I’m back with another round of fun facts about myself since Ally at Ally Writes Things tagged me to do the One Lovely Blog Award! Be sure to check out Ally’s post here.

All this tag asks is that I share seven facts about myself, but I seriously struggled with it since I just did the Liebster Award a few weeks ago, and that also included a list of fun facts. I’m not interesting enough to have this many fun facts!

1. I love pretty patterns. It’s why I’m so obsessed with May Designs (which I talked about some in my bookish notebook post) and have a zillion notebooks and a tumbler  and a desk calendar from them, and it’s also why I’m obsessed with the mugs and tea sets at T2. I love surrounding myself with all of the pretty patterns! Though interestingly, I don’t really wear them.
2. I loosely organize my bookshelves by genre. I love the look of rainbow shelves and would love to try it myself some day, but for now I like keeping all of my nonfiction books together and then grouped around themes, like feminist reads or memoirs or biographies. Then I have a shelf for my YA contemporaries, a shelf for some of my favorite reads as a kid, a couple of shelves for my romance novels (though some of those are dispersed in assorted stacks used as bookends throughout my bookcases), and then a whole bunch of shelves for my fantasy books. Those tend to be grouped by series/author (for instance, Maria V. Snyder has her own shelf, as does Rick Riordan). And then any really big books that don’t fit normally on my shelves, like the illustrated Harry Potters, go on the bottom of my bookcase.
   My husband is really big on organizing by height and goes out of his way to reorganize my books if they’re just haphazardly stuck on a shelf. I think it looks cool with the varying heights, but he hates it.
3. I’m a big tea drinker. I love the smell but hate the taste of coffee, and I started drinking tea when I studied abroad in Germany, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. I personally prefer Twinings and Harney & Sons, preferably some sort of English breakfast tea with milk and sugar. My husband is a tea snob (he’s really a major foodie), so we have an excessive collection of teas. But it’s fun to have such an assortment to pick from!
4. I have an embarrassing number of books at my parents’ house, in addition to all of the books crammed into my apartment. One day I will live in a place big enough to have them all with me! Also, this is after I got rid of an enormous number of books when I was home for Christmas. Pictured are all books that I’ve outgrown, have multiple copies of, want different copies of, or picked up at book sales and never read and probably never will (there’s a stack of DVDs in there too).
5. I’m officially obsessed with my ruana. My mom gifted me a really pretty pink one for Christmas, and I loved it so much that I went out and bought two more so I can leave one at work and just have a few color options. I’m basically wondering where these have been my entire life, because they’re essentially really functional blankets that leave your hands free. They’re perfect, and I’m always wearing one these days (including as I type this out now).
6. I have an excessively large collection of signed books. I think I’ve mentioned on my blog before, but it never even occurred to me to look for book signings when I first moved to New York because they’re just not something that happens very often in Fargo, so it wasn’t until I Sarah J. Maas mentioned in her newsletter that she was doing a signing in New York that I started looking for book signings, and since then I’ve become obsessed. I can’t even really say why I like it so much, because objectively it doesn’t really add much value to my book, I really don’t have any meaningful interaction with the author, and it takes up a lot of time. But for some reason I love it and have acquired more than 50 personalized and signed books.
7. Christmas is my favorite holiday. I don’t think I was given a choice growing up since my mom has always been really big into decorating and does a beautiful job with it, so of course I decorate excessively for Christmas as well. I just think it’s a lot of fun and makes everything feel really festive. And it doesn’t hurt that my birthday is on the 26th! Living in New York has only elevated my love for Christmas because the city goes all out for the holidays. There’s literally nothing like visiting New York before Christmas! Pretty much all of the office and apartment buildings have some sort of tree or wreath out, and a lot of the parks have Christmas trees or trees wrapped in lights. It’s so magical.

Alright, that should be enough about myself for a while now! If you’re interested in doing this post, consider yourself tagged. Just leave a link in the comments—I’d love to check it out.