Saturday, February 21, 2009

Saturday night giveaway.


Out of chaos comes creation, right?

My desk is a terrific mess right now. The other day a couple pieces of mess ended up sitting next to each other, kind of like that "you've got your chocolate in my peanut butter" commercial from my childhood, and I thought they might look neat on a project.


The tea packets I got in a tea swap at least a year ago, and saved in the kitchen drawer because I thought they were so pretty, the black ribbon came tied around a notepad that somebody gave me, and was also hanging out in the kitchen drawer, the ticket is from the parking lot at the Newport News Fall Festival and has been in, you guessed it, the kitchen drawer since then. (I cleaned out the kitchen drawers last week, can you tell?) And the green ribbon was part of a decoration on a packet of little cards I got from an Etsy shop a few weeks ago. Amazingly, it never had to live in the kitchen drawer but settled in directly on my desk.

One-and-a-half "How I Met Your Mother" episodes later (Todd's watching them downstairs)--voila!


It's got a little pocket in the back cover, too, for a bookmark or a packet of tea:

The book is an unlined Moleskine journal, they're super nice to write in.

So I would like to give this to somebody who would enjoy it, because I just needed to do something creative for my soul tonight. Plus, it cleared four tiny things off the chaos of my desk!

Leave a comment and tell me what your favorite kind of tea is. Or if you don't like tea, then tell me what you DO like to drink. I'll pull a name Wednesday morning.

Make mine a double.


I've been a bit of a Crabby Appleton lately (where in the world did
that expression come from?) so I thought I'd spare y'all that. Nothing going wrong, I've just been walking around with a black cloud over my head for some reason.

Well, nothing
was going wrong, till we ripped out all this:

and disconnected this:

and yanked this off:

and plunked down the new countertop and realized it was too big. Silly me, assuming that our vanity was a standard size! Will I ever learn to measure? But really, if you were strolling through a home improvement store and every single countertop was 22" deep, wouldn't you assume your own countertop was also 22" deep? Well, you'd be wrong! No soup for you! (Have too many years gone by for "Seinfeld" references to be appropriate any more?)

So it was back to Home Depot to return it and to special order a new 19" deep top, which should arrive in a week or so. Fortunately, it won't cost any more than the standard one. Whew!

I'm just a little bit over having stuff strewn all over the upstairs--vanity doors, hinges, handles, paint trays, paint cans, paintbrushes, paint rollers, tape, rags, ladder, spackle, the giant mirror, the door mirror, the old shower pole/curtain, pictures, tchotchkes, fixtures, all the soap and shampoo collections from under the sink, cleansers...you know how much stuff accumulates in a bathroom, and it's spread all over everywhere and it's beginning to get on my nerves just...a little...bit.

It's definitely making me re-think painting all the kitchen cabinets and putting in new countertops, since that's a project much greater in magnitude than this previously simple bathroom re-do. The chaos of having kitchen stuff everywhere for weeks and weeks...ooh, the thought gives me chills!

We are going to attach the new doors to the vanity and hang a few things up (as soon as Todd finishes gloating over his unexpectedly freed-up weekend) and that will help with some of the floor clutter. And some of the paint stuff can go away, too, although I do have to do paint touch-ups in a lot of places now that the mirror and medicine cabinet are out and I can reach places I couldn't before.

Someday it will be done! Now where's that bottle of wine...?