As part of my 101 in 1,001 list, I’ve challenged myself to reading 100 books over the 1,001 days. I’m way ahead of schedule and ending up setting a new personal goal to read 52 books in the first year – which I managed to do, but just barely. So, needless to say, I’ve read a lot of books over the last year or so!

I read very few books last year that I didn’t like, and I’d even go as far as to say I loved most of the books I read. But, as I was looking back over the list of books I read in 2012, there were a few that clearly stuck out to me as the best of the best. So, today I’m rounding up the five best books that I read last year. Enjoy!

- Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire: This one is totally cheesy, not particularly well-written, and completely and hopelessly addicting and wonderful. This was one of those books I thought about all day long and couldn’t wait to get back to once I put it down. There’s a sequel coming out later this year, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t way more excited than an adult woman should be about a book clearly meant for someone much younger than me.

- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: If you haven’t heard of this book yet, you’ve probably been living under a rock all year. It was very dark, twisted, and completely insane, and I loved every second of it. This book was not at all what I expected it to be, and it was definitely another one that stayed on my brain for quite some time after I finished reading it.

- Room by Emma Donoghue: I’d been wanting to read this book for a while, and I’m oh so glad I did. This is the kind of story that should be beyond depressing and, at times, it is, but the author manages to make the story so engaging and interesting that you don’t spend the whole book bawling (though, I most certainly cried a time or two). I love, love, loved this book and it’s one that I can see myself reading over and over.

- Divergent by Veronica Roth: This is another way-too-young-for-me book, but this series is SO GOOD and I’m SO ADDICTED. I recently read the second book in the trilogy, Insurgent, and I’m eagerly waiting for the third one to be released. This story is so fascinating and unique (if you can consider a dystopian novel in a sea of dystopian novels unique) and I’m crossing my fingers that they end up releasing a movie because I’m obsessed with this whole story!

- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern: This book was so different, and strange, and wonderful. The writing was incredible and this was one of those books that drew me in so much that I could vividly picture every detail in my mind as I read it. Absolutely wonderful.

And those were my top five books of 2012! I read a ton of books last year and thoroughly enjoyed most of them, so saying these are the best is a pretty big deal. I’ve already read some pretty amazing ones so far this year (Life of Pi, anyone?) and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for me!

What were your favorite books of 2012?

(All images via Barnes & Noble)

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Like I mentioned yesterday, Corey and I aren’t really huge on making official New Year’s resolutions. They generally fail, and I’m not very good at remembering whatever it was I originally resolved to do. But, we’ve been working on a 101 in 1,001 list for the past 11 months, and in the spirit of the new year I wanted to designate a few items that we’d really like to cross off the list in 2013.

I guess you could call these our New Year’s resolutions – I’m just calling them our list-of-crap-we-want-to-get-done. Either way, I’m hoping it all gets accomplished next year!

1. Go on a “staycation”

This is one that’s pretty much for sure going to happen. Corey’s mom got us a stay at the hotel where we got married for Christmas, and we’re hoping to use it sometime within the next few months. It’s in a part of town that we don’t get to visit very often, and I’m looking forward to going back and visiting – we never actually got to stay there together when we were getting married, so it will be the first time we’ll get to spend a night there with one another!

(Photo by She-N-He Photography)

2. One year, watch all Oscar-nominated films

This one was written a bit ambiguously, but the intent was for us to watch all films nominated for Best Picture. Usually we haven’t seen half of them and are so confused about what the big deal is! This year, all of the films that are likely to be nominated are movies that we would really, really like to see, so I’m hoping this will be the year we take care of this – we may not get them all watched before the awards air, but we can definitely do it at some point!

3. Replace our washer and dryer

I’m not sure if this is one we’ll manage to get done this year or not, but I sure would love to! Corey and I have big plans for the tiny little laundry closet off of our kitchen, and I dream of them every time I have to do a load of laundry. It would be awesome if we could get a new washer and dryer at some point this year so we can kick off the makeover of this sad little room!

