New York- By, Edward Rutherfurd

I read this book because this author is similar to my current favorite author, Ken Follett. Rutherfurd writes historical fiction novels and New York is the first of many of his books I plan to read!

New York is a novel that gives you the history of New York City from the 1500's when it was mainly occupied by the dutch fur traders up until 9/11.

This novel follows a fictitious blue blood family that interacts with real high society characters from history.

After reading this novel, I feel like I just finished a semester long class on New York history! This novel also gives you a good bit of American history too because it takes you through all the major events that happened in American history.

If you love history and want to spend some time delving deeper into New York history then this is a great book!

There are characters that you follow throughout the story but the author doesn't get extremely deep into their personal lives for example, there are no sex scenes, deep confessions, or major drama from the characters of this novel.

The characters are mainly  used to guide you through history and help you get a human perspective on events that are happening.

My favorite part of this story is learning how the streets of New York and the neighborhoods of New York were formed. Names that we still hear today like Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, The Bronx, The Hudson River, Governor's Island, all originated hundreds of years ago! Who knew?

This is a long book but one you will come to love. Next I'm reading The Princes of Ireland which is another historical fiction novel about Ireland from this author! It'll probably take me 2-3 months to read but I'll review it when I'm done!

7 Questions

First off, I'd like to vent for a moment. We got some summer college interns last week in my office. This morning I asked them how was y'all's weekend. One of the interns said "Oh, no she said y'all, I'm going to correct you every time you say that." No buddy, you're not going to "correct" me when I say y'all. I will always say y'all and you aren't going to change that!

Moving on, today I'm linking up for the first time to 7 questions at Gentri's blog!

My Funny Pic

1. If you were to start your own business, what would it be?
I would love to open a cute shop in a beach town full of crafty things that I've made. My college roomates and I used to talk about owning a row of shops all specific to the things we love right next to each other so we could have lunch together and hang out all day. Throughout the day I would blog and craft and talk to the customers that came into my shop:)

2. You wake up on the wrong side of the bed, do you embrace your grumpiness or try to fight it?
I usually just avoid talking much and get over it pretty quickly.

3. What's the very first memory you have?
I remember my twin brother and I shared a room when we were really young and we would jump back and forth from each others beds after our parents put us to bed. I also remember when I was 4 getting to pick out anything I wanted at Toys R us if I would give up my pacifier. I chose a stuffed rabbit that I slept with for many years.

4. the world is ending, what do you do? Allow yourself to die? Fight? Hide? Etc.
If it's the end of the world and Jesus is coming I'd like to just go on to heaven.

5. What is your favorite meal of the day?
Lunch!

6. How do you best learn? Visual? Listening? Hands on?
Hands on for sure with a little visual mixed in.

7. What is your favorite joke?
My husband always tells this one-
Why was tiger looking in the toilet?
He was looking for Pooh.
Classic


I'm so glad it only feels like Tuesday but, it's really Wednesday! Have a good one y'all!
 

Great Birthday Weekend

What a great 3 day Memorial Day weekend/birthday weekend! Matt and I kept it classy and went to the casino buffet steak and seafood night for my birthday dinner!

Lots of food was consumed

Matt is Full

I'm 25!

Matt made me a Reese's Peanut Butter pie!

I got some lovely gifts from my family-

Got to see some fireworks at a Memorial Day Celebration!

Hang out at the pool-

 
Grill some Kabobs-

And got lots of amazing work done! The beauty of the three day weekend was, we got to work hard Saturday and Sunday then enjoy a day of rest on Monday.

Saturday we got a lovely dump truck full of dirt to fill in our side yard so that it is level and we can pull the Airstream into our backyard in a couple of months!

Have a fantastic 4 day week!

Here Comes a 3 Day Weekend!

Dear Friday, Welcome! I'm sooo excited that this weekend will be long plus Monday is my 25th Birthday!

This was a great week, I feel encouraged and joyful this week which is fantastic. I'm still thinking about the meal I had last night with my friends, you can read about that here!

While I wish I was going to be at the lake this weekend in Texas or on the beach in Florida, I will be happy to have 3 days to get the Airstream floor finished! prepare a place for the Airstream in our back yard, relax, and enjoy ourselves without working too hard:)

Wish I was doing this for the weekend!

