My Garden Year: 2019

Update 2023: I stopped using Twitter a year ago and made my account private, so many of the images in this post will no longer show up. Here’s a gallery with all my garden photos from that year:

https://twitter.com/DeirdreS/status/1076904292299100160?s=20

We moved into this (rented) home in December 2018. Did I mention that it has a garden? And even a greenhouse?!? Best of all, it was not already landscaped, nor did the landlord have anyone coming in regularly to take care of it – it’s all up to me, and I am thrilled. The garden has kept me very happily busy for much of the year (in addition to all the other things that normally keep me busy, plus a wedding).

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2019 in Review

January

After a very busy December 2018, traveling and then moving house, we spent the first weeks of January in a state of collapse. The California winter rain was heavier than usual so the weather was dank and depressing, but we had plenty to do indoors, unpacking and setting up our new home. I went to Seattle for an internal AWS marketing kick-off. Brendan worked on a new book. (Yes, I edited this one, too.)

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Pink Wedding: My Wedding Dress

Had we been able to make a trip to India before our wedding, things would have turned out very differently. We both like and are comfortable in Indian clothing, and would have been happy to buy (or have made) something Indian, probably a lehnga for me (I have not worn saris enough to be able to wear them gracefully – it’s an art). Brendan looks very sharp in a long kurta, and could definitely rock an achkan.

But this was all happening on a short timeline. We couldn’t go to India before the wedding (we’d be going there in September, after the wedding), and I was not able to find anything Indian readily available and to our taste in the US. 

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia