The November Debrief Nobody Asked For
In a fit of rage over AI content duping me (yet again), I decided to leave social media midway through November. It felt like a rash decision, but in reality, I’d been wanting to get off the doomscroll apps for a while — I’d just held off because I genuinely enjoy sharing my life in photos. I’ve been a photographer, paid or not, in some capacity for most of my life, and while I’m under no illusion that anything I create is ending up in National Geographic, I still enjoy sharing my shenanigans.
As someone who has lived in four different states and has been making friends online for the better part of twenty years, having people I love scattered all over the country has made it nearly impossible to keep up with everyone. On top of that, I recently changed my phone number in an effort to reduce the infuriating amount of spam calls I was getting from previously having a business — and therefore a publicly listed phone number. While these changes have been great for my mental health, they’ve also meant that I’ve basically isolated myself in a communications black hole with no real hope of staying connected with people.
When I announced on Instagram that I was getting off the internet, to my surprise a lot of people (or at least far more than the zero I’d expected) replied and said they’d miss seeing my updates and photos. It was genuinely nice to hear, but it reaffirmed all the reasons I didn’t want to leave Instagram in the first place. While I was questioning my decision, I was whining to a friend who suggested (maybe jokingly?) that I send out newsletters. I mentioned that to my therapist, who suggested I start a Substack… and then I had the realization that I already have my own fucking website with a perfectly capable blog function. A website that almost never gets updated as it is because I normally update my Instagram instead. Honestly, in the past year, I’ve hardly even touched any of my real cameras, so maybe this will give me a reason to pick them back up. So… now that I know I won’t be back on social media any time soon, here we are.
I don’t know yet what this will turn into. For now, it’ll probably be a Ru photo dump, books I’ve been reading during time previously spent scrolling, travel and home updates, recent food hyperfixation recipes, silly life anecdotes, and maybe — one day — the skincare routine I’ve forever been too lazy to type up despite being constantly asked. Don’t get your hopes up for anything wildly entertaining or world-shattering, or you’ll be disappointed. Hell, you’ll probably be disappointed anyway, but to the less than five people who will inevitably read this, I’m glad you’re here. (You won’t miss anything by reading nothing and just scrolling photos, btw.)
So… November, shall we?
(What Would Have Been) Stories
On the good-vibes side of things: one of the things I love most about working for Toast is that we have an entire nonprofit (Toast.org) devoted to making positive contributions toward decreasing food insecurity for all. Every November we host our annual Season of Giving, which means we put an extra-big emphasis on our mission and focus on providing grants and hands-on support to nonprofits in need in the cities and states where our employees are based. This year just so happened to line up with a time where people are even more in need of assistance due to the governmental drama and subsequent SNAP issues.
I serve as the chair for the Idaho Employee chapter of Toast.org, so one of my responsibilities is to set up quarterly volunteer events and decide who locally should receive grant funds. We’ve got a pretty small group of employees in Idaho — and an even smaller group who’s available to volunteer their time — but this past month we spent an afternoon at The Idaho Foodbank helping sort and package food for Idahoans in need. It was a great time, as per usual. It is always one of my favorite parts of November.
This month we also made a pretty significant purchase: a half-beef and half-hog from McIntyre Family Farms, who specialize in grass-fed and grass-finished beef and pasture-raised pork. Part of the push came from the fact that we already had purchased a chest freezer — a souvenir from a past work-trade-for-meat situation with a local ranch that never actually resulted in any meat after my work. The whole thing fizzled out in an annoying-but-not-worth-rehashing way, and I chose to walk away being the bigger person, so we’ll leave it at that. But the constant reminder in our garage did make us revisit the idea, and this time we decided to make the purchase through a highly regarded local ranch with a lot of community trust.
A lot of people will spin bulk-meat purchasing as a means of saving money, though I honestly don’t know if that’s true since I haven’t actually sat down and tallied it all out. For us, it was more about knowing where our food came from, supporting our local economy, investing in our community, purchasing quality protein, and giving ourselves a reserve of meat to encourage better eating habits and let us get creative with cooking. Our cow was killed on November 16, we worked on the cut list with the meat processor and finalized that on November 19, and our meat was ready for pick-up on November 26. We have an 11-cubic-foot chest freezer, and it took up 4/5 of the space. Our hog was killed on November 27, we’re putting in the cut list on Monday, and we are supposed to pick it up later in the week. Once we pick up our hog, I’ll post all the details about final costs/amount of meat and cuts received for both animals.
Pages I Turned (Willingly)
As winter sets in and it gets darker and darker, earlier and earlier, I’m still figuring out what to do with my very long, very empty evenings. Chris was gone for the first half of November, and in my recent radical self-betterment spiral (is it still a spiral if it’s, like… for good?), I’ve been focusing on building some healthier habits. Earlier bedtimes, earlier wake-ups, reading before bed, eating better, and trying to stay active when it’s cold out… all the shit that has always been hard for me to stick with.
So, I’ve replaced a lot of the time I used to spend scrolling with more reading and writing. It’s so easy for me to fall out of those habits when summer rolls around and all my free time is spent with my feet in the water or driving somewhere new to camp. But winter is an easy time to slow down and focus on those things again. As of lately, mornings are for journaling and reflecting, and evenings are for getting lost in a good book.
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle - Maybe one of the most captivating books I’ve read in a long time. For lovers of food and the paranormal, with a focus on grief. Would read again (and again and again). I cried lots.
