Tag Archives: kasteel well

we’re only hearts & bones & blood (but we are giants)

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Slacking this early in the year – but here I am, getting back to it. Since this serendipitously ended up on Traci’s birthday, I will speak to her beautiful soul on her 30th birthday.

Traci, you’re one of the bests. The people that makes me laugh the loudest, the longest, the hardest. You can always make me smile, always have something to tell me that will make me cry tears of happiness, and you obsess about the weird shit I obsess about like Lin-Manuel and GG and Marc Broussard, etc. etc. I love you to the moon, and I am so glad that we became friends in a moderately-sized Kasteel in Nederland, only to live a mile from each other ten years later and more than 5,500 miles from where we started.  

I am so thankful for ten years of inappropriate hand-holding, adventuring around Europe and around Boston and around Los Angeles, and for your making every day an adventure – whether we’re going to Trader Joe’s, hiking with Ray, or just sitting in someone’s driveway listening to Justin Timberlake, you make life more fun to be living.

Here’s a smattering of photos of us over the years – and here’s to many, many more.

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You and these five other beauties have made my life so much richer over the past ten years, and I can’t think of a better way to start celebrating 10 years from this trip than with a celebration of YOU. Happy Birthday, and see ya tonight! XOXO

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we felt like the luckiest ones

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We’ve been bouncing around this summer, making plans every weekend and counting down until the wedding. Now that it’s August, I can officially say that I’m getting married next month (!) and so we’re gearing up and winding down all at once.

This weekend we’re headed to Montana to see Sierra and Dan get married, and I cannot wait. SS was my freshman year roommate, and she’s been dealing with my crazy for 10 years now. Dan and I also met freshman year, and Dan and Sierra started dating early on, which was cool for me because we were all friends and it made my life easier.

In 2006, the spring of our sophomore year, I made Sierra go to the Kasteel Well with me, leaving Dan behind in Boston. Lucky for us, he wrote to both of us frequently to keep us company, and he came to visit us halfway through our stay. We were supposed to go to Berlin, but Dan’s flight was delayed so we end up going for the weekend to Rotterdam. I don’t really know why I had invited myself on this weekend trip with Sierra and her boyfriend who had come all the way across the ocean to see her, but it seemed reasonable at the time (plus, let’s be honest, Dan was half there to see yours truly.)

So we headed South to Rotterdam, and we got a last minute hostel, and we tried to figure out what there was to do in Rotterdam. Turned out, there wasn’t much. So, one of our days was spent visiting the Euromast and obviously making a snowman.

DSCF8223 DSCF8195 DSCF8184The photo above of us in a reflection is the only one of the three of us I have from that trip, but I’ll never forget how much fun we had, despite being poor, cold, off-plan, and probably hungry (and under caffeinated!)

A few years later in 2008, we traveled together for spring break, heading to Los Angeles to see Jeff and potentially see if I could live there (I decided I could.) Here’s another horribly bad-slash-amazing picture of the three of us. What are we doing?

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I am so excited to be celebrating these two nearly ten years after I read them the entire list of ingredients in my multivitamins, interrupting their first date and being the classic annoying freshman year roommate. Sierra and Dan are two of the bests, the reals, the forever-friends. Though we see each other only a couple times of year, if that, we don’t let that stand in the way of this truth: they are my family.

I can’t wait to watch you two get married this weekend – I am so lucky to have such a great two friends in this world who happen to also love each other. Let’s maybe try to get a better photo this weekend, yeah?