Corn bread

To welcome March and to enjoy another snow day after a blizzard, I wanted to bake corn bread.

This is one of our favorite dishes after we eat at the Hoop-Dee-Doo at Walt Disney World in '23. I have been changing and improving the recipe to create our own and become a family recipe one day 

I am not a good cook or baker, but I enjoy the process. I enjoy eating it all even more. But what I really like is using all my curated, beautiful cooking wear. When I was a kid, my mom always "saved" her good china and dishware for when we had guests over. I do agree that we should have nice items to serve guests, but why live using dull items waiting for the right moment to use your nice things? 

I believe that as a woman, my job is to make every moment as whimsical and memorable as I possibly can. That is why I don't hesitate to use my thrifted items. 

Voilà

A delicious corn bread that we will eat with coffee and some butter. 

 

Lisa Fischer & Grand Baton

I surprised myself this week, and I loved it.  I am a big planner. I enjoy planning activities with friends and family, planning outfits for outings...  

A few weeks ago, I was gifted two tickets to Lisa Fischer & Grand Baton at the Rockport Music Hall. Needless to say, I didnt know anything about them, and I didnt do any research.  

I miss the mystery of life, I miss the joy of discovery, so I decided to take it slow and see how it would go.  Well, I am happy to report that it was awesome.  I invented a friend of mine who also has a taste for adventure. We drove about an hour to Rockport, and drove around looking for a opened restaurant in the dead of winter.  

We had a great time at Feather & Wedge, and we were served by a lovely Argentinian woman named Justine.

We had a few cocktails that were delicious. I can't recall the names, but I remember one was apple cider and the second one was a garden drink with cucumbers. 

The GARLIC & ROSEMARY FOCACCIA was the highlight of the night. I definitely need to learn how to bake that bread, it was so good, and I know my husband would like it. 

Lisa's concert was unexpected and incredible. I would have never attended if I hadn't been gifted those tickets. I am grateful for this opportunity to enjoy something new with a friend who also loves an adventure. 

Ecological Landscaping

 I have been thinking about upgrading my backyard for a couple of years now. This year I decided that is time to do it. I have been thinking and planning it for the entire winter of 2021, during my research I came across this blog post - How To Build a Flower Bed  - from 2010, it is a really good source of information and timelines too. I decided to give my own spin to this incredible post and update it to 2022. 

I also found this interesting Massachusetts guide for an Ecological Landscape that I will be following 

For started I need all the tools. I am looking for second-hand tools first since we are a zero-waste community here.  My go-to are thrift shops, yard sales, FB marketplace, and Craigslist. 

So far I found on craigslist a manual reel lawnmower, it just needs to be sharpened. 

This post was a draft from 2022, I decided to publish anyway 

For Brighter days

I always love listening to elderly wisdom. It seems to me that life doesn't have a manual, but the ones that came before me had some kind of key to knowledge. While that is true, as I get older, I realize that the “adults” are as lost as I am, living life by the seat of their pants; they are just better at hiding it. 

I just turned 29 last week. My whole life, I believed that at this stage of life I would have everything figured it our; that I would have the job of my dreams, that I would have a home, and maybe even kids. What the elderly never told me is that I should not have been such a big paneer with so many expectives because live trows rocks at you, you either dodge or you build something with it.  

In the past 20 years i have been chasing something that I dont know what it is. I had many YouTube channels and blogs that i ways end up closing, I learned a lot during those times a bout the internet, social media, and audiences. In the past 2 years, I started a TikTok talking about my business and my entrepreneurial journey, and my whole life now is around chasing what? Money? Fame? Followers? Clicks? Comments?   I dont make anything with passion anymore. I stopped my hobbies because “my TikTok is growing and I need to make more and more content”, “I have to sell on TikTok shop”, “now is a good time to sell a course…”,” warm audience…”

I am done! 

My whole life, I wanted to be in America, be American, and embrace the illusion of the American dream. 

I am writing this today because I want to find myself againg with out pressure, I want to write in this language that I so much love without using AI. I have to exercise my writing muscles; since I left college, I haven't written anything anymore.  And now with AI I use it every day, creating excuses like “I would make mistakes, it can help me write in English”, well, flash news, I am human, human makes mistakes, and this is not my original language, so such it up and practice.

