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Pssssst....I’m over here now. Let’s celebrate stuff. 

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Birthdays, Butter, & (non)Blues

Does anyone else get a little sentimental around birthdays? I do. They're sort of like a mini New Years. I find myself replaying all the highs and lows since I last bit into my mom's delicious Pound Cake she makes each year. Actually, when I think about the amount of butter I've consumed since birth (and probably in the womb, too), it's a miracle I've lived this long.

Butter intake aside, the beginning of last year's birthday felt less like a delightfully sweet Pound Cake and more like a stale processed vanilla cake that's been left out on your Aunt Greta's picnic table for too long. And I don't even have an Aunt Greta. But that cake? It was heavy and hard and it makes me feel a little queasy when I think about it.

The good things about stale cakes, though, is that when you finally get your hands on a homemade piece of heaven l like my mom's pound cake, you're grateful. And in a strange way, you're grateful for the stale cake, too. Maybe sometimes you have to take a bite of stale cake to realize that, not only is it the wrong flavor, but you've been wasting your time keeping a cake around that simply wasn't good anymore. It wasn't until I put my stale cake in the trash that I realized how much room it'd been taking up on that picnic table.

I'm sure there will be times in the future where I'll get a bite of stale cake. That's part of life, I think. But, I refuse to let it take up so much picnic table real estate. Why hold onto something that brings you down when you could open up yourself to a whole new slew of goodness?

I don't know what your picnic table situation is. But, if you have anything moldy or stale on there like I did, I'd highly recommend tossing it out. Once you do, you may even realize you didn't even like that flavor in the first place. How are you supposed to know if you actually prefer cinnamon when you've been coming back to the same old dusty vanilla all these years?

Stale cake, I appreciate the role you played. You taught me a lot and I'll forever have that back left molar cavity to prove it. But, there's just not any room at this table for you anymore.

Here's to homemade cakes and exhausting my use of cake metaphors for the year.

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The other day my nephew and I were on a walk when he looked up at the sky, threw his arms in the air and shouted, "Look at this! Isn't this great?"

I looked at him and I looked at the sky and agreed because a) it was great and b) once you have nieces and nephews, everything they do is great, and this moment was no exception.

A part of me got a little sad because I realized how much I hadn't been paying attention. I'd been too "busy" making plans and rushing around and working and worrying to take a second to realize that there's a whole world going on around me and it's pretty darn great.

I don't know what the sky looks like where you are. Maybe it's pitch black or maybe it's blue or maybe it just stormed and shook up everything around you and you kinda hate everything about it. I've felt that way too, and I have no doubts that there will be plenty of other storms in my future. But, in my experience, storms don't last forever, and once you clean up all the mess and trudge your way out of that mud puddle, you may find that it cleared out a whole new path to something you never even knew existed.

So, I agree with my nephew. It is great.

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Alina Kolot | @alinakolot

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🌹

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Linda Lomelino

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(via Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas)

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Wit and Delight

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Forks, Washington | Michael Flugstad

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