Dana Burland

Later I may look back on last night as an example of wedding planning ridiculousness. Sprawled out on a yoga mat armed with a laptop and credit card, I ordered 156 half pint mason jars for our wedding favors. Ben, will you help me make strawberry jam? Sure. This wasn’t a half-hearted “sure” robotically regurgitated to keep the peace while the NBA playoffs were on. This was a whole-hearted “yes, tell me how to help and we’ll do it together”—that just so happened to keep me quiet while the NBA playoffs were on. Lemme just say we’re going to need to make a lot of strawberry jam. Unreal amounts of jam. We’ll be jammin’ like J.M. Smucker. Jammin’ like a non-shampooin’ hippie and her loving shampoo-using fiance. We’ll be jammin’ like Jam aicans. (Sorry, I had to.) I can be impulsive, but I wouldn’t have clicked that ‘confirm order’ button without Ben. It has nothing to do with needing a minimum wage worker hand in our minor manufacturing facility kitchen. It has everything to d...

Well, another long bike ride is officially in the books. Here’s this year’s 50-mile Zoo-De-Mac bike ride by the numbers: 45ish : average temp for the first half of the ride. Brr. 0 : amount of rain we saw on this year’s ride. Thank goodness. 1 : amount of infants I saw napping in attached bike carriages. Quite unusual. 0 : amount of boxes of beer I saw in attached bike carriages. Even more unusual. 5ish : amount of times we stopped for stretch, lunch, swap jackets, swap gloves, eat trail mix breaks. 6 out of 6 : amount of happy riders at the end of the ride. 6 out of 6 : amount of butts that can’t imagine sitting on a bike seat for one more second. Pre-race selfie. Everyone pictured knew what a selfie was, too! On the route overlooking Lake Michigan Still riding, still happy. Well, some of us. Extra happy at the finish line.

You know what I didn’t do this weekend? Set a 5K PR. You know what I did do? Set a PR in weekend happiness. Ben and I woke up earrrly for the 5K Riverbank Run on Saturday morning. I thought we’d run/walk it, but that so didn’t happen. We ran—minus one minute—almost the entire thing. The secret weapon was Ben . Had I been running alone I would have tried to run near my old pace—a pace that prevents me from running more than a mile straight without stopping. But Ben being the steady runner he is kept us running. It wasn’t a fast run, and I doubt it was a pretty one, but dang it was a prideful. That night we hosted game night with friends who were in town for the race. We laughed a lot, drank some good Michigan beers and Ben and I were beat. Badly. On Sunday we drove out to Windmill Island Gardens in Holland. This is the time of year tulips take over the city. We thought last year’s Tulip Festival was lackluster , but that didn’t include a trip to the gardens. The rows of flower...

Me and my semi-tanned skin are freshly back in town after a long girls weekend in Nashville. Nashville! It was 88 and sunny almost every day we were there! The magnolia trees are near blooming! Country music fills the air! No, I’m serious, at every other streetlight there are permanent black speakers that play country music. It only slightly terrified me on a morning run. But yes, girls weekend. If there ever is a city to do it in, it’s Nashville. We had unreasonable amounts of fun—and that was just on the 9-hour car ride down. While we were actually in town we ate and drank and shopped and explored and napped glorious afternoon naps every day. Here are some of my favorite spots we spent time at, and hopefully will visit again soon: The Ryman Auditorium, Grand Ole Opry and Printer's Alley Tequila Cowboy Right on Broadway (bar row), this is the place to go when you tried that hole in the wall bar and found the country act there sounded like… well, a hole in the wa...