Soakin' Up San Francisco

Four weeks, three Welsh kitty cats, two LA trips and one half-marathon later: the blustery, magical and nonsensically summer-like month of November has somehow come to an end. Like I typically do at the start to any month, I have sat down -- in preparation for a journey of health, intent and reflection -- to ready myself for the remaining thirty-one days of 2014.  Our proudest accomplishment of 2014 (or maybe ever) My yoga membership resumes this Wednesday; I have a date [with a Harvard grad, nbd ] on Tuesday... and I finally run again -- beginning tomorrow! Combined with a renewed commitment to written reflection, I am off to a great start. I will not allow any negative or unforgiving influences, nor my temporary distance from my cat Simba, nor  my busy Q4 work schedule combined with any other challenge to get me down. Instead, I will embrace 1) the freedom I can enjoy this month, 2) the travel that I am blessed with this month, and 3) the holidays and good cheer that g

Having endured - no, adored - my first 90 days as an official resident of my new city, I can happily reflect upon the things I’ve observed, learned and realized throughout my time here. On both the best of days and the most homesick of days, I’ve begun to see the best of my routines revealed to me... little by little.  In the years since graduating from college and while living between West Hollywood, Newbury Park and now the Bay area, I’ve slowly toyed with the question of what makes for the perfect day, the ideal weekend - the best kind of week? These ideas have evolved and somersaulted through the different periods of the past three years - in times of work and during weekends of play, in both my former retail realm and my now more regular, corporate lifestyle.  A dear friend and new colleague at LinkedIn, Stephanie, recently posed her wisdom regarding the need for both spontaneity and routine in her “perfect day” - a juxtaposition to which I whole-heartedly relate. While I lo

I can't think of a better way to begin a new month. Yep: on a fresh, blank canvas — after a day filled with family, one of my best friends, a long adventure-of-a-run... and a brand new movie that I cannot get out of my head. It has been some time since a film haunted me by its consistent and dense portrayal of truth and real human emotion. That’s the only way I can think to describe Begin Again , and the likes of Keira Knightly and Adam Levine and even Mark Ruffalo and their tangled, romantically musical relationships. Like I would imagine the producer’s first movie to be, Once , this was a story of the way that music tells human narratives. Music and the discovery, the fusion of ideas and moods and melodies, that also fuse people and lives - in the case of Mark and his wife, Mark and his daughter, Mark and Keira’s character, Keira and Adam in the beginning, Keira and Adam at the final farewell between them. Perhaps I’m relating to the story - in hindsight, after seeing it in th