"Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres." -Spanish idiom

A few months back, my friend Erica turned 25. I met her a little over a year before her 25th birthday, in mid-June in 2011, when she was referred to me through work as a possible candidate. Since her move to NYC would cause her to leave a job behind in her hometown just outside Philly, she would be looking for a new position in our area as soon as her fit hit the pavement. It wasn't long after I interviewed her in my office that she was offered a position within our firm, and then quickly moved into a spot on my team. She and I clicked immediately, both inside and outside work, and she became one of the people I spend the most time with in NYC. When her 25th birthday rolled around, I spent a lot of time thinking about what to get her... Finally, I combined her love of cooking in her new apartment, her passion for Spain (she spent over a year studying in Seville), and my hope to give her something that could help her build happy memories with friends in NYC while encouraging her amazing love for travel. Enter... The Little Tapas Book.

 

We set a date a couple months in advance, where as many of our close friends as possible could come, and started picking Spanish recipes we wanted to make together. Through Erica, I've been fortunate enough to meet her adorable family, and one of her sisters even recently moved to NYC, bringing her husband along with her.  This worked out very nicely for us, as we pretty much have Selena to thank for all of these photos and Jake for almost all of the food. She's a natural with the camera, and he's a natural in the kitchen. Not only are they awesome company, but they're confident enough to take on the tasks that others are butchering. ;)

 

You may be wondering what Raja's contribution to all of this was. It was supposed to be the meatballs. (Thank you for stepping in, Jake.) Nope, Raja's contribution was giving our supposed-to-be-Spanish tapas party a Chilean flair by shamelessly promoting one of his work clients, the country of Chile.

 



We went with it and threw some Chilean wine into the mix.

In fact, we deviated quite a bit from our original stronghold on Spanish culture that night... In addition to Chilean olive oil and wine, our theme music was one of Erica's favorite Mexican serenaders, and our eventual playlist became a repeat of "Africa" by Toto. What can we say? :)

What WAS consistent throughout the entire night was sharing fabulous food with amazing friends.

 

 

I'm so happy that I can call this amazing group of people my friends and my family.

"Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who are you."



“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

If we've met, even once, you probably know that I am nothing if not a planner. 

I love being organized, having a plan, and tracking things. I can't even NOT do these things... It's just a natural tendency, and my mind subconsciously launches into planning mode at least a few times a day. I've found that if I plan ahead, I can make the most of each day or weekend, avoid inconvenience much of the time, deal with the unexpected if surprises pop up, and create order out of potential chaos. It just works for me, and most of the people in my life are kind enough to indulge my need to plan ahead and work around what's already in place.

Though I've been a natural planner much of my life, it wasn't until last year that I found a tool that seems to really support my infinite number of to-do lists, my need to make reservations weeks in advance, and my hope to spend as much time as possible with the people who make my world happy.

One day last year, I was interviewing a candidate for a potential job, and we were discussing her availability to complete the second phase of the interview process. She needed to check her calendar, so I nonchalantly sat back to let her rifle through her smartphone or notepad or whatever she needed to do. To my surprise, she whipped out a colorful binder with adorably tabbed monthly pages, perfectly propotioned grids for writing down the days' activities over each week, pre-labeled stickers, and the perfect platform for color-coding your life's events. I lost all composure, verbally requested a "pause" to the interview, and spent the next 5 minutes prowling through, what I learned was, her Erin Condren "Life Planner."

Life. Changing.

After we established the timeline for her next interview, I trotted back to my desk and entered the magical, virtual world of erincondren.com. I spent hours thinking about the personalized design/color scheme I wanted for my cover, days searching for THE perfect pens for all of my activities, and a couple of weeks waiting for my 2012 planner to arrive at my door.

I've used my planner consistently over the last 9 months, so much so that I knew 2013 would absolutely require another life planner, no questions asked. So a couple of weeks ago, I attempted to beat the end-of-year shipping delays, and I designed and ordered next year's version. 

After much anticipation, my new planner arrived Saturday! I'd been tracking the shipment city by city, and Raja was under strict orders to harrass the doorman if the package was not logged in as 'delivered' by Saturday afternoon. Each day at work, we've chatted about the planners, and a few first-time orders were made by friends who got sucked in to the excitement. Finally, Saturday, gleeful texts were exchanged with full-detail pictures of the inside, the outside, the happy little pagemarker, the adorable packaging... I mean, who knew how exciting a calendar could be?

I couldn't help but share some of the pictures online, since it's pretty much taken over my life for the past few weeks. There are so many more in-depth posts/videos about the planners; you can find just about any information you want by just doing some internet research, but here's a little glimpse of my very own. :)

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.” -Stephen King

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." -Mrs. de Winter 

“The world is quiet here.” -Lemony Snicket

"Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own." -William Hazlitt

 

"It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you." -Gus

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.” -Coco Chanel

Being married is fabulous... It really is. It means you always have someone to come home to, someone to wake up with, someone to be there for you, and someone you can be there for. It means having someone that often knows you better than you know yourself, and being able to really BE yourself at all times. It's pretty much irreplaceable.

Neither Raja nor I relish when we're separated due to travel, so when Raja ended up having weekend travel plans recently, I went to work planning a girls' weekend... One of the only ones I've had in a long time that was full-on girls' style, complete with sleepovers, trying new recipes, mani/pedis, and drinks in unabashedly girly spots.

Curling irons were brandished... martinis were mixed... dresses were donned... And we had a ridiculously good time laughing together, discussing our lives, and talking about our favorite things about each other. Kiinnnddd of a love-fest. :)  But that's what really good girlfriends are for, and when the weekend was over, I'm not sure who had more fun - Raja on his actual vacation, or me and my girlfriends during our staycation in NYC.

