Welcome to the second installment of Three Thursday Things, in which I share three things that have delighted me over the past week or so.
#1 Oreo Cookie Butter
My boyfriend Angel and I share a deep love for Biscoff cookie butter. We enjoy both the creamy and crunchy varieties. Our favorite ice cream shop, The Revolution Ice Cream in our Tampa neighborhood of Seminole Heights, makes a vegan sundae with crushed Biscoff cookies at the bottom. Yum…but I digress.
Angel’s adventurousness in the kitchen and delight at the challenge of making yummy vegan things for me pays off on the regular. But the other night he made vegan Oreo cookie butter (this recipe is similar to the one he used), and it was INCREDIBLE. He’s already planning another cookie butter with chocolate chip cookies, and I cannot wait.
#2 Lake: Coloring Books & Journal app
On a quest to add a new self-care activity to my routine, I perused the App Store looking for inspiration and the Apple Design Award-winning Lake app caught my eye. I bought a few physical coloring books a year or so ago and I colored two times. I enjoyed the experience, but a physical coloring book requires me to find my colored pencils and enough dog-free space to spread out, which is hard in my 900-square-foot bungalow.
I’ve not tried the iPhone app yet, but I love the iPad version. All of the art is created by independent artists with a portion of the proceeds from subscriptions going to the artists, and there is a wide variety of styles and levels of complexity to choose from. It sounds like a strange addition, but there’s a journaling component as well. You can click on “Coloring Journal” to log your mood and emotions, then Lake creates a color palette for you based on those and offers you two art options. If you want to get right to coloring, you can just start browsing the available art and choose one to color. The image below is something I actually colored myself! It’s from a collection of beautiful images called Space Babes by the illustrator Luna Valentine.
#3 My dog Cleo’s eight three-week-old puppies
Cleo had eight puppies on 8/10/2021. They’re so adorable. Three weeks old is a super cute age! They’re attempting to walk, which is hilarious, and they chew on their siblings faces. Today was the first day they ate "real” food in addition to nursing. I blended a disgusting sludge of puppy food and broth and took it to them in a shallow pan. The smell enticed Pepper and Tucker (yes, I have named them), so they led the way over to the pan. They started lapping it up and also stepping in it, rolling around in it, and eating it off of each other. It made my day to watch them.
And if you don’t already know, you can follow up with their growth and development on this interactive Tableau dashboard I created (static image below). This site is supposedly about data, after all.