I spent most of Thanksgiving alone

Est. reading time: 3 min

Hey Friend!

Here in the United States we celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday. If you’re on this side of the globe with me, I hope you had a wonderful day. If you are not in the U.S. or don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had some time to relax and reflect as we head into the end of year wind down.

I spent most of the day alone. Thanksgiving looks different around here these years — if you don’t know, I got divorced about 6 or 7 years ago and our 16 year old daughter lives with me.

The rest of my family and friends are scattered all over the place, so unless we choose to travel during one of the busiest times of the year (out of Atlanta — the busiest airport), we tend to spend these days low key.

If you have a teen child, maybe you can relate, but she spent most of the day in her room playing games and chatting with friends. I mean, probably the last thing that sounds fun is spending hours cooking with mom to eat a 30 minute meal.

On the upside, it only took me two and a half hours to make the entire meal!

My shortcuts?

I made a Cornish hen and a precooked spiral sliced ham.

All sides were traditional — nothing too crazy but all made from scratch.

The last thing I wanted to do was spend all day cooking for two people, but on the flip side, you can’t skip Thanksgiving dinner.

As I reflected on the past and “what could have been” I remembered that we can’t change the things that happened. We can only learn from them.

I can’t go back to how life used to be.

I can only be thankful for the blessings I have now.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. Have a wonderful weekend!

(it’s also college football rivalry weekend - I hope your team wins).

P.S. The $10 deals are live!

These deals are only good through Monday so head on over and pick something up if you think you’ll need it.

☕️ Simmer on this tip

If you ever need a quick way to remove a background from an image, here are a few of my favorite tools. I have multiple cause I always believe in having a backup when one option doesn’t give you the results you want. If you’ve got a tool like Photoshop or Affinity Photo, then you don’t have to worry about this - stick with one of those. Here are more alternatives.

If you have a MacBook, there is a remove background feature right there in your Preview app when you open your image. Go to Tools → Remove background. It’s pretty good but sometimes it will miss some of the background and there’s no way to make further edits.

If you use Canva, you’ll need the Pro version, but you can export your images without the background. Share → Download PNG → the check the Transparent background box.

Remove.bg I’ve used this one a lot and have never upgraded from the free version. It’s great for when you can get by using lower resolution images (I wouldn’t use the free version if you need a high-res version, upgrade for that).

Adobe offers a free background removal and it’s fantastic - it also allows you to download the high-res image. Yep, still for free. I love this one, and it has a few more image editing features if you want to play around with it.

❤️‍🔥 Hot finds this week

It’s Black Friday weekend and there are hot finds and deals everywherrreee! I’m gonna cut this week short so you can get out of here and go shop for the holidays 😂

Until next time,

💌 Brought to you by