The Pro Portrait Studio was clearly money well spent.

I have never been on a cruise. This is mostly, I think, because I grew up with parents who - based on literally zero first-hand experience - were absolutely positive that cruises were terrible in every way. And so I, too, spent more than three decades believing in the depths of my soul that cruises were, indeed, terrible, and swore that I would never waste my hard-earned money on one. And then one day a few months ago, a friend of mine explained cruises to me in the following way:

“They’re like Club Med,” she said. “But on a boat.”

Well HELLO there. Long time no see.

I’d like to say that I was all zen and “well, there’s nothing I can do about the total and utter absence of communication with the outside, Internet-having world” that I probably should have expected to have for the past few days - being, you know, in the MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN - but nope: I was a lunatic about it, and spent a minimum of two hours every day wandering aimlessly around the ship and riding glass elevators up and down from the bar at the bottom of the ship to the bar at the top of the ship, desperately seeking a spot that would let me do anything at all other than watch the rainbow wheel of death take another spin around my screen. Every time I saw a person whose WiFi appeared to be working, I hated them, even if they were a sweet old grandma.

I tried to be all chilled-out and it’s good to get off the grid; I’m on vacation!, I swear - but every time I got even a whisper of service all it did was let me see tiny glimpses of things like important client emails, or contractor updates, or massive Anthropologie sale alerts (kidding, kidding; Anthropologie’s sales are never massive). So I’d see these glimpses and become vaguely aware of their existence…and then, like the devil himself, the Oceanic Internet would SNATCH THEM AWAY.

Funny story: you know yesterday’s post? The not-very-long one that doesn’t even include the links it’s supposed to and almost certainly has weird typos or formatting issues (I wouldn’t know; a little blue line that enjoys sticking at the 17% mark appears whenever I try to look at it, and one thing I am REALLY sick of looking at is a little blue line that is stuck at the 17% mark).

It took me THREE DAYS to get it up.

I am assuming that somewhere in Cabo San Lucas there is internet, largely because Jennifer Aniston spends a lot of time here and I’d imagine she probably needs to check her email every once and awhile just to see whether she got richer somehow). But there is no internet here, on my ship. (I paid for internet on my ship. I think the effort required for it to dock overwhelmed its senses, and it can no longer handle additional requests.)

So, in the service of my sanity (and assuming nothing miraculous transpires in the Internet-having category over the next couple of days), let’s consider me the metaphorical equivalent of the photo of my children buried in the sand that you can see on my instagram, but that I cannot post here because Cabo Problems.

I hadn’t been planning to visit Brian at Body Electric on my next trip down to LA, but I'd also been hoping that I might be pregnant on my next trip down to LA. And you can't pierce your ears when you're pregnant, so the plan was to put it off for awhile - say, a year or so. Then I found out I wasn't, and wasn't going to be anytime soon - if ever, honestly - and finding this out coincided with a trip down to Los Angeles to so I could focus on finishing up our next book and also just be with Francesca while both of us take a minute to deal with some Big Life Things.

So I booked an appointment and went: all by myself, in the middle of the day. I took my time getting ready that morning; I curled my hair and put on an outfit I liked. Instead of coming in with a plan, I just showed up. Brian and I talked abut our lives for a bit - the good and the bad, but mostly the weirdness of these past few months - and when it came time to discuss what I was there for I just told him to do whatever he wanted.

This is what he did.

My kind of V-day celebration: A trip to the tattoo parlor.

Valentine's Day is a holiday I tend to skip over - or at least forget about until the very last second. When gifts are involved, though, I'm OK with them being a bit traditional - perfume, pajamas, that kind of thing. But I also realllllly don't like giving (or receiving) gifts that won't actually be used. It makes me anxious.

Last year, around Valentine's Day, Kendrick and I were going through a rough patch, and so I put in more effort than I think I've ever put into a gift in my life: I made him one of those personalized "The Story of Us" books, and it ended up being something we both pick up every once in awhile, when we need a reminder of what it is we're doing here. (And it doesn't have to be cheesy at all; I'll do an IG story later on today showing you a few pages of the one I made for K in case you want to make one and could use some ideas.)