Everyone knows I have a long running obsession with rose gold. I think if its copper, rose gold, or marble I instantly want it. But there's one shimmery, metallic that everyone can get behind: Gold. I do love gold whether its simple like a sweater or cute like sprinkles on Christmas cookies. Whether it's being worn or just around the house, gold adds a little bit of excitement to everything.

I won't lie. I think I've probably baked every chocolate chip cookie recipe claiming to be the "best." As a teenager I think I made the classic Nestle Tollhouse recipe so often I had it memorized for many years. Sadly as an adult you begin to realize the chocolate chip/dough ratio is so poor no matter how many chocolate chips you add in. More recently my go-to was the NY Times recipe which uses cake flour and bread flour rather than all-purpose flour. But it has a wait time which is often really hard to abide by when it comes to baking. Eating the dough is rather tempting when it's just sitting there for an extended period of time. Then I moved on to a sea salt chocolate chip recipe I adapted from somewhere else, and made it so much people grew tired of it.

Activewear has been a huge trend for a while now. It's more commonplace to wear these outfits everywhere from the grocery store to brunch. Speaking of which, can we stop wearing this stuff to brunch? Either way having really stylish activewear to the gym makes it much more fun to go. I'm definitely not a ratty, old clothes at the gym type of person. But lately I've felt myself slipping because the holidays did a number on me, and I wasn't feeling 100% great. I am trying to flip that down and reverse it so I went looking for some fit style inspo. It was not hard to find, and now I might have less of a problem looking good at the gym, but getting out of bed, to begin with, is a whole different story.

The list is fulled with indie rock and some hip-hop albums that I really enjoyed over the past year. If you read this blog frequently or know me in real life, you wouldn't be surprised by that at all. This post contains three things: the album list (in no particular order), a sampler playlist featuring gems from the albums on the list, and a link to another (recently updated) playlist featuring plenty more songs from 2017 that were played in fairly heavy rotation. My hope is that you'll agree with at least some of my choices or that you'll find something new to listen to you'd hadn't considered or heard of before.

There's one thing that's very important to me when it comes to cooking & baking: music. I always have it playing. It's really helpful for tuning out distractions and keeping me focused. What makes this playlist different from a regular Christmas playlist is the types of songs. For baking or cooking I like playing more jazz or standards that don't really distract and just fill the room with sound (and set the mood). It's a win-win because if there are guests around, they will be content and happy. So it basically fits both baking and entertaining. I've made a few of these over the years. I think 2012's was the most popular of the bunch, but it was also the first.

The best gift guide has arrived. The perfect gifts for sisters from another misters. The person who gives you guy advice you're likely not to take and eventually regret. The person who encourages you to "eat the burger" because life is way too short to keep eating kale. The person who orders pitchers of margaritas because life. Best friends often know things about us that no one else really does. They are there for us when we do dumb things or attempt to stop us from doing dumb things.

I am a dog mom through and through, and people are expected to spend 69 billion dollars on their pets in 2017. No joke. My dog Chloe is incredibly spoiled. She loves to wear outfits especially sweaters. She is an expert at pretending she didn't make a mess when everyone knows she did (how else did the box of Diet Coke cans get knocked over?) And she really hates cell phones because they take the attention off her. Pets have become such a large part of our family that we tend to spoil them quite a bit like they are children.

Being a parent must be rough sometimes. I wouldn't really know. I'm pretty much just a dog mom and I know she's a handful. I mean who else insists would insist on eating their Trader Joe's gingerbread dog treats on my Christmas tree skirt like it's some kind of convenient blanket?Someday I hope to be a parent as scary of thought that is. I look forward to the days I'll be piling on even more things than I already attempt to.

Christmas is probably the easiest time to make a mix because there are literally thousands of songs to choose from. I mean how many renditions of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" are there out there? So I feel like it's really easy to just grab a bunch of classics and modern takes and toss them all together. It's apparently so easy between my Spotify and old 8Tracks account I was able to find playlists going back to my previous blog in 2012. Yeah...that's pretty far back there.