Dana Burland

May 2008-June 2008 I had two viable options for internships the summer after my junior year of college—one 20 minutes from my house and the other all the dang way downtown in Detroit. The drive was not my favorite, but the internship at Detroit Media Partnership —owner of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News—was well worth it. I worked on Strut Magazine , a monthly circular aimed at metro-Detroit women; it was a great fit after a year’s worth of blogging at A Sizable Apple for a similar audience. The team pulled me in to almost every meeting and I got a great feel for what’s involved in putting a monthly magazine together, but the majority of my work was handling simple web maintenance and clean up tasks. I created and populated an online calendar for readers to view local events and I launched the first blog—hey, it was 2008—for the mag, often populating it with blurbs about local shops and recipes.

You know what feels good? Full weekends. I mean full, busy-in-a-good-way, weekends. Like this weekend—packed with of good food, good laughs, deep sleeping, outdoor adventures and crisp winter running. Perfection. Friday night I took B out for a swanky dinner (actually, our mutual casino winnings took us out for dinner. Thanks Sands!) then he took me to a show. One of my "food rules" is that I won't pay for something I can cook better myself. I mean that in the least pretentious way possible; I say no to soggy broccoli and over-cooked pasta from Applebee's, but yes to the always-perfectly cut quadruple stacked BLTs from the diner off Airport Road. I'd love to learn how to cook an applewood bacon wrapped filet of salmon, and how to make lemon beurre blanc sauce. Yum, courtesy of Porter's Pub.  Taking pictures of food at a restaurant: still just as embarrassing as when my grandpa did it during a family dinner at Bucca De Beppo. But by far better than...

One of the perks of working in the journalism industry is covering the random, wacky and strange—and learning enough to spark a new interest or curiosity. Like Veronica Corningstone covering the cat fashion show in Anchor Man . Kind of. Not gonna lie, when I was trudging through the uncharted woods of the arboretum on my school’s campus (yeah, we had an arboretum—or a ‘garden of trees’) looking for a small, unmarked box, I was more irritated than intrigued. As a low-level sophomore at the school paper , I was assigned to cover geocaching on campus. I was walking with some member of the geocaching club following blips from a GPS device hunting for something we couldn’t keep. What the hell’s the point? I wrote the story, turned it in, and promptly put the experience out of mind, until the other night. Some car commercial showed a young couple driving around and geocaching.

I typically lead a pretty quiet, non-dramatic life. I go to work, I run and I try to read a few pages of a book before bed. I try to do good to others. I’m happy if at the end of the week my kitchen is clean and my DVR is moderately full. My town is quiet and so is my life. Recently though, I feel like the universe is shaking my life’s snow globe. Tremendously good, shockingly sad and mega confusing news has all come my way within the last few weeks, and I’m trying to sort through it all. A lot of it is out of my control and it very much makes me feel like I’m a little plastic figurine in a scenic globe where the snow is feverishly fluttering around me. I think I had gotten blissfully used to the flakes sitting gently on the ground—only moving slightly here and there. It’s ok, I know. Sometimes it’ll snow and sometimes it won’t; sometimes flurries will last for days and other times it will seem like it never will snow again. I’m just crossing my plastic figurine fingers that the ...

January 2008-April 2008 I had been livin’ life large, writing for my school paper with  my own column when a new opportunity came knocking. One of my professors, who was a full time employee at the local newspaper, wanted to know if I wanted in on a blogging endeavor. Oh please, like this girl wouldn’t want in on a blogging endeavor. Covering campus life for the local newspaper was a pretty cool gig. I felt like the ambassador between classless-Fridays, 10-am-is-too-early college students and the 9-5 adult readers. I wanted Grand Rapids Press readers to feel like they too were ‘in’ on some of the idiosyncrasies of Grand Valley State University life. I wanted them to feel as welcome as I did on campus, though most readers of the paper live 20 minutes east of GVSU’s cornfield surrounded main campus. With that in mind, some stories I wrote almost wrote themselves—like the post about the overly optimistic bus driver , who always left students with words of wisdom or motivatio...