4. Get rid of all of the ugly lights in our house

We had so many awful lights when we moved in that it was almost overwhelming to even think about replacing them. But, we’ve made some significant progress on getting some prettier lights in our house, and I have high hopes that we can finish it out over the next year!

(One of our updated lights!)

5. Finish head chairs for the dining room

I’m so embarrassed that this is even still on the list. As I told you guys, I started on these chairs way back in August and…they’re still not finished. They’re close, though, I promise! Things got crazy once school started, and then the holidays hit, and well…they’re just not done. But I swear they’ll be finished before 2013 is over!

I’m hoping we accomplish way more than 5 of these goals over the next year, but these are a few that I really want us to focus on! As always, you can see (infrequent) updates to our 101 in 1,001 list, as well as the list itself, over on the 101 blog. I’m feeling good about our chances of actually finishing it so far!

And, with this post, I’ve officially posted something every day for the entire month of December. Whew. Are you sick of me yet? I have a feeling you might be, which is part of the reason that I’m making this my last post for the next week or so. My break from work is shorter than usual this year and I only have a couple of days left to soak up the freedom before it’s back to work for me, so I’m going to take the rest of this week off to relax, sleep, and watch more television than I’ll be willing to admit! I’ll be back bright and early next Monday morning, though, so keep an eye out!

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? What are your goals for 2013?

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Well, 2012 is almost over and 2013 is upon us. Can you believe it? A few of my kids at school were telling me before the break that they refuse to let go of 2012 and that they’ll never write 2013 on any of their papers – I had to laugh and agree, not because I don’t want 2013 to be here, but just because it always seems to take me until June to remember to put the new year!

I figure since it’s the end of the year, it would be the perfect time to re-visit our 101 in 1,001 list (which we started February 1st of last year so, while it wasn’t necessarily a set of New Year’s resolutions, it’s pretty close!) and see how we did. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at the list again to  chat about some of the things we’re hoping to accomplish in 2013! We aren’t big on making official resolutions, but since we’re already working on this list, it can’t hurt to designate a few things we’d like to knock out over the next year!

So, let’s see what we took care of this year:

21. Finish watching Lost
25. Spend an entire day together with no technology
31. Try the dog park again

32. Get a kitten (we got a puppy instead!)
38. Join a church
42. Have a dinner party
49. Sponsor a child during Christmas
52. Visit a farmer’s market
53. Start recycling

62. Get our garage completely clean and organized - I have to laugh at this one, because our garage is a disaster again. But, it was clean for a while!
66. Learn more about my camera and become very comfortable with it
67. Learn how to use Photoshop (didn’t learn Photoshop, but learned enough about editing photos that I consider this taken care of!)
68. Get at least one paid sponsor
69. Host a giveaway on the blog
70. Learn enough about coding to do basic edits on the blog
71. Add a house tour/layout page (see it here!)
74. Blog daily for a month (31/31) – technically this isn’t finished, but it will be tomorrow so I’m counting it!
75. Research and purchase another lens for our camera (got one for Christmas!)
76. Purchase a tripod (another Christmas present!)
77. Reply to at least 3 comments for every blog post I write for a month
78. Be featured on a large-scale home décor blog (See it here!)

81. Replace my car
86. Learn how to use (and be comfortable with) my Cricut (My personal goal)
87. Get a job I’m happy with (My personal goal)
88. Create at least one item I would be proud to sell online (My personal goal)
90. Create a piece of art I’m proud to display in our home (My personal goal)
97. Join an intramural sports team (Corey’s personal goal)

There are also a few things on our list that are in progress – either we’ve done part of it and haven’t finished the rest, or it’s something we’re actively trying to complete. Here are the things that we’re started on but haven’t completed:

5. Go on 3 vacations (1/3)
10. Spend at least 10 days exploring parts of downtown Austin we’ve never seen (2/10)
11. Go to at least 5 Austin events (1/5)

13. Master at least 10 new cocktail recipes (1/10)
20. Try 10 new local restaurants (4/10)
22. Watch 20 classic movies that we’ve never seen (1/20)
39. Try at least two new recipes a month
41. Spend time with Audrey & Kyle at least once a year (1/3)
84. Read at least 100 books (38/100)

So, all in all that makes 27 items completed and 9 items we’ve at least started on. Not too bad for the first 11 months! I love having something like this, because I sometimes feel like we don’t really accomplish much throughout the year – but looking back at this it’s clear that we got quite a bit done that we wanted to!

