Hi friends, welcome back! It’s time for the first What’s Up post of the year. After traveling to Michigan and Atlanta for Christmas, Jon and I took it easy this month and watched a lot of football! December was a pretty busy month with all of the festivities, so it was nice to have a month to reset and ease into the new year. The cold weather also didn’t provide any motivation to get out much.
On to my post 🙂 I’ve been linking up with my first and favorite blogger I ever read, Shay Shull, for my What’s Up posts. Each month I’m answering the following questions:
What I’m eating: Jon’s mom got us a Breville pizza oven for Christmas and we’ve been loving it! Jon makes the pizza and I partake in the eating 🙂 The pizza maker gets up to 660*F and mimics a real pizza oven, but this one is apartment friendly. Jon’s still perfecting his craft, but the pizzas come out way better than they did in our regular oven on a pizza stone. Also, Friday I’ll be posting another Foodie Friday so stay tuned 🙂
What I’m reminiscing about: three years ago, Jon and I spent MLK weekend in Puerto Rico and had such a blast exploring the island. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was so beautiful there and the warm weather and beach sounds amazing right now!
What I’m loving: this month I met up with two people that I’ve met through the blog. Pam over at …I choose this… was in town from Colorado, so we grabbed coffee and had such a wonderful time chatting the morning away. I also met up with my friend Liz and we had quite the exciting afternoon! (see “What I’m excited about”) With all the negativity in the world these days it makes so grateful for this blogging community and the positive and encouraging people I’ve interacted with in this small corner of the internet.
Favorite post of the month: maybe one of my favorite posts ever, Winter Wonderland in Central Park! The park after a snowfall exceeded all my expectations and it felt like such a dream to be walking in such a beautiful place.
What I’m Up to: planning my year and chipping away at my 40 book goal 🙂
What I’m working on: planning our trip to Paris! Jon bought this picture for me for Christmas and it will always be such a great reminder of our trip 🙂
What I’m excited about: I had my first A-List Celebrity sightings last Wednesday around 2pm, the most random time of the week! Yes, sightings plural! My friend Liz and I were walking through Washington Square Park after lunch and we walked right by Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria pushing their youngest children in strollers. I did a double take and couldn’t believe it! He looked pretty stressed, and I later saw he was sued for $25 million, and on top of the Rust investigation, I can understand why he would be looking that way. It all happened so fast, and I didn’t want to bother him minding his own business with his young kids so sadly I don’t have any pictures. Liz and I kept on walking so excited by our celeb sighting, and as we got to the Arch, we saw a large group of people watching an older guy sing. We both thought he looked familiar, but we couldn’t figure out who it was so we kept walking. Later I remembered to look it up and I quickly I discovered it was BILL MURRAY doing an improv performance! I couldn’t believe it! We were both so mind blown we saw two big celebs in one day. Now when people ask if I’ve seen any celebs, I can finally tell them an interesting story 🙂
What I’m watching/reading: we’re on the last season of Seinfeld and I don’t want it to end! We also watched Emily in Paris season 2 and it was a nice cheery show for January. On Netflix we watched the climbing documentaries The Alpinist and 14 Peaks. We enjoyed both of these documentaries and thought the climbers were amazing and also very inspiring. It’s wild what people can do and also crazy to think of the risks they take to achieve their goals. I’d highly recommend both documentaries along with Free Solo on Disney+. Free Solo is my favorite of the three because it’s about El Capitan in Yosemite so I could relate a little more, but I’d say it was the most nerve wracking even though I knew the ending.
Books:
- The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave – a good non-scary or disturbing thriller/mystery
- Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty – this book was just ok to me, it was a bit long and took a while to get into. Once I got into it, I wanted to know how it ended
- Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins-Reid – this was my favorite of the month! I couldn’t put it down
- Beach Read by Emily Henry – easy romcom
What I’m doing this weekend: we’re getting brunch at Sunday in Brooklyn and watching football. It’s going to be freezing so we will be inside most the weekend.
What I’m looking forward to next month: watching the Winter Olympics!
What are you looking forward to next month?
Keeping warm indoors, eating pizza, watching football – doesn’t sound too bad at all!
Kicking off the new year right 🙂
Exactly
A great summary and kudos on the pizza oven delights. My son has an outdoor gas oven that gets even hotter. Have not tasted his wares yet. Stay well and stay warm. Allan
We dream of the day we have a house and can have a pizza oven and grill. Hopefully you can try some of his pizza soon! Hope you stay well and warm too. They changed the forecast for NYC drastically since I looked last night and it’s going to be 50 next week ha!
