Lifestyle Archives

We are Officially Engaged

On a small table, two bottles of sake catch the light, and a handwritten note rests beside them like a keepsake you’ll want to fold carefully and save.

We are Officially Engaged.

It’s strange how a moment can feel both loud and quiet at the same time. Loud in the way it changes the shape of the future, quiet in the way the present keeps sitting there, steady, asking you to notice it. A simple table. A drink poured slowly. Ink on paper. The kind of details that become anchors later.

Tokyo has a way of making ordinary scenes feel cinematic. The city hums just beyond the room, and inside there’s this pocket of stillness where gratitude can finally land. This is what I want to remember: not just the announcement, but the tenderness of being cared for, the warmth of a shared toast, the soft weight of a new beginning settling in.

To everyone who has been cheering us on from near and far, thank you. We’re holding this close, taking it in, and letting it unfold one day at a time—together.

Okonomiyaki first meal – Sometaro

Our first meal in Japan was okonomiyaki at Sometaro—simple, warm, and a little mesmerizing.

The griddle sat in the middle of the table like a small, black stage. Two pale rounds of cabbage and batter sizzled quietly, edges loosening as if they were waking up. Steam rose and disappeared. Chopsticks hovered. A cold beer sweated beside a small plate of pickles, the kind of everyday details that make travel feel less like a highlight reel and more like a real afternoon you get to keep.

There’s something grounding about cooking at the table. You’re forced to slow down and watch. The food doesn’t arrive finished; it becomes dinner in front of you. The room around us faded into small sounds—the scrape of metal, the soft chatter, the steady hiss—until it felt like the whole city had narrowed to that warm rectangle.

Okonomiyaki is comfort food with a little ceremony: turn, wait, share, eat while it’s hot. It was the kind of first meal that doesn’t try to impress, and somehow that makes it unforgettable. After the flight and the rush of arrival, Sometaro felt like a quiet welcome.

Breakfast Temple Visit

Tokyo in the morning has a different temperature to it—less hurry, more hush. I arrived at Senso-ji with breakfast still warm in my stomach and the feeling that the day hadn’t decided what it would become yet.

At the gate, the giant lantern hangs like a steady heartbeat. Red beams frame it overhead, and the paint and paper look both weathered and cared for, the way old places do when they’re allowed to keep their age. There’s something grounding about standing beneath something so familiar in photos and finally noticing the details: the creases, the rope, the quiet weight of it all.

I’ve learned that travel isn’t always the big sights—it’s the small moments where one world brushes up against another. A temple visit after breakfast feels simple, almost ordinary, and maybe that’s the point. You walk in, you look up, you slow down. For a few minutes, the city doesn’t ask anything from you.

Senso-ji holds that kind of space. Not empty, not silent—just settled. Like it’s been listening for a long time, and it’s in no rush to answer.

If you ever find yourself in Tokyo early, go before the day gets loud. Let the lantern be the first thing you really look at.

JFK > SEA, first leg of the trip to Japan

The cabin light has that familiar, late-afternoon glow—the kind that makes everything feel a little softer than it really is. I’m stretched out in my seat, shoes tucked forward, the screen in front of me running an ad about comfort and legroom, as if it’s trying to narrate the moment while I’m living it.

JFK > SEA is only the first leg, but it already feels like the threshold. Airports have their own weather: recycled air, muted announcements, the low tide of people moving with purpose. On the plane, time becomes something you can fold up and put away for later. The tray table clicks. The seat settles. A small pocket of stillness appears.

There’s a strange comfort in these in-between hours—suspended over the country, watching the world reduce itself to patterns and light. It’s not Japan yet, not even close, but the trip has started in the only way trips really start: by leaving.

Seattle is a pause, a breath, a handoff. Soon there will be different signs, different streets, different morning sounds. For now, I’m content to let the hum of the plane and the quiet choreography of travel do their work—carrying me forward while I sit still, thinking about the distance ahead and the stories waiting on the other side of it.