I was listening to Marigold Manor YouTube channel, and I felt inspired to start a blog to channel my thoughts, emotions, and debrief my days, creating a sort of a Diary to ditch social media, I dont care for the clicks and likes, I just want to document my life in a way that I can come back and read if I want a perspective, the internet is curated and what I want is to curate a place that i can comeback and see my highlights instead of someone elses. Sometimes I can get in my head, I know for a fact that there are many, many brighter days that get covered by the fog of bad days in my memory. 

I also discovered that Martha Stewart has a blog. I used to love reading blogs when I was a team, and her blog looked exactly like the blogs used to look in the early 2010’s. It was a breath of fresh air to get myself into blogs again, maybe finding myself instead of creating a persona to show off on social media. 

I hope you can tell that I am proud to say I wrote this blog post only with the help of a auto corrector and not AI.

Wishing the Lord bless us in 2026 against all the automations, AI, and the dehumanization of things. 

Return of Libraries

 I don't remember when was the last time that I had a library card. It may have been in middle school; when I had school assignments and summer reading. To say the truth it never felt like an obligation to read, I always loved to do it.

I always loved to look behind the book cover to see which other kids read this book before me, always loved to be the first kid to borrow a new book in the library and to be the first one to open the pages wide open and deep sniff those pages and smell the aroma of a new book.

The years went by and I kept reading but now I had the power to buy my own books and build the library that once I dreamed of. For years I had every single book that I ever wanted; my ideal library was pretty and perfect, all my books were organized by gender, buy size, and color. I only had one problem, I couldn't read as fast as I was buying it, I was obsessed with following the trends and reading the latest best-seller but the real deal was that I couldn't physically read that many books.

Almost two years ago I moved over the sea with only 2 suitcases, I brought with me 4 pairs of shoes, all my summer clothes since it was summer in the US, a few winter items, and a big clay water filter. That was the moment that I realized that I couldn't bring any of my books with me; my precious collection, hundreds of books that will be never read, hundreds of os mysteries that I will never know.

Since I moved a lot changed, everything that I knew about myself changed, and the books that I was interested in changed too.

In my school years, I liked action, adventures, mysteries, fantasy, and novels. When I went to college everything that I was reading was related to fashion in some way, related to slow fashion and environment. Since I moved away from my family and friends I started to look for answers to everything that I was feeling and experiencing that was different than everything I ever knew, so I jumped to the self-help books.

When I moved, I was already in my transition of consuming less and trying a low waste lifestyle, so I decided to not purchase more books. Instead, I started exchanging books with one of my friends whenever I finished reading a book, and she would give and I would do the same. I started buying ebooks too and start reading from my tablet since I wasn't thinking about purchasing a reader, but recently I read a book that talks about how bad are the actions we take using the internet/cloud could affect the environment so I decided to slow down my technology consumption.

What to do to keep reading and not harm the environment, the answer couldn't be more simple; a library card. I don't know how that wasn't an option for me anymore, I always had some sort of excuses to not go to the library anymore " it is too far", "they don't have this latest book", "they won't be mine ", "I can order it online and will be here tomorrow"...

I am done with excuses now. I don't want a pile of unread books in my home, I don't want more resources to be taken off the earth to make me a new book. I just want the knowledge that I can gain from going to the library, to know and be part of my community, learn how to share once again, and explore all the worlds hidden behind the library books pages.

3/30/2022 Update: One of my childhood friends that are also part of the zero waste community highly recommended kindle (we purchased it second-hand), now we share an online library. We live fairway but we still have a sense of community when we can read the same books, save money, and we are so lucky of sharing the same interests. 

A letter to the lonely seamstresses out there

The Seamstress by Josef Gisela, 1897.

To whom it may concern

My entry into the sustainable fashion world was within fashion college, all my classmates were so intro brands and style and I was lost, I never care about brand and names and runways, I care more about making and planning sewing projects. 

In my second year, the marketing teacher introduced us "The True Cost"; that documentary left you in tears. There is nothing in the world that I want to do more than fashion, but hurt my heart to know that there are people dying because of fast fashion, I couldn't believe that my clothes were covered in innocent blood.

I almost quit college because I didn't know what to do with my life. I decide to quit fashion instead of quitting college. I decide to stop buying from large companies and learn about old techniques to make garments. Since I started my journey I learned about mending, natural dyeing, upcycling.. every day I learn something different.

Today I'm a lonely seamstress who drinks wine and sews in the basement for my family and me. Whenever a shirt needs to be repaired, I'm happy to do it. Sewing is a lonely pastime that pleases only us who we are making and creating.

I recently started listening to a podcast about sewing that makes me company in my most creative hours.

I hope we can create a community to not feel lonely anymore.