Pieces of Anna

New Year's is my favorite holiday ever. One of the best things about this holiday (besides exchanging presents) is decorating the New Year's tree. Or, as it is known in our household, the New Year's / Christmas tree. Our New Year's / Christmas tree. Our tree is definitely a girl this year. I even topped her off with a bow just in case it wasn't obvious. The bow on top of our girly tree. Last year, I took advantage of post-Christmas sales and scored some awesome ornaments... that I completely forgot about until I pulled out our tree decorations box from under the bed. It felt like I was sneaking in some early presents! These matching stocking ornaments are supposed to represent D and me. When D stumbled upon this ornament while shopping for Christmas presents, he knew he had to get it for me as an early Christmas present because there is nothing more Russian than a Matryoshka doll . Matryoshka ornament. We are off to celebrate the holidays wit...

This is how I do research: Also, I'm running out of bookmarks. What a strange problem to have in the era of Kindles and iPads.

One of the first things we had to do for our wedding was find a venue. Originally, we considered a venue that is owned by D's family, but it turned out to be a bit too small for our envisioned guest list size. So we thought about where we'd want to get married, and here is what we came up with: We preferred an urban location over the suburbs We were looking for something connected with the arts "Typical" wedding venues like hotel ballrooms or country clubs did not excite us Following these guidelines, we researched potential locations nearby. The first venue we visited was a dance studio. It was extremely convenient to get to from our house. There were beautiful hardwood floors and lots of open space. It was also very modern looking and a bit out of our price range. The modern dance studio. Our verdict: too orange . The next venue was on the opposite spectrum from the dance studio. It was an arts center that was decidedly un-modern in its architecture. It ...

Between the APW Internship and another secret thing I am applying for, I submitted five writing samples in the past three days. I was going to write a blog post yesterday (something about our venue search), but at that point I had consumed so much coffee that my brain was refusing to cooperate. I got the caffeine-induced jitters and proceeded to run around the house, flailing my arms around like a mad woman. The following conversation happened: D: "What are you doing? Can you please act like an adult?" A: "OK."   <arm flailing continues> A: "You didn't say which species. I am an adult orangutan." Good thing D was already sitting down because he almost fell over laughing. Clearly, blog posting wasn't going to happen last night.