A Saturday Check-in

Hey everyone! Just a quick check in before I head out for some serious shopping for an upcoming local gift guide on Make, Do and Mend!

Speaking of Make, Do and Mend, I recently posted a bevy of beautiful Thanksgiving tablescapes to get you in the spirit for the big day on Thursday! (I have to admit, I'm a little jealous of the super-cute kids' table featured on the blog). Check them out and get inspired!

It's absolutely freezing (literally) in Milwaukee right now, with a high of only 24 degrees today! We flew right past fall, here. And, just in time for the temperature drop, I had a CrossFit ...(oh, yeah, I'm doing CrossFit now... I don't belong to a box, but do all the WODs with equipment in our basement and garage. I feel like I'm beating the system, here)... a CrossFit workout that kept me outside most of the time. Here's what I did:

3 rounds for time:
800m run
65 lb front squats, 10 reps
200m run
11 pull ups
400m run
24 kettlebell swings, 35 lbs

I finished in 34:39 and was absolutely BEAT. And my fingers were freezing.

But I have nothing to complain about, because Eric is spending the entire day outside on one of his most favorite days of the year: Christmas Light Set-Up Day!

Eric looks forward to this day all year long. He puts on his headphones, blasts the Christmas music, drinks hot coffee and sets up our winter wonderland all day long. This year, we're excited to deck the yard in even more Christmas lights than the last two years (thanks to those pesky trees being removed!). I'm so excited to share the whole shebang with you after Thanksgiving! Eric wasn't planning on it being so cold this year, but his heightened holiday spirit should help keep him toasty.

What are your plans for the weekend? Anyone else doing any Christmas decorating around the house?

Currently Loving: Keep

Hey friends! Just checking in because I found something that I absolutely have to share with you.... it's what I believe is totally going to be the next Pinterest (and you know how much I love Pinterest).

It's called Keep.

Keep works a lot like Pinterest in the sense that it lets you "keep" (get it?) anything you see on any retail site to add to a wishlist or a collection. It's also filled with other things that fabulous followers of Keep have, well, kept! On every item you scroll over on Keep, you easily find the online store it's from, the name of the item and its price. The great thing about Keep is that it's strictly used to curate things specifically for purchase - you won't find any recipes, DIYs, or faded photos with an "inspiring" quote overtop (unless it's a print for sale). You can't "keep" from a site's homepage or from a blog, so this means none of the links in Keep will lead you to some random page where you can't find the item pictured (which, ahem, we all know can be a huge problem on the aforementioned site).

Pretty freaking fantastic, right?

I'm currently making some holiday gift guides to share over on Make, Do and Mend and I'm finding Keep to be the perfect place to keep all my finds in order. Plus, if you're creating a holiday wishlist of your own, this is such an easy (and beautiful) way to share all of the things you want from Santa.

I just stumbled across this site last night (thanks to my spirit animal favorite designer, Emily Henderson) and I'm already head-over-heels in love. What a genius idea!

Go on over to Keep and sign up right away! I know you'll love it just as much as I do. And while you're at it, be sure to follow me, my collections, and everything I keep. I'd love to follow you back!


P.S. This post was in NO way sponsored by Keep. I just love brilliant things on the Internet that people far more brilliant that I have brilliantly brought into my life. And when I love something, I love to share it with everyone around me. So hop to it!

A Change in Style

Alright, after hearing from a few readers (thank you!) who'd love more of I'm Loving Today, and realizing how much I love being a little more personal in this space, I've decided to keep it going here. It was never a question of whether I wanted to keep blogging, but rather, if I would have relevant things to blog about now that I'm posting three times a week to my home decor blog on Fresh (check out that space here).

And then I thought to myself: hey, there's a lot more to me than home design! I love to bake, travel, listen to music, exercise, have fun and be an all-around goofnerd. But mostly importantly I love to write, and having one more outlet for this passion of mine is certainly welcome. I'll continue to give home updates, DIY projects and more (I mean, it is what I love to write about most), but I want to keep this space a little different than Make, Do and Mend. A little more personal, a lot more varied, subject-wise. But because I'm proud of my work on the aforementioned blog, I'd also like to keep you current with my posts over there. So look out on the bottom of my posts for quick links to my latest work over on my other blog. You get the best of both world, people. Ain't life swell?

