Links I'm Loving - curiouser & curiouser

Another Friday? You know what that means. Another Links I’m Loving post! (You’ve probably been anxiously awaiting this very moment allllll week, huh?)

Before we get to the links, though, I wanted to give a shout-out to my husband, Kevin, who is working his last day at Hanes today and, starting Monday, will be working at Fulton & Roark full time. (Whoa. Go, Kevin! I’m SO, so proud of you for growing an idea into a product into a career.)

Okay, on to those links. I’ve got some good ones for you this week.

Let’s get to it:

I discovered a new app called Waterlogged that I’m rather obsessed with. It helps you track your water consumption over the course of each day (fun name, right?). You set your daily water goal (mine is 80 ounces) and you can set up bottle sizes you typically use (my main one is my 25-ounce S’well bottle). Then, as you drink water, you just log it in the app. Until you reach your daily goal, your remaining ounces for the day show up in a red circle on the app (the way your email alerts do). For OCD people like me who can’t STAND those red circles, this acts as a wonderful incentive to drink up! I tend to drink lots of water anyway, but this app has helped boost it even more.

This might be old news for some of you, but I’ve recently fallen in love with Thrive Market. I’d been getting their emails for a while and had a vague understanding of what they offered, but until this past week hadn’t taken the time to explore it. As it turns out, this is a marketplace full of some of my very favorite (and staple) items (mostly food items, but they have other categories like beauty and pet). Not only is their selection great, their prices are genuinely awesome. I’m so excited to have found this new gem!

Essentially everything on the New Arrivals page of Albion Fit. Just…yes.

This time last year, I was raving about the Netflix Original Series Bloodline, and I knew the second season was coming out soon but didn’t realize HOW soon. May 27, as it turns out. WAHOO!

Y’all. These fake obituaries that a 20-something girl’s mother wrote for her while she was living in San Fran (the obits are published in The New Yorker) are so, so good. Please read them all.

I stumbled upon this 2012 TEDx talk by Erika Napoletano while doing some research for work this past week, and was really hooked by what she had to say. Her 16-minute talk — entitled “Rethinking Unpopular — centers around shifting away from being polite and leaning hard into being honest. Being honest with ourselves, and with others. Because, she argues, we’re all human. And all this over-apologizing that we have going on just masks the awesomeness of being, well, human. Not everyone we meet belongs inside our “blanket forts,” she points out — and that’s okay. Give it a watch:

I neglected to include “Surprisingly Awesome” in my list of favorite podcasts a couple of months ago, but it should definitely be added to the list. Each episode, the hosts (Adam McKay and Adam Davidson) and their team dig into a topic that is, on its surface, pretty mundane. They always manage to prove that topic’s depth and nuance, though. Some of my favorite episodes, for example, were on pigeons, frequent flyer miles, and broccoli. Their latest episode, on mattresses, was another winner for me, mainly because Kevin and I always marvel at the absurd abundance of mattress stores in Winston-Salem (and so mattresses are often a topic of conversation for us, especially when running errands on Saturday afternoons). Two main takeaways from this episode: 1. Sleepy’s is owned by Mattress Firm, which means that Mattress Firm owns about, oh, 25% of the commercial real estate in Winston-Salem, by my estimation. 2. According to a Consumer Reports expert, the sweet spot price range for a good mattress is $800 – $1,500 (ish). Anything cheaper you probably want to avoid, and anything more expensive probably doesn’t get you any better quality.