The first thing you should know about me is that I have a British accent. This will help you establish a voice in your head when you're reading, which is important, don't you think?
My name is Holly Burns. I'm 30 and I live in San Francisco, California, with my new-ish husband Sean, and two enormous cats. I work in the travel industry and I'm often on the road. This means that I am on a first name basis with most of the TSA workers at San Francisco International Airport and could probably tell you how their kids' Little League teams are doing at any given moment. I own many bottles of shampoo that are three ounces or less.
I was born in England to English parents, but I grew up all over the place: Paris, Holland, Britain, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Hong Kong---at seven years, it's the longest I've ever lived anywhere---and the slightly less glamorous Connecticut. By the time I was ten, I had been to ten schools, and when I was eleven, I left my family in Hong Kong to attend an all-girls boarding school in a leafy English village, where I stayed until I was eighteen. I learned things like Latin, lacrosse, french-braiding, independence, and how to deal with crippling homesickness. The jury is still out on which of those things has since helped me most in life.
Sean and I got married on September 5, 2009, after being together approximately seven hundred million years. In fact, I've known him since I was sixteen, which means he has seen me through some very ill-advised hairstyles and wardrobe choices, and has still stuck around. We met on a beach in 1996 when I had braces and he was playing hackysack. You can read about it here and here and here.
We moved to San Francisco in January 2007 and bought our first house in June 2010. We're slowly working on making it lovely, but we seem to take a lot of breaks to watch terrible TV. Before we lived in San Francisco, we lived in Charleston, South Carolina, but then one day in 2006, we quit our jobs, packed our lives away, and went traveling in Asia for six months, traipsing through Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. Sometimes we have to stop ourselves from being those awful people who start every sentence with "When we were traveling..."
My favorite piece of punctuation is the parentheses, with the semi-colon taking a close second. Things I like include champagne, going to the library, gold shoes, the word "brouhaha," Trader Joe's, beauty products with clever names, reliving scenes from My So Called Life in my head, black licorice, the page in Us Weekly where they say "Stars: They're Just Like Us" and then show them looking zitty and doing laundry, San Pellegrino, Target, Mark Ruffalo, when people say things like "um, clean up in aisle three from all the names you just dropped," German accents, free samples, people who can drive stick, hydrangeas, when the phone rings in the middle of the night and it's just a wrong number and NOT someone on the other side of the world dying, men in pink shirts, and Nigella Lawson.
Things I don't like include people who use their cell phones at the gym, seafood, bad grammar, beets, the word "ointment," people who won't admit that they shop in TJ Maxx EVEN WHEN YOU'VE SEEN THEM THERE, incorrect pronunciation of the word "croissant," hearing other people pee, elaborate facial hair, thinking you've got one square of your Caramello left when really you've already eaten the whole thing, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, broth-based soups, driving, and people who claim to "heart" things, especially when they write about it in Comic Sans font.
Possibly because of how I grew up---always moving, always leaving---I am unfailingly nostalgic. I love to revel in nostalgia, roll around in it like a pig in....well, you know what pigs roll around in. A little while ago, I started a series of timeline posts, which I have yet to finish but have on a continuous to-do list. This should get you up to speed:
