Friday Favs – Where Did January Go?

Friday Favs – Where Did January Go?

Happy Friday, friends! Is it just me or did January fly by? I had over a week of SUPER slow speeds (it took an entire hour to upload a 10 MB file one night!) and then almost another entire week of no internet at all. This seems to happen every winter, but I’m so happy to be back in business!

I’m considering doing my Friday Favs posts just once a month for awhile. With the weather so cold and being laid off from several of my jobs, I haven’t had many exciting things to share. I’d way rather do a post once a month with things I’ve really been loving than stretch to come up with five things on a week when there isn’t much new!

Here’s what I’ve been loving lately:

 

 

 

1. I reread The Artist’s Way at least once a year, and it always brings up new ideas and new motivation. It;s one of those books that changes as your life does, and I always get something new from it.

There are quotes in the page margins, and I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately:

 

 

2. You may have noticed my blog looks different! I’ve been wanting to fix some things with my blog design FOREVER. I’m pretty decent at CSS and HTML but I HATE doing it. Plus, I learned on blogger since I used it from 1999 until like 2016, so WordPress is still foreign to me. Last week, I finally gave in and decided to see if I could find someone on Fiverr to fix two small things for me. I knew that what would take me hours to figure out would probably take someone experienced a few minutes. I found a guy who does WordPress work for $5, so I asked if he could fix the weird alignment issue I had with the top of my sidebar (for some reason it was like 3 pixels out of alignment and it drove me nuts) and fix my main column so that I could post photos that were at least 800 px wide instead of 600.

Unfortunately, my old WordPress theme was built in a super weird way that I would have needed to get the background graphics totally redesigned to make the changes work, so the guy I hired got back to me and let me know that unfortunately it just wasn’t going to look right if he made the changes I asked for. I was refunded quickly, which was a bummer at first, but I really appreciate that he was so honest about his limitations. I wound up just switching to a whole new theme instead, so while I miss my palm trees, at least I can post wider photos now!

If you have nagging tasks that you’ve been meaning to get around to for ages, I totally recommend Fiverr! Some people charge $10 or $25 or more for their work, and the site adds on a small fee. (I paid a total of $7 for my $5 project.) They have a referral program, so if you sign up via my link, you will get 20% off your first purchase! And like I mentioned, they are great with refunds if things don’t work out. I still consider it to be a really good experience even though it didn’t go as expected.

 

 

 

3. Although it’s super cold today, we’ve had a few REALLY nice days in the last month or so! I can’t resist a nice sunny day, so I’ve been outside a lot. I decided to put together a comprehensive guide to local hiking trails, and it’s a crazy amount of work, but I’m having a blast doing it! My first post should be going up next week, if I can ever manage to finish editing all of the photos. It’s been so fun to have a creative project to work on that I know is actually going to help people!

 

 

 

4. I found these gorgeous vases at Walmart of all places. For $4 each! It’s hard to tell from the photo, but they’re quite large – maybe 8″ tall? Can’t decide if I like the clear or the iridescent one better. But with Valentine’s Day coming up, I wanted to share since they’d be perfect for holding flowers you receive, or filling with the absurd amount of chocolate that you buy for yourself. (I think we know which of those categories I fall into.) I’ve been trying to think of other things I could use them for – basically I’m trying to justify a $4 purchase to myself. This is how my brain works. It’s fun in here.

 

5. Here’s to making better life choices in 2020. We’ve got this.

 

Linking up with A Little Bit of Everything for Friday Favorites