Anniversary Countdown: Guest Post #15

In celebration of my blog's 20th anniversary, I'm having guest posters every week leading up to the big day. 

Today we have The Birchwood Pie Project as our guest!

Birchie blogs over at The Birchwood Pie Project, where she writes about local travel, particularly in her quest to see Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, what's she reading, eating, and how things are going with her puppy, Doggo. She's a reformed runner, is making her way through AFI's Top 100 movies, and you can count on her to tell you all the nitty gritty details about if the book is better than the movie (yes, yes, it is).  

****************

Happy 20th Engie!  It is an honor to join you for your 20-year blogging anniversary, especially considering that I’ve only been blogging for 13 years. 

In the words of Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  In that spirit, I don’t remember exactly how I found Engie’s blog – maybe someone linked to her or maybe it was through a comment – but I do remember vividly how I felt when I clicked the link and started reading.  At the time I’d stopped reading a lot of blogs because they had gone the SEO route and had become a mess of nothing, but here was A Real Person!  Writing about Real Things!  I squealed with delight and clicked through post after post.  I still feel that way when I see a new post from her pop up in Feedly, and if you think her blog is great, you should meet her in person!  I had the pleasure of doing that this summer. 

NGS and Birchie! Together! At House on the Rock!

Here’s the thing, the longer that you blog, the more you’ve already written about so the more that you assume that everyone just knows all of your stuff.  The other thing is that blogging is one huge party where you know some people very well, but you’re always meeting new folks and you have to get their story and catch them up on yours.  So I thought that I would introduce myself to my soon-to-be-new-friends, and reintroduce myself to the people that I already know.   

Here are 20 things about me and about the things that I blog about. 

1. I love it when people ask my husband and me how we met. The answer is: OK Cupid! It’s my favorite website that I haven’t visited since January 2013. I was so scared to try online dating and of course I met him on the first day. According to OKC, Hubs and I are 80% compatible, and as far as I can tell the 20% is that he doesn’t like spicy food and he counts our anniversary as the day that we “met” online and I count it as the day that we met IRL a few weeks later. 

2. I knew from a very early age that I did not want to have kids, and I also thought that it would be kind of neat to be a stepmom. And then it all came true. I am a stepmom to two teenage boys, who are heading into their sophomore year of college and senior year of high school. Kind of neat? It is AWESOME beyond my wildest dreams.  

3. I am both a cat and a dog person. I grew up with cats, and was always afraid of/disgusted by dogs until I was in my 30s and one night a friend’s German Shepherd growled at me and then curled up next to me on the couch and put her head in my lap. I used to dog sit for my friend when she was on vacation and I loved that dog dearly. The next special dog that came into my life was Stepdog, who was technically my husband’s ex-wife’s dog, but lived at our house. She and I were “the girls” in a house full of boys.

Stepdog passed last year, leaving a void that we knew could only be filled by another dog. We had just gotten to the point where we knew we were ready to let another dog love us when Hubs saw a shelter posting for a seven month old German Shepherd mix, and that’s how Doggo came into our lives. 

Note from NGS: This photo was titled "pretty feet" and LOOK AT DOGGO'S ADORABLE PAWS.

Adjusting to puppyhoood has been incredibly difficult but incredibly rewarding. We can’t imagine life without her, but she does make it hard to blog sometimes...most of my nights look like this and there’s no way I’m getting a laptop on my lap. 

4. My husband is a software developer and I am an accountant, so you know we get invited to all of the lit parties. All signs indicate that the little apples have not fallen far from the tree – my oldest stepson is majoring in computer science with a focus on cybersecurity, and the youngest is looking at engineering. My husband and I have worked at home since 2020 and have no plans to ever work “outside of the home” again. 

5.  I have a masters in accounting, but my undergrad degree is in Nutrition and Dietetics. I’ve forgotten all of the chemistry and biology that I had to learn, but I will never forget day one of my first nutrition class where I learned the one absolute rule of nutrition: “there is no such thing as a good food and no such thing as a bad food."

6.  Work has become much less rewarding to me in recent years. Luckily when I was 22 my parents gave me a book called Your Money or Your Life, where I learned about financial independence and that it was possible to start things in motion back then on a small income.  My only motivation was to make sure that I would always have my needs taken care of, and later to make sure that my family would have their needs taken care of, without focusing on a specific number.  During an unhappy time at work last year, I realized that I was at the finish line.  I’m taking this year to get more comfortable with the idea of not working, and I plan to quit next year.  I won’t be retiring “to” anything, I’ll just be doing all of the non-work things that I do now and that should make for a full life.  My husband is happy in his job and can’t imagine ever retiring...but I say stick around until he sees me not working and let’s see if maybe he doesn’t change his mind. 

7.  Enough about work!  My hobbies are blogging and the things that I blog about – cooking, fitness, watching TV and movies, reading, and most recently, travel.  Let’s do a deep dive on all of those things! 

