Kristen Kolp shares her favorite things with us, including the five things she can't live without.

As 2009 comes to end and we prepare to welcome a new year, I must say I am thankful that it’s ending on a good note. I’m not saying that I have everything all together or my life is just completely perfect! That would be far from the truth. I reflect back to the ending of 2007 and remember how absolutely terrible I felt. I was at a point in my life and my business where I thought I had failed on every angle. I was torn up on the inside. I regretted the fact that God had given me...

The weekend before Thanksgiving, my mother spent the day at my house, helping me clean and do laundry. But, the primary purpose of her visit was to help me learn to make sweet potato pie the way she makes it, because that’s the way my husband, John, likes it. I took my first stab at it last year, absent my mom. The way he forced a grin with the first bite told me I needed more formal instruction to get it right. This year, I would. I was determined. That way, he wouldn’t have to say, “Call your Mom and...

Oh, Dan Brown. You’re so very Dan Brown. If you open up The Lost Symbol as one familiar with the way Brown writes a thriller, you will not be disappointed when you finally close it (on the last page, of course). Now, if you’re familiar with Dan Brown, you also open the book expecting to achieve a serious intellectual workout (good) and to run across some kind of badly-concluded, out-of-context interpretation of Scripture (annoying). And, of course, you picked it up in the first place expecting his absolutely masterful suspense to glue you to your chair until sunrise. What? We...

So, I know I’m the book editor, and you’d expect me to blog about a book”¦but I would totally write about this one anyway. Ho-ly. Crap. Marcus Buckingham (New York Times Best-Selling author of Now, Discover Your Strengths) has a new book coming out September 29 called Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. I know a billion books have been written about women finding happiness and being successful, but this is the first book I’ve ever read on the subject that actually seems to get to the heart of the matter. We’re under...