Do you ever think about the stories in your life?  Imagine all the tales you are downloading from your camera or that kids are creating in their crayon drawings and laughter.  Slowing down and embracing the simplicity in life has made me oh-so in love with the moments.

I never really noticed them enough when I was too busy racing to become this or that and obtain this possession or that image.

Last night, I wrote a new poem to insert with Gadanke journals as they are slipped into envelopes.  The words just flowed after feeling so inspired by the day.  I got a United States PO Box for my shipper.  (Oh yippee!)  And the whole way home from the farmer’s market, I smelled the sweet aroma of basil picked this morning.  It’s the little moments, and the stories they hold mean so much.

What do you journal, blog, or tell your stories for?  I promise: those stories are so worth celebrating!

My first visit to Yellowstone National Park was in kindergarden.  My love for this park is one the reasons Martin says, “You can take Katie out of the country and put her in Berlin, but her heart is always in the country.”  Yellowstone is – without a doubt – my all-time favorite National Park.

Here’s a seriously jaw-dropping youtube video my dad documented of a bugling elk in the park:

Absolutely amazing, huh?  Talk about a great way to shock the heck out of a few German classmates in Berlin!

Those of you that know a little Rocky Mountain geography might know that just north of Grand Teton National Park (which we got to share an aerial view with you on this post) is Yellowstone National Park!  So you guessed it… I’ve got some aerial shots of Yellowstone to share with you, too.

When we flew over Yellowstone, I was pretty shocked at how… booooring it was to fly over the park.

I really liked seeing – from the air – all of the mountains and waterfalls we’d climbed over the years.  Otherwise?  Let me just tell you that you should visit Yellowstone from the ground.  These pictures are by NO MEANS a representation of what you can experience there.

I couldn’t spot bears, wolves, or even the enormous buffalo, and nobody ever comes back from Yellowstone and says, “Dang it!  I missed out on the buffalo!”  Those big guys are everywhere and causing the craziest traffic jams; they’re just too small from the sky to spot.

Know what you can see from above Yellowstone?

The Tetons on the horizon!

Have any of you been to Yellowstone?  What was your favorite part?  Or what would you love to see?  Maybe I’ll just have to meet you up there!

Want to see all the National Parks we’ve flown over?  Here’s Canyon Lands, Arches National Park, and our latest visit: Tetons National Park.

I don’t buy brown sugar in the United States anymore.  It began because I couldn’t find brown sugar in Germany.

Now I suspect one of the biggest uses for brown sugar in the United States is making homemade chocolate chip cookies.  A many of you know, I haven’t had the best of luck giving away chocolate chip cookies to Germans.  But their dislike certainly couldn’t keep me from baking chocolate chip cookies on particularly homesick late nights like this one in May…

If you quickly look up “brown sugar” on wikipedia, you’ll have your substitute for America’s little love bug in the very first sentence:

Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content, or it is produced by the addition of molasses to refined white sugar.

Brown sugar = white sugar + molasses.  Well isn’t that easy?  So now I pour white sugar and molasses into my recipes instead of buying brown sugar.  It won’t make me richer any time soon, but it is a little cheaper.  I also don’t have to worry about discovering a brown sugar brick when I go to bake.  (Is there anything worse?!)

Truthfully?  The true reason I keep “making” brown sugar even in the US is that I have one less ingredient to worry about.  I can also keep my recipes consistent wherever I am.

To make your own brown sugar, combine:

1-2 tablespoons of molasses with 1 cup sugar

What’s the difference between “light brown sugar” and “dark brown sugar” at the grocery store?  1 tablespoon or 2 tablespoons of molasses.

So there you have it!  Another handmade trick from our house.  What’s your favorite homemade dessert?  With brown sugar or without?

And while we’re at it, I might as well confess… German chocolate cake is not German at all.

Have you ever heard of compulsive cluttering or obsessive hoarding?  It’s actually a disease, and I remember being in the homes of people who just brought so much stuff into their homes until the spaces completely filled up.  You couldn’t even open the door of one home all the way.

Gradually, no one was going into those homes but the people who lived there.  Not even their own grandchildren were visiting!  There just wasn’t room for visitors.  All of this stuff – enormous quantities of things and the accumulation of more things took over these peoples’ lives.  It was new stuff; it was old stuff.  It was things that mattered, and it was things that didn’t.  And they were so embarrassed, but they just couldn’t stop.  It’s such a heartache to experience!

Confession:  I watched a little TV on Thursday.  I had to go to someone else’s house to do it.  But I just had to see what Opera was talking about on the issue of compulsive cluttering when I got wind of the episode that originally aired in 2007.  (As a side note – wowzers!  I couldn’t believe how LOUD commercials were.  We had to turn up and down the volume like a cat owner letting the cat in and out of the house.)

