Musings on Momentum

design a life you love

The Benefits of Napping

Remember when you were a kid and absolutely hated having to take a nap every day?  I was so against napping that I convinced my parents I didn’t need such frivolity in my life at an unreasonably early age.  I remember feeling SO proud of myself for being such a “grown up” and not requiring any extra sleep during the day.  HA!  What a fool I was.  I’m sorry I was so quick to toss you aside, naps.  Sometimes you just don’t know how good something is until it’s gone.

Times have changed and these days I’m lucky if I get seven hours of sleep a night.  I’m not even talking about seven good hours of sleep.  Lately it has been seven hours of sleep interrupted by my new downstairs neighbor returning home from work (or wherever) at 2:00 AM.  Every night she takes to her patio for her nightly cigarette and proceeds to talk loudly about her life and laugh like a hyena.  And every night those two noises reverberate off our courtyard walls, landing in my bedroom.  Right around the time she crawls into bed I’m getting up for work.

Needless to say sleep has been scarce for me and it has been ROUGH, particularly since I have always been somebody who needs a minimum of eight hours of sleep a night.  The only good thing about this new found lack of sleep is that I have reintroduced napping into my life on weekends and guys, I’m loving it.  In fact, I’m becoming a bit of a napping fanatic so when Casper, an innovative company that offers high quality mattresses, sheets and pillows, contacted me ahead of March 14th’s National Nap Day to share some of my favorite napping tips and tricks it seemed like a match made in (napping) heaven.

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Planning a Small Balcony

I have always been a bit of a planner, particularly when it comes to mapping out living spaces.  As a child I would draw out floor plans and room layouts in my spare time…you know, for fun.  Totally normal childhood behavior, right?  Okay so maybe it isn’t the most common of hobbies for a kid to have, but it has served me well on many a move.

Following our most recent move last September I didn’t have an occasion to map out any spaces and I was starting to feel like I needed to get my fix.  It comes as no surprise that I went a bit overboard when planning out our balcony.  By overboard I mean that I sketched out a basic design months ago and then actually put mouse to graph paper and did a rough mock-up online at Home Styler.  The company’s online tools are incredibly straightforward to use and they have a huge selection of furniture you can choose from to add to your space.  I stayed pretty true to my original rough sketch and think the below little mock-up turned out pretty well!

When planning our small balcony I took three main things into consideration: the budget we wanted to work with; our lifestyle, meaning how we hoped to use our outdoor space; and the amount of light the balcony gets.

Balcony Plan

  • Budget: We are not planning on staying in our current home past the end of next summer.  It therefore doesn’t make sense for us to invest a large sum of money into the space.
  • Lifestyle: We have lofty dreams of sipping wine and dining on our balcony at twilight.  I envision a little perch for Lola to lounge on during the day.  I’d love to have some greenery in our life.  So many ideas for such a small space!
  • Light: You’d think that we would get tons of sun because we are in LA, right?  That turns out to not quite be the case.  We discovered that due to the layout of our building we don’t actually get much, if any, direct sunlight during the day.  There go my dreams of growing rosemary and other sun-loving herbs!

So to recap, we are working with a small self-imposed budget, want the space to serve several purposes and can only put plants that can handle zero direct sunlight out there.  It turns out those are quite a lot of variables to work with, particularly when I envision the space looking something along the lines of the gorgeous small outdoor living inspiration I shared last Thursday.  In other words, I envision perfection!

If you need me at any point over the next few weekends you will be able to find me crisscrossing Los Angeles between IKEA, Home Depot and various nurseries.  Stay tuned for a progress report…

How to Keep Skin Moisturized In Dry Weather

The combination of dry winter air and prescription strength retinol has wreaked complete havoc on my skin.  For months it has been alternating between dryness and peeling, at times staging all out revolts against me.  It has been a really fun time.

That in mind, you can imagine how excited I was to team up with Valentia Skin Care to put their new Royal Rose Hydrating Serum to the test.  Valentia’s products are formulated solely with natural and organic components that are combined to repair and protect skin.  Since one of my goals for the year is to move towards using safer and more natural skin care and makeup products, I was thrilled to try out this serum and see if it could make a difference on my skin.

Keep Skin Moisturized with Hydrating Serum

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The BEST Oven Baked Salmon Recipe

After a day at work, an hour and a half long commute home and an evening workout I am usually pretty exhausted by the time dinner rolls around.  Regardless of how I feel, I make an effort to cook dinner for my husband and myself every night.  While some meals can be labor intensive, most are super straightforward like this oven baked salmon.  It is such a delicious and easy meal that we have taken to eating it a minimum of once a week.

This oven baked salmon recipe needs just a handful of ingredients, takes only a few minutes to make and requires zero cleanup!

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