It's times like these that we often find ourselves turning to the eternal wisdom of Boyz II Men. Last night, as we sobbed into our glass of vintage port and hit our pillows until they were reduced into a feathery, sticky mush of feathers, tears and sweet, sweet wine, we listened, on seemingly endless repeat, to their immortal classic, "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday." Although much of this was relatively standard fare for a Thursday night, it felt particularly meaningful because, as you might have read late yesterday, our dear Alissa Walker has left us for the tranquility of a daily-design-news-blog-less life. But before she stops reading this site entirely, and due to the fact that this writer stopped attending school in the third grade, he wants to send you off the only way he knows how: with one of those poem things that uses the letters in your name to say stuff about you...

A is for "Alissa" because that is her name.
L is for "Louganis," her favorite Olympian from 1984 to 1988.
I is for "I" because she rarely spoke in first person here.
S is for "Sacrebleu!" her favorite French expression.
S is for...wait, we just told you what S is for. Knock it off.
A is for "America" because that is what she stood for.

We're going to miss Alissa around here, particularly me. She made coming here and writing for the past six hundred something days an unexpected treat, even on those times when it was the last thing we wanted to do. She dug up stories, cracked wise, and hopefully helped a lot of people learn a lot of interesting things (or, at the very least, made their hours at work seem a little more bearable). Hopefully she'll stop by time and again to say hello to Stephanie and I, seeing how we're holding up in this backbreaking trade. And when she does, I'll hold back the tears and and say, "You still owe me that twenty bucks."