“To taste, for one last time, that vivid spark of Life before they left it all behind. There was no more for the Dead, no second helping. Only a record that they might leave. A recipe. A recipe could tell you who someone had been, what they had loved, the things that sustained them. It was a way for others to carry them along, to bring them back, to keep them close once they had gone. A way to never really die.”
Love the One You’re With by Emily Giffin - It was fine. Easy to read. Good enough to keep going but wouldn’t have been heartbroken to put it down in favor of something else.
“There are people and places and events that lead you to your final relationship, people and places and events you’d prefer to forget or at least gloss over. In the end, you can slap a pretty label on it—like serendipity or fate. Or you can believe that it’s just the random way life unfolds.”
The Guide by Peter Heller - Another damn good one. Thriller-romance combo that takes place at a fly-fishing lodge. Lots of outdoorsy themes and name-dropping expensive-ass outdoors brands. If you don’t fly fish, you’d probably fucking hate this, or at the very best, be terribly confused. Very niche content that I would really like more of.
“He always marveled how, as soon as he stepped into a creek, the rhythms changed, and all the natural laws governing movement and gravity and light seemed to alter. Light moved differently on the water, and so did he.”
Currently Reading
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas - Listen… I’ve been avoiding reading this for years. It has been recommended by every single book girlie I know, and while that would normally make me read something immediately, romantasy sagas with five current big books that require a whole knowledge of worlds/characters are really intimidating to me. BUT… I’M FINALLY DOING IT SO THAT I CAN STOP SAYING “ACTUALLY NO! I HAVEN’T READ THAT!!”
House & Home / Help??
I’ve been working on a new decor project for the house — the kitchen/dining room specifically — and I need to call in a favor... Because I’m a sentimental girl.
If you’re willing to hand write one of your favorite recipes or one that is important to you (maybe it’s something from your childhood that brings back good memories, maybe it’s a Christmas cookie you bake with your grandma every year, or the meal you made your spouse on an important night) and send it to me, I plan to collect them, frame them, and hang them up.
The specific ask:
Handwritten recipe. It could be a drink, dessert, breakfast, casserole, entree, bread… genuinely anything goes.
It doesn’t have to be gourmet or specific. Honestly? If your bad day recipe is taking a whole package of Nestle Toll House break-and-bake cookies out of a package and throwing them on a cookie sheet, that’s hilarious and write it down for me. If your recipe is “a pinch of this” and “a dash of that,” great. Whatever.
The PAPER doesn’t matter. it could be written on a note card, a piece of stationary, a recipe card, or a piece of torn up notebook paper. Food stains? Rad. TATTERED EDGES? EVEN BETTER.
What does matter is that if it takes up more than just the front of thE page/NOTE CARD, then write the back on a separate piece. (Ya know, because obviously you can’t flip something over when it is in a photo frame.)
Write your name on it and if you want, a note about where it comes from/why it’s special to you.
Mail it to me. :) If you need my address, just tell me.
(Shout out to my angel friend Megan for being the first person to send me one!)
Shenanigans Central
Since summer started wrapping up, I’ve been saying (constantly) how ready I am to stop going places and doing things and just spend some time at home. This was, obviously, a lie — I just didn’t realize it at the time. I did spend a significant amount of October at home, which was nice, and the first two weekends of November I continued to shift into winter-hobbit mode while Chris was gone. But then… winter didn’t come. We rolled into Thanksgiving weekend with zero snow on any of the ski mountains and days still creeping up into the high fifties. It was making me itchy, and knowing that winter is still coming, I felt obligated to get back outside and make something of it before it was too late. I have a suspicion that when winter does finally show up this year, it’ll be a doozy of a season and I probably won’t feel like shenanigansing until May.
So… we decided to go do some shit for the end of November. We rolled up to the Wood River Valley for family Thanksgiving, and then we went up to Ketchum to cash in on a raffle prize we won a few months ago — one free night at the Limelight Hotel — where we took advantage of the hot tub, had some good food and drinks around town, and did some shopping.
Thanksgiving Summarized
A little Ketchum staycation
Breakfast at The Kneadery is always one of my favorite parts of being in Ketchum.
Sadly, the only good ramen spot in all of Idaho is about to shut down. RIP to Ramen Cowboy, you will be missed.
November Gripes
The fact that social media and music streaming platforms don’t require AI-generated content to be labeled as such. Further, the fact that you can’t filter it from ever appearing on any of your feeds. It’s definitely better for me to be off of social media — for a lot of reasons — but this shit is going to make people stupid. While I absolute,y believe there’s a time and place for AI, it’s not in art or entertainment. Ever.
On the note of AI, I am irrationally annoyed about the fact that people think anybody who uses an em dash is writing content with AI. It is making me question everything I do in a professional capacity because (god forbid) somebody in tech sends an email that comes across as being written by AI. To be fair, the increase in popularity did make me realize that I’ve been using - instead of — for my entire life, so thanks to AI, I did change that. But, I digress…
I have always been irrationally annoyed by hotels and their lack of providing hand soap in rooms. I don’t want to wash my hands with a ~moisturizing body bar~ I just want hand soap. Why is that too much to ask for? (Shout out to the Limelight Hotel for actually putting hand soap in rooms. I love you.)
Snail Mail Dreams
Remember when we were kids and getting mail was actually exciting and not full of bills and other bullshit? I miss those days a lot, so I have a goal to Make Mail Great Again, so I bought some cute new stationary, and now I need your address (unless I sent you a wedding invite — then I’ve already got yours).
