Stephany Writes

Categories: Recurring Series

Week in the Life: Monday, November 17, 2025

5:15 a.m.: Alarm goes off. I snooze it, rip off my CPAP mask and throw it on the floor, and then Lila jumps up on the bed. I pet her while half-asleep and she purrs oh-so-loudly.

5:25 a.m.: Second alarm and I’m up. Eloise jumps on the bed after I get up and meows good morning at me. I tell her good morning and pick her up for morning cuddles. Then, I get dressed, brush my teeth, fill up my water bottle, and say goodbye to the cats.

5:40 a.m.: Drive to the gym while listening to a podcast.

6:00 a.m.: HIIT class! My first one in well over a month. It went well – no hip pain or IT band pain! I’m hoping extra movement will help the healing process. I was also surprised that I was able to keep up during class. Maybe not at my previous intensity, but not too far off from it, either.

6:45 a.m.: I leave the gym and drive to Publix.

7:00 a.m.: Grocery shopping! (I love a Monday morning grocery shop right as the store opens. So peaceful!)

7:22 a.m.: Done and driving home. Then, I put away the groceries, feed the cats, and sit down to eat breakfast. I also start writing my blog post that will be published tomorrow (about our last day in London).

8:00 a.m.: I spend far too long trying to figure out why my Apple watch won’t let me check for updates, which is when I discover I need to update my iPhone. The new iOS 26 is wild. Everything looks and feels different on my phone now!

8:30 a.m.: Take a shower and do a quick morning routine (take my meds, deal with CPAP, empty dishwasher, and brush out my hair).

(current meds: turmeric, anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxer, fish oil, vitamin d, iron, prozac, vitamin c, multivitamin)

9:00 a.m.: It’s time for my morning working block. It’s a busy one:

  • morning tasks (sort through emails, divvy out editing assignments, check on my contractor reports to ensure nothing needs to be responded to)
  • pull a Salesforce report about delayed tasks to send to some of our content writers
  • side chat with another manager about a troublesome account
  • reply to emails
  • edit content from one of our contractors
  • do some website posting/QA
  • resource plan for December content assignments

(I like to bounce around different tasks. It works for my brain!)

11:42 a.m.: I’m starving, so it’s time for lunch. I have a Pub sub and then two gingerbread cookies I made yesterday during family time. I watch an episode of Friends and finish a coloring page.

12:17 p.m.: Chore time! I vacuum my room and then put up a few more pictures – gallery wall is almost complete! I also clean up the girls’ breakfast dishes and give them fresh food and water. Then, I swipe a straightener through my hair, draw on some eyebrows, and put on mascara since I have meetings all afternoon.

12:40 p.m.: I call my mom to tell her how weird the new iPhone update is because that’s an important thing to interrupt her workday for.

12:50 p.m.: Afternoon working block! Let’s review:

  • internal meeting to talk through some next steps for a troublesome client
  • 4 back-to-back 1:1 meetings with my writers – some of them last the full 30 minutes and others are quick 10-minute check-in sessions
  • editing contractor content
  • posting/QA
  • email cleanout

I also do a Target curbside order in between my 1:1 meetings.

4:30 p.m.: I’m done with work for the day! I get dressed for physical therapy and tell the kitties good-bye. While driving to therapy, I send Mikaela a Marco Polo video.

5:00 p.m.: Physical therapy! I do a warm-up on the bike and then some stretching and strengthening exercises. My PT also uses a massage stick on my hips, glutes, and IT band, which feels oh-so-good. We talk a lot about books during the second half of our appointment, which is a topic I can chatter on about for a long, long time.

5:53 p.m.: Done with PT! I drive to Target to get my pickup order.

6:17 p.m.: Home sweet home. I give the girls some treats and then start making dinner (homemade nacho night!). I eat dinner and watch three episodes of Friends. I also have a bowl of ice cream at some point.

Proof that Lila doesn’t always look supremely photogenic, ha

8:15 p.m.: I call my mom for an evening chat. Lila sits behind me on the couch and swishes her tail in my face the whole time, ha.

8:50 p.m.: Blogging time! I’ve only written 25% of my last London recap, oops. I finish writing the recap and then work on inserting photos. I take breaks here and there to complete a modified nighttime routine (taking my nightly meds, filling my CPAP humidifier, tidying the kitchen and starting the dishwasher, brushing my teeth, etc). 

