• Forbes: Best Place to Live for Business
• Bloomburg Businessweek: Best City in America
• Portfolio.com: Best Quality of Life

Raleigh is not always the most interesting place to visit (every time I have visitors I stress about what to do with them), but it is a nice place to call home. Seeing all those lists come out caused me to do some thinking: If Raleigh is so great, there must be people who are doing things to make it great. Who are they? What are they doing? What do they like about the city?

I didn’t have answers, but I figured I could find them. This thought process turned into a writing idea — I could interview people who are doing interesting things in the city and write profiles of them. It sounded fun, but time consuming. And then I lost my job. So, with nothing but time on my hands I thought I’d go for it.

Anyway, after several months of doing interviews and writing them up and driving around the city taking pictures, here’s the product: Raleigh Obscura

Take a look, I hope you enjoy it. I hope to publish a post a week until…well, until I run out of people to interview or energy to write them up, I guess.

What was your favorite year growing up?

This was about two years ago, but I think my answer is the same: third grade. It was a pretty great year. Here are a couple highlights:

• My friend Colleen and I were in the play Scrooge and got to skip school a lot to do performances for other schools.
• Colleen and I also tied a hose to a tree and tried to swing off my roof by it. She went first and smacked right into the tree. I still laugh remembering this incident.
• The fourth graders always organized amazing games of tag on the Upper Big Toy*, making recess the most fun ever.
• I think I was the smartest kid in my class.
• I learned to roller skate down this big hill in front of my house without falling down repeatedly. I was a really klutzy kid.
• We had a dog named Ziggy who was adorable. We ended up getting rid of him (her? I have no idea) because it would always escape and go up to the local elementary school and run around causing a ruckus.

Of course, some bad things happened too:

• One day a wasp stung the top of my head and the nurse put all this smelly stuff on it to make it stop hurting, but then no one would come near me all day. It was really embarrassing.
• I started losing teeth (so late), a process I hated so much — just thinking about it now makes me cringe.

* Big Toys are those big wooden playground structures (like this). Our school had two: Upper and Lower, based on their relative location on a hill. The Upper Big Toy had a cool net thing you could play on, that’s actually where the wasp incident happened. The Lower Big Toy had big bars that you could do gymnastics tricks on and some tall(ish) pedestals we would stand on and chicken fight on when the teachers weren’t looking.

What was your favorite year growing up?

The first of the hurricane crafts: upgraded bamboo trays.

I’d been wanting some trays to cart stuff around on. I like to sit on the porch or the couch with some crackers and hummus, a book, and a glass of wine, but I’m lazy and get annoyed carrying things around.

I found these useful, but ugly, trays at Goodwill:

So, I painted them white:

Then traced out the inside onto a piece of scrap paper:

Then I traced the scrap paper shape onto some oil cloth and cut that out to line the tray with. I must not have done a very good job though because I had to trim quite a bit off. As I said, I’m lazy, so this step was sort of tedious.

Anyway, add some hot glue glue and (ta-da!) much improved trays:

Very handy.

I’ve noticed that people in their late twenties tend to approach this event with trepidation that sometimes borders on fear and anger. On the other hand, people in their thirties seem to be enthusiastic about what a great decade it is. Things like, “That’s when I hit my stride!” Or, “It’s the best decade yet!” Etc., etc.

It’s no secret that I love birthdays, but while I adore the days themselves, I tend to not care too much about the age factor. That said, I did have about a day when I was not too thrilled to hit thirty. After all, if you pressed pause on my life at just this moment, it doesn’t look like I’ve accomplished too much — I’m jobless, don’t have any of those things people are ‘supposed’ to have (a nice car, a house, two and a half adorable children, etc.) by this age and, according to the calendar, I’m clearly not getting any younger.

Lucky for me, I’m refusing to think of it that way. I’m usually quite good at not measuring myself to others and not throwing myself extended pity parties (I mean, we all do that sometimes, right?). I liked my 20s more than my teens, so I expect to like the next decade more than the one that preceded it.

So, cheers to the next 10 years! Here’s hoping I don’t grow moss on my back like this guy.

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