8.  I started out as a recipe blogger, and later on when I had a family and needed inspiration for family meals, I started writing about our meals. 

9.  It’s all very fine and well for me to tell you that I’ve been writing about meals for years...but how about I give you a few favorite recipes just in case you’re looking for something to make for dinner tonight?  Here are four recipes that everyone in my family loved, plus one that only I loved. 

(PS I do not like chicken but my family does, so I can verify that the two chicken recipes work for both chicken lovers and chicken haters) 

10.  Chicken and Basil Fettucine Pasta – this is a Blue Apron recipe and please be assured that I have never ordered from Blue Apron.  I found out about this recipe from another blogger’s sponsored post.  My time/money/sanity saving tips are that you can use plain old dried pasta of your choice instead of “fresh basil fettucine pasta” and cream cheese is a perfect substitute for mascarpone. 

11.  Taste of Home's Chicken Fajitas – there’s a little bit of labor involved, but the results are worth it. 

12. Damn Delicious One Pot Garlic Parmesan Pasta – it’s good as written, and also good if you add protein and veggies. 

13.  Beef with Snow Peas – so quick, so good.  Speaking of remembering how something made me feel, I learned about this recipe because Suzanne shared it. 

14. Rainbow Plant Life's Braised Tofu – this thing is not like the other things, so guess which of the five recipes is that one that my family wouldn’t touch but I adore?  This one is just exquisite. 

15. My fitness life has evolved quite a bit during my blogging days. I went from someone who casually ran to someone who was obsessed with running. Later on running and I had a falling out, and I realized that fitness needed to be moved down on my priority list. After two years of blissfully not running, I started doing short runs a few weeks ago...what is the meaning of all of this? Who knows? I’ll let you know when I know but for now the moral of the story is that it’s OK to be passionately into something and then move on to other things. 

16. I love good TV and good movies...and yes I know that what I think is good is not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve loved classic movies since junior high, and sometimes my friends tease me and ask if I’m aware that movies have sound and color nowadays. Hey I like what I like! 

17. Books! Right now reading has to have the lowest priority in my life, but it’s still something that I adore and great pleasure out of. I only read for 10-20 minutes right before bed, and if a book isn’t holding my attention I will mercilessly DNF that sucker. Probably the biggest difference between my IRL life and my blogging life is that I can’t remember the last time I talked about books with someone IRL. In the blogging world, I do nothing but talk about books! I get so many great reading ideas from the Cool Bloggers’ Community. In particular I often use Engie’s reviews to decide if I want to read something or not. 

18. Is the book always better than the movie? Usually! The only exceptions that I can think of offhand are The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. 

19. Travel went from being something that I didn’t care about to something that I am obsessed with. The rest of my family is in Boy Scouts, and that’s where my husband’s limited PTO has to go right now.  A few years ago I realized that all of his vacation going toward Boy Scouts meant no vacation for me and I couldn’t remember the last time that I had taken a day off work. At the same time I was very negative about where I lived. Ohio...Rust Belt...bad economy...what a sorry place to live.  And then one day I came across an article about Lighthouses on Lake Erie...yeah I know about Lake Erie, I see all of those stories about toxic algae that hit the news every year. Wait there are lighthouses? Ugh but I’d have to drive so far to see them...I can go to the park in my town and sit by the lake anytime that I want...but wait did someone say that we have lighthouses here????? 

One day I finally got off my butt and drove out to see a lighthouse. It wasn’t as far as I imagined but it was in a whole new world.  The next week I went out to see another lighthouse and had another magical transport to this magic new world that was somehow in Ohio. Once I’d seen the lighthouses I found myself with a list of other places to go...like who knew that we have islands in Ohio?  And that there is an island hopping day cruise. From my interest in old movies I knew that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall got married on a farm in Ohio and oh hey it turns out that this farm was the place where everyone who was anyone in Old Hollywood came to hang out and it had been preserved and was open for tours. People were always telling me to go to a place called Fallingwater which is how the Frank Lloyd Wright thing started...every time that I went somewhere I came away with 10 other places to visit. From there things escalated to  “Boy Scout Widow Camp” where I started going on short little trips away from home on the weekends when the rest of my family was at Boy Scout camp.   

Every once in a while the stars align and my family comes with me on these trips, but for the next few years Boy Scouts will continue to have first dibs on family time. That’s fine, because I’m not going to run out of places to go anytime soon. 

20.  One of the biggest roadblocks that I had when I started my blog is that I couldn’t figure out what to call it.  I lived on Birchwood Street and my first post was an apple pie, so that’s how I came up with The Birchwood Pie Project.  I don’t live on Birchwood Street anymore, and I hardly ever make pie, and also I still haven’t figured out what to call my blog.  My oldest stepson suggested “Cooking the Books”, which has merit, but I’m not that kind of an accountant so… 

Alrighty that’s my 20 things!  Thanks for reading my ramblings!