Inaugural post: a little bit about me

I've always wanted a blog. When I was little I used to love writing, journaling, and creating stories. Now that I am a grown-up, my writing has been relegated to emails, to-do-lists, and reports, and this is my attempt to make writing fun again. Another contributing factor is that I just moved to Utah, where chronicling one's life either in journals, family histories, or blogs seems to be the status quo. Maybe I'm just trying to fit in.

To be more specific, I did not just move to Utah, but to Sugar House, UT, a charmingly idyllic neighborhood 10 minutes away from downtown Salt Lake City. This is weird to me but completely awesome. I grew up and lived most of my life in Venice Beach, CA, which looks like this:

Now I'm in Sugar House, UT and my life looks like this: 

Sugar House Park, 1 mile from my house

These trees are what sold me 

Seriously, my street looks just like that second picture above except most of the time there are kids playing outside and people walking their dogs. 

Like this

Whenever I tell people that I am from Venice Beach, I get the same reaction. "That is so cool! I've always wanted to live in Venice. What an amazing experience to have grown up there." Nice things to say and probably heartfelt. Venice is cool. It's artsy and eclectic, and has an incredible history in music and skateboarding. But it is not a great place to grow up. The schools are terrible unless you luck out like I did and get into a Magnet program, I couldn't play in my front yard alone until I was like thirteen, and on a block of 80 houses, I had one friend on my street my entire life (hi, Miles Davis!). 

Now, I had a great childhood, but my parents (who are not hippies) had to work exceptionally hard to protect me and my three siblings from the prominent underbelly of Venice. For that, Bob and Wendy, I thank you. 

Greatest parents ever

So now I live in Sugar House. How did I get here? I met and fell in love with a man from Salt Lake City. On our second date, he literally asked me how portable I was. Robert loves Salt Lake and always wanted to come home once he was done putting in a few years at a large corporate law firm in Los Angeles. So last June after I finished my masters degree at UCLA, I moved away from the only home I've ever known and set down roots on a street with sprawling sycamore trees, red brick, and majestic mountains as a backdrop. 

Salt Lake City at night. I'm not Mormon, but the temple sure is pretty.

This is what houses look like from November until spring 

Since this is an introductory post, I should probably introduce myself. My name is Rebekah, and I am 33 years old. This is what I look like holding a lemon:

This is what I look like in awkward family photos:

It's a whole family of Supers! 

This is my husband cleaning the floors at his new law firm this week. Because he is good like that: 

This is my 8-year-old son Aidan who is impossibly cute and knows it:

I'm a librarian which means that everyone has a serious misconception about what I do and socially awkward people make jokes to me about the Dewey decimal system.  Really socially awkward people make sexy librarian jokes. I work at the University of Utah and love my job. 

This is where I get to work everyday:

J Williard Marriott Library cell phone pic

I'm the Assistant Director of the Mountain West Digital Library which means I get to help libraries in states where people usually shoot things, digitize old things and put them online (caveat: this is a gross overgeneralization about what I do, but if I tell you what I actually do in detail, you will go to sleep.) 

Sometimes my job makes me look like a DJ

I started this blog post thinking I was going to get to a story about a puppet show, but that may have to wait for another day because my dog Stan is looking at me like I need to take him for a walk. Oh yeah, this is my dog Stan. He is really cute but still not potty trained and therefore makes my perfect little house on my perfect little street smell like a toilet: 

Love you, Stan

I can already tell that I am going to like this blogging thing. Hopefully a few other people end up enjoying it too!