Live Well: Two Movie Things

I don't have time for a longer post today because my free time is in short supply due to social events + a busy work schedule. However, I wanted to make sure you guys didn't think I had abandoned the blog. So today I bring you two quick movie things.

First: FiveThirtyEight's Oscar predictions model (full model has not yet been updated to reflect the results of the SAG Awards). Click around a bit and you'll see that the folks at the blog built their own model and have been profiling the Oscar models of statistics hobbyists. Math + highly-regarded movies? COUNT ME IN.

Second: The reviews for Dirty Grandpa. On any given Friday you will likely find me surfing the Flixster app, which I like to use to keep abreast of new movies and their critical reception. Flixster very helpfully pulls in Rotten Tomatoes' two-sentence-ish summation of the reviews of a movie + sentences from each of the reviews used to calculate the freshness score that are indicative of the overall tenor of the review. Shocking no one, Dirty Grandpa has a horrendous Rotten Tomatoes score (8%) and some of the excerpts from the reviews are so amazing that I just have to share them with you:

"It will make you feel bad for yourself, and anyone else who sees it, and anyone else who has to live in the world where it exists as a physical document."  -- Will Leitch, The New Republic

"I'm not saying Dirty Grandpa is terrible, but I fully expect a terrorist organization to claim responsibility for it any minute now." -- Mike McGranaghan, Aisle Seat

"...feels like something you'd find next to a used condom and a discarded can of Red Bull." -- Katherine Monk, Ex-Press.com

"I began giggling with a kind of metaphysical embarrassment for everyone involved in the enterprise, and, eventually, for all of humanity itself." -- Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com 

Needless to say, I hope you did not find yourself at a showing of Dirty Grandpa over the weekend.

After five straight nights of dinners out with friends (so fun!) I am looking forward to having a few quiet nights at home. I will hopefully be back later this week with a 2016 resolutions post (as promised last week). Or maybe I'll be back with more miscellaneous things from my life. Who knows. Either way, see you in a few days!

Live Well: 2015 New Years Resolutions Scorecard

When I was in the third grade, I was in a "gifted and talented" program that sent a small group of us to a different school once a week. At that school, we mostly played games and did creative projections. And while this program probably had many positive impacts on my life (my now-husband was in it with me), at the time I hated it. And do you know why I hated it?

There weren't any grades. That's right! Ten year old Natalie Ashcroft liked living in a world where even small children were rigorously assessed and stack-ranked versus their peers. 

So please, keep the charming anecdote above in mind when I say this: all New Year's resolutions should be specific and measurable. I signed myself up for three quantifiable resolutions in 2015. Let's see how I did:

Resolution #1: Go to Crossfit 150 times

Status: Fail

In order to assess myself on this one, I pulled a spreadsheet down off of MindBody, the software that both CrossFit gyms I attended in 2015 use. That spreadsheet had a record of every Crossfit class I signed up for and attended. (I'm really not kidding about this measurability thing.) While there were some inconsistencies in that data, it looks like I made it to the gym around 125 times. Close, but no cigar. 

That being said, I honestly don't consider myself to have failed on the gym-going front last year. One year ago, I still found Crossfit intimidating. I had to force myself out of bed in the morning, and I often dreaded the class up until the moment it started. With another year of experience under my belt + switching to a new gym that's a better fit, I actually look forward to going each morning. I feel sad instead of relieved when I have to miss a class. And I'm in better shape as a result. So did I hit 150? No. But did I learn to enjoy Crossfit? Yes I did. 

(Ignore how that conclusion goes against everything I just argued in favor of measurability.)

Resolution #2: Read 10,000 pages

Status: Fail

Aren't you so glad you clicked into this super depressing post?

Okay yes, I failed, and failed big at this one. I only read 4,337 pages--nowhere close. As I wrote last year, I switched my reading goal to be pages-focused instead of number of books-focused so that I wouldn't have an excuse to skip long books. I knew I was missing out on great stuff, and I read some really great, really lengthy books in 2015 (more on those in a later post!). Unfortunately, those lengthy books were not enough. I spent most of the year deluding myself about how I was tracking versus my goal, and by the time I realized how far behind I was, it was way too late.

This goal also had a sub-goal: look at my phone less. I knew 10,000 pages was ambitious, and I figured if I worked hard at accomplishing that goal there just wouldn't be time in the day to mindlessly surf Instagram. But the call of my iPhone was too strong, and my spirit too weak. But there's always next (this) year...right?

