Web Time Wasters

I’m in Mexico for the next 2.5 weeks (you can follow along on Instagram!) so I brought in some of my favorite internet buddies to share their favorite links with you!

Hello new friends! I’m standing in for Sarah while she is sipping fruity drinks and feeling the sun on her skin in Mexico. I live in Scotland, where we have not seen the sun for about twelve days now, and all the parts of my skin are covered up. Even my face, because of a little thing called gale-force winds. They blow in off of the North Sea and make you want to stay inside with your electric blanket.

Anyways, my name is Alison and I am excited about sharing a few of my favorite corners of the internet with you. It’s a wild and wonderful place.

Links for you!

I have three sons who have memorized this SNL video and manage to interject quotes from it into every single conversation we have right now. (Hello life with teenage boys.)

This video was filmed in an area of Scotland where we have been on family vacation a couple of times and it captures so much of what we love about the Highlands.

Podcasts makes me feel smarter somehow. I am a long-time faithful listener of both Radiolab and Livewire, but more recently I’m loving Reply All and 99% Invisible.

Since our kids are starting to hit university age, we talk all the time about how the current model for college (accumulating massive student loan debt) in the US is not sustainable. I am so curious about this developing idea as a possible alternative: A college degree for $1000!?

Every year I go on a long walking holiday. It’s my favorite way to see a new place. Two years ago I walked all the way across England. Last year I walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. This year I have my heart set on walking in Italy.

Also this hostel to hostel walk through the Lake District (loved by William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter) covers 50 miles of the most beautiful country in England in four days.

I fell in love with Amsterdam last year on a week-long visit, so I keep an eye on this British expat turned Amsterdam dweller for a steady supply of photos of canals and bicycles. Bonus: She started keeping a lovely motherhood diary since giving birth last year.

If you love the city of Edinburgh, Scotland like I do, you need this print in your life.  

Did you know that there’s a website where you can find a phone number for almost any company that takes you directly to a person (instead of an answering service)? It’s called GetHuman.com. You’re welcome!!

I love it when someone transparently shares their own entrepreneurship journey, so the rest of us can learn from them. My friend Mike has been doing this for a while now (mostly about storytelling), and his latest post on self-publishing is a library of resources for the many of us who have considered writing and releasing our own books.

Speaking of books, I stayed up waaaay too late to get to the end Snowdrops. But I think a novel called No Great Mischief will be the story that stays with me the longest this year.

And my best (and most mind blowing) nonfiction recent reads were definitely Brene Brown’s Rising Strong and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

I’m loving this song in the kitchen right now. And this one makes me want to go on a road trip. I listen to waaaaay more country music now that I live abroad because it reminds me of home. I have one epic country music playlist. We have a long tradition in our family of making end-of-year playlists for each other, and this year my husband took it to a whole new level and made an entire website for his 2015 mixtape.

And speaking of my slightly obsessive, but ever-so-darling hubs, he is on the home stretch of writing his PhD thesis and he swears by this Mung Bean Power Bowl for maximum productivity. I make a giant batch every couple of weeks and he freezes it in little one serving pots.

I just came off of a pretty serious food cleanse, so I’ll be digging out some of my favorite carb recipes in the weeks ahead to make up for it, which includes pretty much anything in the biscuit family. These blueberry scones come to mind.

That’s it for me, friends! Happy Sunday! And feel free to come and say hello over in my corner of the internet where you can always find photos of Scotland or stories about travel and our expat life.