Life Lately: Back From Vacation

One of K's photos from beautiful Grace Bay Beach in Turks and Caicos.

I just got back from a lovely and rejuvenating vacation or "babymoon" to Turks and Caicos, and am now settling back in for several more extremely busy months at the office before our little bean arrives. Today's post is a grab bag of a few smaller, non-pregnancy related things that have caught my attention recently. 

I greatly enjoyed this Harper's Bazaar article about the history of Tibi as the brand reaches its 25 year anniversary. There won't be too much new information here if you've followed the company and its founder Amy Smilovic for a while, but I still find the story of Smilovic's complete reinvention of the brand around 2011 fascinating. It's particularly interesting because Tibi was first founded with its original more preppy, print-focused aesthetic - so different from the brand's approach to design today - in 2008, around when I first became interested in fashion (though I didn't have any sense of my personal style and just read about what was popular in fashion magazines and other blogs). Many brands I remember from back then are no longer around.

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Speaking of things I first came across in part because of my interest in Tibi, here's another jewelry brand somewhat in the same design vein as Smilovic favorite CompletedWorks (also here, here, here, and here): I recently learned about Agmes Jewelry (also here, here, and here) from fellow Tibi fan TheCreativeClassicist, who in turn discovered it in part because of new J.Crew head of women's design, Olympia Gayot. Agmes is somewhat similar to CompletedWorks in that both favor very contemporary, more sculptural designs. Some Agmes pieces I like can be found in the widget below: 

These days, I find I have many ideas for longer-form posts, but not much time and energy to write them because of my long hours at work. Among other things,  I haven't really written about personal finance or money for a long time. 

One big idea is for a post about K and I's experience with negotiating and signing a fairly straightforward and simple prenup, which then became a postnup - a distinction that generally doesn't make a significant difference under New York law - due to getting time-crunched in the weeks before our courthouse wedding last year. Throughout the process, I did learn that some of my original assumptions about prenups were a bit incorrect. 

In general, I feel like many people around my age in the US have a fairly accurate sense about how prenuptial agreements generally work and why both people entering a marriage might want one. For instance, when the topic comes up on r/MoneyDiariesActive (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here), most replies are in the zone of reasonably correct. There aren't too many people whose views are completely off-base. People do sometimes forget that because prenuptial (or postnuptial) agreements are contracts, they can be negotiated and customized to a potentially very large extent by the parties. Thus, relatively few things are inherently true about all such agreements. 

Entertainment-wise: This year's Formula 1 racing season has been incredibly dramatic, but often not for happenings on the racetrack. K and I continue to derive tons of amusement from following the sport. 

We also recently took advantage of a few months of free Apple TV+ through one of K's other subscriptions, and it's been fun watching some of their shows, in particular Foundation and For All Mankind. The writing quality on For All Mankind can be uneven - it's an alternate history about the space race with very long time-jumps between seasons, which can cause some issues with character development - but we've still been really enjoying it so far.