-
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…
-
Seven Days, Seven Black and White Photos Instagram Challenge
A few weeks ago I got tagged on my personal facebook/instagram to participate in this Black and White Photo Challenge that’s been going around. It was a pretty neat challenge and forced me to look at what is so often “just another day of the grind” for me with a more creative eye. So, now that I’ve completed it I want to share the photos here as well. The challenge requires posting a black and white photo a day for seven days, presenting each photo without any caption or commentary, and I feel like the end result was a pretty interesting visual summary of the minutia of my everyday life…
-
October Wrap-Up and November Goals
October was a whirlwind of a month, to put it lightly. Much of the first few weeks flew by as our days were consumed with moving, and unpacking… and setting up the house… and figuring out bills… and… and… and… That said, even with all the chaos, October ended up being a pretty good month in Magpie world. Let’s see what got accomplished. 1) Jim and I celebrated 7 years together. So yea, I think we kind of like each other. 2) We bought a house (HOLY SHIT WE BOUGHT A HOUSE) and moved into said house. Again, no small undertaking. So while most of my other personal projects and…
-
Magpie’s Pinterest Test Kitchen: Beefy Tomato Soup via Mantitlement
Now that we have our own house, I’ve begun to get back into cooking again. Not that I didn’t love our apartment kitchen, but I just got a bit out of the habit over the years, since the type of cooking I love to do is big batches of stuff, but there’s only so many leftovers I’m willing to eat (I often couldn’t share them with the apartmentmate because he’s vegan). Additionally, sometimes because of my schedule I wouldn’t want to do a lot of dishes right away because I’d be exhausted, and leaving them around is just rude when you’re sharing the kitchen with someone else. So I just…
-
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…
-
Book Review: Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas
So after how much I absolutely loved Crown of Midnight, and after what a cliffhanger it left off on, I was super excited to start Heir of Fire. Annnndddd…. It started off pretty disappointing. Where Crown of Fire seemed to hit the perfect balance between developing nuanced characters and weaving their growth in with a fast-paced, exciting, and steadily forward pushing plot, Heir of Fire, well, didn’t. It’s a Little Bit Wibbly-Wobbly. In terms of pacing, this book felt very unbalanced. It starts off slow. Very slow. And then somehow gets slower. Even as it introduces a new character who should be a thrilling addition (I mean an ancient, full-blooded,…
-
Book Review: Abhorsen by Garth Nix
So, I sort of let this review linger in the “unfinished” post pile a little too long, given how hard I came down on the previous book in the series, Lirael. I read this not long afterwards, and honestly was so amazed at how much better it was than its predecessor – and how much better it made its predecessor retroactively, that I sort of struggled to put it into words. And so I put off writing this review for a while. And then I just kind of forgot about it. But I finally got the other Old Kingdom books, and so I better get my shit together and get…
-
On Blogging Seriously (and Being Seriously Overwhelmed)
I’ve wanted to blog seriously for years. Honestly, 10+ years ago when I first discovered bloggers like Alicia Paulson of Posy Gets Cozy and Jane Brocket of Yarnstorm it quickly instilled in me a nagging want. To be a blogger. To take this seriously. To make this world of creativity a serious part of how I lived my life and made my living. But there was always something holding me back. Lack of time, lack of inspiration, lack of money, lack of my own space, an overabundance of fear… the excuses were and are many. First I was in college and had classes and trying to graduate a year early…
-
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…
-
Tips for Emailing Your Professors – From a Professor!
In recent years, one of the most common things I’m asked about by students is email. Specifically, how to email your professors. When I first started getting this, I was a little confused by it – until I realized that we’re at the point where none of our traditional students remember a world without IM or texts. For the current batch of college students, communication has always been getting increasingly informal, and increasingly instantaneous, and so it seems that many find themselves anxious about saying “the right thing” when sending a formal email to a professor for the first time. So I’ve decided to compile some tips about how to…
