Downloading iTunes. (Yes, I know it’s 2009. I haven’t downloaded a song since Kazaa was king, which means since my sophomore year of college.)

Ordering a Dirty Pickle the next time I go to a classy bar, which is to say, perhaps sometime in the next five years.

Making kale chips with the ungodly amount of greens I am still receiving from my CSA every week.

Painting my toenails.

That is all.

OMG, where have I been? Can I really not have updated my blog since [checks...gasps...] January? What the hell have I been doing?!

Let me tell you!

I turned 25, and received a cake worthy of recognition on Cake Wrecks, although I haven’t sent it to them. (In case you can’t read it, it says “Happy Birthday Christina Welcome to Your Quarter Life Crisis.”)

Even a teal-lover knows when to stop.

My husb got me tickets to the Penguins, and I saw this amazing car when we parked near the arena.

A kindred soul.

Then, the Penguins won the Stanley Cup and I collapsed in a huge heap of sobbing/laughing/screaming/hyperventilating mess on my living room floor. Less than twelve hours later, I was holding the Cup with Coach Bylsma.

GAHHHHH!!!!

(I’ll give you a second to recover from the sheer awesomeness of that picture. I needed a week to recover.)

I went to Houston for a friend’s wedding and SOMEHOW BECAME PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

"Look, I'm the President, and if I want to change the national anthem to "Take A Chance On Me," I WILL."

I also met this feisty little guy, painted on the ceiling of where the wedding reception was.

Yee-haw.

I’ve been doing a whole lot of writing and editing, and actually gave my manuscript to some people to read, which was hella terrifying. So far, no one has handed it back to me and then proceeded to laugh in my face for ten minutes, so that’s good.

I started another blog (Hi, my name is Christina, and I’m a blogaholic who doesn’t follow through), where I’ve been thinking through some writing stuff. Follow me there…if you dare. Of if, you know, you’re interested in me blabbing about writing. I also occasionally contribute to the very amazing Only in Pittsburgh blog, for which my spouse is the main contributor. If you have a picture that belongs there, what are you waiting for? Send it to us!

KTHXBAI

The turn of a new year gets many people thinking about goals, progress, where they are and where they want to be. I am one of those people. A listmaker extraordinaire, I see the new year as the perfect time to make the List of Lists for the year and try to stick to it as best I can.

I didn’t write any of my goals down last year (or at least, I can’t find any record of them – this is what happens when you’re both a listmaker extraordinaire and a packrat). I vaguely remember something about writing a book before I turned 25. Exercising a few times a week. And, of course, moving back to Pittsburgh. Beyond that, I’ve no idea.

Well, I wrote a book last year, but I haven’t even glanced at it since August, when I finished what Anne Lamott affectionately calls the “shitty first draft.” Exercising three times a week, don’t make me laugh. I did find my way back to Pittsburgh, as you all know, and managed to do a few other things too, like buy a house and get married.

This year, I’m being a bit smarter about my goals. I’ve compiled them in one place and created a spreadsheet to track my progress. (I love you, Google Docs.) I’ve made them achievable and measurable. One of them is to post on this blog three times per week. Another is to work really hard at revising my book so I can send it out to agents by September. Others are financial or related to work we want to do on the house. All of them are doable.

Let’s just see where this year takes us, shall we?

Hey folks — sorry, I didn’t keep up on my end of the bargain with the 90s vids. I have recently experienced the most violent illness I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was so bad my husb was considering taking me to the hospital in the wee hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning. 90s vids will be back in full force tomorrow.

In the meantime, husb and I are thinking of taking a weekend trip some weekend in November. Ideally, we’d like to be able to leave after work on a Friday, get there and check into a hotel so we can spend all day Sunday and most of Sunday in the destination. But we don’t know where to go! DC is out of the question – hello, we just spent two years living there – as are places we’ve been like New York or Philly or places I was raised to loathe like Cleveland. We’re looking for something under the radar, a place people wouldn’t normally think to visit.

Maybe Detroit? Or Toronto? Any ideas or suggestions, faithful readers?

Hey. It’s been awhile, huh? Sorry about that! Turns out that one (or at least, I) cannot successfully buy a house, strip and refinish the hardwood floors, move into said house, morph into an amateur plumber, plan a wedding, execute a wedding, refinish a deck, get rid of a weirdly placed strip of plants in a huge backyard, grow grass, dig up a patch of backyard where the garden will be in the spring, kick ass at a new job, and get involved in a neighborhood organization while still blogging regularly.

(So, that’s my pathetic attempt at saying sorry for leaving you hanging for months on end.)

I missed blogging, I really did. Some days I would go back and read through the entries on this site and remember what I was feeling when I wrote them and feel the urge to start up again. I didn’t, because there was always a house thing to do, or a job thing to do, or a wedding thing to do.

Well, guess what – the wedding is over, the house is pretty much all settled, and the job is going great. So, I’m BACK, kids. And in honor of the occasion, I am going to do a 90s VOTW every DAY until the end of October. That is my solemn vow to you. Because we all need a little 90s music in our lives when the seasons start to change and you know winter is coming. We at least need it so we can rock out with our bad selves in chilly houses.

