She Likes Purple

Thanks + Thoughts

Thank you for all the kind comments and emails, after my hard announcements that the Lush sites would be (sort of) closing this week. (I say sort of because I absolutely intend to pay to host them until forever, so we can access all that wonderfulness long after this Friday.) I've felt a lot of love since Friday, and I hope the other writers have too. It feels like a part of my family is scattering away from me, and that's scary and sad, but all the love and support from the readers (and the writers, too) make the scattering feel less scary and more exciting. We have new things ahead of us! The goodbye is bittersweet, but as my smart friend Caitlin said, it's mostly sweet and that's a good time to walk away.

You know how some people exclaim that this will be the year (whatever year it happens to be) when they say yes more? Yes to ziplining! Yes to mid-week dinner plans! Yes to new groups and activities and intimidating opportunities! Well, ask anyone who knows me, and I have saying yes down. I say yes a lot, to a lot of different things. (Including ziplining, which I can assure you I'll never say yes to AGAIN so help me.) While this isn't necessarily a bad thing--oh the beautiful things I've gotten to do because of this quality of mine--I think 2013 is unfolding as the year I say yes slightly less often. Or, say yes to much slower, calmer things. Yes to more books, to cooking, to closing my laptop when I get home so I can be at home.

I hope all this newfound time inspires me to share new and different things here, I really do like this space a lot, but I also hope this time just gives me a little extra breathing room. It's what I'm looking forward to most, more time to breathe.

Still, this week has been tough. (I hope you're reading all our last posts, please say yes.) I expect next week to be a little tough, too. Change, man. It's kind of weird, with all its possibilities and fresh starts and "the best is yes to come"s while also being a total bitch.

I came here to thank you, though, so that's what I'd like to end on. I hit publish last week, with a lot of worry, and as the comments came in, that worry just rolled away. Your words, they've always been the absolute best, and I'm so grateful for them. I started blogging almost six years ago and while a lot has changed since then (Twitter was just a baby! I was much skinnier! VERONICA MARS WAS STILL ON!), my gratitude has never wavered.

I talked to Kyle tonight about gratitude, and he told me he was grateful for milkshakes. Well, even though that's not a bad thing to be grateful for (milkshakes are delicious), I told him that today I am grateful for you.

A Few Hard Goodbyes

I have a couple hard announcements for you today, and you can read about them officially at Style Lush and Food Lush.

Last year was a year of many questions. Some of those were: Was I doing too much? Would I ever find the time to do more? Should I step up? Or step back? Should I just give up sleep altogether or should I give up the things keeping me from sleep?

This year, there have been answers.

Simply (but sadly) put: I don't have the time to manage the Lush sites any longer. It was a painful realization, a painful answer to a few questions, and it's been heartbreaking to set in motion. I know this sounds a little dramatic. They're websites! What little advertising money they brought in dried up a while ago because I stopped having the time to seek out advertising opportunities. The ideas I had for the sites kept piling up but the time to devote to those ideas either never came or came at the expense of my offline life.

Rationally, it makes a lot of sense to shut them down. It's time. It's been time. But, emotionally. Oh, emotionally, I'm a mess. I have made such incredible friends and memories directly because of the sites. I can't tell you how proud they've made me over the years. I really wanted them to take off, to fill the writers' pockets with money, to catch the attention of important people. I believed they could do all that (and would). I still think they could, if only circumstances were different.

Kyle will be four the week after next. It stuns me. He was a baby and now he's a boy, and I've never loved anything more than watching that kid grow, but he's still growing too fast. I can't make time slow down, but I can make me slow down. 

When I told Mike my decision, he actually tried to talk me out of it. He might not get blogging but he gets when I'm happy. I told him all my reasons, all my thoughts, and the next night he said to me, "You know, I think this is the right choice for our family." That's all I needed to hear. Any doubt I might have had over these hard goodbyes went poof. Mike would never ask that I walk away from something that's taking time from him, but he still deserves that I walk away anyway.

There will be new posts up through next week, and I hope you'll visit and then go on to continue supporting the team of writers as they move on to new things. They are something else, those women. They are rock stars, stylish role-models, inspiring women, and all-around incredible friends. I love each of them, so much, and I could never say that enough. 

I talked to Natalie about this too because I tend to talk to Natalie about a lot and she asked if I thought I would regret this decision. Absolutely, without a doubt, likely every single day. I will regret giving these sites up for a long time to come, I'd be willing to bet.

But something I'm learning as I get older, regret doesn't necessarily mean you made a mistake. It just means you need a little time to be sad that things didn't work out differently.

