Ambushed at the quilt show.

Why didn't anyone ever warn me that the danger of quilt shows isn't in the sewing supplies???

My friend Cheryl and I went to the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival in Hampton today, and I was expecting to be buying lots of ribbons and fibers and buttons and maybe even fabric although I don't sew--well, there were bigger temptations lurking.

Who knew that they sell jewelry at these things? Vintage jewelry made from old china and antique buttons!

I bought the most beautiful bracelet made from circa-1870s celluloid buttons. Each button has a tiny image on it, birds and butterflies and a tiny castle. I could have bought every bracelet and watch at this booth...they were all stunning, like little bits of wearable history. Cheryl got a bracelet at another booth that was made from old pearl buttons. Oh, and I got a small necklace charm made from a bit of floral china.

We also found a booth chock-full of ribbons and buttons and buckles and trims, most of which were vintage. Although the booth owner had the people skills you'd expect of a New Englander, she did know how to merchandise. The buttons were grouped by colors in vintage jars. The ribbons were wrapped around old spools and piled in baskets. The whole thing was formulated precisely to appeal to crafty ladies who love old stuff. Needless to say, Cheryl and I spent a lot of time there. I picked out a handful of old green, teal and orange buttons to go on the tabtops of my future scraproom curtains.

I also got Mother's Day/birthday presents for my mom and MIL, but I can't elaborate because I know they read this! Neener, neener!

Oh yeah, there were some pretty quilts, too. Heh, they faded into the background after we started discovering the vintage doodads booths, but we really did enjoy seeing them. The colors and textures were a feast for the eyes. I hadn't realized now many people are doing 3-D quilting, with lily pads and bird's tails that spring out from the quilt. Lots of hand-dyed, variegated and batik fabrics in the quilts, too, which were so, so lovely.

I just never dreamed I'd buy so much non-craft stuff at a quilt show. Dangerous, very dangerous.

Birthday boy.

Thirty-six years ago today, this precious little baby boy was born...and he grew up into a lovely man and I married him! Happy birthday, sweetie! I love you so much, and remember: you're not getting older, you're getting better. Or some crap like that. Also wanted to remind you: no matter how old you get, you'll still be older than me.

Anything else I can do to rub in the fact of your advancing age, just let me know. I'm here for you, babe.

Of course, I know you'll be here for me in eight months when my turn comes, too, so maybe I'd better just leave it at "Happy Birthday, Sweetie!" and a cheesy grin.

Pretties.

I bought these tulips a couple weeks ago, and I just uploaded the pics off the memory card. They were so gorgeous against my apple-green wall.

Where I left off.

Well, it took a couple days but the freaking headache finally went away. Sheesh!

Anyway, this writing class...it's been really interesting. It was a six-week workshop in Becky's wonderful scraproom above her garage. We all sat at a gorgeous wood table and wrote. I snagged the chair on the side of the table where I could look out the window at her view of Back Creek...oh, I'm so pea-green with envy about her room with a view!

Becky lost her daughter to MS three years ago, and began her writing workshops as a way to talk with others about writing your story, writing through grief, telling the things that need to be told. I have come to admire this lady so much...she is such a giving, creative person with such a deep wound. I admire the way she's surrounded herself with people to teach and to learn from.

This workshop was more emotional than I had anticipated. And I wasn't completely comfortable with that. But it was a chance to get back into writing, and I explored a couple of memories that I hadn't totally understood before. Foremost was my memory of going to Washington D.C. to protest the first Iraq war 15 years ago. It was funny how it popped into my head one morning and demanded to be re-examined. Maybe I'll post the bit I wrote about it here sometime soon.

Speaking of writers, Sarah Vowell was on The Daily Show last night, and I missed it because I got caught up in some Olympic moment, so I made sure to catch her tonight on the repeat. I just read her book Assassination Vacation last week, and really enjoyed it. I like her essay books better, but how can you not love someone who makes pilgrimages to presidential assassination sites? And I mean, sites that are really, really peripherally linked. But she makes the links all come together.

The main thing I always remember from Sarah's writings is her description of going to the first GWB inauguration in 2001 and bursting into tears when he finished his oath of office. I can totally relate, although in 2001 I was still too much in a state of shock for tears. The tears came for me on Election Day 2004. Ugh.

Sarah is a year older than I am, and grew up fundamentalist Christian, which makes me feel sort of a peer connection with her, but she's about a million times more sophisticated and educated than I am, so I know I'd be completely intimidated by her. I can forgive her that, but she's friends with Jon Stewart and gets to sit and crack wise with him on The Daily Show, and that is hard to get past. I'm turning pea-green again.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, although I still profess my undying love for him, he may have to share that love from now on with Stephen Colbert. Man, I love that guy! I always loved him on The Daily Show...I loved how he would say the most appalling things with this really wicked look in his eyes. Wicked isn't even the word for it...it's this amused devilish gleam that is amazingly attractive. Mm.

And now he's got his own show where he absolutely skewers the Bill O-Reilly/Joe Scarborough pompous blowhard stereotype, and I love it. LOVE it. Jon at 11 pm and Stephen at 11:30...I'm sorry, but Letterman and Leno could never in their wildest dreams be so cool, funny and subversive.

I had other things swirling around that I wanted to write about, but my feet are soooo coooold from sitting here...I need to break out my electric blanket. I've been freezing all night!

Headache.

My alarm clock woke me up this morning, which is really unusual--I always wake up at least a few minutes before it goes off, and turn on NPR and doze for a few more minutes before getting up. But today it interrupted my dream starring Jon Stewart (yum) and yanked me into morning-time before I was quite ready.

And I woke up with a headache. A mega-headache. I had writing class first thing this morning, and I grabbed a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee on the way there, thinking the caffeine would ease it out. But although it tasted heavenly, it didn't help. The headache kept creeping up and creeping up, worse and worse as I sat there, and when I left Becky's house and walked out to my car, it had made it into the "top ten worst headaches of my life" list, quite a feat.

I came home and had lunch and popped three Tylenol, but my head is still throbbing. However, I have the day off and am fresh from my last writing class, and I want to take a little time to write about it.

Becky is a retired middle-school English teacher who has started holding six-week writing workshops in her home. I found out about the class last fall from one of the owners of the scrapbook store across the street from our former neighborhood. Becky scrapbooks, so she's a customer at that store as well as ours. I knew her only slightly, but a writing class sounded like a good thing at this stage. I took a couple creative writing classes when we lived in Idaho, but that was a long time ago, and since then the only writing I've done is journaling for scrapbook pages and instruction lists for my published work.

I'll finish this later...headache too bad now! Ugh.

Dramatic clouds.

This was the view out my study window late this afternoon. We went from 70 degrees yesterday to 32 today. We had some really wet snow flurries, but nothing that stuck. These clouds show that something was moving through, for sure.

I've spent the day working on Fiskars projects for a Paper Crafts supplement for this fall. Weird to be thinking about back-to-school projects! You'd think I'd be used to working six months ahead by now. Anyway, the first two have gone way smoother than I feared they would. I have two more small ideas in the works. Then I think I'll start planning for the October Paper Crafts call. I am anxious to jump back into the regular submittal routine, since I've been out of it for quite a while. Every now and then I think about branching out and trying for some design team work, but the magazine stuff is so nice. Good pay and exposure, and I can pretty much create whatever I want. It works well for me.

Last night I heard a sound I haven't heard in ages: a "plink, plink, plink" coming from Todd's study up the hall. That means he was playing online poker (the plinks are the sound of cards flipping), and that means that life is slowly returning to normal after our big move! For almost two months, he's been busy with projects, but this week we hit a point where leisure time is coming back. Oh, there are still boxes around and millions of things to attend to, but Todd is finding time to fish and play poker now. It's a good sign.

Lazy Sunday.

Well, it's a lazy Sunday for me, anyway. Todd and his dad are working on our closet re-modeling job, so they haven't had a relaxing weekend, but it's going well, and they get a charge out of building and hammering and planning. Todd's mom and I may run out and hit a few thrift stores today, but there's nothing that really has to be done except buy a gallon of milk. I can't express how wonderful it is to have a day where I don't have to get up and go somewhere all day long.

