Dana Burland

Three bananas foster cupcakes. Those leftover wedding treats brought over by Andy and Ashley are all that’s left from their wedding last weekend. Sure, somewhere in this apartment there are two can koozies with their name and wedding date on ‘em, but I don’t even have a photo of us with the bride and groom for cryin’ out sideways. Watching our two buddies commit their lives to each other was too beautiful to witness from behind the screen of a camera. Plus I had to focus on controlling my emotional wedding weeping that has plagued me at every wedding since Chelsea’s . Talk about cryin’ sideways. Even their reception was too full of dancing, laughing, drinking and chatting to remember to take home the flowers gifted to me by Ashley’s mom. I was too busy sing/yelling Backstreet Boys lyrics on the dance floor with Ashley and her girlfriends who have become my girlfriends, too. Ben, Andy and their Troy gang were too busy busting out dance moves that would put Usher to shame—plus a f...

Grand Rapids may be well known for its breweries, but out in the 'burbs where we live it's much less about beer and much more about Jesus. I read somewhere that Grand Rapids has the most churches per capita—that's a truth to believe in. Ben and I were joking once while driving through town that Grand Rapids can take any building and make it into a church. It was silly at first, but the funniest thing was that every example we traded was a true one. “Grand Rapids loves their churches so much they can turn a gym into one.” Right near our apartment was an old school turned gym with a workout facility, indoor rock climbing wall and pool. Now, it's a church. You think the pastor preaches while suspended from carabiners and cords? “Oh yeah? Well Grand Rapids loves their churches so much they can turn a drive-in movie theater into one.” This is my favorite. There's an old drive-in theater parking lot tucked off Brenton and 28th Street that long ago was converted...

...and salads and cheese trays and dips by the dozens. And mushroom turnovers, mozzarella sticks and a platter of salami. And meatballs, hummus and Mexican bean dip. Plus beer, wine, iced tea and a Mai Tai punch that accidentally turned out blue. And cake. Two big, glorious cakes. One for the guy I've happily agreed to live the rest of my life with, and one for me. This was the scene at the beautiful family engagement party my mom threw for us last weekend. My grandparent's condo clubhouse was full of food, extended family, beautiful flowers and a lot of fun. Fun like watching my brother, who takes after my dad in his ability to befriend any living or non-living organism, re-tell the story of the passed out drunk man he found in a hospital elevator while at work last week. Fun like hearing aunts and cousins tell us they have trips planned to Grand Rapids soon and that we'd meet up on our side of the state soon. Fun like seeing all the people we love in a room togethe...

Next year I hope to celebrate my work anniversary  with a little less of a bang. On my one-year anniversary two Tuesdays ago I was in a rental van with coworkers headed to a cross-state meeting when we were rear ended on the freeway. Quite intensely. Everyone is fine; bruised and sore, but fine. I was in the back so I’m extra bruised and sore—but also fine. Because of the bruising and soreness (a.k.a. a muscle contusion), I’ve spent the last two weeks getting my RICE on. How much have I been RICE’ing? I’m resting so much Ben hasn’t gotten a seat on the couch since mid-July. I’ve been icing so intently that I found a thawed package of peas hidden on the floor under a bath towel. I’ve compressed my way through three rolls of athletic tape and made an embarrassing purchase of three more rolls at MC Sports last week. I’ve elevated my left leg high enough perform as a Radio City Rockette. I’m limping a lot, fighting an injured calf muscle that just wants to rest when so much of...

Alpena is just as charming as most northern Michigan towns—time ticks slower, wildflowers grow taller and even with its big ol’ cement factory on the shore, Lake Huron’s vastness is still beautifully impressive. But unlike other northern Michigan towns, Alpena is a humble working class city. On a weekend trip with my family we found out the locals, just like the city, are pure gems too. Like the older woman who owns an alpaca farm down the street from my brother’s apartment. Being the curious and audacious folk that we are, we wandered up to her property to oogle over Tuffett and Frosty the alpacas. In any other town you might be chased away by an angry, get-off-my-lawn kinda townie. In Alpena we were met by the friendly, may-have-some-screws-loose, Mrs. Alpaca Owner who would have pinned us up all dang day talking about the wheat based diet she’s got her seven alpacas on and how she’s trained her hens to raise baby peacocks. Ok then. Frosty and Tuffett We also met a...

One day you can’t find the drinking fountain and boom—a year passes. Today’s my glorious, fire the confetti cannons, one year anniversary at Steelcase. It’s been fun, it’s been hard, it’s been an adventure. I was lucky enough to do some traveling in my first year. I went to New York for a SEO conference , Boston for a meeting and today to Ann Arbor for another meeting. In my first five months, I tried to bury myself in my responsibilities and tried hard to measure them. No one was pulling regular referring traffic from search engines reports, so I started tracking that to measure our SEO  progress. We didn’t have an easy way to gather sales that came in as a result of email marketing efforts, so I worked with a coworker to start tracking that. I led a project to redesign the site and started capturing conversion rates, which has helped us get a better idea of overall site health. That’s all been easy potatoes compared to the last seven months. Now I’m diving deeper—mapping...

We have two front-facing windows in our apartment—one in the bedroom and the other in the office. Outside both is a view of lush branches from a nearby tree. Apparently lush and comfortable branches as each morning a team of birds populate it to squat and squawk. In the bedroom, our sleepy heads lay two feet away from the chirping. When all you want to do is sleep past 6 am, the birds are a constant annoying alarm clock without a snooze button. Six in the morning from the office window is a different story. I sit at my desk with coffee in hand watching the birds ruffle their feathers, peck at the outside wood walls and hope they stay a little longer. This has been my routine for the last two weeks—rising early to get some work done. What kind of work? Sometimes it’s emailing wedding vendors, or downloading the new Lady Antebellum song . It could be unloading and reloading the dishwasher or folding a load of laundry. It’s often reading the morning news and replying to messages I di...