10:50 p.m.: Blog post is scheduled to publish tomorrow morning, and I am so very tired. But I can’t go to sleep just yet – I need to read for just a few minutes to keep my Bookly reading streak alive. I haven’t read at all today – not even my audiobook! I only make it one chapter (8 minutes) before I call it a night. The book goes on the nightstand, the alarm is set, the CPAP mask is on, and I turn on an ASMR video to lull me to sleep.

END NOTES //

  • Sleep score: 83 (high) <– this seems inaccurate, since I slept less than 6 hours!
  • Apnea score: 2.6 per hour
  • Sleep duration: 5 hrs, 42 min
  • Podcast episodes: 5 (two episodes of Rob Has a Podcast, Book Riot, Behind the Bastards, Good Hang)
  • TV episodes: 4 (one episode of Friends during lunch, three episodes while eating dinner)
  • Facetimes with mom: 3
  • Reading time: 8 minutes (The English Experience)

monday in the life: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015. and 2014

Do you take more or fewer meds/supplements than me?

Categories: Recurring Series

Currently…

Loving… my new Wordle for the Book Girlies chat, where we share our Wordle and Connections results, and basically have tons of side convos about all different things. It’s really nice!

Loathing… everything happening in politics. Aside from the good things like all the Dems who got elected! But everything else.

Reading… It’s a Love Story by Annabel Monaghan. It’s… fine. I’m not very invested in the romance between the two main characters, which is a problem when I’m supposed to be rooting for them to be together.

Watching… Friends, season 3. There is no sitcom that makes me laugh out loud as much as this one.

Listening to… Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge. This has been a fascinating audiobook! I just finished that chapter on Gen X, which is my mom’s generation, and learned a lot about the era she grew up.

Anticipating… putting up my Christmas tree soon. I was going to put it up yesterday, but I decided to take a nap instead. Heh.

Thinking about… how to structure this year’s “Week in the Life” posts. I don’t think I want to do “One Photo Per Hour,” which is how I structure my Day in the Life posts now. I want something that’s a little more casual and doesn’t require 12+ photos.

Buying… Advent calendars! I have two Advent calendars for myself: a murder mystery Advent calendar where I’ll have to solve 24 different puzzles to figure out the “whodunit” and a chocolate Advent calendar. And then I bought the girls a treat Advent calendar (they each got their own!). I’m ready for December 1st!

Grateful for… NaBloPoMo. What a wonderful blogging challenge! I’m so glad I decided to do it again this year, and love all the new people who have stopped by my blog. I’ve added so many new blogs to Feedly!

Celebrating… my dear friend Mikaela, who is going to start looking for agents for her book! I’m so proud of her! I’m also proud of this essay, which had me crying in my chiropractor’s parking lot as I read it before an appointment.

What is something you’re anticipating right now?

Categories: Recurring Series

Five for Friday | The New Apartment Edition

Here are five things I’m thinking about when it comes to my new apartment:

1) Working from my office

It has been such a delight to have my own office! I love that I can completely compartmentalize my working life now, and when I’m done working for the day, I can shut everything down, turn off the light, and fully leave the room for the night. (On Monday, I was hoping for a dramatic moment where I could shut down my laptop, turn off the light, and close the door firmly behind me, but Eloise was sleeping on my office chair and took that joy away from me. SIGH.)

I still need to figure out the cat lounging situation. I have a cart that Eloise will sleep on top of (I have a blanket for her) and I put one of their covered beds in the room, but Lila seems a little out of sorts when she walks into the office. I think I might put her hammock on the other side of my desk and see if she starts using it.

2) Figuring out the thermostat

In my old apartment, my AC needed to be between 68-70 degrees for it to feel comfortable. Usually, I would increase the temp to 74 degrees during the day to try to save on electricity, and that was the absolute max I could handle. Anything else and I would feel like I was suffocating. In this apartment, I’m still trying to figure out the ideal temp. My first night here, I set the thermostat to 70 degrees and woke up freezing. I could even feel how cold the cats were! The next night, I tried 72 degrees—still cold! Last night, I slept comfortably at 74 degrees, and that makes no sense to me. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s been a smidge colder at night (in the 60s, which I know will make my northern friends laugh), so I don’t really need the AC as cold as the summer. Or maybe this place is just much more insulated than my previous apartment! I guess time will tell. It would be lovely if I could keep the AC at 73 or higher, though! Imagine the electricity savings!

