January joys

I’m actually having a randomly really lovely January, and I certainly can’t attribute to the week of twenty-below windchill Minnesota is currently enduring. A few bright sunny spots I’m loving:

• Food: Target’s Nashville Hot salad kits, this elote chowder (which I whipped up over my lunch break today), and LiveItUp greens powder every am - a shockingly not-unpleasant way to start the day when mixed into a pint of water and chugged as fast as possible through a straw. Not food technically, nor is the “Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride” Celestial Seasonings tea I’m drinking by the quart, but whatever gets you through a January day, amirite?

• Movement: Yoga with Adriene’s 30 day “Flow” challenge is making my life. She has such a soothing voice, the flows are all under half an hour (I’ve been stacking two back to back to get a good long practice in), and Bou adorably loves to watch her videos along with me.

• TV: I’m currently binge-ing “Selena + Chef” on HBO, which features many of the chefs I’ve been privileged to meet through the Spoon and Stable Synergy Series (Nancy Silverton, Curtis Stone, Marcus Samuelsson, Jon & Vinny come to mind…). It’s frothy and delightful and makes me want to cook every day. I also can’t get enough of “The Established Home” on Discovery+, watched “Mr. Selfridge” on PBS during peak arctic freeze, and am looking forward to starting Apple TV’s “Lessons in Chemistry.”

• Books: Currently cracking up over/nodding in concurrence with Blythe Roberson’s “How to Date Men When You Hate Men,” HAHAHA. Starting 2024 off on the right note for sure. I just finished listening to “Lessons in Chemistry” and found the narration grating but the story delightful. Will also plug “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer - my sister, her boyfriend and I had a mini book club over the holidays after reading it, and it was so thought-provoking and rich to unpack.

• Home: I’m tracking the candles I burn this year because I’m never happy than when I’m lighting money on (scented, ambiance-enriching) fire. Currently burning a “Cinnamon Donuts and Coffee” scented candle by Swan Creek Candle Co, and it’s exactly the cozy, gourmand warmer needed this time of year. Also will plug the Michel Design Works Cedar and Rose soap I just put out in my kitchen and my double humidifiers in my dry-as-a-bone bedroom.

• Self-Care: I treated myself to an infrared sauna blanket from LifePro after Christmas and it’s such a great way to warm up when I inevitably get really chilled in the winter. I tuck myself into it in bed and it’s so relaxing to sweat and be cozy. I also live for my Aire facial steamer, Burts Bees Coconut Foot Cream, and Jo Malone body cream…working through a little sampler of Wood Sage and Sea Salt and I feel like I might need to get the full-size perfume, I’m enjoying it so much…

Looking forward to next week’s high thirties and a trip to CA in early Feb - til then, cheers to hunkering down and cozying up!

The end of October

I woke up this morning to bitter Minnesota weather, the kind that is an undeniable harbinger of what is to come far too soon for my liking. From under the covers at 6:22 am, Bou cuddled up warm and limp against my side, I blinked in the harsh light of my iPhone screen, first blinded and then baffled by the even-more-harsh reality of “twenty degrees. Feels like fourteen. Wind is making it feel colder. Sunrise: 7:49am.”

Reader, I screamed inside.

Then I braced myself, bundled up in a snug and cheerful red wool coat, shrugged Bou into a puffer vest, and took her outside. What other option do I have? I choose to live in, and love, Minnesota. This is the reality of half the year here. It’s cold.

While my computer updated for a full 90 minutes this morning, I cleaned out my beautiful fall flowerpots. Flaming orange zinnias, bright rainbows of tiny chili peppers, golden mums and vibrant purple celosia like little paintbrushes - all drooping, faded, frostbitten. I derive so much joy from my postage stamp of an urban balcony garden, and to see the flowers I’ve tended carefully for the past few months so wilted under the hard frost wilted me inside a little bit. I had let them go a few days too long, clinging to the fact that my sheltered balcony insulated them from the first few cold nights and enjoying every moment of their color, the composition of the containers so carefully plotted on an afternoon boondoggle to Bachman’s with my mom.

Fall in Minnesota is always my favorite season. I go full Anne of Green Gables, full Joe Fox, full F. Scott Fitzgerald when treated to this most beautiful of months. “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” “Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies.” “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” I fly high, living for sunrise lake walks lighting the trees on fire, for sweaters and apple candles and petite, warty pumpkins. For Bou’s joy at crisp mornings and my own delight at being able to spend time outside without peeling sweat-damp clothes off afterward. I think the heights of happiness I hit in October just make the inevitable crash harder.

And so, this morning. The leaves are down, the wind has changed in timbre, the landscape leached of its flaming color and settled into that ghastly, made-to-depress November monochrome. I’m a little salty and a little anxious and, always this time of year, a little lonely. Watching nature turn inward has me introspecting a bit too, and working really hard to convince myself that this will be the year I have a good attitude about winter. No real point beyond that except to put virtual pen to virtual keyboard and resolve to find little joys in a season where everything feels a bit harsher and harder.

