I just finished watching Marie Kondo's new show, Tidying Up, on Netflix. If you're not familiar with Marie Kondo she's the best-selling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Basically, she is the queen of organization. Using...
Two years ago I bought a fig tree. It was at once a thoroughly calculated and yet impulsive buy. I'd wanted to get a fig tree, I'd thought about getting a fig tree, I'd researched where I could even get a fig tree in Chicago,...
I spend my entire life cleaning. OK, maybe that's an overstatement. But, no, I spend my entire life cleaning. Or, at least, thinking that maybe I should clean. There's always laundry that somehow gathers in a pile next to the hamper. There's always a sink...
It was my first time in Europe. My first time out of the country. I'd tagged along on my friends' three-week backpacking trip - eight cities in six countries- a pace that now has my quivering. Paris was our last stop. And, like many American...
I take a lot of photos on my travels, as most people do. OK, no, I probably take about a million times more photos on my travels than most people do...
East Meets West (Elm) — my teal, aqua, and gold mid-century modern meets global-inspired living room. Over the holidays I had seven extra days off from work, everything from Christmas Eve through New Years. Combined with the weekends, that was eleven days off in a row....
When I was young, maybe eleven or twelve years old, I got a cactus. I named my cactus Mr. Bean and put it near the window of my bedroom. And it sat there, for a while, until it eventually died because I never remembered to...
Not much has changed in my living room since I last checked in five months ago. I guess I added the fig tree (I have a FIG TREE!) and the side table-turned plant stand. And I added the ugly-but-ever-so-necessary air conditioner. But really, not much...
I live in Chicago. I think that's official. I've been here for seven months. I have a job. I have an apartment. I have furniture in said apartment. I think that means I really, truly, live here. It's something I'm totally fine with until those times...
For the past four months I've been neither here nor there. At the end of October, after over three years of living nomadically, I "finished" my travels, flew back to Chicago on a one-way ticket, and accepted a full-time job. But, in the four months since, I...