Airstream floor is close to done, hallelujah!

Happy Weekend and see you after the weekend!

Vegan For Dinner

I've been waiting to post all day because I knew I'd have an amazing experience to tell you about!

Tonight I went to a local vegan restaurant called FÜD with two amazing sisters.

We had fantastic girl talk about all sorts of things. I'm pretty sure these ladies are going to change the world.

The awesome Katherine and Hannah

Besides having great conversation for a few hours we ate and filled ourselves with vegan goodness!

I had a Chalupa made with cheese made from cashews that tasted so good and sooo much like cheddar. It also had "chicken" which was actually made of Jack Fruit that looked like chicken, tasted like chicken, and almost had the same texture as chicken! If I was served this chalupa at any other restaurant and was told that there was chicken in it, I would not have noticed that I was eating Jack Fruit, seriously.

Katherine had a taco made with rice and mushrooms blended together and seasoned in such a way that tasted, looked, and had a similar texture to ground beef! Insane.

Taco, Chalupa, and Nachos!

All of our meals included guacamole which is always good, and the cashew cheese that was rich and cheesy even though there was no actual cheese involved.

For desert I had a chocolate milk shake made with cashews, agave nectar, sunflower milk, and chocolate. It was definitely good, it wasn't very thick and rich but, it was chocolatey and light.

Chocolate Milkshake

Katherine and Hannah had cashew ice cream that was chocolate with goji berries on top. It was good and tasted like chocolate frozen yogurt, the goji berries were dried so they were just like dried berries.

Chocolate Cashew Ice Cream with Goji Berries

I was surprised how much the food tasted like an actual chicken chalupa or beef taco or chocolate ice cream. I thought the restaurant would be more all about serving vegetables and not trying to make them taste like "normal food" at all. I enjoyed my food so much and would go back for sure! I want to figure out how they made the jack fruit I ate!

I'm not a vegan but I really like eating healthy. I toy with the idea of taking the leap and becoming a vegan but I am not committed to eating every meal every day with no meat or animal products. One reason is because I don't want to be that strict on myself, I want to be able to eat something that's not vegan when I really desire it. Also, it is just easier in group settings to not be on a vegan diet. Lastly, I cook for my husband and myself and he is not interested in being vegan so I am surrounded by normal milk cheese and meat in my fridge and sometimes desire to partake.

It is fun to go to a cool restaurant like FÜD with my friends and pretend for a night that I'm a cool vegan:)

I feel full from our lovely in-depth conversation and from the food we enjoyed!

Salads and ETSY

I am aware that I blog often about my garden and the salads we've been eating from them but I still can't get over how convenient and awesome it is to walk into my backyard and pick leaves that I can eat that I would usually buy at the store and let go bad before I could eat it all.

My salad has yellow and red peppers, half an avocado, chicken, and Italian dressing!

The thing about harvesting only enough lettuce or kale for immediate use is, it doesn't go bad in the fridge, it just keeps growing and thriving in the yard where it's roots are. The even more amazing thing is that my hubby loves eating salads now.

Matt's salad has Parmesan, chicken, red peppers and creamy Caesar dressing!

For two weeks now, I've bought a rotisserie chicken at the beginning of the week and use that in the salad along with some sweet mini peppers. We are both eating a salad for lunch and dinner so our grocery bill is pretty cheap when the only meat I buy is a $4.99 chicken that lasts all week.

For a special treat on Saturday night we has salad with coconut shrimp on top (the coconut shrimp are from Trader Joes and they are fantastic!)

If you are at all interested in growing your own lettuce, you should! You get so much reward for very little work (you plant, you water, nature takes care of the rest).

Besides eating salads, I've been working on setting up my very own ETSY shop! I've wanted to try this for a while but I was nervous that my ideas were lame. However, after seeing all of the creative things sold on ETSY I decided that as long as I sell crafts that I love and use myself, then someone else out there may just love them too!

 
You can check it out sometime by clicking here!