Cheers to a gorgeous October, and for finding November’s own weird kind of beauty. :)

mid-May moments of joy

I’m randomly in a really wonderful mood today and am appreciating a whole bunch of little things bringing me joy:

• Nespresso’s iced coconut coffee out of a beautiful Anthropologie mug

• switching over to summertime candles (currently burning the ol’ stalwart, Capri Blue Volcano)

• new leaves popping on my fiddle leaf fig

• seeing the pool open (still empty, but still!) on my building’s terrace

• a hot streak of really impactful reading - both positive and negative - with Jennifer Saint’s “Ariadne,” Shana Abe’s “The Second Mrs. Astor,” and, currently, my beloved Ann Patchett’s “The Patron Saint of Liars”

• lots of fun with home cocktails - Tattersall’s mixes, Camp Cocktails’ infused vodka kits, and hopefully a home version of the delicious Coasterra coconut margarita Laura and I enjoyed the day before her wedding in April

• Bou feeling much more normal after a scary few days rehabbing a back injury

• a gorgeous new perfume, Agua de Sevilla, courtesy of my mama on her trip to Spain with my dad last week - it smells like orange blossoms and sunshine and I’m addicted

• Also courtesy of their trip - eight perfect Laduree macarons that my parents picked up for me at Charles de Gaulle on their Paris layover heading home

• a few new swimsuits headed to me in the mail to fit the post-pandemic body I’m currently working with…and a few more trips to the gym coming down the pipeline to feel better about said body :)

grammatical errors that make me a little insane

to "reign in" versus "rein in"

• To rein in is the correct usage - it originates from controlling a horse (using reins). To "reign someone in" makes no sense because to reign is to rule, and if I, personally, were reigning, there would BE no reining me in. Move over Kate Middleton, I want ALL THE TIARAS. 

Haphazard capitalization of wines

• I admittedly didn’t know the rules around this until well after I moved to California, and noticed people were notably inconsistent about it even on restaurant menus and at wineries. I found this New York Times article incredibly helpful to clarify.

to "pore over" versus "pour over"

• The only time anyone "pours over" anything is pour-over coffee. Pouring is the act of filling a glass or receptacle. The correct usage is "pore over," meaning "to analyze intensely."

to “peak” one’s interest versus to “pique” one’s interest; “sneak peak” versus “sneak peek”

• Guys, why is “peak” so hard for people? The word, spelled that way, means “the top.” As in mountain peak, or peak physical fitness. I can’t quantify how many bloggers, Instagram accounts, even actual celebrities and public figures I’ve seen use “peak” in place of “pique” or “peek,” and it gives me hives every time.

And finally: it is "I SAW," or "I HAVE SEEN," not "I seen." 

Breakout breakdowns.

I just got out of a meeting with a team of leadership direct reports which always starts with a breakout room of themed round robin share sessions (I know, I know…blame California, maybe?). Today’s theme: to share something we are looking forward to professionally, something personally, and how we are feeling starting a new year with those topics/goals/thoughts in mind. A coworker of mine, who has always been the human embodiment of happiness and…dare I say…joy?…in the workplace, fully broke down, confessing how hard it is to be staring down yet more pandemic, to be backsliding into deepened mask mandates and testing scarcity and isolation when we all hoped for a brighter 2021 this time last year, never considering 2022 could dawn with the ceremony of Groundhog Day. I found myself trying to hide that I was straight-up weeping along with her as she stated “I just have so much pandemic fatigue, I don’t even know how to handle this anymore.” Woman, me too.

It’s been an insanely long 22 months of this, a full 16 of which I have gone radio-silent here (not that the preceding six months were prolific from a writing standpoint). In that time, I spent ten months quarantining in Minnesota with my parents; returned to Silicon Valley to grit my teeth through the last three months of my lease; relocated officially to the Twin Cities with the full support of my employer…and found that somehow, moving away for four and a half years meant both everything and nothing had changed in Minneapolis.

I’m tired.

And I don’t even know if I can blame the COVID pandemic for my exhaustion. I think that I somehow blocked out just how frigid Minnesota can be in January - the harsh brilliance of a subzero sun obfuscating just how intolerably bitter the world outside my window is. Today is the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, and democracy feels perilously divisive. Last summer, wildfires raged less than 500 miles from my Midwest idyll and Minnesota suffered its driest summer in decades - forcing climate change down our throats along with the hazy smog from the fires’ far-flung smoke. My beloved hometown became an epicenter (and, dare I say, a national embarrassment?) for racially-fueled dialogue, heartbreak, and despair. And today, after nearly a year of vaccine-fueled optimism, the Twin Cities reintroduced a sweeping mask mandate after hitting multiple days of record highs for COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

This meandering laundry list of complaints is not how I planned to return to this space. In fact, just yesterday I downloaded a full archive of the site, with plans to take it offline permanently - thinking that the era of flinging my words into the digital ether had come to an end. Then I cried my way through a Zoom meeting and realized that maybe I’m not quite done after all. It feels kind of appropriate, actually, that now that I’m back in Minneapolis, it’s time for Minneapoliz to enjoy yet another renaissance. TBD - potentially more to come - but until then, holy shitballs on toast, hang in there, campers.