Perspectives change as time passes

1. My nephews' trophies. MVPs for the win.
2. Super oldie but goodie of me and my cousin.
3. The backyard of the neighborhood I grew up in.
4. The front yard of the neighborhood I grew up in.
5. My youngest nephew and his ex-bae.
6. Cruising through the skies on the way back to ATL.

Amicalola Falls

Easily my favorite part of last weekend's North GA trip.

♥

(Amicalola Falls)

Things I can appreciate about life

Last year around this time, I wrote a post on gratitude, and how I felt it was important to express it year-round. Well, a whole year has gone by, and here I am around the Thanksgiving holiday looking back at how often I really took the time to appreciate the people and things in my life. Appreciation is a funny thing. You can feel it, deep inside, sitting all warm and fuzzy within your body, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're showing it and/or expressing it openly. At least, such is the case for me. I'm working on that. The YouVersion app has a good reading plan on Thankfulness, and it's a quick read. When I fall behind, it's easy to catch up.

I wrote a post a little while back on the few things that made me smile that day, and I'm outrageously grateful for those moments. They may be small, but those moments are important. There's so much in my world I'm thankful for. No matter what's going on, I always have a laundry list of things I can appreciate about life - my life. As I sit here typing this post, my mother is in the background (all warm in cozy in my apartment), asking if I have corn meal in my kitchen. I tell her "no, probably not," and she takes it upon herself to check my cupboards to make sure. She's making quite a bit of noise, all while I'm trying to concentrate on writing this post, and lo' and behold she's found some.

"See! You don't even know what you have in this kitchen..."

I started to get slightly irritated because I wanted some time alone this afternoon, but I'm thankful to have her around and close, especially during the holidays when being near family just feels... right.

Burts Farm

We were on CP Time for the pumpkin patch. (About a week late)

Gotsta do better.

♥

(Burt's Farm)

North Georgia Mountains

This past week has been a rough one for me. These photos are from a last weekend's trip to North Georgia Mountains. My quiet before the storm.

Running a 5K

I ran my (first?) 5K this weekend! It was the Luminate 5K, so it happened at night, which means I don't have any pictures. And that's not really a good excuse for not having any pictures, but I was so caught up in the moment and too busy being anxious/excited about the then-uncharted territory that I wasn't even thinking about snapping a few photos for sharing purposes. It happened, though. The proof was in my next-day soreness. I did manage to capture the shots above before sunset.

The race started at Piedmont Park, and it took us all around Midtown Atlanta. You never realize how many hills your city has until you're trying to run up them. That, coupled with the fact that I caught a little cramp in my right side, is my excuse for not running the whole thing through. I have no clue what my time was, and I don't even care what "place" I finished in. I doubt the rest of my teammates cared either, because dangggittt - we finished!

I had forgotten how good it feels to do something you never thought you'd do. Running a 5K, or any kind of race for that matter, is definitely one of those things. Now I can cross it off my list.

Whew!

♥

Goodies

(photo source »»)

I may be a little late to the party on the Pocket app, but now that I'm here, I'm hooked! Saving a webpage to the app is as easy as pressing one, little button, and I've got a queue of goodies stored for a rainy day. From now on, Friday will likely be that rainy day around here. Otherwise, I'll keep saving sites and never getting back to them.

Art

I've had this sitting in my drafts titled as "Art" for a couple weeks now, and it's interesting I couldn't find a better title since I was impressed by the displays at such a small museum.

Located in the Marietta Square (I really like that place), the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art showcases a mix of modern and contemporary art, mostly oil-on-canvas paintings.

What I probably love most about visual art is that it does not always require much commentary (if any at all). The work speaks for itself.

Downtown Woodstock

This past Saturdays was one of those days where nothing really goes as planned, but everything still turns out to be okay, and that's the best way I know how to describe it.

The plan for me was to wake up early, wash a load or two of laundry, go to the bank and get back home by the time the rinse cycle hits. Yoga was at 9am, so I planned to do all this before 8:30am. Nope, none of that happened. I didn't actually crawl out from under the covers until about 9:45am, but it was my own fault. My alarm went off bright and early, and all I wanted to do was lay around. Even the thought of brewing a fresh cup of my favorite coffee from Trader Joe's wasn't enough to motivate me out the bed that morning. So I snoozed my way through the mid-morning, and it felt glorious. 

I was supposed to be at Tierra's place by 11am, because we had planned to ride up to North Georgia for a little rural-farm fun. I've been itching to pick some apples and make this slow-cooker apple butter recipe I found online, so I was hoping we'd find our way to an orchard of some kind. After running those errands I was supposed to run by 8:30am, (and after a quick Starbucks run, because it super cold and even more windy), I managed to get to Tierra's at almost noon. Sometimes I'm that friend. If I'm running late, it's not usually that late. One of these days I'll get my act together and be early for everything, and then I'll write a post on punctuality and let my life be my testimony, but today is not that day. 

Thankfully, I wasn't the only one running late. Her mom and little sister didn't show up for another hour or so, which means we got to sit around and play catch up on each other's lives for a while. We finally rode out in search of our adventure around 2pm. Unfortunately, the farm we went to wasn't exactly what we were expecting, and there weren't really many activities for the kids. I did a quick search for "Apple Orchard" on my maps app and found there was one about 6 minutes away. When we got there, we realized Apple Maps had found a private neighborhood named "Apple Orchard," not an actual orchard where you can pick apples.