Amesbury is one of my favorite towns north of Boston. There’s a quaint downtown, with fun shopping and yummy restaurants. It leans more to the funky end and that’s just what I like. One of my favorite things to do there is go to the free Friday chocolate tastings at m cacao. Their chocolates are pictured above. I’m a total chocoholic and the fact that they let you eat as much as you want in the tastings is a chocoholic’s dream. Their chocolate is complex, with flavors like basil lime and earl grey with lemon. They also got new packaging that allows you to upload a video of your choosing which you can play when you open the box. As I may have mentioned before, I love astrology and this combo is totally Uranus in Taurus if you ask me.

Two days before Thanksgiving my husband and I pressed pause on normal life and snuck away to the Green Briar Inn in Rowley. This isn’t far from our house, and that was kind of the point. I have been incredibly stressed, for what reason I’m not exactly sure. I blame it on a variety of astrological phenomena, Mars Retrograde in Gemini for an extended time, and a recent eclipse season that felt exceptionally challenging. Maybe it was those things, maybe it’s just midlife. Either way, I haven’t slept well in weeks and my nerves were fried. I didn’t want to travel far, all I really wanted to do was lay in bed and watch TV for 10 hours. And so, we took ourselves only a short distance from home and did just that.