3) A delightful bubble bath

My new bathtub is one of my favorite things about this apartment! Unfortunately, I couldn’t take a bath until last night because the drain stopper was broken, so I had to have maintenance fix it. I was in heaven the minute I sank down into the tub. The water was hot and there was just so much space to spread out! Plus, there’s a lovely incline for me to lean on, and I could have stayed in there forever. (The shower is nice, too! It is so spacious and I’m digging the rainfall showerhead.)

4) Too many kitchen cabinets?!

What a problem to have! There are a lot of kitchen cabinets and I am still trying to figure out the most ideal way to organize all of my kitchen items. There’s also a lot of counter space, which means I can have things like my air fryer out. (I’m really excited about this because the reason I didn’t use my air fryer as much as I could have it because I hated lugging it out of a cabinet every time I needed it.)

The other problem with my kitchen cabinets is that they’re pretty high. The bottom of the cabinet meets my eye line, which means I’ll need a step stool to reach anything in the third or fourth shelf. I also need a step stool to reach anything in the cabinets over my microwave. (I’m 5’2, so it’s not unusual for me to struggle with height-related tasks!)

I know I just need to live in the space for a bit to figure out the ideal way to organize all of my kitchen items, and I’ve already swapped around what’s in the different cabinets a few times. (For example, my mug collection went into a skinny cabinet, but didn’t fit well, so I moved them to a large cabinet, but then that felt like too much space, so I moved them to a different, more central cabinet. We’ll see if that’s a good location for them!)

5) Lila

Lila has had quite the adjustment period to her new home. I knew she would struggle more than Eloise. She’s my skittish lady who never, ever comes out from under the couch when guests are over. (Although sometimes she will appear if my mom is over.) For the first few nights, she was digging in the litter box and making these really mournful meows as she crept around the apartment. She’s never done anything like that before, and usually, her meow is a soft squeak that you can barely hear. It was very unlike her!

But she’s adjusting – she’s not hiding under the couch as much as she was in the first few days, Eloise has stopped hissing at her (she did this when we were at the Airbnb together earlier this year; I think it’s something about establishing dominance? IDK!), and I’ve found her curled up on her favorite beds and hammocks. She’s also been meowing at me for treats again, which is a go-to indication that she’s getting comfortable in her new home.

Bubble baths: yay or nay?

Categories: Recurring Series

A Wednesday Morning Coffee Date

Hi, friends! It’s been a while, huh? Why don’t we catch up about life over coffee? I’ll be drinking a pumpkin cold brew. Tis the season and all that!

If we were having coffee today… I would start our chat by gushing about London! While it probably won’t go down as one of our favorite trips since my poor mom got food poisoning on our third day and never felt 100% after that, we both agreed we’d love to come back to London someday. My favorite things: the London Eye, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and seeing Wicked at the West End! I also made it to five different bookstores and came home with 10 books. Oops? I am planning on writing lots of blog posts about our trip in November, so stay tuned!

If we were having coffee today… I would gush about my new apartment! The day after I got home from London, I received the keys to my new place. Walking through the empty apartment, thinking about all of the possibilities as I think about how I want to set everything up… it’s so exciting! I’ve been filling up my car with some lighter objects (like clothes, some of my smaller bins, etc) to bring over on my own and working on culling my book collection, so lots of things are happening behind the scenes. Now the question I’m pondering: Do I stick with my official move date (with the movers) of October 30th or do I move it up by a few days? Decisions, decisions!

If we were having coffee today… I’d tell you that I caught some sort of vacation “crud.” Thankfully, it was only a few days of feeling crummy, starting Wednesday evening. By Sunday, I was feeling almost 100%. Mostly, I dealt with a scratchy throat, some congestion/sneezing, and a dry cough. My mom was also feeling pretty crummy on Thursday and was still having the nausea she hadn’t been able to shake since London, so she ended up going to urgent care… only to find out she had Covid! We’re not sure when she got it, as we think it’s unrelated to her illness in London—maybe her immune system was just compromised from the other illness, so being on a 9-hour flight didn’t help? Anyway, I was operating under the impression that I also had Covid until I went and got an at-home test, which was negative. So I must have just had your garden-variety vacation crud while Mom got stuck with the much more severe viral infection. Thanks for taking one for the team, Mom!