This woman on Oprah couldn’t stop shopping or bringing more and more into her house in an episode called Inside the Lives of Hoarders.  If you get a chance, click on a few of the links on that episode.  I haven’t seen them all.  But I can tell you this – I suspect there were thousands of women attacking junk drawers and garages and making huge runs to drop stuff off at thrift shops after this show!  It’s intense.

It all goes back to the sorts of things you and I talk about with The Decluttering Project: owning quality things instead of a greater quantity, parting with the excess, and loving what we have.

I took Oprah’s hoarding quiz to find out where I stand on the Hoarding Severity Scale.  The quiz is right here so you can take it with me.

My scores were 3, 2, 3.  In other words, I’ve got the discard category down and easily ditch stuff I don’t really need (according to Oprah’s quiz master… maybe not Martin!).  But her quiz master feels I’m going to have to work on the acquiring department.  (Yet there were no questions that said, “When was the last time you bought clothes?” Why is that?!)

So go take the quiz and let us know how you score.  Or watch some clips from the hoarding days at Oprah and tell us what you’re tempted to head off and declutter a little!  I love a little simplicity – don’t you?

Note to those of you outside of the US: Can you view these clips?  We’ve never been able to see US tv station clips outside of the US, so if that is the case for you, too, I apologize.  Nothing like reading, “Oh you HAVE TO SEE THIS,” only to not be able to.  Just take the quiz then and forgive me, will ya?

We’ve been getting a lot of junk mail lately.  It’s all been coming from a satellite tv company and a toilet paper company.  (Don’t ask – we have no idea how this combo came to be!)  It’s been amazing to read the fliers from the satellite tv company  - how we have to get their service!  how there’s so much we’re missing out on!  how we deserve to have it!  how we could be so much happier!

(a very simple German apartment with a TV)

Well we actually discovered that we could be much happier another way:

We called the satellite tv company and slowly, slowly worked our way to a representative who hesitantly removed us from their mailing list.

I have no idea if I am missing out by not having several dozen or several hundred tv channels.  I can’t even imagine the things I could be up to date on.  But that’s okay.  If I don’t expose myself to media, I don’t find myself craving more.  And tv – with all the elaborate and well-thought out ads – can easily become the perfect place to foster new desires.

How do you feel about TV and satellite?  Do you have them?  If you do – how do you avoid the temptations of advertisements and luxuries on different shows?

Here’s a post on how we get rid of junk mail in the US and Germany in case you’re ready to clear your mailbox of clutter!

Today we’ve got another special treat.  Christine from the blog, Simple Savvy, is here to share some peeks into her bedroom with all of us.  (You might remember Christine from last summer when she shared her beautiful and simple wedding with us.)  Not only is she letting us into her home today, she’s also sharing some really amazing insight into the internal conflicts with what we think society says we need and what we actually need.   Or as Christine found out – what we can actually fit into our homes!

Here’s Christine to share her home…

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This story starts with a bed. It’s a big bed, bought to assuage my big ego not long after I got my first grown-up job and thought debt was something everyone lived with. I figured my first grown-up apartment deserved a big bed — I deserved a big bed.

Not too much later, the U.S. economy tanked, my husband and I changed jobs, and we moved to a smaller apartment over an hour away. That’s when we realized the big bed was a huge mistake.

Why? Because we had to lay out our new apartment according to our bed’s needs. The biggest, most well-lit room obviously held our impressive bed. It was front and center, smack dab in the middle of everything (including the walkway through the room). We had a lot of wasted space making sure that bed was well taken care of.

Thank goodness something clicked and we realized that our bed could survive in a small, dark room just as easily as it could in a big, beautiful room. We moved things around so that the big, beautiful bedroom room became our living room and the office became our bedroom; our living space doubled as our bedroom space was cut in half.

Despite the lack of space, the bedroom is cozy and feels like a cottage — like I’m on vacation when I’m in there. I now use it as an actual space to hang out and relax, instead of just a room that I sleep in. We keep it cleaner than we might have otherwise (well, in theory), simply because we like that cottagey feeling. We play cards in there at night, snuggle the puppy, have tickle fights.

The neatest revelation of all is that since the bedroom is so small, I get sick of it easily. Yes, I really am in love with not being in love with my bedroom. I’m more likely to get outside because the bedroom is tiny and I can’t spend all of my time there. Now I get my space and sunlight from the outdoors instead of from my house. It’s funny how small spaces make you do that.

Since learning to live in a small bedroom, Mr. Savvy and I have figured out that we can live in a small apartment.

We’re looking forward to moving someplace smaller, saving some money on rent, and downsizing our lives. All this from a bed!

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Huge thanks to Christine.  Don’t you just love her honesty about accepting that she is not in love with her space… and that makes her happier?!  Soo inspiring.

Is there something in your home that you thought you had to have?  And has the discovery that you don’t have to have it changed your perspective on home?

Catch more readers’ small and simple space tours, and I hope to hear from you next to share your love for a simpler space.