I never thought a shelf could make me so happy.

Since moving back to Jackson, where we live in a house and not a tiny shoebox, I have gotten really into decorating our home. I loved researching and dreaming and doing what little I could in Boston, but having walls that I can actually nail into and more than one bookshelf to squeeze our book collection onto ... it's great. And since we moved rental homes over the summer, we have even more room than at our previous house. We also have two bookshelves in the big main room. The first thing I really decorated in this house is one of these bookshelves.

I love this bookshelf. I lurve it. I flurve it.

Which is a good thing, because it directly faces our main sofa, it is next to our TV stand and it's the first thing most people see when they come through our front door. So it's a pretty visible shelf.

Everything on it makes me happy, but I picked a few things to point out.

1. I'm trying to tone down my obsession with having frames photos all over the place—Brian prefers a more toned-down look, so I'm trying to be more thoughtful about which photos I display and how. We only have two photos from our wedding up in the house, and this is one of them. It's of Brian's fraternity lifting him up and chanting at the reception. It's a perfect shot.

2. I'm working on a collection of globes for our house. This one, the first of three, has been in my family for at long as I can remember—it still says Soviet Union instead of Russia and things like that. My mom brought it all the way from Salt Lake City the last time she visited.

3. Another theme in our house: ampersands. I am veritably obsessed. This one is a bit hard to see in the photo. You can see it fine in real life. The yarn-wrapped bottles behind it are DIY table decorations from my wedding.

4. This shelf is mostly open. We stick laptops, Brian's med school books, phones, etc. on it. If I've learned one thing about myself, its that I need space to just put things sometimes. It looks (a little) less cluttered if I leave a specific space for that. The floral tray next to the laptop is a place to drop mail.

5. Seven matching baskets to hold DVDs might seem excessive, and it is. But damn do they look nice.

6. ZOMG YOU GUYS LET'S TALK ABOUT THESE BOOKS. I have wanted to make a book spectrum (a reading rainbow if you will? kudos to one of Brian's fraternity brothers for that one) for a while, and this shelf gave me the perfect opportunity. It's big enough but not crazy huge. I pull out boxes and boxes of books and picked the ones with nearly solid-colored spines, then just tweaked until I loved it. All the credit in the world to my husband for watching me painstakingly put this up without saying a word.

I'd like to share more of our home in the coming weeks, but I should probably clean a wee bit first. Maybe wash some dishes. Maybe.

finding my way

Life lately has been hard. Although there certainly have been bright spots, overall I have really been struggling to find my footing as an adult—to juggle work, home, marriage, friends, responsibilities, health, pets... It's been hard and I often feel like I'm drowning in it. Of course, then I feel silly (and even worse) because I know, objectively, that I am a lucky person. But difficult emotions don't care about rational thought. They'll drag you under no matter what.

I need to get back to what makes me happy. Creating things. Being with my friends. Good food and wine. Joking with my husband.

So I am returning to this space once more. Sometimes it will just be so I can spill out all the things swirling in my head, in the hopes I can make sense of them. Sometimes it will be to share something creative that I'm excited about. Sometimes it will be to remind myself to be grateful for what I have. It's mostly for me, but if any readers out there get something out of my ramblings, all the better.

hey remember when I did this? and #mileaday, too

Whoa, a blog post! I've been feeling the itch lately to write. Or rather, to write in my blog voice rather than my fancy newspaper writer voice—because I do write. I write constantly. I write articles for the JFP and I write emails and I write notes and plans and some days I write until I never want to type another word—but other days I want to keep writing, only via an outlet that allows me to write with more of my own personality.

Eventually I'd like to write about the utter whirlwind that has been the past 10 months (Jackson! job! marriage! puppy! med school! grown-up life! so! many! things!), but for now I'm just going to jump in and write about the things on my brain.

I've never been very good at resolutions. Last year I set really vague "resolutions" in the hope that a general movement towards being a better person would be easier than trying for (and probably failing at) something very specific. Which, okay, was a fine thought. I did a lot, maybe even all the things on my list. But to what degree? Did I do them fully? What would fully even be?

This year I was inspired by one of my current favorite blogger, Elise Blaha, to do something different. Elise made it a goal to run (at least) a mile every day between Thanksgiving and New Year's, and kept up with it by instagramming photos each day. So I decided to take her idea and run with it on a slightly larger/adjusted scale.

For each month of 2013, I plan to focus on something different, and spend time EVERY DAY doing that thing. Run, clean, make, read, write, cook, stretch, think... I've got ideas but I think I'll decide at the beginning of each month what the new goal will be. In January I went with the most obvious: run at least a mile a day, just like Elise did. I wanted to take that on for a few reasons. One, oh my god I ate a bajillion things and drank at least a few barrels of wine while at my parents for the holidays, and getting into a running habit—even a simple one—couldn't hurt. Two, we now have a really, really large dog (more on that later) and we had gotten a bit out of the habit of taking him on adequate walks and runs once the weather turned bad. I wanted to get back in the habit of taking him out every day.

So how did I do?

I ran 29 times in the 31 days of January. I actually only logged 28 days (the last day I ran in the morning and again at night, to sneak another one in), and I actually only really, literally ran 27 days (one day it was wayyyyy too rainy and cold and miserable, so I did p90x). But I made an effort to be active 29 times and that's what I'm counting. I also use the term "ran" pretty loosely here. Since I took Teddy puppy along most of the time, my actually running was somewhat fragmented. As a large dog is wont to do, Teddy would often run a couple blocks and then stop to pee/sniff everything/look at other dogs/watch squirrels/whatever else dogs do. So we didn't exactly log a swift pace. 

But part of the point of my new resolutions is that its about the effort. I'm not going to beat myself up over the three days I didn't go for a run (and I didn't at the time either) and I'm not going to worry that I didn't log any great times. I wanted to make running with Teddy a part of my daily habit, and I did. I've continued to go for runs and walks nearly every day after January ended.

I also really enjoyed taking and instagramming photos of the project. It became a creative outlet within the resolution, trying to make each photo a little bit different. It might make my instagram feed boring as hell, but I'll probably continue that aspect throughout the year. I'll take the motivation wherever I can find it. 

My February project is #conquerclutter, which I am finding more difficult for  several reasons. 1) I am so not a cleaner. 2) It's vaguer, as far as timeframe and goal (I'm trying to fix that by choosing specific areas to focus on going forward). and 3) The photos are less uniform, so its not as much fun to instagram—yes, this shouldn't be a factor, but it is. The creative miniproject aspect isn't quite as present on this one. 

We'll see how the rest of 2013 goes. I'm proud of January's progress. No matter what happens going forward, this has been one of my most successful resolutions in years and years.