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Why Do NPR Reporters Have Such Great Names?
Perhaps no reporter's name is more beloved than Sylvia Poggioli, NPR's Italian correspondent. Sylvia has had a cow in Cambodia named after her, and a restaurant in Salem, Oregon. "Every time Sylvia says her name," the restaurateur said, "I envision Italy, I see and smell good food."

Try Acting More Like A Kindergartner
I live across the street from a kindergarten. Kindergarten, where I live in Switzerland, is two years and begins at four. They have their own building and most children walk to school. Except they don't walk. They run. As adults, we run too. When we're very late, or when we're in exercise clothes, trying to get in shape or just get into our jeans. But, these children are not late. They aren't trying to lose weight. They're just running, from their houses to school. And they laugh while they're doing it.

It's OK to be Happy with a Quiet Life
In our society we are constantly bombarded with the message that we should want more. Advertising tells us life will be better with more. Our families and school teachers (who only want the best for us) encourage us to work hard to achieve more. The media and popular culture focus on celebrities and people who have more. More means success. So deciding that, actually, we'd be happy with a bit less, can require a big adjustment.

curated: wedding wishes

This week I've had nothing but weddings on the brain. When I lay down at night, I have to force my mind to be quiet and stop thinking about wedding stuff so I can get a few hours of sleep! 

Even when I'm not consumed with the planning of my own wedding, I love to look through wedding boards on Pinterest. I may be a little biased, but I think they are some of the best curated boards on Pinterest. And they're all unique! Each one evokes a different feeling or vibe, which I think is awesome. Weddings have been around forever, but I love the fact that they can still all be so different. 

Laicie Heeley of A Thousand Threads has put together a beautiful wedding board titled wedding wishes. She also posts some great wedding inspiration on her blog, so go check that out as well! 

For more curated posts, click here. 

This will be my last post for awhile. There are a couple of posts sitting in Drafts that I might schedule for the coming weeks, but otherwise I'll be signing off for the rest of May. Enjoy your summer weekends! They're already flying by too fast.

gettin' hitched.

A few months into wedding planning, it suddenly dawned on Mark and I that we needed to find someone to officiate our ceremony. We had been so focused on hosting a party for over a hundred people that the actual ceremony had slipped our mind. So we began the search for an officiant.

It was a long and frustrating search. Sure, there were plenty of wedding officiants for hire but they weren't exactly what we were looking for. An Elvis look-alike who would sing karaoke? No thanks. We asked around at my parents' work. The chaplain at the military base required a three-month marriage counseling course before he would marry a couple. The hospital's chaplain didn't perform outside ceremonies.

 Finally, we decided to have one of my uncles officiate for us. This, however, threw another wrench into the plans because he couldn't sign our marriage license since technically he's not ordained in the state of Virginia. Weeks and months were slipping by and we still hadn't figured out this "legally married" bit.

We started looking into going to the courthouse a few days before our wedding and getting legally married. That way we could take care of all the legal aspects and paperwork beforehand and still have a special ceremony on the day of our wedding. We called the courthouse in the county where we're getting married, only to find out that they no longer perform wedding ceremonies there.

Our next option was to try getting married in the county courthouse in Mark's hometown.We spoke with a sweet old lady with a syrupy Southern accent in the vital records department. "Well, of course you can get married here, honey," she told us, "Just walk right down the hall to the judge and he'll getcha married."

We figured this out on Wednesday and I was driving to Georgia on Thursday night, so Mark and I both did a mad dash to find our birth certificates and all the paperwork we needed to get hitched that weekend.

We woke up bright and early on Friday morning to get married. There were at least six other couples in line with us as we filled out our application for a marriage license. No one told us that we needed to know the counties where both our mother and father were born. We scratched our heads a little on that one and then made a safe guess. Once we got home and double-checked, we realized we had both put down the wrong county. Really, though, I'm still trying to figure out how the place of our parents birth really affects the legality of our marriage.

After we handed over our paperwork and signed our signatures on a few more pieces of paper, we walked down to the courtroom. Another couple was getting married, so we quietly took a seat on the back row. As we were waiting our turn, the door to the courtroom opened and another couple walked in....as well as their entire family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers...they kept streaming into the courtroom one after another. Soon every seat in the courtroom was filled. I was laughing quietly to myself. Mark was freaking out.

When it was finally our turn to stand before the judge and exchange our vows, we did so in front of a packed courtroom full of complete strangers. As we kissed, they all clapped and cheered and congratulated us. It was totally unexpected, but funny all at the same time.

I'll always consider our wedding day to be May 25th, but I don't think I'll ever forget the day we became husband and wife in front of a bored old judge and a room full of strangers.

weekend links 5.17.13

Happy weekend! I've been pinching myself because I can hardly believe this weekend is here. It's the last weekend before our wedding which means a lot of stuff needs to get done, but I'm so excited by the simple fact that it's the last weekend before our wedding that I'm not bothered by the mountain of stuff that needs to be done. I exaggerate a bit -- it's not a mountain. I intend to get it all done, but I keep thinking that in 10 years time I probably won't even remember the little wedding things that I rushed to get done the weekend before our wedding. On Monday a few wedding guests will be arriving and I'm excited to enjoy the week with my almost-husband and our families. Enjoy your weekend! It's supposed to be beautiful weather here in Virginia. Here's hoping it's gorgeous where you are, too. Some links:

- Awesome is probably the most over-used word in America. Some writers got fed up with it and created the Anti-Awesome list.

- The Rain Room exhibit at MOMA sounds amazing!

- BHLDN is giving away a summer party kit.

- I loved reading Laicie's post about planning she and her husband's wedding.

- Family photos with a hot air balloon!

- I'm so excited to visit this beautiful place while we're in New York.

- What we can learn from Scandal. Who else is a huge fan of this show? Raises hand!

- If only I had a couple extra grand laying around, I could rent a zip line for our next party.

what i'm reading

found via pinterest

The best blogging advice I've ever read
Sometimes the things you write are going to be similar to other people, and you should probably be friends with those people, and then broaden your horizons by looking in different places for inspiration. The internet can be very small for how impossibly large it really is, and often I see people all looking in the exact same places for direction. Maybe that person you're following is interesting to you because he pulls inspiration from so many different places. There is no reason you can't do that too. 


Why I Became a Freegan
What is an apple? In your kitchen, it's food, nourishment. At the market, it's currency, a player in transactions. Dangling from a tree or baked in a pie, it's a part of our cultural identity, an axis for uniting families and friends around the bounty of the harvest. But what about when it's sitting under three layers of thick black plastic, in a tower of bulging garbage bags on the curb, waiting for the metallic teeth of the nightly garbage truck? How do we regard this resource that holds such cultural, economic and environmental value when it's suffocating beneath plastic, tossed away?

Timeline for a Tragedy
There seems to be an unknown timeline for tragedies. The public is expected to limit and consider what they say on Twitter and Facebook in the light of horrific events. Maybe they should stay silent and disconnect from social media altogether. But for how long? How long do you disconnect from day-to-day activities that had been a part of your everyday life? And how long do you look at the world with a different perspective forced upon you by an unexpected act of violence or a terrifying medical diagnosis?

If You Use the Web, You Are a "Curator"
As much as the term gets criticized, curation requires patience, resourcefulness, and a keen editing eye. It means becoming fluent in one particular dialect of the web, versus trying to speak its entire language. It's the reason journalists have beats, and the reason you chose one major in college, instead of seven.