That pizza looks amazing! And your pics of central park with the snow took me back…I was there for NYE 8 years ago and then it snowed the next day and it was amazing!
Wow what a magical trip you had!! Thanks for stopping by 😊
The Breville pizza oven, ha! Another thing I didn’t know I needed. Sounds like you had a nice month with pizza, books and football. I would love to have caught Bill Murray singing casually in the NY park! More so than the tense Alec Baldwin. We are looking forward to a fortnight in London next months and even going to a couple of football (soccer) matches.
It’s a great little oven! Bill was definitely in a way better mood ha. That sounds like a lot of fun!! You should definitely watch Ted Lasso before you go to get you even more excited for the trip, it’s a good laugh too!
Wow, Bill Murray is quite the exciting celebrity sighting!! I’m also looking forward to the winter Olympics. As much as I hate winter, I enjoy watching the winter Olympics more than the summer Olympics. Ice skating is my favorite to watch.
I like summer best because of the gymnastics and swimming, but winter is cool too! I like the ice skating and snowboarding. The bobsled/luge is cool too.
I can’t believe you guys saw Bill Murray!!!! He is such a good actor and hilarious 🙂
It was such an eventful day of celeb sightings!! I still can’t believe it haha
Sounds like a great month with your blogger meet-ups, football matches and pizza oven eating. Keep warm and continue enjoying life. So pleased I found you on Instagram too! M.
Definitely a great start to the year! I am so glad we connected on Instagram too 🙂
Bill Murray singing…I think you were better off walking.😄 The only celeb I remember seeing in NYC was John McEnroe getting out of a limo. He actually said hi to me! I said, “You can’t be serious!” Ha ha🤣 Your year is off to a great start.
Haha my ears didn’t hurt too bad while we were there luckily 🙂 Haha wow you had communication with a celeb! The year is off to a good start!
What a cool little pizza oven!
It is cool and not even expensive!
We were like you – we didn’t do much in Jan and mainly just watched the NFL (I can’t bring myself to call it football because obviously that’s soccer!). We were off our SEATS for the Bills Chiefs game – it was about 2am here so we were super tired and had to work the next day, but we couldn’t turn it off! The pizza looks amazing though, and super excited for your Paris trip. We visit friends regularly there (it’s a door to door 3.5 hour train ride for us so not far) and it’s such a stunning city! 🙂
Haha the games on Sunday were wild!!! Definitely worth staying up for and the tiredness the next day for you ha! So amazing just a short (relatively) train ride can get you to Paris! Do you have any suggestion of what neighborhood I should stay in?
Yeah crazy day of games! Yeah Europe is so great for being connected, and easy to get away for weekend breaks by trains. Great question. So if you want to be super close to the tourist attractions like the Eiffel Tower etc then 1ST ARR or 7th ARR (short for Arrondissement, which are the areas Paris are divided in to) are the best and safest. But if you want like cafe culture, bookshops, parks nearby and like no more than a 30 min walk to the central area then Le Marais is gorgeous. I also stayed in the Montmatre area once and it’s so romantic, full of cobbled streets and houses and also Paris’ only winery if you like wine! Saint Germain des Pres is also nice – it’s more like the art galleries and boutique shops. So I guess really what you’re looking for but any of those areas you can’t go wrong with 🙂 x
THANK YOU!!! This is very helpful ❤️❤️❤️
Surprised no one said, “A pizza oven? WHEW! Lyssy & Jon don’t get enough pizza already so the Breville will take care of the need nicely.” Was going to suggest Ted Lasso but you’ve already watched it. We’re about to launch Season 2. “Emily In Paris” Season 2 was another fun romp. I love how she intersperses beautiful scenes of Paris throughout the episodes. I’m sure the show only revved up your enthusiasm for your upcoming trip.
Haha we aren’t deprived of pizza over here 🙂 Ted Lasso is one of my favorites, I wish there were more seasons! I did love seeing some sights I discovered in my planning featured on the show!
Love that you’re planning your trip to Paris and watch Emily in Paris lol
Glad you have a great start of the year 🙂
I noticed so many things in Emily in Paris as I was planning haha. Looks like you’re having a fun start to the year!!
I’m belatedly catching up on my What’s Up Wednesday posts. The Winter Olympics are my FAVOURITES!!! And those are great celebrity sighting stories.
I am loving all of the figure skating so far!