Todd got my countertop and wall shelves put up Friday night, so yesterday I was able to unpack a couple more boxes and free up a little more floor space in my scraproom. Now I need to really sort through everything, and I may start that this evening, but it's not something that has to be tackled right this minute.

So I'm just sitting here, listening to the hammers pound, watching a few miniscule snowflakes drift past the window, and looking forward to a pleasant day before I plunge into Monday activities. It's great.

Fish story.

Todd had a very happy afternoon today...he got to go striper fishing on his co-worker Dave's boat. A few weeks ago, some of the office guys played hooky on a Wednesday afternoon, and had a super day. Alas, Todd decided to be responsible that day, stayed at work, and had to listen to phone call after phone call detailing the massive stripers the guys were hauling in. He was quite woebegone by the time he got home that night!

So the next time Dave took his boat out for an afternoon trip, Todd had to go along. Alas, the stripers were all off shopping and having their nails done that day...not a bite to be had.

Today was just right. The guys hauled in huge fish all afternoon and evening. How huge? Take a look!

That's Todd in the middle with the big smile on his face, Dave on the left, Aaron on the right. Usually when Todd goes striper fishing, he never gets good photos for one reason or another, but this time he got me some fun ones to scrap!

It looks like such a warm heavenly day out on the ocean, but somehow I don't think it was. January and February are prime time for striped bass as they meet and greet each other in the bay and out in the ocean. Unfortunately, those also happen to be the coldest months here in Virginia. But it looks like the guys stayed warm lifting fish!

Stuff.

So this three-year-old kid comes into the store today with his mom. I came out of the back where I was bagging die cuts and said "Hi" to the little boy. He puts his hands on his hips and says, "Aren't you forgetting something?" like a mini diva. I was so amazed to get such an attitude from a three-year-old stranger...I said, "What am I forgetting?" His mom smiles and says, "He's wanting to play with the toys." (We keep a box of toys behind the counter for the rugrat-type of visitors.)

I couldn't decide whether to be amused or annoyed! I went with a little of each. It was all in the way he said it, like a 15-year-old girl on her period. Glad I'm not your mama, kid.

I indulged in a flurry of scrapbooking activity last week, making my first album for Shimelle's DoneNDusted class. You can look at it here if you're interested. We're just finishing up week two in the class, and although I was inspired by the topic, no album is forthcoming.

The week two album is a small album where you use three words to decribe your passion. Well, the only passion I could come up with was driving in my car and singing along to the radio. Hey, I never claimed to be deep. So I decided to do an album of road trip songs, which morphed into a collage-with-lyrics album idea, which doesn't at all fit the class album's theme and structure. So I started on my own idea, and have played around with it a little, but I have this sinking feeling it will end up yet another of my unfinished projects. All the creating mojo I was feeling last week has drizzled away.

The problem is my scraproom, and the boxes in it, and the lack of workspace, and the dilemma of where to put everything so I can live in here. I did sort of a mental "la la la I'm not listening" in here last week and was able to plow through the mess, but now it's bogging me down.

You'd think I could just move my old scraproom furniture into my new scraproom, bim bam boom, but not only is this room smaller, it's configured differently. I'm really at a loss as to how to get everything in the way I need it. However, the teal paint on the walls is indeed bitchin'. I guess the rest will fall into place, but I need it to happen soon...I have deadlines again. Fiskars and Paper Crafts.

I picked up the spring Stamp It today, and my Mother's Day stationery set was there, page 32. I'm always, always blown away by how well they photograph my stuff so it looks way better than I ever dreamed it could. It actually looks professional, and not like I threw it together in a fit of anxiety, heh heh.

So seeing my work in print always fires me up to submit more...really, to plunge back into it since my submissions have totally dried up between work and the holidays and moving...I just gotta get this room in shape and then figure out how to overcome the tiredness and carve out some time to indulge in creating. Hm. Seems like a lot to ask.

Our humble abode.

I was talking to my friend Bev last night and she mentioned that she hadn't seen any pics of our house yet. Which reminded me that I had tried once to post pics here weeks and weeks ago, but failed. So I'll try again!

