Dear West Elm,

The love I felt for you was instant and it hit me like a ton of mid-century bricks. I remember how my heart was all a-flutter as I walked through doors of your Lincoln Park store for the very first time. Oh, I was crushing. I was crushing hard. As we really got to know to each other on that first encounter, it was so apparent we were a match. I loved everything about you, from your style to your adorable sales associates to your to-go-to-be-true sales. I felt crazy that I had not known you sooner and knew my life would never be the same.

I courted you as coyly as I could manage as I yearned for more; some juice glasses on clearance then a decorative bowl. But I couldn’t hold back. Soon enough, I had two of your rugs on their way to tie up my living room together with your love. Thankfully, I have the most understanding then-fiance/now-husband who recognized there was enough room for our love along with his and mine. Soon, I added you to our wedding registry, and before we knew it, we welcomed new bedding, pillow cases, and modern steel into our home.

Your love is like a cozy leather chair to snuggle up with that throw and read a book. Your love is like rose gold salad utensils, the way you deliver a hearty meal to my plate. Your love is like a modern table lamp, the way you light up my life. Your love is like a decorative pillow, very fun and useful in a specific way. Your love is a little wooden box with a marble top, holding all my most precious treasures. Your love is like a warm wool throw wrapped around me on a freezing Chicago day.

You could be the pillow I sleep on at night, the light that shows me the way, the reflection of myself I’ve always wanted to see. All we need to do is continue to explore these feelings we have and watch our love grow. West Elm, I can’t imagine my life without you and I’m so confident that our mutually beneficial relationship will continue if not forever, then certainly for years to come.

With love and admiration,

Work From Homo

PS – I’ve been thinking I need a new loveseat, what do you say?

My grandfather passed away in March of 2013. During his last few years, his mind remained sharp as a tack, even as his body deteriorated; losing his ability to walk and see.

My poppy was a talented carpenter, having a hand in building nearly every home my mother lived in for her entire life. Growing up, they moved every couple of years as he finished a project and fell in love with a house he built. Little did he know, the spoiling effect that would have on my mom who has only lived in one place ever that wasn’t brand new when she moved in. As a family, we built both houses I grew up in including the one my parents live in now.

Poppy also made beautiful furniture: selling stools at church, and making each of his grandchildren a sofa table by which to remember him. Mine has not quite made it to Chicago yet, but as soon as Michael and I buy a condo, we’ll find the perfect spot for it. He was inspiring in that way, an artist really, making homes, furniture and even jewelry for work and hobbies during his lifetime.

We recently sold the house he built for himself and my grandma shortly before I was born. This house was truly a work of art. From the outside, the home looks like a big red barn. The inside was warm and inviting, with a large living and lofted second-floor balcony. Pop put so much love into his craft. He laid each brick in the wall he built around their fireplace. He designed and put together each cabinet and door with all the little details that makes woodworking so appealing.

If you can imagine, this was a pretty special place to have cozy Christmas mornings with my sisters and cousins or to enjoy a game of Scrabble with competing generations. It was also the home my grandparents loved to host their two daughters, two sons-in-law, five grandchildren and their spouses and nine great-grandkids for a meal, rambunctious as those great-grandkids may be.

Now that my Pop is gone, I feel I really missed an opportunity to have him pass on his lifetime of knowledge to his grandson.  After moving to Chicago, I found I was spending a lot more free time thinking about building and creating — becoming obsessed with HGTV renovation shows and Pinterest projects.

I had a small bout of unemployment in the summer of 2013 during which time, I spent over a month in my friend Jesse’s backyard sanding, staining and refinishing my kitchen table and chairs that were hand-me-downs from my parents. The experience was very rewarding and I shared pictures of the work I did refinishing with my family  who was excited to see my new interest in furniture and woodworking.

A few summers ago, I started researching craft schools in Chicago — seeking something to occupy my free time, while learning a skill and working with my hands. Luckily Chicago has a ton of options from glassblowing to metalwork, but ultimately I decided on a woodworking school (that happened to be a 10-minute walk from my place) where they specialized in furniture making and cabinetry using solid rough cut wood to make the projects. Excited and hopeful that the class would make me feel closer to my beloved grandpa, I signed up for Furniture Making 101.

