Adios, April. I appreciate all your spring blooms but your pollen not so much. Other things I appreciated this month…..

…..that my backyard looks like this:

…..speaking to a nice group of folks at AB’s Design Camp:

…..catching up with some blogger friends:

…..discovering a too cool venue and great music:

…..and a good dose of New York:

…..which included Broadway of course:

…..lots of design inspiration:

…..installations that make you think:

…..fine dining:

….. drinks and great conversation with dear Amy:

…..and Jerry Seinfeld:

…..where there was a Martha Stewart sighting(!) There was also some late night dancing with my GBF, shirtless boys serving cosmo shots and other shenanigans that always ensue when I’m with him but there are no Instagrams of those! (Gotta keep it classy around here! Ha!)

April ended up being a month of connecting and re-connecting with a lot of friends which has me feeling really energized. Sometimes, between blogging and edesigning, I can go days without seeing anyone (other than my husband) and forget how great a good face-to-face talk can be.  It’s hard because we’re all slammed with obligations but I believe you can and should make time for the people in your life. It doesn’t have to be some big elaborate production; a spontaneous get-together is easy and totally do-able no matter how busy we are. As a case in point, an old friend in New York who I hadn’t spoken to in years just happened to email me the day before my trip so we squeezed in a meet up last minute – we just made it happen and it was so great to catch up with her. So to everyone out there who has been saying we need to get together: email me, tweet me, send smoke signals, whatever…… let’s just do it!

*My Month in Pictures is part of my Living La Belle Vie series. You can follow me on Instagram (@FromTheRightBank) or Twitter for more daily pictures.

(All photos by FROM THE RIGHT BANK except #3 by Ben Corda)

Happy Spring, everybody!  I equate spring with flowers and I really enjoy creating arrangements with all the pretty blooms that become available this time of year. I talked before about how having fresh flowers around the house is a must for me. A simple bunch of one flower will always do the trick but sometimes it’s nice to put together something a little more special like these. And it’s surprisingly easy to do if you just deconstruct them.

This one is stunning and it’s just tulips, hyacinth, ranunculus and peonies in pastel shades:

This one is just roses and hydrangeas in dusty colors with chamomile all cut very short:

If you can’t find chamomile, you could substitute daisies or some filler flowers like baby’s breath. (I think chamomile blooms later in the year anyway.)

This beautiful bunch is made up of ranunculus, hyacinth, sweet peas and queen anne’s lace in shades of pink and cream:

With all of these bouquets, simply gather all the heads together tightly in the shape you want, trim the stems to fit the vase or whatever vessel you are using and voilà. Easy, right?

So go and make yourself a pretty bouquet to enjoy over the weekend and let me know how it turns out! See you Monday!

(Photos via Pinterest as linked.)

*Living La Belle Vie is an FTRB series about celebrating the everyday. You can read more about it here and see other posts in the series here.

So I did something pretty drastic this weekend that I wanted to share with you.

For quite a while, I’ve been frustrated with how I’m scheduling and using my time. When you don’t have a 9 to 5 office job, your days can flow one to the next, weekdays into weekends without clear delineations between work and play. I both love and hate this. On the one hand, I love having a totally flexible schedule and am grateful for it everyday. But on the other hand, no matter what I’m doing, I always feel like I should be doing something else, like I’m wasting my time with this when I should be doing that. And the worst part is, because I already feel like I’m not doing enough, I never make time for a lot of things that are true passions because it feels frivolous and indulgent.

All this crystalized for me when I started journaling about it. I made a list of all the things that take up my time during a given week as well as the things I’d like to do but can never seem to find the time. I want to draw and paint more; I want to finally watch all the films in my ridiculously long Netflix queue; I want to re-read all the classics and all those books I’ve only read reviews of; And of course, there are all those house projects. Well, guess what? These are all offline activities.

I knew (even before this little exercise) that I was spending too much time online. The web has been the source of so many wonderful things in my life, including real friendships, but it can also cause so much anxiety. I want to keep up with everyone and everything and not miss out on the newest and the latest. Of course this is an impossible task and I’ve become better about letting go but I need to do better.

So what was the drastic thing I did? I went completely offline. And I plan on doing that on the weekends from now on. The one exception is Instagram. It’s my visual diary and I want to keep documenting my days which only takes a few minutes. But that is all. This will leave my weekends free to do all those other activities, and most importantly, without guilt. And by the same token, on weekdays, I won’t feel guilty if I fall down an internet rabbit hole every now and then.

Life is short and we need to make time for the things that we love doing instead of just complaining about not having time. So what about you? What’s your relationship with the internet like these days?  Have any strategies for balancing life online and off? I’d love to hear.

*Living La Belle Vie is an FTRB series about celebrating the everyday. You can read more about it here and see other posts in the series here.

(Cartoon by Dean Vietor/New Yorker)