C.G.Koens's Blog, page 9

It's Just Stuff (A #MinimalismSimplified Post)

Last week I had a little meltdown when I went up into the play loft and discovered that my much beloved American Girl dolls (and their various accouterments) that had been in my possession for almost 30 years were - to put it mildly - trashed. There might have been weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth...or at least a few tears and a lot of disappointment that the girls had taken such poor care of my treasured childhood toys. I did my best to keep my temper in check, but my disappointment...

Keep It #Simple - A Blog Renewal

Everyone who works in social media knows that it's difficult to get traction on Facebook pages these days without paying for ads. And anyone who knows me (IRL or through the blog) knows that my Scotch-Irish heritage makes me too cheap to ever pay Facebook to push my post. So, naturally, this puts me at an impasse with the social media giant.

However, I keep using my Busy Nothings page because I've never been good at doing short blog posts. I'm too wordy, wanting to get it just right, while Fac...

What's On My Nightstand #WOMNS (Summer Mystery Edition)

Summer 2018 seems to have been the season for discovering new (to me) British mystery stories. As stated previously, I've long been a fan of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their respective detectives, but this summer I not only stumbled across the Death in Paradise books, but a lovely little series called the Lady Hardcastle Mysteries by T.E. Kinsey.

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Thanks to our Amazon Prime account (which I love, but hate that they recently raised the yearly fee - again), through the Prime l...

What's On My Nightstand (#WOMNS): Caribbean Mysteries Edition

If you've been reading the blog for any length of time, then you probably know that I am a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and enjoy a good British mystery show when I find one. In the case of Holmes and Poirot, I read - and loved - the books long before I ever saw Benedict Cumberbatch or David Suchet own the characters on TV, and as much as I enjoyed their respective portrayals of my favorite detectives, in my own mind the books would always be better.

No copyright infringemen...

#MinimalismSimplified: Evolving Needs

Do you have a favorite mug? The one that you grab every time you make a pot of tea or coffee? The one you might even shed a tear over if it broke because of the memories associated with it?

Several years ago I cleaned out the mugs in our kitchen to a select group that - at least at the time - all meant something to me. The mug from when we lived in Alaska. The handmade pottery we bought when we lived in Lesotho. The one I had made for the Hubs when he (briefly) had an electrical contracting si...

What's On My Nightstand (The #MinimalismSimplified Edition)

Last month I read Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (Fumio Sasaki) through the Prime library of books available to borrow through Amazon. Although I have been interested in minimalism for a number of years now (even blogging about my attempts to purge in the past), my focus on simplifying and clearing out has definitely evolved into more of a necessity for sanity after we adopted our five kids in 2016.

The draw of minimalism first started about twelve years ago, when the Hubs a...

What's On My Nightstand (Recommended Beach Reading)

Let's just make this quite clear: I love Goodreads giveaways. I'm always signing up for them and rarely win, but when I do... well, make room for the Bookworm Happy Dance!! Back in April I won a copy of The Lost Vintage: A Novel by Ann Mah (author of Mastering the Art of French Eating - which I loved), and the {Happy Dance} that went down was intense.

This was a book that I really wanted to read when I first heard about it in her monthly e-newsletter (see, I'm actually a fan because I nev...

What's On My Nightstand (Summer Reads Edition)

Well hello there! It seems that I haven't written a WOMNS post on the blog in several weeks. For that matter, it appears that I haven't actually written ANY post on the blog in over a month. Oops. Apparently typing it up as a post on Facebook is just easier, and with limited time, I'm all about easy!

That being said, I recently read two books that I had a hard time putting down. The first was One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. I've read several of his other books and enjoyed most of the...

Be Anxious For Nothing (Part 3)

If you missed the first two posts about this, you can find them HERE.
When I got into the car after coming out of the doctor's office with the information that I was, in fact, having panic attacks, I felt a sense of relief. I wasn't dying, I wasn't going crazy, and there was actually something I could do about it. As an INTJ, I needed to know those things in order to begin the process of "fixing" it - in this case, the "it" being me. 
My doctor had offered to refer me to a counselor, and a...

The Grass Won't Mow Itself

Working in front of a fireplace on Monday... working with the windows open on Thursday. This is spring in East Tennessee! 

In other news, today at 3:30, Spring Break (Part Deux) began, with the kids home for the next 4 days as we celebrate Easter. It will be a different celebration this year as they are all Christians (which they weren't last year), and we have been reading through the Gospels so that they have a better idea of why we celebrate. In the words of one child when she realized...