If we were having coffee today… I’d admit that my back pain is still a big problem. The muscle relaxers were not the miracle cure I was hoping for so I was in a lot of pain while in London. Thankfully, it wasn’t so much of an issue while we were out and about. It was when we were trying to relax in the hotel room that things devolved greatly. Laying down or sitting worsens the pain, and forget it I wanted to get up from the bed or even turn over for a different sleeping position. Immense pain. My next step is to see a chiropractor and hope they can fix what ails me. The fun never ends!

If we were having coffee today… I’d excitedly announce that I paid off one of my student loans! I officially have less than $1,500 left to pay on my student loans, which is really exciting. While my student loan payments aren’t astronomical (thanks to a $100 monthly student loan reimbursement through my company, it’s only about $100 a month), it will be nice to finally have those damn things paid off. The goal is not to enter my forties with student loan debt!

If we were having coffee today… I’d tell you that I finished beta-reading my friend’s memoir! It was such a great experience to read her memoir from a critical lens so I could offer helpful feedback about pacing, word choice, emotional depth, etc. She’s sent her memoir out to several people to read and everyone is gushing about it because it is so well-written and packs a punch. I can’t wait for the whole world to read it! And if you’d like to get a sampling of what you can expect from my dear friend’s book, please take a moment to read one of her latest essays. It made me tear up while I was helping her edit it, and tear up again when I reread it last night.

If we were having coffee today, what would you want to talk about?

Categories: Recurring Series

TGIF (v. 79)

The high of my week was going to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book event! Her book is getting a lot of buzz (and a lot of criticism). It has been very interesting to take in all of this criticism after going to her book event and hearing her talk about the book and what led her to write it. There was a whole discussion on a Patreon episode of Sarah’s Book Shelves Live that I vehemently disagreed with, but I also haven’t read the book so maybe my opinion will change after I do. But anyway, the book event itself was a wonderful time (it’s the best being surrounded by other bookish people!) and even better, my friend Lynn picked me up and handled the downtown parking situation, which always gives me anxiety. Ha!

The low of my week was back pain. I already talked about this back pain last Friday and on my Wednesday post, so I won’t continue carrying on about it. It hasn’t been fun to deal with, and I’m really glad I went to urgent care on Tuesday and got some muscle relaxers. They have helped so much. I’m still having some weird pain right in my spine (it almost feels like I need someone to crack one of the vertebrae back in place, if that’s even a thing), but it’s not super painful. After my trip, I’ll go see my chiropractor about it because what’s my life without doctor’s appointments?!

I’m currently reading two books. I’m still slowly working my way through Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which has been fascinating! I’m also nearly finished with Any Trope But You by Victoria Lavine, which will likely be a 3-star romance (unless things go really off the rails at the end).

A Reel I loved was this “will my cats sit on anything?” Reel from one of my favorite cat account. I love that his cats are named Porky Belly and Jim!

A show I watched this week was the premiere of season 49 of Survivor! I really enjoyed the premiere and all of the different personalities. I already have a few favorites picked out, so we’ll see if they continue to be my favorites as the season progresses.

The best money I spent this week was on dinner for my nephew’s birthday yesterday. It was quite an inexpensive dinner, too, because my mom and I opted to split a meal, which was such a great decision.

My plans this weekend include a lot of fun things! Tonight, Bri and I are recording a few podcast episodes. Tomorrow, I have my writing date with Mikaela, and afterward, I’m getting my hair cut and colored! And then Sunday is football with the fam, and we’re going to celebrate my nephew’s birthday again. Yay! Also, after today, I have two full weeks off work, and I don’t even know what I’m going to do with myself. (I mean, aside from a little international travel!)

What was the high of your week?

Programming note: I’ll be taking the next two weeks off my blog, and then I’ll have a pretty light blogging schedule throughout October (maybe one post per week, at most). I’ll be back in full force in November, though, for NaBloPoMo!