Shopping Sacramento: Scout Living

I’m still pretty fresh when it comes to unique , local shopping in Sacramento (and am open to suggestions!) despite having lived in Midtown for one year after college. But one spot I’ve returned to on multiple occasions now is Scout Living. (We found the Eames chair that some of you spotted in our dining room there!) It’s definitely my favorite shopping find so far.

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Andrew Bird, on repeat

There’s a cliché about girls that they’re prone to listening to one artist or one album (or watching one romantic comedy) over and over until the (now mostly proverbial) tape wears thin. I love to break stereotypes, but… guilty as charged. My friend Jesse used to mock me ruthlessly, probably deservedly, for my Tori Amos addiction as a freshman in college, for example. And the Aimee Mann-dominated Magnolia soundtrack? On constant repeat for at least a month after it came out.

Over the years, I’ve become less prone to episodes of slavish fandom, but I have yet to grow tired of any of my favorite Andrew Bird albums. He’s easily been my favorite musician for the better part of the past five years.

We had to give up our tickets to see him when he came through Davis in November (we ended up taking a very nice vacation that week, so no regrets), so we’re headed into San Francisco tonight to see him perform at a unique venue, Congregation Sherith Israel. I believe it will be more focused on his instrumental violin playing that the more vocally driven tracks I love, so it should be an interesting show. I loved this recent Opinionator piece he wrote for the NYT on the process of writing a song (and there are some audio samples, if you’re interested). I also love how he looks like a character in a Wes Anderson movie—with his skinny, lanky suits. I just learned that his wife makes a lot of his clothes and has a boutique in New York! 

Aron and I have a couple of non-wedding anniversaries we always mark in December—we’ve been together 13 years this month, and it was eight years ago that he proposed and that we decided on a life together—so I think we’ll use the occasion to celebrate!

P.S. How we celebrated last year. And the last time we saw Mr. Bird, on our first ever night away from Hudson, in Tarrytown.

[Image of Andrew Bird via FanArt]

Thinking about: The power of habit

Well over a year ago (the spring before we left New York), at an articles club, some friends and I started talking about Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit

. I knew it from the excerpts that appeared in the New York Times—they were fascinating: the article, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” discussed how Target was using customer purchase records to determine which female shoppers were pregnant.

Apparently, your habits are subject to change dramatically during major life-changes, like getting pregnant. When you have a child, you are open to developing new brand loyalties, making you an ideal customer for companies to, well, target! Anyway, I was loving the book so much during our trip to St. Martin that year that Aron and I even bought copies for our fathers.

I thought about it often when we were moving. One could look at the book as containing lessons for breaking bad habits. But as I understood, habits never die. You can only change or remove cues and form new habits. So it was of special interest to me when all of our cues were about to completely change! In moving, we were completely removing ourselves from our routines, our familiar surroundings and depositing ourselves into a totally different environment.

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