So, I almost made it to the end of June without a single hint of a sunburn… but some scarcely-applied sunblock and a strangely-positioned chair on the Big Star patio left me with just one half of one bright red shoulder last week. Sigh. I was so close, too!
Anyway, aside from trying to avoid the sun (#redheadprobs), here’s what’s been going on in my life lately.
Whenever summer comes around, I end up getting DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince stuck in my head about once a week. Is that just me?
“Summertime” makes me so nostalgic for the ’90s. I don’t know about you, but “hey pull over real quick and throw your car in park to override its safety system so we can sync my iPhone up to your car’s Bluetooth audio connection and use Siri to switch tracks on Spotify” just doesn’t really have the same flow as “pop in my CD and let me run a rhyme.”
Seriously, mix CDs were about a million times better than streaming service playlists. I think I loved the fact that they were so permanent. Unless you had a million dollars to spend on CD-RWs, you were basically stuck with whatever 22 songs you could fit onto a few CDs for the whole summer.
So, yeah. I miss a few things from the ’90s, like terrible super awesome mix CDs, writing in Lisa Frank binders with gel pens, and original Nicktoons. But, the style? Not so much. I know there’s a huge fashion revival going on right now trying to re-popularize some of the styles from the decade, but I’ll pass on the muddy brown lipstick, butterfly hair clips and Steve Madden flatforms.
But, the crop tops? The resurgence of those suckers started a few years ago, and I can get behind it. I just probably won’t pair them with incredibly low-rise super flared jeans this time around.
When it comes to eating breakfast on workdays, I am a grab-and-go kind of person.
Sometimes I’ll plop a big Pyrex bowl of sliced melon on my kitchen table to pick at while I get ready, but since my shift starts at 6 a.m., I ditch any and all morning activities that aren’t absolutely crucial to getting me looking socially presentable and out the door.
That includes sitting down and eating breakfast.
I do make coffee in the a.m. and drink my cup while I’m doing my hair and makeup, but a full sit-down breakfast — even if it’s just cereal and milk — is not possible. So, I usually end up bringing my breakfast to work.
I have a few go-to staples at this point. Overnight oats and smoothies are two of my favorites, but I like to keep a few things in the freezer for the days I hit snooze one too many times and don’t even have time to press “liquify” on a blender.
One of those freezer-friendly portable breakfasts? Baked oatmeal cups.
I have, admittedly, somewhat of a spotty track record with skincare.
All through my late teens and early 20’s, I slept in my makeup. And — even as recently as last year — if I ran out of face cleanser or couldn’t fit my moisturizer in my TSA-approved baggie of liquids, I’d just swap out my body soap and hand cream. Cringe.
I’ve been genetically blessed with mostly-clear skin. I have a pale freckly complexion that doesn’t break out much at all aside from the inevitable that-time-of-the-month zit, so I’ve always been able to get away with treating my skin like straight garbage.
But now that 30 is on the horizon (gulp), I’ve been trying to take a more active role in putting together an actual skincare regimen. As it turns out, it’s kinda hard to do! I’m planning on writing a post about how you can develop a skincare routine starting from scratch, but for now, I’m just going to share my current lineup.
It’s actually somewhat embarrassing to admit this, but — for roughly a year and a half of my post-graduate adult life — I didn’t have business cards.
Whoops.
My last job had cards printed for me, and I relied exclusively on those for about three years. I used my personal cellphone for everything, so that number was printed on them. I wasn’t freelancing or side hustling at all back then, so my work-provided cards filled every need I had.
But, when I took my new job in early 2015, it did not come with pretty printed business cards right off the bat. Also, I had started freelancing and had joined a few professional organizations — which basically exist only for networking purposes.
And so, after putting it off month after month and scribbling my Twitter handle down on scrap paper (sorry everyone), I finally got around to designing my own personal business cards and having them printed.
And then, ironically enough, my job presented me with a case of 1,000 business cards two months later. Sigh.
However, I think it’s important to have more than one business card design — more on that later. So, right now, I have three different card options: My company-provided cards, and two different personal business card designs.