My first class started a few weeks before Michael moved to Ohio for three months to attend a web dev boot camp. It may have been my favorite of three classes I took there, even though I have less to show for it. We studied the fundamentals of woodworking, using almost only hand tools to plane, chisel and saw wood into a 5×7 picture frame and a handmade sanding block. Taking a saw or chisel to a piece of wood is about the best stress reliever I’ve ever come across. It was like therapy. I loved it.

The next class was much more intense, using for the first time the big expensive power tools, planers and jointers, table saws and Domino tables. Over the course of nine weeks, we molded raw wood into a side table.

Throughout the class, I constantly self-doubted, thinking I measured wrong and went back to do it again. After you cut a piece of wood, you certainly can’t uncut it. In the end, all the pieces fit just right and I was able to to glue the whole thing together, using only two screws to hold the tabletop on. The tabletop was the only thing that didn’t turn out quite perfect, the wood I used to make it would bow every so slightly each time I planned it, forcing me to joint and plane it again until it was finally flat enough though it ended up about 1/4 inch thinner than ideal.

The table itself really turned out beautiful, though. It’s an arts-and-crafts style design from a woodworking magazine. It now sits proudly in my living room.

I took about six months off from woodworking. While certainly worth it, the classes are expensive (a little more than $400) and I didn’t think we could afford it while Michael was searching for his first programming job. I had one class to complete before “graduating.” This summer, after Michael had been working for a few months, I decided it was time to take the third and final class in their woodworking program. Of course, my supporting husband was all for it. So I paid for the class and we headed out to one of the few locations you can purchase rough sawn lumber in Chicago.

Michael and I piled a couple hundred dollars worth of walnut and hard maple into our car (with planks out both windows at the same time) and drove it over to our school to drop it off.

In the new class, we would be making a telephone table — which is a tall side table that were incredibly popular in the days when homes had one telephone, usually located in a hallway or common area. We hit the ground running, molding and transforming the huge cuts of lumber into legs, drawer parts, panels, and a beautiful tabletop.

This class somehow seemed easier than the last — something just clicked about how to cut and organize and make sure pieces fit together. Woodworking is not easy, its a lot of math (mostly in your head) and visualizing how two pieces match and fit together in a product you won’t be putting together until the very end. This piece of furniture was not without its issues. While using my favorite tool, the Festool Domino, I must have misaligned something and when I finally put my table together for the first time, nothing fit quite right. Thankfully, a few hours on a Saturday was enough to fix up the issues and I was able to complete my table with the rest of my class.

I’m not much of a spiritual person, but I do believe in human connection that can transcend distance and difference and life and death. Every time I pick up a tool to work on creating something, I feel a little closer to my grandfather, who was a great teacher, friend, and storyteller. That feeling does not leave me feeling sad, but rather happy that even a small part of him is still with me today. My tables sit in my favorite corner of the apartment, with one of my Pop’s many canes leaning against it and one of his many tools hanging on the wall just above it.

For me, 2015 was definitely the year of the podcast. I am utterly and completely obsessed. I think I first started dabbling with listening to podcasts when I was a blogger in college, probably even considered making one with my friend Rachel at some point, but never followed through. In 2014 though, Serial and StartUp got me hooked and I haven’t looked back.

I also have to credit a couple of people with nurturing my love of podcasts. My husband Michael has been a podcast fanboy for years. He used to mostly listen to podcasts from NPR and various baseball writers that he followed on Twitter as a means to feed his love for knowledge and America’s Pastime. We listen to a lot of the same shows, finding it a stimulating alternative to TV.

I did not grow up listening to NPR, as he did, so I have decades of This American Life to catch up on (don’t worry, I’m not actively trying), but I’m a total convert these days and listen to TAM, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! (WWDTM), the Ted Radio Hour, Fresh Air and regularly catch the Afternoon Shift from WBEZ. I love all the abbreviations that come with NPR.

The other person I have to credit with my podcast passion is my hilarious and talented friend Brittany Luse. In late 2014, I was alerted by our mutual friend that Brittany and her friend Eric had started a podcast called “For Colored Nerds” (FCN for white folks — love to abbrev.). Brittany is absolutely magnetic coming in through headphones. And Eric plays off of Brittany in the a perfect way. I feel lucky that I have gotten to know one of her best friends through FCN, even if we haven’t met.