On my drive home for Thanksgiving one year I extended my trip to spend a pre-holiday weekend with my good pal, Kendal . I was looking forward to quality giggle time and picking up the witty discourse I love her so much for—but when I gave her a call 45-minutes away from her house, she picked up the phone in tears. My trip was perfectly timed in the worst way; that morning she broke off her relationship with new boyfriend, Rob, and needed a weekend with a good friend more than ever. The next day we wandered to a paint-your-own-pottery place to craft and chat our hearts out. Mid-decorating on her empty ceramic bowl, Kendal started to tear up again. It was obvious my pal was more upset than your average newly single girl. Rob was very certain of their relationship already; she was just starting to open up and his confidence overwhelmed her. Listen, who knows who his “Nance” really is, I told her as we embarked on our third hour of pottery painting—hypothetically speaking of Rob La...

Using Facebook can be sneaky. One day you’re innocently passing around photos to friends and the next day your grandma’s calling you wondering what a keg stand is and why you have an entire photo album dedicated to it. The way we post to social media sites—and the way social media sites use our posts—changes all the time. I spend an above average amount of time (not including upload-obsessed college kids) keeping up with Facebook for work, and boy have I learned a thing or two in the process. Here’s how I’ve changed my personal usage to stay a step ahead of Facebook’s constant changes. Open Vault Nothing on the Internet is private, no matter how many privacy settings fool you into thinking so. Content you hide on Facebook one day can be mysteriously unlocked in the next batch of site changes. Es no bueno. Adopt the idea that your witty status updates about your ex-boyfriend and photos of you over-celebrating at a football game aren’t yours—they’re Facebook’s. When privacy, secur...

I know what you're thinking, and no, it's not possible to wait and find a camera before eating the chicken. It's just not possible. If you’ve ever gotten the bug to don a frilly apron and cook up a beautiful, full, 1950’s-housewife-inspired meal, this recipe is for you. You’ve never gotten that bug? Oh, right, me either. This recipe is perfect for modern day, non-apron wearing cooks, too. I’m talkin’ about a roasted chicken, yall. A whole, glorious giblets and all, bird. I really wanted to roast a chicken last month, and again last weekend—but I didn’t. One could say I chickened out (har har). My sources, one a website and one a human (hi, Maria!), said it’s real easy. Real easy is good; especially when working with raw meat, especially when cooking for one who visited the hospital on account of poorly cooked meat (hi, B!). I finally stopped being… chicken (sorry) and got ready for roasting last Sunday. Just to be safe, I pulled up a recipe as guidance. The resul...

January 2007-December 2007 One of the benefits—one of the very few benefits—of going to a school with a small journalism program instead of a dedicated journalism school is that competition for positions at the school newspaper is relatively low. So, when I rollerbladed across campus with my friend Dave in the fall of my sophomore year to put in my application and caught wind on an uneven crack sending me flying and resulting in three inch bloody scrape on my forearm, my disheveled self still landed the new features writer position. I had only one semester of basic news writing courses under my belt, but went on assignments and wrote up my reports anyway. I liked the freedom of being out at events and writing from home instead of sitting shoulder to shoulder on crappy old Mac computers in our windowless basement cafeteria office—which sometimes smelled, and never in a good way. But, even the most inquisitive reporters reach a time when being one of two students at a Fair Trade...

I feel like the power to part of my brain went out. Like some freak storm (looking at you, Hurricane Irene ) came in and took down some pretty important electrical lines. The little worker robots in my brain are boiling water just in case stuff got contaminated in the process. Thanks, little robots. I’m pretty sure stuff is contaminated. The big circuit blew a few days before the New Year, when I misplaced my new, expensive GPS watch. The where-I-saw-it-last to when-it-went-missing mind rope I constructed leaves an open window of only 10-15 minutes. Surely I could figure out what I did with something in a 10-15 minute window. I assure you, I cannot. It’s as if my brain clicked over to half-power mode as I went through a pretty standard morning routine; all memory files associated with search terms ‘waking up earlier than I want to’ are automatically deleted. Then two days ago, a second circuit popped. I arrived at my apartment building to find no apartment keys on my keychain. This...