Resolution #3: Travel internationally (pre-planned trip to the Caribbean doesn't count)

Status: SUCCESS! (given away by the photo at the top)

I'm glad we can close this out on a high note. Despite a few curveballs during the year--most significantly, my husband's vacation policy being changed for the (way) worse--we managed to plan and execute a trip to Japan. And man, am I glad we went. I'll give you a longer recap soon, but the food, the culture, and the scenery was all spectacular. I would go back in a heartbeat. It's definitely the piece of 2015 I will remember best.

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Coming to a blog near you (this one) soon (like in the next couple days): my 2016 resolutions. 

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Now for everyone's favorite part of this blog (I'm sure): the daily minutiae of my life. Yesterday consisted of a workout (It had double-unders! I can do them now!), getting to catch up with an old friend and co-worker, a productive day of work, and closing it all out by ordering sushi for dinner. Tomorrow we're going to a weeknight dinner with friends (who are we?) and then hopefully slowly sliding into the weekend.

If I'm not back tomorrow (and I'm not sure I will be, due to that crazy Thursday night dinner out), have an excellent weekend. I'm looking forward to filling you guys in on 2016 resolutions, Japan, my favorite books of the year, and so much else.

Hello there.

I can't quite tell you what finally beckoned me back to the blog. My best guess is that it's a combination of it being a new year and currently being in the heart of Oscars season. Given that new years resolutions and Oscar noms are two things I've written about religiously in the past, I think both made me miss this little corner of the internet.

So what have I been up to during the past year? Nothing. Okay, slightly less than nothing. About a week after my last blog post, we moved apartments. The move came up very quickly and unexpectedly. Up until last March, we lived in a neighborhood in San Francisco called the Marina. The Marina is beautiful, lively, and super inconveniently located when you have to commute south of the city every day...which I did. One day, my husband was looking at Craigslist on a whim and saw the apartment we now live in. It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, hardwood floors, a big kitchen, and was a great price (for San Francisco) so we jumped at it. Best of all, it's located in a neighborhood called Bernal Heights, which is on the south side of San Francisco. The new location cuts a minimum of twenty minutes off my commute each way. Huge. Although there are some things we miss about our old apartment (like the flower-lined walkway in front that served as the stage for basically every single outfit photo I ever took for this blog), we absolutely love our new place.

And yes, I will definitely be posting photos of the apartment here sometime soon!

Other happenings: we traveled! To Japan! And then to the Grenadines! Both trips were spectacular. The Japan trip was just me and my husband, and I am so, so, so glad that we did it. Memories from that trip will be an upcoming topic on the blog, too. The trip to the Grenadines was with my family, and it was just as relaxing and beautiful as we could have possibly hoped it would be.

Smaller things: I joined a gym here on the south side of the city that I love (I never once felt intimidated by the other people there), we've gotten better about cooking at home, I've read lots of books and seen lots of TV shows I want to tell you about, and I'm thoroughly convinced that 2016 will be a banner year. With that in mind, I think now's a great time to pick writing back up. I'm a little unsure of the posting cadence I'll be able to maintain, but I'm going to try to at least write every time I have something interesting to report. Which might not be often, we shall see.

Finally, how do you like the new look? Slick, right? I think the incredible amount of advertising Squarespace does on all my favorite podcasts finally got to me. You'll have to forgive some funky formatting on old posts, but I think the site going forward will be cleaner and more easily-navigable than it's ever been. 

And a quick administrative note: if you were signed up for the auto-generated emails from my blog before, they likely won't work anymore. I'll be working without an email option for now--thanks for being flexible.

So nice to be writing again! Happy to have you back.

Dress Well: Tweed-ledee

J. Crew shirt (old), J. Crew coated jeans (similar), Rag&Bone booties, J. Crew necklace (no longer available), Rebecca Minkoff bag, Ray-Ban sunglasses

Happy Monday, everyone! The pictures in these post are from two weekends ago, when I wore this out to a dinner with some friends of ours. Lately, I've been making an extra effort to appreciate the items that are already in my closet, rather than going out and buying new things. This shirt was the beneficiary of that strategy--I got it as a Christmas present in 2013, and have not worn it enough since!

And just in case you were under the impression that I look photogenic all the time, I thought I'd provide some proof that I most definitely do not:

I'm going to warn you now: my blog posting schedule over the next two or three weeks will be spotty at best. I just got home from a weekend trip to Austin--I was there to celebrate a friend's bachelorette party, and while the weekend was lots of fun, I got zero outfit photos. I'm also leaving for a whirlwind of business trips tomorrow, heading out to Pittsburgh, then onto LA, and then finally back to San Francisco. All of that means I probably won't be able to post again this week, and might be a little short on posts next week. However, I'll do my best to grab photos where I can!

Have a great week.