Here it is: 213 Stony Ridge Court:



We really are on a ridge...we look out over all the neighborhood from our perch. On this flat, swampy peninsula, a ridge is like a mountain! When the Great Atlantic Tsunami comes, we'll be sitting high and dry. Hopefully.

A view of the backyard from the upstairs deck:

And a view of the back side of the house:

The upstairs deck opens off my study/scraproom, and the downstairs deck opens off the dining room.

This weekend I finally got a pile of small things done that had been gathering necessity over the past couple weeks. I re-painted the last tiny bit of kitchen, which has been waiting for a month or so. There's a tiny alcove at the end of the kitchen with two closets, a half-bath and the door to the garage branching off it. While originally painting it, I brushed up against either wall while crouching and contorting myself to get every crevice. So I finally got around to giving it a nice neat second coat--now I can take the tape off and feel like it's done.

I also got four loads of laundry done, a couple more boxes unpacked, and moved everything from the guest bath which we've been using to the master bath which has been sitting empty. We made a mega-run to Target and got shelving for the bath...and I found the cutest shower curtain on clearance. I still want to completely overhaul all the bathrooms--they all need paint, new floors and new sinks/counters, but it looks nice now and useable, so that's a step in the right direction. I'm starting to be able to visualize the end result, rather than chaos unending!

It was so great to have a couple days to putz around here and take care of some of the stuff that's been piling up.

Good for the soul.

I'm in love with another man. I've never met him, but he fulfills my needs in a way I've never experienced before. His name? Trader Joe.

I wrote about my wonderful Farm Fresh grocery store a couple months ago, but we've moved now, and it's too far away for the drop-in visit now. I miss it so!

But Trader Joe's which opened here in December, just happens to be placed right in the middle of the 20 minute-trip from my new house to work, if I don't take the highway, which I do some days.

It's a small store, but it's chock-full of organic fruits and veggies, exotic frozen dinners, frozen organic veggies, cereals, crackers, delicious chocolates, rices and pastas and hormone-free milk.

Right now I'm snacking on Chocolate Raspberry Sticks, which are two bites of sheer heaven. I stopped by this afternoon to pick up some Emergen-C fruit drink, which my realtor told me helps stave off colds, which I feel like I am getting merely a month after my last cold from hell. But chocolate is good for cold prevention, too, right?

The rest of this afternoon, I'm going to work on my first album for a three-week, three-album online class by Shimelle Laine. I was thinking about taking a class at Big Picture Scrapbooking, after Beth showed me her adorable mini-album she made in a class there, but then I got to poking around on Shimelle's site, and I decided to try that one first. It's a class called DoneNDusted. I am so much in need of some small, completed projects that will allow me to do whatever I want, in a new vein. My creativity has been at a low ebb, and unfortunately, now that I feel it slowly stirring back to life, my time is also at a low ebb. I am dying for just one day, a single day, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. Is it even possible??? I used to have those luxuries all the time, and too much of a luxury is definitely a bad thing, but now I'm too far at the other end of the spectrum.

Off to play for a precious little bit...

Abigail.

The other night I defiantly sat down to watch TV among the boxes. Todd passed through the living room and said, "Why aren't you working?" By that time, I'd flipped to the very beginning of American Experience on PBS, and I watched as I unpacked a few token boxes, just to pacify the man.

Well. This particular episode was about John and Abigail Adams, beautifully played by Simon Russell Beale (Charles Musgrove in one of my favorite movies, Persuasion) and Linda Emond. The characters only spoke words directly from the letters the Adamses wrote to each other during their long marriage, and they came to life so vividly. David McCullough narrated the show...I imagine much of it was drawn from his book on Adams.

That Abigail. What a woman. What a thinker! "We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." I'd like to have this engraved on a rock and toss it through the Oval Office window. Oops, hope some NSA guy isn't reading this.

"These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great challenges are formed. . . . Great necessities call out great virtues." This quote is a challenge to me. I love the still calm of life, I crave it. Do I really need great virtues? Can't I just be middling good?

And of course, "Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could." Take that, husband who wants me to unpack boxes.