Do you have a life “to-do” list? What did you accomplished this year?

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Well, that’s it. I started back to work this morning and my summer is officially – sniff – over. It was a whirlwind of a summer and I can’t even begin to believe how quickly it flew by. I’m incredibly sad that it’s already over, but – let’s be honest – I’ve already got Christmas on the brain, so I guess it’s a good thing that December is fast approaching!

Today I thought I’d re-visit the bucket list that I created for myself at the beginning of the summer and see how I did – I definitely didn’t finish ‘em all, but I think I made pretty good progress!

1. Learn how to use (and be comfortable with) my Cricut - Mission Accomplished!

I spent quite a bit of time playing around with my Cricut over these last few weeks, and I’ve actually be able to use it to make a few things for my classroom!

Hopefully now that I’m a bit more comfortable with it – and not terrified of it – I’ll be able to get a bit more creative and maybe even use it to make a few things for the house!

2. Learn more about my camera - Mission (Kinda) Accomplished!

I still am by no means an expert on my camera, but I spent some quality time with it (and with the various editing features on free programs like Picasa and Gimp) this summer, and I feel so much more comfortable using my camera – I even made the leap into only using manual mode, which is huge for me!

Hopefully it’s also at least a little obvious here on the blog that I’ve been learning a bit more about my camera. At the beginning of the summer my images looked like this:

And now they’re looking a bit more like this:

Definite improvement, right? I fully intend to keep growing and learning more about how to use my camera, but I feel pretty happy with the progress I’ve made so far – I’m calling this one a success!

3. Finish head chairs for the dining room! – Mission In Progress!

I’m finally making some headway on this project and am happy to report that I’m actually actively working on the chairs! My amazing sister, Jennifer, is helping me out, and we are by no means done but we will be soon!

4. Find two new thrift stores to frequent in Austin. - Mission Accomplished!

When I originally wrote this goal for myself I wrote it with the intention of finding small, local thrift stores that can’t be found anywhere else. Of course, after visiting about a bajillion (that’s a technical term) thrift and antique stores over the last few months Corey and I have learned that hands down the best ones in our area just so happen to be Goodwills. We have three that are relatively close to us that we’ve had tremendous luck at (all of our change jar finds were from various Goodwills!) and we’ve been pretty disappointed with the selection found in smaller, local shops.

We still haven’t given up – we’re determined that one of these days we’ll find a few good local thrift stores, but for now we’re very happy with our Goodwills and we plan to visit them every chance we get!

5. Spend an entire day together with no technology - Mission NOT Accomplished

Corey and I still have every intention of completing this, but this summer has just not been a good time for it to happen. He’s in the process of a big transition in his career right now and things have been more than a little stressful for us (that’s totally an understatement – things have been hard, y’all). Corey hasn’t had a true weekend since before I finished the school year, and when he’s home he is so exhausted and stressed that he has a hard time mustering up the energy to do anything other than fall in front of the television and relax.

Hopefully within the next few months, however, things will pick back up and we’ll be on the right track again – and when they do, you know I’m incredibly excited to do this!

6. Go to the pool (a lot)! - Mission (Kinda) Accomplished!

I definitely intended to spend a lot more time at the pool than Corey and I actually did, but I’d definitely say that, with our cruise, we spent our fair share of time poolside this summer!

Aside from the cruise, I only made it out to the pool one time, but thankfully even though my break may be over, the pool season is not! I still intend to hit up the pool a few more times before they close down for the winter!

