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Health Values and Visiting Great Cooks
This past weekend, I picked an idea for handling “holiday” stress from one of Fiona Ferris’s other books, A Chic and Simple Christmas to try. It just so happens that on this weekend, I traveled to visit some wonderful extended family members. So, why was I reading ideas on how to handle stress, you naturally ask. Well, not only are the family members wonderful people, they are also wonderful cooks. And I am trying to follow a Keto food plan (basically, eating very low sugar/low carb.) It’s been surprisingly easy to adapt to this approach as long as I am not surrounded by delicious home-baked sweets, donuts, cakes, cookies…. all…
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France Long-Stay Visa Process (Aug-Sept 2018)
My family and I just received our official long-stay Visa’s for France last week! Here are the materials needed and the process that we followed. A. Required Documents: 1. Copies of Long-Stay Visa Application (with application number from the on-line submittal.) One copy per person. I filled out one application on-line. Then we printed 3 blank applications and filled one out for each person (using the same app number that I had received on my on-line app) – for my husband and two children. So, each person in the family has to have their own paper application. to take to the interview. Only one adult filled out and submitted the…
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Reflections on 30 More Chic Days – Day 2 – “Glamour”
I picked Day 2 from Fiona Ferris’ book, 30 More Chic Days, as my weekend “Chic-Think” this past weekend. The topic is glamour – how to incorporate some touches of glamour into one’s life. The exercise stretched past just the weekend and into the following week. It turns out that glamour takes a bit more reflection than I had anticipated! (That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy Fiona’s books – her ideas often spark many follow-on questions and thoughts.) I can definitely write about what is NOT glamorous. I was able to zero in on those things in a heartbeat. On the list of the non-glamorous: the pile of…
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Inspiration and Creativity as Springboards to a Beautifully-Lived Life
Want to add a sparkle to your day? Read Thirty More Chic Days: Creating an Inspired Mindset for a Magical Life by Fiona Ferris. Ferris offers a month of ideas that will turbocharge your inner Parisian chic-ster (and upgrade your daily life experience.) Each chapter represents a day in the month. And each day, the author presents an idea to “up-level” the reader’s ordinary life experience. Whether it’s an idea to free one’s creativity or an idea to set aside a little time for additional self-care, each nugget of advice is gently and persuasively described. One cannot help but be inspired by the author’s sense of enthusiasm and ingenuity! Her…
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Sleep -vs- Calm
I tried a “schedule” experiment a few weeks ago. I read Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning: The Not So Obvious Secret Guarenteed to Transform Your Life and decided to try his 30-day challenge. Here is Elrod’s basic message: how we START our day basically sets the course for how our day goes. Start our day by scrambling out of bed late and panic-stricken (because we hit the snooze button too many times) and we tend to continue on a scrambling, chaotic-feeling course for the whole day. Start our day with a short series of activities that brings us to a calm, focused, grateful mental state and we move through…
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Road Rage or Inner Peace?
Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan. So how do we spend our time when caught in traffic or trapped in the slowest line ever experienced in the history of mankind? Tan gives us some ideas on how to creatively use these brief (or not so) interludes in our busy days. Humorous and thoughtful, Tan offers unusual wisedom and good advice presented in gentle, bite-sized nuggets. I’ve tried his approach to line-survival (the 20-second meditation on loving-kindness) and can honestly report that it works! I could feel my tension seep away as I breathed slowly and focused on the positive intention of sending the (very) slow clerk thoughts of loving-kindness. It…
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Authenticity, Freedom and LESS
The Year of Less – How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy In a Store by Cait Flanders. Cait Flanders writes a blog called CaitFlanders.com. Several years ago, she embarked on a year-long experiment to NOT purchase anything that was not consumable or not needed (or not related to her dream of travel) and documented her journey on her blog. The book about her year of un-consumerism takes her experiences and adds in some background information and post-experiment discoveries that she didn’t write about in her blog. It’s a fascinating read by an interesting and likable author. Her…
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Old Money and New Blood
The Old Money Book by Byron Tully. Humorous, tongue-in-cheek but VERY spot-on advice for thinking about money and our relationship with it. I had the mental image of a visiting great-uncle (looking eerily like an older Winston Churchill) sitting back in a wing-back leather chair in an old English country estate library. In between puffs on his cigar, he acerbically mutters little gems of great financial management advice to the “younger niece or nephew” (us, the reader.) One of the best pieces of advice is that there is quite a difference between “appearance of wealth” and “reality of wealth”. We’ve all heard the idea expressed before – but it is…
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Younger Next Year & Thinner This Year, What’s Not to Love?
Laugh-out-loud funny, irreverent, thought-provoking Chris Crowley (and Henry Lodge, MD, and Jennifer Sachek, PhD) will have you snickering your way to a healthier, happier & more youthful you – no matter what your age or stage of life is. Chris, Harry and Jen have my sweetheart and me rethinking the next stage of our life. And with Chris driving the discussion, it’s a hilarious and encouraging experience. The topic is deep – what do we think our last third of our lives will like and exactly how do we want to be living it? Chris definitely got us thinking and even more important, through his boisterous good humor and wily…
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What I Learned from Winston Churchill and Gretchen Rubin Last Week, Part 1
I had a terrific book to read this past week, 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, by Gretchen Rubin. (I wrote a short review of it here.) What was especially interesting from the book was how Rubin described Churchill as a perfect example of the classical Greek tragic hero. According to the author, the tragic hero has four main characteristics: 1. The hero is from a high ranking family and lives his triumphs and his defeats in the public eye. – Certainly the portly figure of the aristocratic Winston Churchill, complete with cigar, looms large over the twentieth century. 2. The hero’s greatest strength is his greatest weakness. It…