One day I’ll write about something other than running. Today is not that day. The start of 2012 was particularly exciting for my brother and I because it meant we could finally stop a healthy habit—running. The two of us had been running (and tweet recapping) for 39 consecutive days and lemme just say, there’s glory in a rest day. It was also pretty fantastic to wobble to the dessert counter at home more times than I’ll ever admit to because runners need extra calories, you know. Both of us tweeted through the process. Here are my favorite mid-streak remarks and my favorite remarks from my 78-mile-running, double-PR-setting brother: Nov. 29 7 = the amount of times one must run around a Red Roof Inn in Toledo, Ohio to clock a mile. Nov. 30 2.2 miles Run Streak day 7. Didn't feel amazing and saw too many dead animals.

Mary 2007-June 2007 In the summer of 2007 I drove to Ferndale for an internship interview at Detroit’s leading (hey Metro Times, did you hear that?) entertainment newspaper, Real Detroit Weekly . It was pretty apparent from the get-go that this internship was going to be an uphill battle for me. At my interview, I sat with my dress-pant legs crossed on a mismatched desk chair in a worn down meeting room across from the slightly balding, torn-jeans wearing editor-in-chief. He was clearly cooler, chiller, hipper and at least 10 years older than me. Confession: I know diddlysquat about movie, music and local trends; but I did know I needed someone to gamble with welcoming a green college reporter to their team. Lucky for me, RDW did. I spent a loooot of time at my super old Mac in the office—which was an odd corridor of a commercial sign company’s building—staring at the screen HOPING to be as easily inspired as my coworkers were.

I can’t believe this project is complete—my knees can, but my brain can’t fathom that it's actually done. I knew when I concocted the idea of running a 5K a month that it wasn’t a remarkably difficult challenge for me. A 5K is a pretty standard distance in my life as a runner. I was really looking to keep myself running throughout the year and thought more racing would help make that happen. Twelve 5Ks , two 10Ks , a 39-day run streak complete and a half-marathon on the horizon, I think I succeeded with that goal. While this wasn’t tough for me, it was for B who jumped on the project without ever having raced or ran three miles before in his life. He surprised me last December when he jumped on the challenge and has impressed me every month at every race since. I’m way proud of him. Having him on board my originally solo goal made the traveling much easier, the races more fun and the entire experience all the more worthwhile. So, what’s next? Twelve more 5Ks in 2012? Twelve ...

It took me a good amount of soul searching to decide what I wanted to “be” when I grew up, but once I pinned it down I went to work at it. Within the same semester as declaring my major, I started my first blog—a women’s health and fitness site called A Sizable Apple . I didn’t want to wait for classes or an internship to realize I'd rather be a garbage woman—which was strangely enough one of my childhood dream jobs—instead of being a journalist. Writing and aggregating content on women’s health and fitness was a natural route for me. I was just hanging up my goggles after a 12 year competitive swimming career and settling into an independent routine of working out and eating right. Except for that whole box of Snackwell cookies I ate in a day during my junior year. Let’s not talk about that.

Last year one of my favorite bloggers compiled a photo-heavy recap of her year. It was a good idea , I thought, but 21 blog posts didn’t give me very much fuel for a year-end review. I decided I’d write more in 2011 (among other resolutions). I wanted to share more of my life, 500 miles away from friends and family, and wanted 2011’s recap to be easier than 2010’s. This year I blogged almost four times more than I did last year; but that’s not the only difference a year’s made. I’ve experienced more, (certainly I've been running more), traveled more, worked toward exciting goals and developed a clearer idea of what I stand for. I’m not sure what 2012 will bring, but I have some ideas about where I want to be come 2013. Here’s a brief salute to the past, so I can move swiftly forward. Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. - Hal Borland I introduced B to the world, err, my blog readers. We rang in...