Being married IS fabulous, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've just learned that good friends are every bit as important, and they are just as irreplaceable. While I love these girls in a different way, I truly love them every bit as much.

 Sushi from Ki Sushi

 Brooklyn's Gorilla Coffee

 Healthy homemade brunch

 

Dinner at Po - West Village (above and below)

Drinks at LelaBar - West Village (above and below)

Drinks at Little Branch - West Village

"Everything I know, I learned after I was thirty." -Georges Clemenceau

This week was special for me... I turned 30! A few weeks before this big event, I was approaching this whole thing pretty warily. I think turning 30 is a huge deal for some, no matter to others, sometimes difficult or confusing, often exciting. While I didn't know exactly how I would feel on the big day, I did expect it to be a huge mix of emotions, which can be a bit unsettling in itself. Regardless of who you are or how you look at birthdays, I think milestone birthdays like these cause you to reflect on your life in some ways, which inevitably leads to measuring how far you've come, and what you need to do to get to where you want to be. This was the part that was worrying for me... While overall I'm pretty satisfied with my life, I think it's very easy to turn "measuring how far you've come" into "how short you've fallen of where you want to be."

My life became a bit of a whirlwind around the couple of weeks leading up to my birthday this year. Just as in everyone else's lives, every once in a while I get some kind of opportunity to make decisions about things that matter in my life. They are generally things that are too small to matter to anyone else but me, but they are decisions nonetheless, and huge learning opportunities. The fact that one of life's little whirlwinds was hitting right around my birthday was incredibly stressful for me at the time... I thought "Oh my goodness... I have enough going on with turning 30, I don't want to be trying to make difficult decisions in the midst of trying to see if my life is on the track I want it to be on." But, as it turned out, this particular whirlwind ended up hitting at exactly the right time. Having the courage to go on a little self-exploration journey despite it being easier to push off the process until AFTER this milestone birthday proved to be the perfect decision.

And you know what? Through all of this, I learned something I didn't think I was going to "have" when I turned 30: I learned that while my life isn't perfect, I'm doing exactly the right things at exactly the right times for myself. Sometimes when you're presented with decisions, you struggle so much trying to figure out which path to turn down, which changes to make... And in my case, I ended up with the surprising decision to not change a single thing. My path is the perfect path for me at this time, at this stage, with what I've been given, and with what I've earned.

I couldn't be happier I was tested a bit right around this milestone birthday. I had no idea I would enter my 30's so confident in where I was, where I'm heading, and with the people that are taking life's journey with me. I learned a lot not only about myself, but about those friends and family members... These people were 100% there for me, regardless of not knowing if I was going to become a basketcase, be a confused mess, or somehow shake out okay throughout this whole 'turning 30' thing. They sent me poems about wearing red dresses and really owning who you are in life; they sent cards (some even handmade!) from afar... those kinds of cards so full of love that it literally closes the gap between the miles; they gave me cakes with actual candles, and in some cases, topped with sparklers; they gave me books that flamboyantly tout the joy of "grown up happiness"; they gave me countless hugs and told me that the 30's are awesome because it's when you start really doing only the things that truly make YOU happy. These special people were there in a way I never imagined I'd be lucky enough to experience.

So as I enter my 30's, I'm celebrating the red dresses, the fiery sparklers and the quiet candles, the grown up happiness, and the handmade cards that make your heart grow bigger while your eyes fill with tears of happiness... and most importantly, I'm celebrating embracing life as it is, and the people that are kind enough to share my life with me and have me share theirs.



“Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you are gone.”-John Steinbeck

One look at this city makes it easy to understand why I was so glad we pursued the virtually immobile relaxation route in Capri.

There are stairs that lead you all the way up from the coastal beach area to the top of the city. And there are thousands of them. And they look like this:

In order to get anywhere, including up the mountain to your bed & breakfast while carrying all of your luggage that seemed like a pride-inducing minimal amount for a three-week stay in Italy but now seems like a major, heavy, unwieldy mistake... To get anywhere you either take these thousands of stairs, or you catch a bus that chugs up the mountain, picking up passengers only once every hour.  We succumbed to that bus about halfway through our climb while carrying all of our bags, but I'm proud to say that's one of the only times we took that bus. The rest of the time, we bravely forged up and down countless staired passages... After all, we'd come to Positano to see just these very stairs; we might as well embrace them and see what their paths hold!

And they held a lot. Namely a rare peek into how some of these locals live. Positano is supported largely by tourism today, and we met quite a few people during our time in Italy who'd visited Positano, but went up no further than a quarter mile or so into the town. The area near the coast is laden with restaurants, clothing stands, tourist information booths, and artists hawking their work. It's all very cool to see, very lively... but I'm so happy we chose to get off the beaten path and see just what all this village offers. The locals' gardens, their homes, their small farms, their pets, their flowerbeds, their kindness...

We took one entire afternoon and walked ALL the way down, capturing all of the charm as we went. People along the way were so kind and friendly, and seemed to have such an open and honest way about them. The trek down was completely worth it, since we got to experience this less seen version of Positano, which was followed by some of the most amazing views I've ever seen.

Even on a cloudy day, the colors of the city are as rich as the spirits of its people. I can't say enough about how breathtaking this village is... There is just so much to soak up - homemade pastas, vegetables fresh from the garden, wines straight from the vineyard, the simple goodness of people, and scenary clearly drawn by God's hand. Just unforgettable.