The stuff about John was good, but it was Abigail who really shone out of that story. Raising kids, running a farm, and keeping an ear to the ground along the way for war news and political news to pass along to her husband, and finding the time to throw her own cogent opinions and thoughts into those long letters...she needs to be in the pantheon of patriots right up there with Jefferson and Washington. Her picture should be on classroom walls for all us American girls to look up to and aspire to, because she was an American girl to the bone: strong, savvy, saucy and smart.

My laundry woes.

Life in a new house is always a series of adjustments, but the worst adjustments of all are the unexpected ones.

This house came with a washer and dryer, hooked up in the garage. We knew from the first day we considered the house that this would have to change, because Todd needs lots and lots of garage real-estate for his tools...and because I don't want to do laundry next to a table saw covered an inch deep in sawdust and grease. Also, the garage smells like a dog's toilet, which I think isn't too far from the truth. Not pleasant.

The house has a downstairs storage closet located on the same wall as the washer/dryer hook-ups, just on the other side of the wall from the garage. So we planned to expand the closet so it could accomodate a stackable washer and dryer, and thus spare us both from a garage/laundry conflict.

Last week, Todd hooked up our new stackables, in the garage for now, until he and his dad can do the closet re-model, hopefully next month. I had six loads of laundry waiting...more than usual, because things got backed up during the last frantic days of moving. I hauled the first load down to the garage, and holding my breath against the dog pee smell, programmed the washer.

As I pushed the buttons, I noticed that the green number in the LCD window said 55. I honestly, fleetingly, thought for a moment that this was the washer's speed limit. (I may have hummed a snatch of "I Can't Drive 55.") Then it dawned on me, to my horror, that this was the load time. From the first push of the button to the last revolution of the tub...fifty-five minutes.

Worse news followed when I crammed that first load into the dryer and again, programmed it. The LCD window read 1:36. As in one hour and thirty-six minutes to dry the load that I'd been waiting for an hour to finish washing.

This saga began at 4:15. By the time I went to bed at 10:30, I had completed and folded three loads of laundry. A fourth was still drying, a fifth sat in the washer waiting for the dryer, and a sixth was still dirty in the basket.

I've never really minded doing laundry. As household chores go, it's way above cleaning toilets...it's really probably the only chore I don't hate. Until now. I've always been a get-it-done-at-once laundrywoman, which is possible since there's only two of us dirtying clothes in this family. I take an afternoon and do three or four loads while I'm scrapbooking or reading or putzing around the house. In our condo, the laundry room was steps away from the bedroom, which made laundry day a total breeze.

On Friday night, I sensed that this era was coming to an end, and that laundry may shoot to the top of my hated household chores list. I understood, when we looked at the stackables, that the loads would have to be smaller and probably more frequent, simply because the tubs were smaller. But I never dreamed the time limit would be so much longer. The only way to cope with this 155-minute-per-load problem is to do a load a day...maybe throw it in the washer as I leave for work, throw it in the dryer when I come home from work, and fold it and put it away before bed. I can't tell you how much this depresses me. I used to think about laundry exactly once every 5-to-8 days, freeing my mind for infinitely more important matters. Now I have to think about it every day. Goodbye, Nobel Prize, I guess.

A new year in a new house.

My friend Beth stopped by the store yesterday and said--"I keep checking your blog but all I keep seeing is 'Glory to the Newborn King!' How about an update?" My friend Beverly has also dropped some gentle hints that I'm falling down on the job as a blogger. It's kinda nice that someone actually wants to hear what I have to say.

Well, it's been three or four weeks of busy, that sums it all up pretty well. We closed on our house two days after Christmas, and began painting right away. I had tried to post a few house pictures here that week, but it was far too frustrating. I'm not really happy with the user-friendliness of Blogger. Or maybe I should say the idiot-proofness.

Painting, taping, painting, taping...then packing, packing packing. We were doing one or the other for three weeks. Our new living room is now buttercream yellow instead of off-white. Our new kitchen and dining room are apple green instead of white. Our new bedroom is a warm cocoa color, rather than the yellow it was before. Nothing wrong with yellow, but I had a different vision for this room!

