Five Little Pecks to Prod a Procrastinator

Chirped by Tina

Coming as I do from a family of procrastinators and obsessive compulsives, getting anything done can be a challenge. Particularly around the house, without looming work deadlines and pressures, it’s easy to let things slide. So, during a recent flurry of home project productivity, I decided to chirp about what was working for me, to help me maintain my momentum and create a template I can come back to when this rush starts to fade.

July’s Cheep Trills

Chirped by Tina and Cass

As you’ve probably noticed, we like to end each month by highlighting ten great things that we enjoyed over the course of the last 30 days or so. Whether it was a fun event we participated in, something we read for book club, a new recipe we tried, a craft that we loved, or an awesome life hack we discovered, taking the time to make our list helps us appreciate the good stuff and stay positive even through difficult or trying times.

Favorite Books for the Month

Ok, full disclosure, Cass and I didn’t actually finish/read July’s book club selections, but you’ll be happy to know that if our clubs didn’t think a book was really great, or we didn’t actually read it ourselves, we’re certainly not going to list it as a favorite! So we’ve gone back into our pre-blog archives to pull out two favorites from last year.

At the Edge of the Orchard, by Tracy Chevalier. Set in the mid 1800s, this novel introduces you to James and Sadie Goodenough, who headed West with some cuttings from the family orchards to stake their own claim… on the edge of a swamp in Ohio where their wagon got stuck. I loved being immersed in the brutal realities of frontier life, and was fascinated by the descriptions of cultivating and trying to maintain an apple orchard. When their youngest son escapes the crazily dysfunctional family to head to California, we learn all about the giant redwood

March’s Cheep Trills

Chirped by Cass and Tina

A new list of highlights from our month – things we’re happy about and/or would recommend!

• Two Book Clubs, two books! A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley, is the memoir that the movie Lion was based on –  the amazing story of a 5 year old boy who gets irretrievably lost in Calcutta, ends up being adopted by a family in Australia, and eventually finds his way back home to rural India as an adult using Google Earth!

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, is another true story, about how an unlikely  group of gritty