Happy Tuesday! (I was about to type Wednesday. Today definitely feels more like a Wednesday).

The month of November contains a lot of great things. Movember for a great cause. Election Day. And then also things like Thanksgiving and NaBloPoMo (where participants write a blog post every day) and NaNoWriMo (writing a 50,000 word novel in a month). I know I won’t be writing a blog post every day or a novel (I’d already be so behind!), but I do want to do something special for November. Challenge myself.

Every month I pick up magazines.. Bon Appetit,  Saveur, Food and Wine, Whole Living, etc. and they always contain such delicious-sounding recipes. But it’s rare I ever attempt to make anything from any of them. So this month, each week (starting with this week), I am going to choose a recipe from a magazine, cook it, photograph it, and write about my experience.

What’s first? I have no idea. I’ll have to do some serious magazine reading to decide.

In the meantime, here are some random things:

This cookbook looks amazing.

I love these photos of Laurel Hardware by Laure Joliet

This song by the band NO

This food blog.

This dress is gorgeous.

Okay, so I know Easter was almost a month ago.. so this may seem a bit out-of-date, but hey, I got busy. And then realized I never posted these.

I loooove dyeing easter eggs. Like REALLY love. It’s one of my favorite things to do all year. My mom is lovely enough to hard-boil a bunch of eggs beforehand, and then the Saturday night before Easter we have a dyeing fest! I mix all the colors together in bowls, and then we get crayons and draw on the eggs and then dye them. Sooo fun.

Here are some photos from the festivities this year:

This past week my Grandma turned 90. As part of her birthday celebration, my relatives and I all gathered in the church hall in Moulton, Texas to celebrate her and spend a little time with each other. It was fantastic.

Towards the end of the afternoon, I found out that some of my cousins had wandered over to the school gym. Once I heard this, I immediately grabbed my camera and then walked over there myself. The Moulton High School Gym is a place I’ve been many times when I was younger, but I think it has been at least 15 years since I’d stepped foot in. I wandered over, took a lot of photos of my relatives and family shooting hoops and having a good time, and enjoyed jumping into the past a bit myself. Here’s what I captured:

(also, check out the Yoda-esque Moulton High School song)

Here’s the thing about being a photographer.. a lot of times you’re working on projects that you can’t share for awhile, no matter how much you want to be able to! I’ve been jetting around the city, doing a lot of different food shoots, but unfortunately will not be able to share for a really long time. We’re talking about probably over a year before you get to see these photos. Total sadface. I REALLY wish I could post them! There are so many restaurants and chefs in this city that create innovate, delicious food and I’d love to give you a peek into that. But, we will all have to be patient.

So instead of sharing the things I’m actually getting paid to do.. here’s a few photos just of my life. At home, walking around the city, etc.

This last week before Christmas always sneaks up on me. I think I have so much time, and then I’m like.. oh shoot. I wind up spending the whole week working and have to squeeze in last-minute present shopping and wrapping. Luckily, I have been doing soooome Christmas stuff. There is now a tree, decorated, in my living room, and I actually put on all the lights myself while the doggie supervised. This is a big accomplishment. I never am quite sure how to string them up there and make them look evenly distributed without winding up with them tangled around me. I also tackled making Christmas cookies!