The editors and writers behind Blog Nosh Magazine are a motley bunch. Our stories are hilarious, colorful, transcendent, painful, absurd, and strong. They are what define us, make us interesting, and sharpen our eye for stories that we know will resonate with you.

I am not an exception to this rule. I have my story, as well, and as much as I try to fight its attempts to define me, it colors my every day.

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. When she left, she took my home with her. Down to the bare slab of concrete. I was far from alone in my loss.

Her reach was astonishing. Her strength was impressive. Her cruelty was deplorable. And yet, she left us with spirits far better defined than we thought possible in the days and hours before August 29, 2005.

Our feature today begs a little favoritism as I republish my own first writing of my family’s experience on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during and after Hurricane Katrina, playfully titled Victor Vito, after a Laurie Berkner song. Many of you have read it before, far more never even realized that I had a Katrina story. That’s one of my favorite things about the editors of Blog Nosh Magazine: we do not wear our tragedies on our sleeves. We are so much more than what we’ve witnessed. Plus, we much prefer to knock your socks off with them when you least expect it. It is then that we know you are listening.

While we have your delectably nibble-worthy ear, we would like to take a moment and thank one of this month’s sponsors of Blog Nosh Magazine, Tide Loads of Hope. A deliciously novel disaster-relief campaign, Tide Loads of Hope centers around a simple plan. After natural disasters, nationwide, a Loads of Hope truck equipped with 32 high-efficiency washers and dryers is sent out to meet one of the most basic human needs of families in crisis: clean clothes.

You can read much more about the Loads of Hope program at http://tideloadsofhope.com, as well as my personal response to their nationwide disaster relief efforts in my Hurricane Katrina 4th Anniversary post at Velveteen Mind. Only the end is about Tide…

{Originally published on Velveteen Mind as Victor Vito}

Laurie Berkner’s song “Victor Vito” came on and I felt three seconds of pure happiness, and then I could not breathe. It was like the exhilaration of jumping into a wave, then realizing too late that it’s too high and too deep. Before you know it, you are going under. It felt like that wave.

No. More like a storm surge.

Two years ago this month, I was still unpacking boxes. We had been moved in for a month already, but I had been taking my time unpacking all of the decorations because I wanted everything to be just right. Although we didn’t plan to stay in this new beach apartment for long, it was going to be just the change of pace we needed while we looked for our new home. The home where we hoped to stay for years this time. In the meantime, let’s have some fun in the sun!

Pants’s room was done and it looked suitable for a Pottery Barn Kids catalog shoot, only for a really cool kid with some fantastically groovy stuff. After waiting over a year to bring in the ceramic giraffes inherited from my great-aunt (which I had admired since I was little), we had finally displayed them on the wall with the rest of his mish-mash of funky stuff and it couldn’t have looked cooler. So eclectic. So pulled together. So him.

The living room was coming together and I was so excited that I would sometimes just lie on the couch at night after Pants was in bed, turn off all the lights except for a warm lamp or two, and look around at our home. Everything was coming together. Everything just fit here, even if it was only temporary.

I don’t always tell people that the home we lost in Hurricane Katrina was an apartment we were renting. For some reason, they seem to sort of turn off when I tell them that. As though “oh, it was just a rental” means that it wasn’t a home. That our stuff wasn’t real.

Only the walls were rented. The home was ours…

{Originally published on John T. Unger Studio}

The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The second best thing that ever happened to me was when the dot com crash of 2000 wiped out most of the design industry at the peak of my career as a freelance print designer. I went from turning away work every week to working exactly 7 days of the next year. I lost my girl. I lost my loft. I lost part of my thumb in an accident moving out of the loft. I pretty much lost it all.

Of course, the only reason I was working in offices was to fund the art career I wanted… materials, space, tools, etc. I worked eight hours in the office and ten in the studio, sleeping when I passed out involuntarily. I decided that if my industry had tanked, I was damned if I was gonna retrain to do something else I didn’t want to do. I chose to make the art be my sole means of support. I built some monumentally scaled commissions working out of borrowed shop space, with borrowed gear, sleeping on borrowed couches.

It worked. I’ve been making my living as an artist ever since, and these days I earn triple the income I ever did from the best corporate gigs.

The third best thing that ever happened was the day my studio building collapsed under a load of snow while I was standing on the roof shoveling. I rode that roof to the ground like a gut-shot rodeo pony. The building and some pricey tools were completely destroyed, but I was unharmed… until I spent the next three months (December, January and February) without heat, running water or a stove because the natural gas line into the house had been severed in the collapse. The gas company refused to fix the line until they could bury it in the spring. I lost a few brain cells, I’m sure, by running an unvented kerosene heater inside the house to stay alive.