Brittany and I totally reconnected after FCN started, now talking nearly every day, quite often about podcasts. I knew how good she was, but maybe I was a little bias? After all, she was my friend, and her podcast was like getting to hang out with her every other week for an hour in spite of the physical distance between us. And then to make a long story short, she was personally selected for a job at Gimlet Media based on her natural talent for radio and is mere days away from starting her own show on their network — Sampler, a podcast about PODCASTS. Obviously, Michael and I donated to become Gimlet members and so we got a solid preview of her show and absolutely loved it. I highly suggest you subscribe on iTunes, so you can listen when it finally arrives on January 18th.

As part of being a being a fan of podcasts, I push them on everyone. My coworkers, friends, siblings, even people I meet at parties are very often the recipients of my saying: “So I just heard this podcast I think you would love…” following up with a text linking them to episode I think they’ll love. I’m a total podcast pusher. And now, I’m going to push you.

Here are the top podcasts of 2015 as rated by me. If you give any of them a listen, please let me know. I love to talk pcasts with anyone and everyone!

Best shows of 2015:

1. 

Reply All

Hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman host a show about the internet. But it’s really so much more. These two have a bromance that is evident from their equal parts love and disdain for each other. They’re best friends whose livelihood is totally dependent on one another. I can’t put my finger on what exactly makes Reply All my absolute favorite podcast of 2015 other than that it is amazing story-telling. They weave their personal relationship seamlessly in with the stories they’re telling of others. The only thread throughout the show is the internet, a topic as broad as the internet itself, and it works. It’s just so damn relatable. No matter how many podcasts I have in my cue, I always hit play on Reply All as soon as it’s available. It has made me laugh and cry numerous times, not to mention the times it made me feel extremely uncomfortable (like when PJ was micro-dosing on LSD and… going to work).

Start with: #32 The Evilest Technology On Earth 🙂 It was so difficult to pick an episode that I really loved, but the one I chose happened to be originally posted on my anniversary. And since I obviously can’t pick just one, also listen to #37 Taking Power.

2.

Women of the Hour

So I’ve been a fan of Girls since the start. I haven’t read Lena’s book or seen Tiny Furniture and I don’t consider myself a big fan of her as a person, as much as I loved Girls. That is, until recently. Women of the Hour is an exceptional five part series produced by the all female #podsquad at BuzzFeed last fall. It’s smart, intentional, funny, emotional, beautiful, complex, heart-breaking, queer, and up-lifting. The show features incredible women like writers Ashley Ford, Anne Helen Peterson, Janet Mock, and Zadie Smith; and actors Emma Stone, Amy Sedaris, her costar and real life best friend Jemima Kirke, and Aidy Bryant. Lena, like myself, is striving to do the work to acknowledge our privilege and unlearn the racism, (internalized) sexism, (internalized) homophobia, and transphobia of our heteronormative patriarchal society. In this show, she does the important work of being an ally: that is not speaking for others, but rather pointing to those people and giving them a chance to tell their story.

Start with: Episode 1: Friendship and I know you’ll keep going. Lena and Ashley Ford explain their complicated and beautiful internet friendship in this introductory episode.

3.

Mystery Show

Starlee Kine is one-of-a-kind, not to mention a little awkward, creepy, and stalker-ish (I mean that in the best way possible). I think I read someone describe her as a modern day gumshoe, solving the mysteries no one else would ever bother with. It makes for great radio. Endlessly entertaining, Kine has an obvious knack for story telling and a shameless attitude about asking questions and uncovering answers. The only downside is how few episodes can be produced in a given season. I’m so looking forward for season 2.

Oh yeah, when you become a member of Gimlet Media, they send you a T-Shirt from the show of your choice. I picked Mystery Show.

Start with: Case #2 Britney where Starlee finds out exactly why Britney Spears was photographed with a copy of a book her friend wrote that no one read.

4.

FCN

As I mentioned earlier, my real-life-friend Brittany is the host of FCN, the conversations black people have when white people aren’t around, except they record them and put them on the internet. I swear, even if you haven’t had the pleasure of knowing Brittany for years as I have, this show is so great. She and her BFF Eric deliver honest, thoughtful, and often hilarious commentary on race and pop culture and just what it’s like moving through the world as young black folks in America.

