handcraftedadventure 
I spent years accumulating a life, and then I spent years quietly letting pieces of it go — without ever calling it that. I started as a secretary. Moved through accounting, became a controller, and then — gradually, for reasons that made sense at the time — stepped back. Part-time. Assistant work. Full charge bookkeeping. … Read more
We’ve only been to Cannon Beach Oregon once. I think about it more than anywhere we’ve been in the last few years — more than places we’ve returned to multiple times, more than trips that required more planning and more money. There’s something about a place that gets you exactly once, in exactly the right … Read more
Day 8. Module 1, Phase 2 — Ownership. Week two of the solo run. This is part of Building It Live — a weekly dispatch from inside the Fully Lived Framework as we run it on ourselves before the September beta. Start from the beginning here. The question the workbook kept circling back to this … Read more
Most plans require you to get out of your pajamas. That sounds like a joke. It isn’t. There’s something that happens between the moment you make a plan and the moment the day actually arrives. When you planned it, leaving the house sounded completely reasonable. Of course you’d go. Why wouldn’t you? And then the … Read more
For most of my adult life, I thought having goals meant I had direction. I always had a list — career goals, health goals, financial goals, trips we kept saying we’d take someday. Some years I hit them. Some years I didn’t. Either way, January would arrive and I’d start over, because that’s what you’re … Read more
May feels like the right month to talk about what’s been on the nightstand — and these four books for midlife readers landed at exactly the right time. Not because I have a reading program or a books-per-month goal. Just because these four have been sitting with me lately and each one hit differently — … Read more
Day 1. Module 1, Phase 1 — Awareness. We opened the workbook last night at the kitchen table and began. Not planning to start. Not talking about starting. Actually opening the pages and doing Day 1. The workbook has been sitting on the desk for a week. I’ve been building the Fully Lived Framework for … Read more
I don’t find motivation in the morning. I don’t look for it, I don’t wait for it, and I’ve stopped expecting it to show up on its own. What I do instead is remove every possible reason not to move — the night before, while I still have the energy and the intention to do … Read more
I wasn’t in crisis. That’s the thing that made it hard to name. There was no rock bottom, no dramatic moment, no morning I woke up and knew something had to change. Just a quiet, persistent dissatisfaction that I kept moving past — too busy to stop, too uncertain to look directly at it. I … Read more
May is the month the backyard actually becomes part of the house again. Here’s are out outdoor living favorites – everything we’re using to make the most of it — from the garden we skipped last year to the backyard movie nights we’re not skipping this summer. If you’ve been following along here, you know … Read more