{Originally published in Wisdom Pursuit}

I learned a great Hebrew word in my quiet time recently- Hineni.

Hineni means “I’m ready, Lord; I’ll go if you send me; I’m listening, Lord, tell me what you would have me to know.” It is the word Abraham used when God called to him and asked him to sacrifice Isaac; it is the word Moses used as he stood before the burning bush, and it is the word that young Samuel used in the temple when he heard a voice calling to him in the night.

It’s a powerful word. A word that brought life- changing events for each of the people who spoke it. And I bet not one of them would take it back. Not one of them regrets grappling with the fear, but giving in to the will of the God who is Good, who has plans to prosper and not to harm us.

The hard part comes for those of us who are a little more seasoned in life and have seen that God’s ways are not our ways, and that our lives are not always going the way we think He should have them mapped out. His plans to prosper us and not harm us may be in the next life, and not right now. So, to conquer our fears we need an eternal perspective, a reminder that this life is but a blip on the screen of time. God sees it all, and He has a great call and plan for each of us, both in this life and the next.

Since we are but temporal creatures, our job is to be willing, just for today. We are not called to know what God has in store for us in the next life, or even next year or next week. We are called to take one step at a time to seek God’s plan and to follow it with conviction.

Wrestle with the fear, and beat it down if you must. But, if you truly seek God’s call on your life, then offer to Him these words:

{Originally posted on Poot and Cubby}

Dear Elliot,

One day when you are older, I will tell you about the day I rode the subway with tulips in my arms. I will tell you how people gave me sideways smiles thinking that someone had bought me flowers. But they couldn’t know what I really held in my hands – that I was carrying fairies to my four-year-old.

A few weeks ago you told me that a fairy lived inside every tulip. And that if you placed the flowers in your room and made a wish, the fairy would grant your wish while you slept.

So today, I brought you fairies, believing that you were incapable of coming up with an ungrantable wish – that anything you muttered before you said goodnight would be chocolate-related or something equally easy. Instead, you told me you were going to wish for wings.

In the morning, I will wake up holding my breath. I will hope that the absence of wings sprouting from your back won’t convince you that beside your bed stand ordinary tulips. I will tell you that the fairies are so magical, that they gave you the power to imagine your wings as if they were really there.

Then we will look into the center of a flower and if we squint hard enough, we will see one. Tiny and covered in glitter. Able to hear only the voices of children who might wish for wings or candy or decent splashing puddles. Her ears too small to hear the too-big wishes that someone older might have – to reverse the irreversible. Cure the incurable. Create the uncreateable.

{Originally published at Aesthetic Outburst}

I start teaching Book Design again next week and have been searching for interesting images to show my students. Libby recently posted these typographic tree columns by why not associates. They’re being made in collaboration with Gordon Young at Crawley Library (UK) and reminded me of the floors at The Seattle Public Library designed by Ann Hamilton.

{Originally Published on Learned on Women}

To feed both my quick hit Tweets (I’m @AndreaLearned) and longer blog posts, I survey the many marketing-related news stories on a daily basis. Today, I found plenty of food for thought. Two articles in the same MediaPost newsletter caught my eye: 1) a story of Swiffer doing promotions at the much-buzzed Blogher conference, and 2) the story of Target sponsoring “staycation” events. Those news bits brought to my mind the broad continuum of marketing to women (over which the pendulum regularly swings) – from pinky, pink-ness to transparency – all in one place. Fascinating!

The background on those two tales -

(Visibly pink pitch) P&G’s Swiffer appealed to the girly side of female bloggers by sponsoring a pre-event Blogher lounge, SocialLuxe, which was described this way in Karl Greenberg’s MediaPost article:

As part of the partnership, P&G and Swiffer will offer guests manicures, pedicures, something called “clean-tinis,” and the first-ever BlogLuxe Award presentation — awards given by bloggers to bloggers — to recognize outstanding efforts in the blogging community.

(Full-on transparent approach) According to MediaPost’s Sarah Mahoney, Target is leveraging awareness of the bad economy/staycation trend to appeal to women and families trying to have fun with less money this year by:

…sponsoring a long list of local art events, offering 2,200 free days at more than 100 museums, theaters and cultural institutions throughout the country.

One approach resonates with today’s culture and the other seems lost in never-never land. One is relevant to a lot more women for a longer period of time and one is fun for a small amount of women who may well not remember it a few days later. One encourages/embraces a larger trend toward experiencing the wonders of your own “backyard,” and the other is counter to the more sustainable sensibilities that a lot of the members of its target market exhibit in their real and daily lives.