Spring Beach Time 1989

Spring beach time, 1989: not quite summer, not quite anything else. The sand is still cool enough to register, the wind sharp in that early-season way that keeps adults zipped up and kids unfazed.

In the photo, my mom walks along the packed shoreline holding my hand. I’m about a year and a half old—still learning balance, still trusting that the ground will mostly behave. A red sweatshirt is tied around her waist like a practical marker of foresight. She carries a weekend bag, the kind you pack when you don’t yet know how long you’ll stay or what the weather will decide. Behind us, tire tracks cut clean parallel lines, evidence that the beach has already been crossed, flattened, crossed again.

The best throwback photos aren’t dramatic. They look like errands. A walk. A hand held without discussion. Forward motion without a destination. The details date it—the haircut, the sandals, my small late-80s outfit—but the feeling isn’t stuck in a decade. It’s the ordinary certainty of being guided across uneven ground before you know how to do that yourself.

Spring at the beach was never about swimming. It was about arriving early, when the shoreline was still half-awake, and letting the day remind you how to be outside.

A picture doesn’t bring the past back. It just proves it happened. Sometimes that’s enough.

Happy Birthday Angel

There’s a particular kind of warmth that settles over a table when a birthday is the reason everyone showed up. It’s not loud, not staged. It’s in the small things: the shine of glassware catching low light, the quiet order of plates and folded napkins, the way people lean in toward one another as if the evening is a room you can step into and close the door behind you.

Happy Birthday Angel. A simple line, but it carries a whole soft history—shared meals, familiar jokes, the comfort of being known. At dinner, that feeling becomes tangible. You can see it in the relaxed shoulders, in the easy smiles, in the way the table feels lived-in before the first course even arrives.

Restaurants can be anonymous places, but nights like this give them a pulse. The wood grain under candlelight, the clink of forks, the paused moment before everyone starts talking at once—little ordinary details turning quietly meaningful.

Birthdays aren’t only about marking time. They’re about gathering it. Collecting a handful of people and making one evening feel like it belongs on a shelf in your mind, ready to be taken down later when you need something steady.

Here’s to Angel—celebrated well, surrounded by friends, and held for a moment in the gentle ceremony of dinner.

Dyson, “I’m snooow much fun”

Dyson runs straight into winter like it’s an invitation. In the middle of all that white, he’s a dark, eager shape cutting a path through the churned-up snow, tennis ball held tight like a prize he earned fair and square. His ears are up, his eyes are locked in, and his whole body says the same thing: throw it again.

Snow has a way of rewriting a place. It softens the edges, hushes the street, and makes even familiar ground feel briefly new. Every footprint becomes a small story—where you went, how fast, how excited you were to get there. Dyson seems to read the page as he goes, adding lines as quickly as he can.

There’s a particular joy in watching a dog take the cold personally, like it’s not something to endure but something to conquer. The air might sting, the snow might melt into slush later, but right now it’s all possibility. A ball, a run, a return. Simple rules, endless rounds.

Maybe that’s the best part of days like this: the reminder that you don’t need much to feel full of it. Just a bright green-and-blue circle, a stretch of snow, and someone who comes back every time like it’s the first time.

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Social Story Templates for 2018 into 2019

| #story #nye #yearinreview

| ???

| A cute little trend on Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat stories are little templates to fill in your own answers to questions, comments, goals and more.

Design Background:

There were a few other designers that created their own versions of these story templates for the year and and the new year but ultimately many of them were too complicated or did not distill the information down to an understandable point. Additionally, many of the design templates I looked at were also very helter-skelter with positioning, fonts, colors, etc… I decided to start with making my branded version of these story templates, and While not everyone will like this blue template i created, there is also gold version as a secondary option that is maybe a bit more festive.

Please feel free to use them and tag my account @zamartz.

2018, A Year in Review
New Year’s Resolutions
2019, My New Goals

Robe in Hotel Bed

A robe left on a hotel bed always feels like an invitation and a warning at the same time.

