Café Con Monica

High Five for Friday!

I haven’t linked up for this one in a while!

Cooking!

One of my Goals for 2019 was definitely to cook more! In narrowing down what I really wanted to share on my blog my love of food is high up there plus I got some great Cookbooks for Christmas! I made some Jerk Chicken, Cornbread and Green Beans from Snoop Dogg’s Cook Book “From Crook to Cook” and everything was DELICIOUS!

Work Retreat

We had a work retreat the first few days of this week. I say it is a highlight because getting a nice big hotel room to myself, free food and drinks, a boat cruise and an escape room are all fun things! It was exhausting (2 very long days with coworkers is a lot mentally) but I am glad that we did it and hopeful for the discoveries made during that time!

My goodie bag!
On the chilly boat cruise!

Praise from work

Kind of ties into the second one but I have only been at this new job and in Austin for 5 months now and I appreciated being told how well everyone thought I was doing my job and that they felt like they could rely on me!

Blog Related

Back in December I decided to move my blog over to my own domain and really give it some work. It has been A LOT more work than I thought. I’ve been learning new things and trying to pick back up where I left off a few years ago when I took that long break. I created a new Instagram (follow me!) and it is steadily growing along with the views and interactions on my blog!

Positivity

Another goal for January and 2019 in general was to really work on that negative self take and negativity in my life. January is an especially hard time to do it with everyone posting everywhere about their diet and their exercise and constantly negatively talking about themselves when they don’t eat right or workout. It is so easy to fall into that but I have held strong and I will continue to remind myself that my weight and my level of fitness is not relevant to the person that I am!

What is your five this Friday?

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Three on Thursday

Another Thursday post of Favorites thanks to Steph @ Not Entirely Perfect

Bloglovin – Since I started to try and make changes and grow my blog I have realized how hard it is to keep up with blogs that aren’t in one place. I love bloglovin because I can just go to one site and see all the new posts from the people I follow. Other blogs I have to subscribe to their mailing list or remember to check their blogs for new posts which means I often don’t see posts until weeks later. I know that all the “make money” blog posts tell you that you need subscribers but I like having the option to not crowd my inbox.

Adobe Spark – I get free adobe everything through work so I am biased obviously…even though I still have no idea how to use most of it. But I am learning and Adobe spark has been super helpful for blog graphics and getting my SUYB posts together!

Helene in Between – I have been following her for what feels like forever and recently started to really pay attention to her posts about growing your blog and following. The reason I would say she is my favorite is because it feels like she doesn’t preach about being fake for your blog to grow. All the other stuff I’ve discovered seems geared towards people trying to make money with literally no interest in blogging other than that. I blog because I really enjoy sharing my life with the community (and yes of course I would love to make money off of it) but I don’t want to have to fake it to do that. Anyway, check her out. She has some great stuff!!

Somehow this turned into all the bloggy things I love but that is probably because it is something I’ve been working on a bit more. What are some of the blog related things you love?

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Travel Days: Caribbean Cruise – Roatan, Honduras

Finally sharing Day 3 of the Cruise! You can find Days 1-2 here and more Travel posts here!

The third day of the Cruise started by arriving in Roatan, Honduras. This was the stop I was most excited about since I have been to all the other places (minus the stop in Belize that is a man made island and not really Belize). As part of our planning we had chosen to only do excursions in Roatan and Cozumel.

We had breakfast on the boat and look at what a view we had! We had a few hours until our excursion started so we took our time.

They had this little market set up with tourist shops and stalls. We walked around, got some drinks, took plenty of photos and then headed back toward the meeting area.

Excursion: Gumbalimba Park

After a not too far ride (about 45 mins) We arrived at the park where we got to walk a beautiful trail, play with birds (not me, I don’t like birds at all) and make friends with some monkeys and then lay on the beach for a while. It was HOT which I loved but poor AJS turns into a lobster in the sun so SPF 1000 if you do this excursion please! We enjoyed the water being so warm, until AJS found a jellyfish and then I was not touching the water.

I would definitely recommend this excursion to people as something fun to do, especially if you have kids because there are a few different things to do!

Of Course, now I have to share a ridiculous amount of photos!!

We are so happy that we did that excursion and we were exhausted and ready for another night on the boat. We had sushi and drinks that night then back to our rooms to relax!

One of my favorite things about these kind of vacations is the animals in the room when you back!!

I’m clearly easily amused!

Have you been on this cruise or done a similar excursion?

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