• Blogging,  Life,  Magpie Writes

    The One Where Magpie Is Angry

    So January and Feburary haven’t quite gone as planned. You can probably figure that out based on the quietness here. Nothing about the last two months has been the way I expected. January this year was… weird. I generally spend a good deal of the month working from home. Because of that, January is usually one of my most productive months of the year in terms of blogging and prep work thanks to the lack of crazy commutes to eight different places. It’s always easier to get stuff done when you’re not spending half of your day living out of your car, after all. But this year I just really…

  • Holidays,  Life

    November Wrap-Up and December Goals

    Once again, November has come and gone, and I’m left confused and dismayed about how it passed by so quickly. Like, seriously – I swear it was just the beginning of October the other day. How did this happen? How is Thanksgiving over already? How are we almost two weeks into December already and I’m JUST NOW posting my November update? Well, I know how that one happened… my photoshop updated and it took me until now to figure out how to get it to work properly again… but anyway… I guess time marches onwards, and while I haven’t been super active on the blog here, that’s not to say…

  • Blogging,  Home Dec Love,  Life

    August/September Wrap-Up, or, “Why Magpie’s Been Away for Three Weeks”

    So, big news here in Magpie land. I’ve been pretty absent from the interwebs for the last few weeks, and I’ve teased on twitter a number of times that it’s because of some serious life changes happening in the background, but never really specified exactly what was going on. Well, it’s finally time to specify: we bought a house. So yea, kind of a big deal. It’s an older house, and some of the floors are a little tilty, but other than that it’s in great shape (the previous owners took such amazing care of it) and we love it already. To be honest, the journey to this point has…

  • Life,  Lists,  Travel

    July/August Wrap-Up and September Goals

    The last two months have been just an absolute whirlwind. There’s some pretty big and significant life-changes that have been going on behind the scenes here at Magpie over the last few weeks that have been simultaneously super-exciting, and absolutely terrifying. I won’t say too much about it all on here until all is said and done, and everything is finalized, but it has certainly contributed to the overall chaos that has been the last two months. As a result of everything that’s been going on, many of the goals that I had originally set for July ended up put on the back-burner for much of the time since I…

  • Life,  Lists,  Making Do

    May Wrap-up and June Goals

    Well, hot damned. It’s June. Already. I find myself saying that a lot these days. “Already!?” “It’s summer already!?” “It’s [insert month] already!?” And the busier I am from day to day, the more I seem to be saying it. And May was a VERY busy month. It always is. From wrapping up and ending the semester, grading final papers and exams, getting final grades in, and working graduations not just at my own institution, but at a couple others in the region as a musician… Then add in all the holidays and anniversaries – Mother’s Day, a major family member’s “cancer free” milestone anniversary, my birthday, trying to shop…

  • Life,  Lists

    April Misses and May Goals

    So it’s time for my monthly wrap-up! Who knew it was going to be May so soon? It completely snuck up on me, and unfortunately I didn’t really meet all my goals for April as a result. To recap what I wanted to do, you can find the full post here. I was able to control my spending on take-out even better this month, but pretty much all the other goals were either misses, or near-misses. I wasn’t able to get anything done in terms of knitting, and while I read more this month, I stalled out about 75% of the way through my second book. And keeping up with…

  • Life,  Lists,  Making Do

    March: The Good, The Bad, And the Goals.

    As part of my plan for getting more consistent around here, I’ve decided to make it my goal to post a wrap-up of each month – this way I can sort of look at each month in review, identify what I accomplished and what needs improvement. I feel like it’s also going to be nice to have a handy list of what I’ve accomplished for myself (in addition to everything I know I’ve gotten done for work) over the last month. Hopefully it’ll be a handy guard against my anxiety creeping in and telling me I’m unproductive and lazy. Now the shape this post takes may change as the year…