This week, apparently, I decided there was no reason to celebrate just one milestone at a time.
The new siding is going up on the old Miss Daisy’s house. My book is officially out of my hands and making its way into the publishing world. I celebrated another birthday on Thursday. And on Saturday, I gathered some of my favorite people together for a proper birthday celebration.
Because subtlety has never really been my thing.
There is something particularly strange about having a birthday in the middle of building an entirely new life.
Birthdays have a way of making you take inventory. Not the La Chic Chef kind involving SKUs, candles, French linens and the increasingly alarming number of boxes currently occupying my life. The other kind.
Where was I a year ago?
Where did I think I would be?
And how on earth did I end up here?
A year ago, La Chic Chef was still largely a collection of ideas, plans, spreadsheets, dreams and probably an unreasonable number of Pinterest boards. The old Miss Daisy’s house wasn’t mine yet. The cooking school existed mostly in my imagination. And although I had started writing about my experience at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, I certainly wasn’t holding a finished manuscript and sending it off to literary agents.
Now, I drive past a Victorian house in Leesburg and think, That’s going to be La Chic Chef.
And this week, for the first time, it is beginning to look like it.
