Pieces of Anna

I am currently taking a web design class (thank you, unemployment , for the gift of free time), and it has inspired me to make some changes around the blog. After learning a little bit about the concept of user experience, and then observing how I interact with some of my favorite blogs, I came to the realization that the design of my blog made it difficult to navigate it. Readers were finding the blog through links or searches, but it appeared that they were not finding other content that was relevant to what they were looking for, even though it does exist somewhere on the blog. So, with the goal of streamlining the blog layout and making it easier to navigate, I thought about the changes that I wanted to make to the design, and I've since started implementing them. One of the first things I did was install Google Analytics to figure out where my readers were coming from and what they were reading once they got to the blog. I highly recommend doing this because the vast amount...

New York City at night. From here . Eighteen years ago today, my family landed in the JFK airport in New York, stepping on the American soil for the first time. It was a long journey, and I don't mean just the fourteen hour flight. The immigration process had started years earlier, with applications and interviews, stolen documents and pointless blackmail. But on November 21st, 1994, our bags were packed and we were ready to leave our lives behind and fly to the land of opportunity. For breakfast, I had cottage cheese and cold cuts. I remember that meal so well because I spent the next fourteen hours throwing it all up. At least a decade passed by before I touched cottage cheese again. The vomiting was particularly bad on takeoffs and landings, and our layover in Helsinki did not help the matters. We arrived in New York amid darkness and downpour. Our plane attempted to land three times. To my stomach, that was three additional landings and takeoffs. Mercifully, the plane ...

She lifts her leg to step into the minivan, and is surprised to find herself falling backwards moments later. Her family hurries to lift her up, and everyone fusses and worries about the bump now growing on the back of her head. No one pays any particular attention to how she ended up falling in the first place - she is an elderly woman, it happens. But she is confused. She is sure that she lifted her leg high enough to get into the car. After all, she has done this many times before. She told her foot to lift, so why didn't it listen? Three years and many symptoms later, she finally gets her answer when she is diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. "Diagnosed" is a bit misleading, since there is no definitive diagnostic test for this destructive and unstoppable disease. ALS is particularly difficult to diagnose in the early stages, when there are virtually no visible symptoms. Not that it would do her any good - there is no cure and no effective t...

Remember how back in April, I put together a post on what my dream home office would look like? It was full of images with West Elm's Parsons Desk (in white, of course) and white chairs with interesting lines. Well, after months of acquiring and rearranging furniture, I present to you my home office: My home office! As you can see, I am finally a proud owner of the white West Elm Parsons desk! And I have Craigslist to thank for it. At $350, buying the desk new did not seem like a viable option to me, especially since we were planning our wedding at that time and had other major expenses to worry about. I found this desk on Craigslist back in May for $150, less than half the price, and bought it immediately. Sure, it's not in a perfect condition - there are some scratches in the veneer. But for this kind of bargain, I am willing to overlook the imperfections. Especially considering that my office looked like this before: That four-year-old IKEA desk had served me w...

Life has been incredibly difficult this month, in ways I am not ready to talk about yet. So when I spotted these beauties while shopping at Trader Joe's today, I knew they were coming home with me. My life needs a touch of color right now. A touch of color. I have no idea what these flowers are called. They are bright red and fuzzy, and their stems remind me of bamboo. Whatever they are called, I am grateful to these flowers for making my day a little bit better.

A month and a half ago, I left my work office for the last time. It was not a voluntary departure - I was being laid off. The truth is, I suspected that my days on that job were numbered when phrases like "cost cutting" and "restructuring" were used in meetings to explain the massive layoffs that preceded in the months leading up to the end of the fiscal year. And if I am being honest with myself, it was time to move on from that job anyway. It's just that I had pictured the transition a little differently in my head. I was somewhat mentally prepared for the diminished monthly income that was to follow. It was the emotional roller-coaster of unemployment that caught me by surprise. So here they are: the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of my unemployment. The Good I am not a morning person. The morning of my first day of unemployment was glorious - I slept in till noon, and there was no alarm clock in sight. Much to the chagrin of my early bird husband, w...

Post cards for our guestbook Shortly after we started planning our wedding, we were bombarded with the message that no matter how much money we decide to spend on the big day, we would inevitably go over budget. Well, last week we ordered our thank you cards, the last of our wedding-related expenditures, and I am happy to report that we actually came in under budget! I admit that coming in under budget was one of my goals, but it was no small feat to get it done. It took a lot of careful planning and decision making over the year of wedding planning. But before any cost-cutting measures could be implemented, we first had to set our wedding budget. Setting the Wedding Budget After we got engaged, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was how do we decide what the wedding budget would be? Should we get some quotes from vendors in our area first, and then use them as a ballpark estimate to create our budget? But that sounded like a disaster waiting to happen – the quote...