So, in honor of my comeback, I felt like I'm Loving Today needed a little facelift. Honestly, I've been wanting to change up the design of this blog for a long time, and I'm so happy with the simpler, sleeker style I've come up with! Easier to read, prettier, cleaner. So for all you Feedly-ers, BlogLovin-ers (or whatever else people use now that Google Reader is no more), switch on over to the physical blog and check it out! Hooray for a change in style!

Thanks again for the feedback about my uncertainty with this space. It means so much to know I have reader who care about my silly little words, no matter how trivial they may seem sometimes. You're the raddest group of folks on the 'net. You are the ones who make me want to continue what I'm doing.

So, in the words of every SNL host just after their monologue, "We've got a great show coming up. Stick around, we'll be right back!"

This week on Make, Do and Mend:

• Plastic Pot with Pizzazz
• Steep vs. Cheap
• Weekly Inspiration - Hanging Out

Where I've Been, Where I'm Going

Hello? Hello? Anybody still out there?

While I can't be sure that I've got anyone still checking in on this poor little neglected blog, on the off chance that some readers haven't given up on me completely, I wanted to give you an update.

After my wedding in May, I just kind of stopped doing.... anything. I had burnt myself out with projects and was so consumed with planning and throwing together what turned out to be the most amazing day in the history of days that after it was all done, I relished in the fact that I had nothing to do. Nothing to plan. No pressure.

So I spent the summer just relaxing, enjoying married life (which really hasn't been different whatsoever than our former situation of living in and owning a home together, aside from the name change) and just having a very uncharacteristic "I don't have to do a DAMN thing, so I'm not gonna!" kind of 'tude.

Flash forward to September of this year and I started getting the itch again. I really missed blogging, but I only wanted to blog if I had quality things to share. So I started rethinking this blog and mustering the inspiration for some fun home projects to come. Right around this same time I was contacted by the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin's largest newspaper), who I'd been privately consulting over the summer about a new lifestyle-devoted web site. They said they needed a home blogger and asked me if I'd be interested in hosting a blog on their site (they also featured our home in their home and garden section of the paper and on their web site!). After weighing the options, I decided it would be a great opportunity. You see, I absolutely love this little space and I love sharing my life and ideas with you, but I am also excited to be hosting a new blog on a high-trafficked web site where I'll reach a whole new slew of readers. It's great freelance work, and much of my new blog is just like what I've been sharing here for the past few years: fun home decor ideas, tips and projects for young folks on a budget.

My new blog, if you'd like to jump aboard, is called Make, Do and Mend. I'm liking where it's going so far, and I think it's only going to get better as it grows!

I've been thinking about what's going to happen to I'm Loving Today since Make, Do and Mend launched last month. To be honest, I've really missed being a little more personal on the blog. I'm Loving Today is a space where I share about trials and triumphs in home design, but it's also a space where I share updates on our silly little life, which for some odd reason, I really enjoy writing about.

I don't have an answer on where I'm Loving Today is going. A few months ago, my backlog of photos was inexplicably completely wiped. There's a large, large chunk of old posts that are missing photos and after that happened, I just got really down about this space. Would I go back and add in the photos back post after post? Would I scrap the whole thing altogether? Would I continue as if nothing happened? I eventually decided upon continuing forward, but when I look back at old posts I just cringe at those sad "missing photo" blocks. It's horrible. It's bad blog form.

So I guess what I'm rambling about is... should I keep this blog going as a space for me to write about life updates? Should I start up a new blog solely devoted to that (I've already began designing a new blog if I should decide on this option)? I'm lost here, and I'm wondering if anyone is missing me.

Whatever the case, if you want to keep up with my home-decor-specific blogging, hop on over to Make, Do and Mend and see what I've been up to lately!

Or leave a comment, drop a note or something letting me know your thoughts, if any, on what I should do with I'm Loving Today. I could really use some reader insight, here.


Thanks gang! Just know I love writing for you, and it's something I don't plan on stopping... maybe just moving.