“Hallo Juliette! My name is Fynn and I am so excited to finally meet you!”

“It is now time to travel to my real home with you... Juliette, I hope you will love me as much as I love you.”

“Summer turned to fall and, Juliette, I think it is my favorite season. Sunny days and cool nights. Trees dressed in red and orange and yellow, and then brown leaves crunching under your feet.”

“The pigs squeaked and jumped when they saw me!”

“Oh we saw so many wonderful things looking out Seat 34A Window! Clouds of all shapes and sizes, some of them reminded me of my stuffie friends back in the Steiff store. I am sure I saw an elephant.”

“We crashed in the hotel bar and had cool drinks and the bartender even gave us some nuts to munch on.”

“We walked across the street from the park and into a big building called the 'Kunsthistorisches'. Don’t worry, I come from Vienna and even I can’t say it. But it is a very famous art museum. We visited many rooms and saw many beautiful paintings.”

“She put me on the park bench right next to her. We were in the Burggarten. That’s the name of the park, and right in front of me was a big statue of Mozart.”

“Soon the three people who had picked me were standing at a table with sandwiches and drinks. It was so busy there was no place to sit.”

“I took one last look at the top shelf and saw all of my other bear friends there, each with his or her own suitcase, packed and ready to go.”

“My friends and I on the top shelf started to get excited. Could this be the day we would be chosen?”

“Most of us had been on the top shelf for a long time. It was dusty up there because it was hard to reach, so the shopkeepers often wouldn’t bother with it.”

"I lived for a long time on a top shelf in the Steiff store at Braunerstrasse 3 in Vienna, Austria."

I recently made the impulsive decision to re-do my desk. Over the last seven years, I've had the same desk surface, which I've loved and continue to love. But it's been propped on a variety of things that haven't optimized storage potential…

Chris and I each grew up in a yellow house. Down the street from our apartment is our favorite house. It's so symmetrical and has great big windows, and the sweetest little dormer windows…

This is the scene I mentioned earlier that is a flashback within a flashback (actually... within a flashback because the whole story exists in the memory of myself in 2016)…

This portrait was for a friend of mine from high school. He wanted to surprise his fiancée with something personalized for Christmas and chose this family photo from right after they adopted Luna the corgi.

It has been such a wonderful week at my parents' house. As you can see from all the photos below, the main attraction was my niece and goddaughter, who is the sweetest baby ever…

It was crunch time at work this week which meant staying late and finding new places to focus and get things squared away during the day…