And our studies are teal green (mine) and a soft forest green (Todd) instead of gray. What kind of person paints rooms gray? And this wasn't a nice classy warm gray, like my sis-in-law Julie's downstairs rooms...this was institutional depression gray. They look ever so much better now. Paint makes a world of difference for sure, even if I never want to lift a paint roller again.

I will have to, though, and soon...I have three bathrooms and a foyer/stairway/hallway yet to paint, as well as the garage, which smells of dog so badly, we both want to barf every time we enter it. And since I'm currently doing laundry out there, that's a lot of nausea.

We moved the last box out of our condo on the 15th, and two days later I ran over to let in the carpet cleaners. When they were done, I left my key on the kitchen counter, took one last look around and left forever. Such a bittersweet moment. I really loved living in that community and that condo. And I knew I was heading home to a house filled with boxes!

We've been living in the new place for almost three weeks now. Stuff is still piled everywhere--mostly the stuff I have no place for. We lost a coat closet, half a utility closet, and at least a few more square feet of general closet space in this move, so I am trying to come up with ingenious storage solutions. Not much luck so far.

Anyway, I'm trying to wrestle my life back into order and routine, so I'll pick up my blog again and head into 2006. Feels nice to make a fresh start.

Glory to the newborn King.

Merry Christmas! It seems like a good day to catch up this darned blog, since we are home alone [insert McCauley Culkin-type hands-on-face expression here] on Christmas Day, with nothing much to do.

So many fun and crazy things have happened in the past six weeks, it's almost too much to type out, which is why I've let this blog fall behind. We took a week-long trip to Ohio for Thanksgiving, and I took a four-day to trip to Memphis two weeks ago for a girlfriends get-together.

The big news is that we finally bought a house and will be closing on it the day after tomorrow. It's actually the house I mentioned in my previous post, way back in mid-November.

The house had been sold by the time I got to look at it, which was really disappointing. The following weekend, I took Todd over to see it just for a lark. We walked through the yard. I called our realtors to see if that sake was indeed going through, and theygot back to me a couple days before Thanksgiving to say that, indeed, the sale was solid. So I just put the whole thing out of my mind.

On December 5, our realtor Pat called us and said that the sale had fallen through. Amazing! We went over and looked at the house again, made an offer that night and had it accepted. All was well!

But then the appraisal came back...at $12,000 less than the sale price. We couldn't make up that shortfall (not would we have, even if we could have) and neither could the seller, as they were selling it after only just buying the place in August.

We really thought the whole thing had just fallen through. And we were okay with that. The thought of doing all that painting, packing, and moving over Christmas was daunting. And we realized there would be some real storage challenges with this house, too.

But last Wednesday the word came down that the agents had worked it out between them to take a commission cut, and the seller was able to come up with the rest of the shortfall. So we got the house, at $12,000 less than we planned. A nice Christmas gift!
I'm sad to be leaving this condo...we've been happy here and I was really feeling ensconced and contented after I got my few Christmas decorations up in late November. Love the neighborhood, love the community, but we'll have some great times in our new house, too, I really feel it.

So we're here all by ourselves for Christmas...the first time in ten years that we haven't traveled to be with family for the holidays. I miss seeing everyone, but it's a relief not to have to travel, especially since this house thing popped up, and since I've been sick with a cold for a week, and still feeling under the weather.

We opened presents this morning...I got Todd a bunch of supplies for building his RC airplanes, plus a book on tablesaws and one on...what else, RC airplanes. He got me a book on herb gardening, the Back to the Future trilogy on DVD, and The Sound of Music on DVD, and two pairs of earrings from Super Hero Designs, which is a site my friend Suzanne stumbled across and got me interested in. Plus, some lavender soap and the loveliest garnet and freshwater pearl necklace/earrings set, both of which he picked up at the Newport News Fall Festival in October. Very nice indeed!
This evening we'll feast on roast chicken if I can bestir myself from the computer long enough to go down and get it started. Tomorrow the packing begins, and Tuesday we do our walk-through and closing. Wednesday will be the beginning of the taping and painting extravaganza...ugh! But how wonderful everything will look when it's all done.
I'll write up the rest of our doings in a couple more posts.

Excrutiating minutiae.

Another sitcom quote--Seinfeld this time!

I'm trying to keep up with my blog a little better. Everything is so blah here, though. We've been coming home in the evenings and vegging out, which isn't really like us, but we're both tired and frustrated at the end of the day lately. I feel like I've got pebbles in the shoe of my soul. Hm, that's almost a pun, isn't it?

I drove around to five different houses with my realtors yesterday afternoon...one was pretty good. I wanted to go back today so Todd could see it, and maybe write an offer...this morning our realtor told us it's already in contract. It was in contract when I looked at it yesterday--the listing agent simply didn't bother to mention that fact. I absolutely feel in the depths of my mind that we will never own a house. I know I get discouraged easily, but that's because nothing encouraging has ever, ever happened when we get involved in real estate!

It's easier to be content when I just don't look at houses for a few weeks. Our neighborhood here is so beautiful right now. I've always loved living here; each season seems like the most beautiful, until you get to the next one. The development is full of large trees and shrubs...it's like living in a park. If only we owned this dumb place, it'd be perfect.

I've been rearranging the store like mad this week. It's been quite fun. It's the one part of my job I really do like--straightening, consolidating, making things look better and more appealing, making displays that are easy for a customer to look at. I guess it's hardly surprising--that's the part of scrapbooking I like the best too! Finding just the right place for everything! Now I just need to apply that talent to our home.

For years, I'd been very organized with our possessions, keeping things organized and arranged, weeding out things on a regular basis. I like having a tidy house. But then we moved twice in less than a year's time, and it all fell apart and I've never gotten a grip on it since! In the fall, I always want to clean closets and get rid of things, but this fall there has been no time at all for that. I need to make the time--we've got a downstairs closet that's like a black hole. Stuff goes in, but it doesn't come out.

This is such a boring post, I want to delete it, but it's just as easy to hit publish instead. I guess.

Grocery delights.

I've been surfing around reading a few other people's blogs this afternoon, and I feel like mine is BOOORING!

Then again, my life is pretty boring, so that doesn't give me much blog fodder.

How boring is my life? Well, I made a trip to our new grocery store this morning and it was definitely the highlight of my week.

We have a plaza with a bunch of empty storefronts just up the road, and an effort is being made to fill the plaza and spiff it up some. So Farm Fresh put in a new store in one of the empty sections. We have a couple Farm Fresh stores over in Newport News, and I go to the one every so often, but this is great to have one right up the road.

Here's how truly boring our lives are--Todd ran over to the plaza to pick up Chinese food a couple weeks ago, and called me all in a tizzy because the Farm Fresh had just opened. We weren't expecting it to open so soon, since the sign had just gone up, and construction in Virginia seems to take about five times longer than it did in Ohio.

The conversation went:

"Hey, guess what? That new Farm Fresh is open!"

"REALLY?!!"

"YEAH! I'm in here right now!"

"REALLY?!!"

"YEAH! It's so cool!"

Weep for us poor thirty-something homebody losers, gentle reader.

Anyway, I finally made it over to check it out for myself, and it's quite nice. I'm a bit of a food snob. I don't really like to cook, and I don't eat right, but I like to have the option of cooking and eating right when the desire hits me.

I like seeing fancy spaghetti sauces and whole-grain breads and cheese with names I can't pronounce. I adore seeing well-lit, beautifully arranged produce and ethnic food sections that encompass more than just Italian and Mexican. I like finding foods from companies other than General Mills and Kraft.

And I don't mind paying a little more for the experience, either. Our other neighborhood grocery store is a Food Lion, and it's about the least-inspired grocery store I've ever seen. It's nice to have a pretty grocery store finally. I don't care if that makes me shallow.

Because I was there mid-morning, it was just me and a handful of senior citizens, so I walked right up to the smiling waiting cashier who said, "I can take you right here," had my groceries bagged in paper bags by a lovely girl, and then had a very nice gentleman wheel them out and load them in the car for me. I can't remember the last time I was attended by three whole people at a grocery store. I felt like Queen Elizabeth surrounded by courtiers.

