why!

5)  Because there is no way a Kid President video can fail at putting a smile on anyone's face:

Happy Friday!  I hope you enjoy your weekend!

A few housekeeping tidbits: 1) I still have an error showing in my FeedBurner RSS coding so I can't get streaming up and running with Bloglovin' until it is fixed.  Hopefully I'll conquer it over the weekend.  If anyone would like to share their knowlege of RSS feeds not being valid any longer I'd love to hear your thoughts because finding help on this topic has proven to be a bit of a challenge. *Edited to add that the Bloglovin' feed is now up and running again. It somehow fixed itself. Yay! 2) Amidst working to fix the Bloglovin' linkage it appears an email went out to subscribers with a post from a blog that has the same name as mine but is definitely not my blog.  That has now since

been resolved, I apologize for the spam content.   

Hello World!

Look what the cat drug in!  Some might have noticed, others might not have, but this blog was MIA for a bit. 

Social media is definitely a love/strongly dislike (because hate is such a harsh word) type of thing for me.  I love seeing what shenanigans my sister is up to off at grad school and photos from friends out traveling the world or the successes they are experiencing in their own lives.  I enjoy reading well wishes on my birthday and discovering articles of interest shared by others.  But then there are the days where I find myself longing for the good ol’ days.  You know, the days before “Spacebook” as my dad calls it.  MySpace+Facebook=Spacebook?????

So then you have the people who say, “Well just spend less time on Facebook, Instagram etc.” 

But here’s the thing, as a writer, not only do you want to produce content that people want to read, but you also want to acknowledge every person who leaves a nice comment or sends an email, all of which takes time that needs to be spent online.  Ultimately I found myself feeling bad as a blogger for either a) not making time to respond or b) taking time away from other things that matter to make time to respond. Also, between enjoying being a newlywed (which is awesome!), training for a half marathon (also awesome!), working fulltime, participating in all sorts of holiday craziness and fighting some weird bug around Christmas, I really just didn’t have the time to write.

At the end of the year I made it my goal in 2014 to spend more time on things that are important to me and writing this blog is one of them.  Yes it’s a type of social media but I’ve cut so much out in other areas of social media (which has been pretty liberating) that I feel it’s much more manageable now.

I’ve missed writing here and some have even missed me!  I know so because they’ve told me, so here I am! I’ve gotten rid of the blog’s Facebook page (as part of the de-cluttering my social media life process) and links to blog posts will be one of the few things found on my personal Facebook page.  You can also subscribe to receive blog posts via e-mail too if you’ve made an anti-Facebook type of resolution.  I'm also trying to get the kinks worked out of the Bloglovin' feed.  I'll let yo know when it's up and running! The Instagram account is still live as is the e-mail account and Pinterest.  I’ll be doing my best to keep up with regular posts here, free time permitting, and we’ll see where it goes. 

Here’s a little bit of what we’ve been up to lately:

Running a 1/2 marathon

And earning this ridiculously large medal

Marley is our new shower creeper

And Maya is still as persistent as ever.

We've been drinking green juice

And cayenne, agave lemon water 

Cooking recipes from BlueApron.com

And taking the term "grocery getter" to a whole new level in our new truck.

Thanks for hanging in there wonderful friends of mine!