Thank you to every single one of you who ever visited, who ever commented, who ever told me at a dinner party or in an email that you liked such-and-such post or that you bookmarked the sites or that you shared them with your friends. That never got old. Something we built entertained you. Oh, that was always such a fun feeling. So, thank you a million times over for supporting me, supporting the writers, supporting the sites. I'm so grateful.

It's hard to close doors, but I have great faith there are new ones opening as I hit publish.

Seven Quick Takes: Family Issues, Taylor Kitsch, Smoothies + More

1. My dad was in Texas this past weekend, visiting for a couple days. Kyle hasn't seen him since he visited last summer, so it was great that he took to my dad so quickly. He even asked for him over and over after we dropped him off at the airport yesterday morning. My relationship with my dad is ... complicated (mostly complicated for me, admittedly) but it was still a good visit. I appreciated that he complimented our newly cleaned house and our tiny town and my sweet boy. (He called Kyle "perfect" and although he's not, ohgodno, his grandpa should think he is, so it was nice to hear.)

A visit with him stirs up so much in my head and heart, and I'm still waiting for the stirring to settle. Still, it was good to see him. It was good for Kyle to see him.

 2. Let's move on from Family Issues with an uplifting note on Savages (ha), which we saw while my dad was in town (heads-up: kind of an awkward movie to see with your father) and despite it being hide-behind-my-hands violent, I actually liked it. Taylor Kitsch redeems all those John Carter Battlestar Whatever Movies and brings the Tim Riggins-level appeal (apparently what Tim Riggins was missing all this time was FACIAL SCARS, who knew!) and Blake Lively even made me hate her a little less.

I don't know that I'd recommend it--man, it's just so violent and I know there are few people who seek out these kinds of movies--but I felt myself enjoying it in the middle of it, to my own surprise.

3. Hey, don't know if I mentioned it but a couple weeks ago we hosted Hometown week at Food Lush and Style Lush and I'm so crazy proud of the quality of the posts from that week. If you're visiting Texas, Chicago, New York City, California, and many other map dots, bookmark these posts, my friends!

4. My mom and I recently saw Jersey Boys together, and it was such a perfect day. We took in an afternoon show and then had a delicious dinner followed by champagne and cupcakes at my mom's house. Kinda funny, though, while I had definitely heard dozens of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons songs, I couldn't remember if Frankie Valli was one of the singers on the plane that tragically crashed in the '60s, so the whole time I'm bopping to "Oh What a Night" and "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't Cry," I kept waiting for Frankie to die in an awful plane crash. (Spoiler alert: He was not on that plane.)

5. Kyle is in this (adorable) phase where everything is "super" something. "Daddy drives super fast!" "That toy is super cool!" "The plane we'll fly on is super big!" and, basically, Mike and I have adopted it in our own vocabularies. Forgive me, boss, if my next marketing plan is "super awesome" or something like that. It's just, man, this kid is cooler than I'll ever be.

6. This is kind of a silly thing to write about but I had the most delicious smoothie from Whole Foods last week and I am STILL THINKING ABOUT IT. My life is thrilling. I've begun talking about smoothies.

7. I'm gearing up to start training for another half-marathon (well, two, actually) this winter and that means training starts in a couple weeks. I'm adjusting last year's plan to take into account that the half-marathon I ran at the end of my training last year was pretty brutally awful those last three miles, and I'd like to feel more rockstar than puking-in-a-Luxor-trashcan this time around. I very highly doubt that I'll be recapping each week's training like I did last year, but I'm sure I'll still talk at length about the training. Really this is all just to warn you that things may get Running Heavy around these parts again after a very Running Light spring. (First things first, I need new shoes, and I think I need them to be a fun color this year.)

I Have Gift Guides for You!

It's my favorite time of year, friends, and one of my favorite things about this time of year is that I know some ridiculously talented people who know how to find some ridiculously awesome gifts for nearly anyone in your life. Those people combined with those gifts has created two of my favorite links in all the world to share:

1. The Official 2011 Style Lush Gift Guide

AND

2. The Official (and First!) 2011 Food Lush Gift Guide

Elizabeth is the brains behind the first and Caitlin is the new brains behind the second. I'm so lucky to know them both, and even luckier to work with them. They did an incredible job, and I am so excited to share these with you.

Happy shopping! 

Food Lush on Facebook!

Speaking of food, Food Lush is all grown-up! It has a Facebook page, which officially means it's big time. Or maybe it means we created a Facebook page for it. The former sounds better, so let's go with that.

We'll include links to our posts and other fun, internet, food finds, so if Facebook is your social media drug site of choice, give us a "like" and follow along.

Food Lush on Facebook!

(And a big, huge amount of thanks for your continued support for both Lush sites.)