30 days of posting challenge

We made it to Day 30. The challenge is complete. I should really have a better quality and/or celebratory image, but I don’t. Some nights are just like that.

I’ve learned a lot in the past 30 days. I was reminded that I love and have missed blogging daily. I figured out that that the connection between this personal blog and my job designing brand campaigns for real estate developments, is that they are both about home.

Most importantly though, in the past 30 days we finally started to move into the first real home we’ve had in over 3 years, and that just tied in really nicely with my return to the blog.

I posed the question a few days ago about what makes a home feel like home. And then I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Of course it’s different for everyone. For me, it’s about my family but it’s not only about that. Living with my family in a tiny, dismal, dark hole of an apartment for a year didn’t make it feel like a home.

I want my home to be the nicest place I go all day (except on days that I go to the beach). I want it to be filled with beauty, light & art. I want to be comfortable and happy there, and I want to cook and eat good food there. And I want… my things.

Yes! My things. I know it sounds horribly superficial and un-Buddhist-minded of me but it’s true! My stuff makes me happy.

By stuff, I don’t mean pedestrian stuff like lotion, belts or Coach bags (or whatever). I mean the carefully curated, mostly-vintage, yard sale finds that are pretty much useless but for the fact that finding, collecting and admiring them brings me great joy.

You may have seen some of these things if you were following the black and white challenge The Steady Table did on Instagram last week. If not, no worries because I’m going to start featuring these wonderful items—I hope you’ll find them wonderful too—on Fridays. Friday because it’s the day that I am most likely to find the time to shoot pictures. And because then I can call it Friday Finds.

In the mean time, happy Tuesday! Shane made chicken and rice and was so hungry that I didn’t even get to set up the shot. I threw a hunk of cheese on my salad.

It’s not so much that I didn’t know what to cook, than that we didn’t have much in the fridge. I was going to make my usual last-minute-on-a-Friday go-to dish—pasta with corn and whatever else we’ve got, but we didn’t even have frozen corn. And the only vegetable we had was a piece of a head of cauliflower.

All in all it was a decent meal considering. We were fortunate that there was some leftover vodka sauce in the fridge, that bit of cauliflower, and a lemon. I really need to eat a green vegetable tomorrow.

I went out tonight. That’s right. Out!

Some mom colleagues and I went to the make-you-cry-hilarious Pump & Dump Show. Before that, we had dinner at Explorateur. I had the burrata and tomato flatbread which looked an awful lot like pizza and was excellent. Also, you gotta love pizza that’s served with a side of salt. Seriously.

Ok, it’s late folks. Goodnight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes home feel like home. People say it’s the people. I’m not really sure.

I lived with my family for a year in a dark, dismal basement apartment. It never felt like home, even though I was with my family. Even though I really tried with all my might to find some joy in that miserable place.

Why was that? Was it because we were deprived of natural light? Was it because we didn’t have all our stuff? Or because we thought we were going to be there short term and it just dragged on and on? Or maybe because we just couldn’t feel settled? I don’t know. I think it was probably the lack of natural light (and maybe also all the bugs and the stinky, moldy basement atmosphere).

Tonight really felt like the old home we know and love down in Unit 1, my parents unit. My mom set a long table for lots of people, my dad made pasta Bolognese, and dinner was noisy and chaotic. This is essentially how things have been down there since 1982 with the exception of the past year, when we all moved out to convert the house to a two-family.

Unit 2, our unit, is totally new though, so it’s not a matter of getting back to how things were for us. So I wonder, what is that thing, that moment, that perfect set of circumstances that makes a place feel like home?

And I wonder, does this slice of Gail’s famous cheese bread look like Martha’s Vineyard?

Despite our best intentions, we essentially had Halloween candy for dinner. Brush your fangs boys and girls. And boo!

When I started this 30 day challenge, the idea was to figure out how the blog relates to my professional work and how to leverage it in order to raise my professional profile. Over the course of 30 days, I was going to write, think and explore commonalities between what I post about here and what I do at work.

I’ve thought a lot about it but haven’t shared much of it with you. The reason for this is twofold. One, is that I’ve just really been enjoying the routine of posting every day, it’s fulfilling in the way that having a disciplined activity, like writing in a dairy or doing a daily sketch is fulfilling. It makes me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something amidst the chaos that is day-to-day life.

The other reason is that I feel like I kinda nailed it on Day 5 when I said that the connection is home. You can read that post here.

My family has been living in a state of flux for over 3 years now. We’ve moved 4 times since the summer of 2013, that’s a big deal for a family with young kids. Sid has been moving around for essentially his entire life (from 7 months to almost 4). And now here we are, finally (god willing) in our forever home.

It seems only natural to revive the blog now that we have a home again. As the blog has picked back up, our home has started to come together. Last night we sat in our own, permanent, packing material-free living room for the first time since the spring of 2013.

Now that we know home is the common thread, I’m going to spend the last week or so of the challenge trying to figure out where to take the blog and how to leverage it to build career success and visibility. Suggestions welcome!

P.S. Mexican tonight.