you’re here. we’re here. we made it.

we’ve been around the sun once more. but mostly, this makes a year of moons.

this is officially something we’re doing now.

our first post shared our favorite day of 2016. in it, i talked about how i hoped alex and i could find more days to adventure, to find more of the kind of joy we experienced on that wonderful day (read about it here).

as a callback, we tried to pick our favorite day of 2017, only to realized that we couldn’t. there are too many incredible days to pick from. we’re both incredibly thankful that we've been able to put all those beautiful, blissful moments and days right here. on the internet. forever. we can say with confidence that this year we figured out how to use our time more wisely - and a huge component of that is this site. when we have more downtime than we need, we now put that time to good use and do creative work for this site, instead of sitting on the couch and watching tv.

our new home is equally a huge contributor to our daily happiness. it's helped us enjoy slow days here, learning how to love more mundane things. our neighborhood, an extension of our home, has changed the way we feel living in the city. we can easily walk anywhere we need for errands, and now, both of us love visiting the grocery store. we've even made a few friends there. we feel a grander sense of community than we ever have. and on the rare occasion when we need an escape, we've taken walks along the river where there is more nature and we can recharge. the accessibility of everything we need makes it so much easier for us to live at a pace more suited to our vision: a slower and more compassionate existence.

this slow life has really allowed us to fully experience and enjoy both small moments and more grandiose. overall, we have cultivated a new degree of gratitude in our lives and i feel that our existence is much more well-rounded and based in happiness than we were last year. we can be as happy with a day cooking and making content for the blog as if we are out adventuring in a different part of the city, or somewhere else all together. when we were in louisville, we both kept expressing how much fun we were having but how we were also excited to go home. this was a new feeling for us.

we all just want to be happy. and this last year, both happiness and our understanding of it grew exponentially. and for that, we are so grateful. i am so curious to see what we will manifest in 2018. we both want to post more on the site - a bigger commitment to consistent content. we both want to continue working on the house. we've been investing a lot in the house this winter, and we are both so happy to have a house we love. i want to cook for more people, and in conjunction with this we want to have more people over to our house to enjoy a meal and connect in a meaningful way. we each have a couple other individual goals, but these are the big ones.

2017 has been the most transformative year so far for alex and i. when i think about the ways the last 365 days have irrevocably shaped us, i see that this was the year where we really started to step into our full potential as people, friends, partners, and artists.

onto the next one.