The room is quiet in that careful way conference hotels are quiet: carpet swallowing footsteps, air conditioning breathing in measured sighs, the hallway’s life kept at a distance. Inside, it’s just the bed—white sheets pulled tight—and the simple weight of fabric waiting where a person should be.

Travel does that. It compresses you. Days become lanyards and schedules, small talk and bad coffee, a loop of elevators and meeting rooms. Then you come back to the room and everything you carried in your head finally sets down. The robe is there like a placeholder for rest, a soft uniform for the hour when you’re no longer presenting anything.

I think that’s what I notice most in places like this: how the ordinary becomes briefly strange. A bed that isn’t yours. A mirror that doesn’t know you. A silence that feels rented.

And still, there’s comfort. The room doesn’t ask for your history. It doesn’t creak with the ghosts of old years or hold the familiar scuffs of a life lived. It just offers clean edges, a lamp glow, and the chance to be anonymous for a night.

Somewhere outside the window, the city keeps going. In here, the robe waits. So do I.

Seattle Sightseeing

Seattle Sightseeing is supposed to feel like motion—tickets, turns, the bright insistence of places you’re meant to see. But this morning the city is doing something gentler.

From a hillside vantage, the Seattle skyline sits behind a seam of trees, as if the neighborhood is holding the view in its hands. The Space Needle rises like a compass point, less a spectacle than a quiet reassurance: yes, you’re here. The buildings gather around it in clean edges and softened grays, while the sky refuses to be tidy.

Clouds spread in layers, mottled and luminous, the kind of weather that can’t decide whether it’s clearing or arriving. The light is early and careful, turning glass into something almost warm. Off to the side, water glints faintly, not demanding attention—just present.

I think this is the kind of sightseeing that sticks. Not the rushing kind, but the moment you pause and the city becomes a landscape instead of a checklist. Green in the foreground, steel in the distance, morning threaded through everything.

If you’re looking for a Seattle view, you could chase the famous angles. Or you could find a hill, stand still, and let the skyline meet you where you are—beneath a sky that looks like it’s still deciding what the day will be.

Seattle Space Needle

There’s something about looking up at the Seattle Space Needle from directly below that makes the city feel quieter than it is. The legs lean inward like a careful brace, and the saucer above hangs there with a kind of calm confidence—steel and geometry holding their place against a soft, shifting sky.

Today the clouds are scattered, bright and uncommitted, and the white structure catches the light in a way that feels almost domestic—like a familiar porch light in a neighborhood you haven’t visited in years. It’s a landmark, sure, but it also has the steady presence of something that has watched a lot of ordinary days go by.

I like monuments best when they don’t demand anything from you. When they just stand there and let you move around them, letting your thoughts fill in the empty space. The Space Needle does that. It doesn’t need to be explained; it just needs to be seen, from the street, from the park, from the angle that makes you notice the bones of it.

If you’re visiting, you can do the obvious things. But if you live nearby, or if you’re passing through with time to spare, it’s worth stopping for a minute and looking up—letting the wind and the traffic fade, and letting the city feel a little bigger, a little brighter.

Weekend Vaca with Boo in NOFO

The weekend in NOFO felt like the kind of pause you don’t plan, you just fall into.

The sky was a wide, soft gray—nothing dramatic, just a ceiling of cloud that made the water look steadier and more honest. We stood close at the edge of it all, shoulder to shoulder, letting the wind do what it wanted with our shirts and our hair, letting the moment be unposed even as the camera caught it.

There’s a comfort in getting away with someone you love and realizing you don’t have to fill every second. A short drive turns into a different rhythm: slower meals, longer looks, quiet jokes that only make sense to the two of you. NOFO has that effect. It doesn’t demand a checklist. It just gives you room.

I keep thinking about how places can hold feelings the way old houses hold heat—subtle, stored up, and easy to miss until you step back inside your own life. This trip wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It was the simple relief of salt air, an arm around a shoulder, and the ocean stretching out like a reset button.

If you want the little details and reactions, the Instagram comments tell the rest of the story.

Design Background:

Use and share story templates: