I think you always have a special little fondness for the styles that were cool when you were in high school. My formative years, for example, were spent developing extreme (and unrequited) crushes on two boys named Borden and Jordan (yes, ha ha, I know), both of whom dressed in that half-grunge half-skater hybrid so particular to the mid-'90s, and to this day I have quite the thing for a man in a button-down flannel.

Likewise, whenever I put on something that could arguably have been worn by Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, Kendrick gets all "Oh well HELLO there." (I get it; I think our entire generation had a collective crush on Winona Ryder in pretty much every movie she did around that time.) Which is what he said when he put on this dress...which is what made me realize that it's totally '90s, hence the accessorizing with hat and round sunglasses, plus a bag and pair of boots that were actually purchased during that era (the bag from a Barney's Warehouse sale; the boots from a Salvation Army in Colorado - they've been re-soled maybe five times, have a big hole in the side made by a switchblade during my Hogs 'n' Heifers bartending days, and are still kicking).

Nothing wrong with dressing up like your partner's Teenage Dream every once in awhile...especially if it happens to coincide with your own.

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The weather here is funny. It'll be all 90 degrees and clear blue skies in our back yard, and then we get in the car and drive twenty minutes away, and all of a sudden it's 50 and overcast. Last summer, I remember the first time we drove from the South Bay into San Francisco, our son looked out the window and said, "Mom, look! The clouds are falling down." Which is an incredibly creepy and Stephen King-story-ish thing to hear a three-year-old say, but it was true: the clouds were literally rolling down the sides of the hills. If you've never seen it, you wouldn't believe how dramatic the climate here is: you can actually see a wall of fog coming at you. Like, an actual wall. That you will hit.

Weird.

This weekend, we drove down to Pasadena (just outside of LA) to visit my parents, who were there for the weekend for my dad's work. At one point, my mom and I were standing in the hallway, waiting for Kendrick to come upstairs with the stroller, and she turned to me and said, "So. Do you like it here?"

Part of me wants to say I don't. Especially to my mom, because I miss her and my dad so much, every single day. And there's also a big part of me that feels like...you know, being a New Yorker is such a huge part of my identity, of my upbringing. I haven't technically lived in the city for a few years now, but I still felt like if I was raising my children just a few minutes outside its borders I'd...I don't know, I'd somehow be able to wrap my mind more easily around what their childhood would look like. I'd know what museums to take them to, what restaurants they'd like, be able to tell them stories about the things I did when I was their age when I walked down this street or that one.

At this point we've obviously committed to a life out here, but still:

| Carmel, California |

You know how there are certain things in your closet that you really love, but just never wear for whatever reason? For me, it was always hats: I would find one, and love it, and buy it, and then never wear it because every time I put it on I felt like I was wearing a big sign saying HELLO I AM THAT GIRL WEARING THE HAT.

And then one day I realized: I totally don't care if I'm that girl wearing the hat.

Foster's Freeze (San Jose, CA)

I've never been a Grateful Dead fan. Not because I don't like the music...because I know exactly nothing about it. I'm fairly certain that my high school boyfriend was into them, but he was also into Phish, and I apparently managed to tune out every single thing about his musical taste for the duration of our relationship (the one Phish concert he succeeded in dragging me to was less-than-successful, as what I did the moment I arrived was curl up on top of a table and fall asleep).

In short: if you told me to sing a Grateful Dead song for you on pain of death, I would be dead.