We just finished putting together the office this weekend, so I have a nice place to focus on writing my blog, writing my book, and working on various other projects that require my attention outside of work. So, I’ll see you tomorrow.

That’s a promise.

The past three months, I’ve been working as a temp for a major Pittsburgh company. In a week and a half, I’ll be leaving this gig for a permanent position at a local non-profit. I interned at this organization when I was in college, and it was pretty much the best working experience of my life, so I’m psyched to be headed back there to do a bunch of crazy, awesome things.

I’ve realized that the for-profit world is not for me. I just can’t get excited about selling stuff or contributing in any way to the selling of stuff. I think I’m realizing as I grow up that I really desire a simple life, uncluttered by possessions and distractions. I truly don’t care about getting the latest iPod or a flat-screen TV or 6000 channels. I just want to live my life with my boyfriend, in the simple old house we’ll be moving into in a little less than a month. I want to write books. I want to spend my working hours trying to advance a cause I believe in. Eventually I want to have kids and play with them in the backyard and teach them how to play hopscotch and this weird game about colored eggs I played when I was a kid.

Last week, I read this article in the New York Times about equal parenting. There are a few references in that piece about women choosing lower-paying, more flexible jobs. And I’ve heard it over and over again in the media that women choose to work at non-profits, or in areas like social work where they’re never going to make much money. But why should I kill myself working long hours, destroying any semblance of a personal life or writing ambitions, to make tons of money at a company I don’t care about and which doesn’t care about me? I’ll take the flexibility and work environment of a non-profit any day over that horrendous situation.

I’m not saying that non-profits are the most amazing organizations ever thought up by humankind. There are plenty of problems with them. In DC, I only worked for non-profits (although the last one I worked for was practically corporate) and I definitely got a sense of feeling like nothing was changing, no matter what the organization tried to do. (That non-profit, though, was trying to fight a pretty big battle.) But they definitely offered more of the things that I personally look for in a job than this corporate job I’m working now – friendlier people, flexible schedules, and interesting work.

And, oh, I will not miss being a temp. No more being addressed by my boss as “Hey” because he still doesn’t know my name after three months. No more condescending conversations about whether it’s better to file things alphabetically or chronologically or by subject or a mixture of all three. (They’re magazines, people. Let it go.) No more hushed conversations by the woman in the cube next to mine alluding to the fact that they’re hiring for the position I’m filling right now. No more unpaid holiday time, no more paying for crappy short-term health insurance, no more telling my supervisor I’m heading to the ladies’ room so I don’t get the evil eye when I walk back to my desk after being gone for two minutes. No more teaching my boss, who’s surely making at least four times as much as me, about the very complicated intricacies of a shared drive.

I’ll miss the free lunches. But I’ll be okay leaving everything else behind.

Once upon a time, there lived a young woman who grew up in the Fireworks Capital of America and went to the City of Champions for college. In 2006, she moved with her boyfriend to Washington, DC, where she, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed college graduate, began working at a small nonprofit as a program assistant. Our heroine quickly learned that “program assistant” was code for “do endless mail merges using information from a database still running on Microsoft Access 1997 while your supervisor watches soccer games online all day” and that life in the nation’s capital was not nearly as exciting as The West Wing had made it out to be.

Undeterred, she found a new job and moved to a nicer neighborhood. The job was good. The neighborhood was charming. But she never quite warmed to her new city. She found that many of the people she met enjoyed talking only about how important they were working as interns in obscure House members’ offices, drafting legislation on horse slaughtering or mailing flags to constituents, and weren’t interested in talking to her once they realized they had nothing career-wise to gain from her. The hourlong commute got to her. The one hundred degree temperatures coupled with one hundred percent humidity every single August day wilted her. The studio condominiums selling at over three hundred thousand dollars shocked her. The general “just as soon spit on you as look at you” attitude of her fellow citizens dismayed her.

In short, she was unhappy. And her boyfriend was, too.

So they began looking for ways to get back to the fair city in which they met. They planned and schemed for several months, squirreling away savings, looking for jobs, thinking about the future. Soon, her boyfriend had a job offer in hand and they moved back to Pittsburgh during its most beautiful month: February. Amidst the slush and ice and blackened snow, they settled with their two cats into an apartment where the rent was less than half their rent in DC and they were happy.

Soon after this, they decided to get married. And soon after that, they applied for a mortgage and began seriously looking for a house. Three days ago, they made an offer on a lovely house in Greenfield that seemed as though it was built for them: great backyard, plenty of space, large kitchen, creative vibe. Two days ago, they learned that their offer was accepted. They laughed and hugged and talked about new paint colors for the bedrooms and generally felt very happy but also very strange at the idea of owning a house. Because that is something grown-ups do.

Nevertheless, they will hopefully soon be homeowners and spouses in the city that they love very dearly. Because sometimes dreams do come true. If you know what your dream is and you work very, very hard at achieving it, that is.

I actually have a pretty good excuse: the woman in question, in this post? The woman with her arms filled with books about how to have a cheap, yet dazzling, wedding? The woman who the librarian told that she should elope?

That’s me.

Eek.

The boyf and I have decided to get married and we’ve been telling family and friends the past few days. So you could say I’ve been a little preoccupied… =)