7. Spend lots of time outside - Mission NOT REALLY Accomplished

This one really goes hand-in-hand with the “spend a day together with no technology” one. Corey has been so busy lately that heading to the dog park or taking the dogs for a long walk in the evening have been the last thing on his mind, so we didn’t spend nearly as much time in the great outdoors as we would have liked to this summer. We did, however, spend some time in our backyard sprucing things up (and dealing with a myriad of problems with our sprinkler system!), so I’m calling this one a bit of a draw. We would have liked to hang outside quite a bit more than we did this summer, but the circumstances just really didn’t lend themselves to this happening.

8. Give the blog some love - Mission Accomplished!

In the first few weeks of summer I spent an ton of time tweaking, sprucing, and switching things up on the blog, so I’m definitely calling this one a success!

I added a projects page, updated our house tour page with current photos, updated the search function, and added a few other small details like the “Related Posts” at the bottom of each post, and an Instagram stream in the sidebar, as well as a “Most Popular Posts” section in the sidebar too! I’m constantly thinking of new things I want to tweak or add to the blog, though, so you’ll definitely continue to see it evolve!

9. Try some new, local restaurants - Mission Accomplished!

Corey and I didn’t go out to eat very much this summer (see previous “crazy job changes” statements), but when we did we were surprisingly good about changing it up a bit and trying a few new things! We managed to try two new restaurants that we had never visited before, and we added about seven thousand to the list of restaurants that we’d like to someday try!

Grabbing some breakfast tacos at a random local Mexican bakery!

10.Re-texture the walls in our powder room - Mission NOT Accomplished

Corey and I really did have every intention of getting this project done over the last couple of months, but after talking about it we realized it just wasn’t practical to do it yet. We figured re-texturing would be a quick and easy way to do a little update to this bathroom before we complete a larger overhaul down the road, but then we realized that with everything we have planned in here (switching out the vanity for a pedestal sink, raising the ceiling, and eventually adding in a pocket door), it just didn’t make sense to take the time to re-texture everything only to have it ripped up or ruined later. So, this project has officially been put on the back burner until we are actually able to tackle the whole bathroom. We did, however, manage to knock out another wall-related project – the amazing stencil in our living room – so it’s gotta at least be considered somewhat of a success!

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It’s officially been four whole months since we started our 101 in 1,001 challenge, and each month over on our 101 in 1,001 blog I’ve been wrapping up the books I’m reading for my goal of reading 100 books over the course of the three-ish years the challenge will last.

I thought today I’d stop in and round up the books that I’ve read over the past four months (please no judging for my admittedly low-brow selection of reading material!). I’m a huge fan of reading and I’m excited that having this little goal for myself has made me much more motivated to get through all of my books!

So, here we go – a little list of all the books I’ve read in the past 4 months!

1. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

2. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

3. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

4. Explosive Eighteen – Janet Evanovitch

5. Feed – M.T. Anderson 

6. Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins 

7. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender

8. The Giver – Lois Lowry

9. Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang – Chelsea Handler

10. A Feast for Crows – George R. R. Martin

11. Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins 

12. I Don’t Know How She Does It – Allison Pearson

13. The Vampire Diaries, The Hunters – Phantom – L.J. Smith

14. Fallen – Lauren Kate

15. Something Borrowed – Emily Giffen

16. Something Blue – Emily Giffen

Whew – 16 books in 4 months isn’t bad, right? I have a feeling I’ll be blowing through a ton more books this summer – I’m gonna have a lot of free time on my hands!

So, what was my favorite book that I’ve read so far in this challenge? Hands down, it was Night Circus.

(Source)

This book was amazing. I recommend it wholeheartedly. I also really loved The Giver (I had read it years ago as a kid, but didn’t remember much about it), Fallen (although I’m a little embarrassed to admit it) and, of course, the Hunger Games Trilogy (I had read them before a while back, but was re-reading for the movie release). My least favorites? I absolutely hated Feed, and had a really hard time getting into I Don’t Know How She Does It – it was very slow!

What books have you been reading lately? Any recommendations for me?

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