Taking a moment to be a little sentimental, I wanted to chat about the below picture: Three years ago I stayed at this hotel with my family for less than 24 hours en route to Southampton. It was my first, and only, time visiting the city. I decided on that brief stay that I would move to London. Someday, somehow. (My mother was not amused).  Today I stumbled upon it while buying some books in the neighborhood. It caught me off guard and naturally I got all teary eyed looking at it. (However, take that emotion with a grain of salt as I also cried two days ago when a baby smiled at me). I'm so happy to have fulfilled that promise to myself, but I'm also incredibly lucky. I wouldn't have been able to do it alone. So thank you to all the people who helped me get here (this blog is not long enough to list all of you). And just to balance out the emotion of this post with a little humor (as my life tends to do), getting off the tube today, I slipped on the...

15,277 words typed. In 14 days. (I technically had closer to 19 days, but I smartly decided that this was also the time to catch up on Mad Men...I finally get Zou Bisou Bisou now by the way). It was the most I've written, I think ever? It was very rough/kind of awesome. (You have to be slightly sick in the head in order to voluntarily put yourself in this position). I don't think I slept a full night in two weeks since there was always something to be researched. Or in my case, I had to research my research since I'm not as smart as I thought I was. For a little perspective- I'm very aware that people do much harder things than this everyday. (I actually found a list of "which foods to eat during all nighters" from a doctor's online forum. You know, where they need to discuss these kinds of things in order to function and save people's lives 24/7. Can you say Shame 101?) But I will gladly complain about these past two weeks in the name of humor. A...