“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” — Lin Yutang I’ve been lucky to travel the world — and I’ve always felt equally lucky to have a beautiful city that I was born and raised in to come back to. My hometown…

Where we’re at: I finished recapping my summer of 2018, of which this is a huge roundup. I’ve been working on this post for what feels like forever. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. To be honest, I think this draft sitting in my queue kind of messed with my head a little…

I can’t tell you how good it used to feel to touch back down in Albany after long stretches on the other side of the world. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in this case I’d been away from my home country for about eight months — though due to my crazy travel schedule, I…

Confession: I love the holidays. The music, the cookies, the ornaments, the cookies, the crafting opportunities, the cookies… you get it. Okay, maybe the confession is that I like Christmas cookies. Anyway, I also like any excuse to get out, celebrate, and love where you live. This was my first stateside Christmas since 2014 and I…

I read the usual deluge of 2018 kiss off posts streaming across my screens recently with a great sense of envy. Not because of the exotic places my friends were writing them from, or the amazing achievements they listed… but because of the sense of finality they all seemed to share. Whether 2018 was kind or…

Time to dive back into roundups! Since I’m working my way through my black hole of content from September of 2016 to April of 2017, that means we’ve got roundups to catch up on as well. This post covers the end of 2016 into 2017. Apologies for the delay, but I suppose better is late than never… right…