A few weeks ago, I asked you guys to send me questions for a Q&A since I’ve never done anything like that on Style As Needed and also, I wanted you to get to know me a bit better. Today, I’ll be sharing some of the questions I was asked as well as giving a general life update.

Let’s start with the life update first. As you all know, I got married eight months ago and went on a delayed honeymoon to Thailand in February. In March, we were anxiously awaiting Match Day – the day that all medical students find out where they match to do their residency. My husband applied at places all over the Midwest, but we were really hoping to stay in Cincinnati since both our families are here. Luckily, he matched at his number one pick and we will be staying in Cincinnati for the next three years for his residency!

With all that in mind, we decided to renew our lease in Over the Rhine, since we now know that we’ll be staying here for a while. We absolutely love the part of town we live in and couldn’t be more excited about staying here for another year. I was super hesitant about decorating our apartment while we were waiting to hear about residency, but now that we know we’re staying, I’m currently all about interior design and looking to make our apartment our own perfect space. If anyone has great suggestions about places to find mini bars, lamps and overall good decorative material, please leave me some comments below!

Things have settled down for me a bit at work and everything has gotten a little less crazy, so I plan on investing more of my time into the blog. Plus, with it being warm again, it’s so much easier to shoot outside which makes blogging ten times easier for me since I actually have material (in form of photos) to post. I also decided to change my Instagram handle from @styleprn to @styleasneeded so if you didn’t follow me before, please follow me for daily updates on my Instagram page. I’ve gotten more into Stories so I’m really enjoying that part of the blog right now.

That’s about it for the life/blog update so let’s answer some questions…

Do you work full time?

• Yes. I am a full-time pharmacist at a big retail chain.

Where did you meet your husband?

• We met in school. We started dating our freshman year of high school and have been together 11 years.

Where are you traveling to next?

• Our next trip is a long weekend in Philadelphia. My husband’s sister and her husband live there and we’ve been wanting to go for a while to visit them so we’re going at the beginning of June! We are planning an international trip to celebrate our 1 year anniversary in September but we’re keeping that destination a secret for now 😊

What’s your favorite part of blogging?

• Honestly, my favorite part is sitting down and completely getting lost in my writing. Work can get super stressful sometimes. Pharmacist carry a lot of responsibility and I find myself coming home sometimes with racing thoughts of possible mistakes I could have made or dosing errors, errors in judgement, etc. but when I sit down to work on my posts, all of those thoughts evaporate and I’m just left with me and the blog. I love that.

What’s your least favorite part of blogging?

• My least favorite part is setting expectations. I always tell myself “this is how many posts you need to write this month” or “this is how many times you need to post on Instagram” and sometimes that is just not possible because life happens.

How much time do you put into the blog?

• A lot more than I would have ever expected. I probably put in about 15-20 hours per week go into the blog.

Where are you from? What was it like growing up in two different cultures?

• I am from Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was 10 years old when I moved to the United States. Growing up in two different cultures was definitely something that shaped me and my personality. I very much took away from both Russian culture and American and my parents often say I’ve kept all my Russian traits and everything else they’ve always tried to instill in me as well as picked up some here since so much of your personality is made up during your teenage years. I have very strong family values which is something that goes along with Russian culture and I am someone that likes to hold on to traditions. I still would say I speak Russian and English at the same level although I would still probably consider Russian my primary language because I find my thoughts often are mostly in Russian. I have lived in the US longer than in Kazakhstan though so that part is a bit surprising even to myself. And if you’re wondering why I’m mentioning Russian culture when I’m from Kazakhstan, it’s because Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union and I pretty much refer to any ex-Soviets as Russians just because we speak Russian and share many Russian traditions.

What’s your favorite post you’ve ever written?

• I can’t say I have one that is my all time favorite, but I absolutely loved writing my Closet Clean Out Tips and our 2 Week Italy Itinerary, so I’ll say those two are my favorites.

What is something you enjoy doing that you don’t get to do enough?

• Definitely reading. I used to read all the time. Like two books a week at least but ever since me and my husband moved in together, I’ve found myself not reading at all. When he’s around, I want us to either go out and do something, go on walks, watch a movie together, or just do other things together and don’t find time to read anymore. I’m hoping to change that cause I really love reading.

 

That’s all I have for you guys with the update and the answers. Thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions! I had so much fun answering all of these! Let me know what you want to see on the blog and posts you enjoy reading the most. If you like seeing personal posts, I’ll try to increase the amount of those that get to go on the blog. As always, thanks for reading!