Designing both of my personal business cards was surprisingly hard! Picking a design, deciding what contact information I wanted to include… the process was a little more nitpick-y than I thought it would be. It took a few weeks of designing, editing, proofing and consulting to get them how I wanted them, but I’m really pleased with how they turned out.
Here are a few tips I picked up along the way.
It’s been an emotional graduation season this year.
I’m a few years removed from college at this point, so I usually forget all about graduation season. At least, until I’m trying to grab dinner during an early summer weekend and the waitlist is hours long and the restaurant is filled with smiling teens and 20-somethings. Then I remember.
But this year’s a little different. Not only did my little sister graduate from college, but I’m also celebrating two notable anniversaries this year: It’s been 10 years (!!!) since I graduated high school, and five years since I walked across the stage from undergrad.
While I want to say I can’t believe it’s already been a decade since I left high school with the rest of the class of 2007, it really does feel like so long ago. It’s been a whirlwind 10 years and I’ve changed so much. The change isn’t really noticeable day-to-day — or even year-to-year. But, when I look back at High School Randi dressed in a canary red cap and gown, nervously tottering across a gymnasium stage, a decade’s worth of change is glaringly obvious.
In a lot of ways, I’m still pretty unsure of myself. I work in an unstable industry, and I’m far from being “settled down” in that American Dream White Picket Fence kind of way… although, to be honest, that’s not what I want right now, and even though High School Randi didn’t exactly have a 10-year plan for her life, I think she’d be pretty content with where Grown Up Randi is at right now.
When you don’t eat meat and one of your good friends is a taxidermist, the jokes practically write themselves.
But, jokes aside, my friend Mickey is a taxidermist by trade. I’ve been friends with this girl since high school, when we both obsessed over things like UnderOath, pyramid-studded belts and Vans sneakers together.
I’ve always felt kind of bad, because I really wanted to support her career, but also I didn’t really want to gut and stuff a dead rat. You know, normal friendship dilemmas.
So, I got super stoked when I found out that she was offering a not-quite-as-gruesome class at the recent Pilsen Renegade Craft Fair pop-up: Butterfly pinning!
Important side note: No butterflies were killed during the making of this project. That would be sad. This little guy died naturally at a butterfly farm.
This craft takes two sessions to make, because the butterfly needs to be moist when you spread it, and then dry when you mount it. I did the first part of the project at Renegade, and then Mickey came over and helped me finish it up a few weeks later.
I’m totally in love with how this framed specimen turned out!
Oh, and the best part? She also sells these kits in her Etsy store (affiliate link), so you can actually buy your supplies and do this at home! No worries — the directions are included.
An interesting fact about my little Chicago apartment: it’s only my second ever apartment to offer a front door closed off to the general public. You need two keys to get to it: a building key, and a unit key.
All but one of my college apartments and houses had outdoor-accessible doors. This meant that anything you left by the front door — doormats, shoes, shovels, half-finished bottles of pomegranate Burnett’s, seasonal decor, mail — would end up stolen.
So, one of the things I love about #aptwithani is the hallway-facing front door, because it means I can decorate it for each season with a beautiful wreath, without having to worry quite so much about it disappearing.
Yesterday marked my two-year anniversary in Chicago. Where has the time gone? It doesn’t feel like it’s been two years since I packed my boxes into a U-Haul and moved into my little apartment.
Oh, my little apartment.
There are so many things I love about the city, but real estate is not one of them.
You know what I’m talking about — the impossibly tiny closet-sized units that come with all the perks of big city living.
Seriously. Sitcoms are filled with totally unrealistic expectations of big-city apartment living.
I’m looking at you, Carrie Bradshaw.
Excuse me while I take a second to gush over here. My baby sister is a college graduate! Kelly picked up her bachelor’s degree in human biology from Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science this past weekend, and I’m so excited for her. She’s one of the smartest and most caring people I know, and I can’t wait to see how she changes the biomedical field for the better.
I wanted to take a minute to heap tons of praise on her because she’s brilliant and amazing, and even though the two of us are as different as night and day, I couldn’t possibly love her any more than I do.