Start with: From Bessie to Beyonce, follow up with I’m Thankful (where Michael and I get a shoutout for giving Brittany a few issues of one of my favorite comic books, Bitch Planet) and then keep it moving with Dear White People.

5.

Happier with Gretchen Rubin

This show is totally cheesy and probably resonates best with female married Gen Xers, but on that note, I cannot get enough. I would describe the shows host, upholder and author Gretchen Rubin, as awesomely uncool (and fine with that) with a total obsession when it comes to habits and happiness. Her sister, monotone “straight man” Elizabeth Craft, is the perfect yin to Gretchen’s spunky yang, and as a fellow obliger, I relate to her so much. Gretchen and Elizabeth explore what exactly makes us happy and how we can keep up the habits we want to keep to live our lives healthfully and happily. While I listen to the show religiously every week, Michael (also an obliger) tends to listen when he’s cooking, cleaning or doing chores and needs some inspiration.

We have picked up several good habits from Gretchen’s suggestions including: power hours (not the kind we did in college, guys), the One-Minute Rule, and giving ourselves and each other demerits and gold stars. I just finished reading Gretchen’s second book, Better Than Before, as well. The podcast is very much the embodiment of the book in audio form.

Start with: Episode 35: Upholders – Are You A Hermione? and then the next three episodes to really understand how Gretchen formulates happiness around habit formation.

6. 

Another Round with Heben and Tracy

PEW PEW PEW! Heben and Tracy are the affirming hosts of BuzzFeed’s Another Round where they discuss race, pop culture, life, bad jokes and squirrels — I cannot forget squirrels. This is another one I tend to play immediately, regardless of what’s waiting in my feed, as it always leaves me with an optimistic feeling, wishing only that I could share a cocktail with the dynamic hosts.

Start with: Episode 19: Was That A Microaggression Or Just Tuesday? because I love Audie Cornish, but the Hilary Clinton episode is pretty damn good as well.

7.

Death, Sex, + Money

Anna Sale talks about three of my favorite topics in spite of how difficult it can be to speak on those subjects with guests from all walks of life. By naming the topics in the show name, the guests know what they’re getting themselves into and it relieves some of the societal pressure and shame about being honest when it comes to death, sex, money. I hope listeners can take a page out of her book and talk about all three more often.

Start with: Hedwig, Older and a Little Less Angry with John Cameron Mitchell.

8. 

Conversation Parade

John Moe and Open Mike Eagle discuss their favorite TV show, and one of mine, in a podcast about Adventure Time, one of the best cartoons ever made. The show comes from such a place of nerdy love and with so many great interviews with voice actors and animators from the show, you’d almost think it was officially sanctioned. If you’re an Adventure Time fan, this podcast is a must-listen.

Start with: Episode 6: Storyboarding and BMO’s Multitudes

9. 

Start Up

I didn’t love season 2 as much as season 1, but the original podcast from Gimlet Media couldn’t not be on my list of best pcasts. Alex Blumberg is totally adorable and you find  yourself really rooting for him as a CEO and co-founder of this for-profit media endeavor.

Start with: Episode 15: Married To Your Business from the mini-season revisiting Gimlet Media as the subject of its inaugural podcast.

10. 

Radio Lab

Clearly one of the most solid shows NPR produces, RadioLab is a favorite of mine and Michael’s. Host Jad Abumrad is curious about how the world works and elevates topics about science, technology, philosophy and the human experience.

Start with: Darkode

Honorable Mention: 

Dear Sugar

I would definitely put this podcast in the touchy-feely category. Hosts Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond take their advice column to the radio, where they give realistic and useful advice to people going through it. Dear Sugar is an ironic name for the show, as the hosts do not sugar code a thing, especially when they disagree with each other. What makes it work so well is how they give weight to the complexity of family, love, sex and relationships and offer those that write to them honest, thoughtful, and equally complex advice. I love this podcast so much that I couldn’t leave it off. Michael bought me Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of essays from the advice column with the same name, for Christmas and it’s next up on my reading list.

Start with: Episode 10: When Friendships End