{Originally posted on Diary of an Unlikely Housewife.}

For someone so unadept at keeping house, I am surprisingly (some might say annoyingly) neurotic about organizing.

My computer files are organized in folders, sub-folders, sub-subfolders, so are my favorites. My spices are in alphabetical order, with the spice mixes all on one side, separate from the single spices. When I do my grocery shopping I place all produce in one bag, all frozen foods in a separate bag, all refrigerated foods in a third bag and all dry, canned and packaged foods in a fourth. And if I buy any beauty products or toiletries, they go in a small paper bag inside the dry foods bag.

Now, to me this just makes sense, because it makes putting stuff away a piece of cake, and avoiding leaving something that goes in the fridge at the bottom of a bag with dry stuff in it. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m weird. I am messy, I have to actually force myself to put things away every now and then just so I’ll be able to find them again, but if anyone helps me put stuff away, they HAVE to put it exactly where it belongs or it irritates me to no end. I should be thankful for any help I can get, right? Instead I prefer having no help to having to move things to the places where I think they belong.

My poor husband, who has been putting up with me for 11 years (I do have some good traits, you know), after almost 2 years in this house still doesn’t totally get where everything goes when the dishwasher is unloaded or the groceries are put away. To me it’s very simple: the burgundy plates on one pile on the lower shelf – next to them the lavender plates and then the everyday white plates. The Chinese tea set, the bowls and the Mayan-inspired dinner set on the middle shelf, the white porcelain dinner set and Croatian coffee set on the top shelf obviously, because they are only used for special occasions. What is so difficult about that?

Or the arrangement of pots and pans in the kitchen: frying pans in one pile, pots with one long handle in another, pots with 2 short handles in a third; lids on the higher shelf, baking dishes in the other cabinet (on the opposite side of the kitchen).

I don’t know, to me there is a logic to all this – but I guess it isn’t apparent to everyone. My friend K. thinks this is where my Virgo personality shows up, my mom thinks I’m just concentrating on the wrong things and thinks that I’m neurotic just for doing a weekly menu and shopping list, but understands some of the organizing points (and questions others). The only one who understands me is my cool aunt Rox, except it has always been sort of an in-joke in the family, how high-maintenance she is because she wants her things just so – so I’m not sure that her support gains me any points.

{Originally Published on Food Loves Writing}

Morning, and the kitchen is quiet, with sunlight streaming across the sink and onto the wood floors, and I pour coffee, grab my lunch, take my keys from the little basket by the door. There will be 20 minutes at least, between me and the office, along expressways of commuters, and I will look at them, talking on their phones, singing with their radios, glancing at their watches, before I park and walk inside, up stairs to my desk, to begin the work day, to talk with my coworkers and double-check spellings at Merriam-Webster and watch the geese fly past my window and onto the roof.

5:30, and I’m getting in my car, like I’ve done so many times, and I’m stopping by the train station, like I do every day, and I’m walking in my front door, and I’m eating dinner, again. It’s spring here—when did spring come? Weren’t we just talking about fall and winter and how I hated the snow? The light lasts longer now, and the days are warmer, rainy. I take it all, eagerly, greedily, like it will never end.

You know, I’m only 26—I find myself throwing the only in there more and more, the way it’s inserted into excuses from guilty children like, I only skipped one homework assignment or I only said that because the other kids did. But as much as I know we are guaranteed nothing, in terms of time, in terms of living, I also know 26 is, usually, not a lot of life to have lived and, usually, it’s not enough time to warrant strong opinions or heavy reminiscing. But I do: I look at the moments around me—the way the grass looks when it’s wet, shiny with dew and fragrant with summer; how my mom makes me laugh when she does, when her mouth closes and her nose widens and her eyes slant, just slightly, as her body shakes, like her mother’s did; the kindness someone shows you when he carries in your bags, so you don’t have to—and I think, I am living this.

This, right here—the morning coffee and the conversation and the drive home in daylight to a cozy evening with a book and blankets—this is life, and it’s a gift, and I am living this.

{Originally published on Sgt. and Mrs. Hub}

Last night a big group of us friends got together for a delicious taco salad dinner with chocolate cake for dessert. What a great time we had!

I laughed so hard and so much I was afraid my face was going to fall off.

But, that’s the best part, isn’t it?

I was worried that Daniel and I were never going to make friends after we moved here. It was touch and go for awhile. We had tons of people over for barbecues but we just weren’t finding “our type of people.” You know, the good kind. The kind that when your face falls off from laughing so hard, they’ll help you pick it up and stick it back on.

Thankfully, we found them. Or did they find us? I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m happy now.

Here is a glimpse into our fun time last night. You can find more on Flickr.

This is Miss Sydney and her Mama, Kelly. Isn’t she gorgeous?