Let Me Tell You Something

Our floors were so dirty that I couldn't walk barefoot around our house anymore, don't worry, I swept them. I usually clean up on the weekend and since I was gone this weekend, cleaning didn't happen. It's crazy how you have to clean every week or else things get out of control.

Something else I think that is crazy, out of all the cute cups I have, why do I like to drink my afternoon tea out of this giant Styrofoam cup? I don't know, but I do, with my Christmas straw too.

BTW, I like to make a giant ice tea when I get home by brewing some green tea, mixing about 2 tablespoons of Agave Nectar and lime juice in, then covering with ice!

Iced Green Tea with Agave and Lime

And here are a few pictures of my garden!

Green Peas

Corn

Sweet Potato

 
Right now I have green peas growing really well, tomatoes that I started from seed, 3 bell pepper plants, sweet potatoes, carrots, corn, squash, and of course lettuce, kale, and spinach. Hopefully these plants will produce lots of good veggies for us to eat! I've already made maybe 20 salads out of the greens in our garden which has been so fun.

Our latest house project this week is building this retaining wall! We will fill in dirt so you won't be able to see the back of this wall. The ground will be level, the reason we need it level is so we can park our Airstream there! We are excited to bring our Airstream to our house instead of leaving it at the storage lot!

That's all I got for now, have a beautiful Tuesday will ya.

Glimpse

This past weekend I went on a 3 day mission trip to Joplin Missouri with my church. This past weekend marked the one year anniversary of the F5 tornado that killed 158 people.

My team that I served with was so fun. I've been on lots of mission trips in my life and always walk away feeling amazing. The work we do on mission trips is good and helpful to those we are serving but honestly the best part of trips are the relationships you build in a short amount of time.

There is something about mission trips that make people break out of their shell quickly. For our 3 day trip, most of us hadn't met yet but by the time we reached Joplin after our 7:00am 2 hourish car ride, we were already friends.

The reason people are able to bond so quickly on mission trips may have something to do with the over night factor, where you see people at the end of the day at their most unattractive, you stay up late laughing, playing games, and eating junk food.

You see people learn how to paint for the first time, jam out to 80's music (this is what we listened to for some reason), get excited about fast food, have dance parties, play ultimate frisbee in the dark. These are all things we did.

We laughed so much, painted a church gym from pink to ivory, and started work on painting the outside of another house.

I kept thinking while I was on the trip that I wish everyday could be more like this. The sense of Christian community where we didn't care what we looked like, we wanted to encourage everybody in our group and new people we met, and just act like ourselves.

A cute dog that followed us back to the church where we were staying.

Maybe trips like this are a glimpse of heaven, when people will work together, encourage each other, stay out of competition with each other, and focus on loving people instead of focusing on ourselves.

Cat helping out on the ladder.

I hope you had a great weekend! And I hope you have a lovely week.

P.S. Today, I tried to give blood for the first time and my veins were too small. They told me to drink lots of water and come back tomorrow. Hopefully I will be successful tomorrow!

Green Fuel

I love eating oatmeal for breakfast, but not in the summer. I started making smoothies for breakfast lately, and added oatmeal!

 This particular smoothie consists of-
1 cup Kale/Spinach mixture from my garden (gotta find ways to use it there is so much!)
1/2 cup dry oats
1/2 cup 2% milk
1 banana
4-5 ice cubes

Blend, drink, and be full all morning no problem!

This smoothie mostly tastes like banana, you don't taste the green stuff at all! Are you brave enough to try it/ do you trust me when I tell you it is good??

I hope YOU have a fantastic day!

Being One with Nature

Yesterday I went to our local Arboretum after work to check it out and maybe go for a jog. When I got there, I found out they had lovely mulched trails though the woods and so, I set out. Running on the trails was more fun than on the street like I usually do and there was so much to see as I went!

 I was going along when suddenly I saw this little lady minding her own business eating some plants-

Deer!

Hello there!

It was neat to be so close to a deer, she really wasn't too concerned I was there. She just kept on walking and eating and looking at me while I looked at her and took her picture on my phone!

As I continued on, I kept hearing little animals moving around in the leaves, the squirrels were the loudest, and I kept seeing signs warning of snakes. Thankfully I didn't run into any of those!

I hope you have a happy Wednesday!

Linking up here!