Favourite Things

Inspired By Autumn

{Mini, white pumpkins are tucked into all corners of my apartment. They like to hang out on the towel rack in my bathroom, the stack of plates in my kitchen, and on top of my vintage cake stand}

Fall is my favourite season, but in Montreal, it doesn’t last half as long as I would like – the weather likes to race towards its preferred and longest season: Winter. (Ugh..) But this year I’m really trying to make the most of my beloved Autumn, as long as it sticks around. I’ve been apple picking, hiking, baking, eating soup (and flagging recipes to make it!), and going on little strolls in the crisp night air, kicking up leaves all the way! What have you been doing to celebrate fall?

At home, I’ve been having lots of fun with festive, harvest-like, Halloween-y decorations. It’s been really comforting to create a few little autumnal touches for my humble little apartment – it makes it feel more cozy and homey. And it feels like I’m making an effort to appreciate my favourite season! In the coming weeks, I hope I’ll have a chance to snuggle up more into the fall weather, and celebrate with warm apple cider, carved pumpkins and roasted root veggies. Mmm.

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How To Share Photos With Your Loved Ones

I tend to be the main photographer at family gatherings. This is because I have a wonderful camera that takes nice photos, and because I love snapping away and recording these events. I usually end up with some nice shots, and then the problem becomes: how best to share them? My family usually wants to see and download the pictures to be printed or saved, but it’s sometimes tricky to find the best way to accomplish that!

Emailing generally doesn’t work – attaching the photos takes a long time, and you can only send a couple in each email. I used to use primarily Flickr and Facebook, but my family has said that it’s time-consuming and increasingly difficult to download pictures off these websites. When you have grandparents who don’t love technology at the best of times, sending them confusing emails with five sentences of download instructions for Flickr pictures is not the best method! They’re not so good at the right click, options, download thing for each picture. They want one straightforward method to get the whole bunch.

So after Thanksgiving this year, I was determined to find a way to share my pictures that would let my family download them easily to their own computers and then look at them or print them however they’d like. I found a couple great solutions to this problem, which I’ll present in a hierarchy of needs! Enjoy, and happy sharing!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving today! And although I had my big family dinner yesterday evening, and I’m on the train back to school right now, I don’t want to forget to give thanks, the way I oughta. What a great holiday, don’t you think? It’s a holiday specifically meant for gratitude and happiness. I love that! Even if you’re not a Canuck, I hope you’re blessed, happy and thankful today.

As for me…

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Writing: Inspiration & Motivation

Since my last post about writing, I’ve been trying to incorporate writing into my day-to-day life. I think I’m making some progress, and that makes me feel so happy. As I said in the last article, writing is something I want to practice, improve and enjoy. I want to make it more of a priority! And I think I’m being successful so far, so I wanted to share some of the things that have been helping me with my goals.

Inspiration

I’ve been really drawing inspiration from the world of writing over the past week! I’ve written out about a dozen cards, filled with great quotes about writing. There are some great resources for quotes here and here. The cards are scattered around my workspace, and my eyes tend to fall on them while I’m spacing out from work. Great system so far!

I’ve read some great articles about the art of writing! My favourite is a piece from The Guardian about various writers’ top 10 rules for writing. There are some contradictions, definitely, but it’s so interesting.

I watched Finding Forrester a few days ago, and definitely got some inspiration! It was wonderful to take a look inside (albeit a fictional) writer’s life, see how they work and what they suggest. His line: “write your first draft with your heart, re-write with your head” is a great one that will stick with me for some time. I hope to watch some other films about writers, like those listed here.

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