Month: October 2015

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Chewy Gingerbread Bars with Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting

Chewy Gingerbread Bars with Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting
Chewy Gingerbread Bars with Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting

Best Guesses About What My Upstairs Neighbors Are Doing Right Now:

  1. They’ve been evicted and told they only have until 3 a.m. to move their belongings out. They are bowling enthusiasts and therefore have roughly 856 bowling balls in varying shapes and sizes, including a limited edition My Little Pony ball with a bowling pin cutie mark. To save time, they’re rolling, tossing, and occasionally drop-kicking their ball collection out of the apartment.

    2. (more…)

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cakes

4-Ingredient Slow Cooker Coconut Cake (VIDEO)

4-Ingredient Slow Cooker Coconut Cake
4-Ingredient Slow Cooker Coconut Cake

What are your favorite rituals? Life goes thick and thin in cycles, and at this point I’m old enough to recognize when it’s time to hunker down through a thin space. Busyness, fatigue, grief, stress, depression — so many things can pull at us until all we can focus on is putting one foot in front of the other. When things thin out for me, I brace for the exhaustion and stock my cupboards with moments of contentedness in preparation the leanness to come.

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cakes

3-Ingredient Slow-Cooker Pumpkin Cake

3-Ingredient Slow-Cooker Pumpkin Cake
3-Ingredient Slow-Cooker Pumpkin Cake

Let’s talk about ugliness.

When my students study American history, they often begin by talking about the Native Americans and the beginning of colonization. In English, we use this time to read excerpts from Christopher Columbus’s diaries. Let me tell you, in those diaries . . . there is ugliness.

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cakes

Pumpkin Skillet Cake with Caramel Crackle Icing (and 17 Things People with Mental Illness Wish You Knew)

Pumpkin Skillet Cake with Caramel Crackle Icing
Pumpkin Skillet Cake with Caramel Crackle Icing

Maybe it’s you: maybe managing your mental illness makes you feel alone even when you’re surrounded by other people. Nobody’s experience is quite like yours. Maybe it’s your friend or family member: maybe from your point of view, they never seem to get it together.

According to the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1 out of every 5 adults has a mental illness and 1 out of every 24 adults has a serious mental illness (i.e., one that significantly interferes with one or more major life activities). Personally, I deal with a fun confluence of several mental illnesses and I wish people understood that my daily life and experiences are different from theirs. People tend to evaluate things through their own personal lens without realizing they’re doing so, which is dangerous in all kinds of ways. Pondering this made me want to ask you all on Facebook what you wish people knew about mental illness, and here’s what was said:

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