This Farm Fresh also has a program where you can shop online, send in your order, then drop by and pick it up. The fee is only $4.50. I can't begin to tell you how tempted I am by this feature. It seems incredibly decadent to pay someone else to do my grocery shopping for me.

But you know, everything was so bright and pretty, I think I can suck it up and shop for myself for a while longer.

Leafy, leafy.

That's a Phoebe quote from Friends, by the way...for some reason, Todd and I have been quoting it for, oh, ten years now. It's just fun to say.

A few fall foliage pictures from our Sunday drive along the Colonial Parkway. This is a limited-access tourist road that connects Yorktown, Williamsburg and Jamestown, and runs along some of the prettiest rivers and streams you'll ever see.





I think this one on the left is sooo pretty. Love all the grasses and weedy stuff in the foreground.

This one below was taken in roughly the same spot as the other one, just facing the opposite direction.

That's all for now--Todd wants his dinner for some dumb reason. Heh.

Buzzing.

Someday it will dawn on me that ingesting caffeine after 4 pm guarantees a jittery sleepless night. But I guess I'm a slow learner.

I had wonderful iced tea with dinner tonight...what a dope. Saturday night, I had wonderful coffee with dinner...you'd think the lesson would have lingered in my tiny brain a little longer. It's 1:45 and I am sleepy yet agitated. My brain's all jumpy.

So I thought I'd write what my SBF girlfriends call a "ketchup post."

Store news: I am so eager to quit my job. However--

My friend Cheryl is taking over as manager, and there will be a desperate need for several part-timers. Much as I'd like to drop a lighted match on the carpet and run away from that place forever...I am needed. At least for a couple afternoons a week. And since I know I will miss that paycheck, miniscule as it will be, I think I am stuck there for the forseeable future.

But No Teaching and No Weekends. On this there can be no compromise!

Designing news: I finished 14 cards for the Paper Crafts book I was asked to contribute to. Last week I had to make some last-minute changes, type up all the supply lists and instructions and mail them off. It was a panicky day or two, but oh, what a relief to drop them in the bin at the post office.

Consequently, I am finding it hard to get enthused about creating anything for the latest magazine call that entered my e-mail inbox a few weeks ago. It's for an issue I've had a lot of luck with in the past, but I am having a hard time forcing myself to sit and stamp. What I have come up with has been less than good.

However, I discovered a new company that has no design team that I'm aware of, and that I would like to work for. So tonight I directed my energy to making a layout with their stuff. I'd like to make three or four layouts, plus a couple cards, and toss them out to see if I can get a bite. The first layout went together well...I haven't scrapped a page in EONS.

Life news: We're slowly making our way through Season 1 of Gilmore Girls on DVD. I'm completely amused by how much Todd likes it. Because it's a fairly girly show. But we just fast forward through that dreadful Carole King theme song, and try to ignore the super-girly "da-da-da" vocal snippets that get played during scene changes. I'm soooo not a chick-flick kind of woman, but this is a good show. The acting and writing are excellent, and it pulls you right in. Definitely in the same vein as Ed and Northern Exposure, but with female protagonists, which is a mighty refreshing change.

My aunt, uncle and cousin came down for a day visit last weekend, and we took them up to Yorktown for lunch, walked along the river and nearly froze to death, and walked through the town, which was only slightly less cold. My cousin Alan lives in Charlottesville, which is about two hours away from us, so John and Molly decided to drive on out to us during their weekend visit to Alan.

It was such a great little visit...we appreciated them making the trip!

We went to a Halloween party/poker game that Saturday night at our friends Dawn and Dave's house. I am feeling such a desire to entertain. We just have no room in this condo to have a party. Having two or three people over is pushing it. One of my many regrets about losing that house in September was that it was laid out perfectly for entertaining. Ah well. Maybe I'm just not ever meant to break out of my "I hate people" persona.

This past weekend we drove up the Colonial Parkway to Williamsburg to look at the fall foliage, which really started looking glorious about a week ago. I had made a rush trip to Williamsburg on Thursday and I wanted to go back when I had time and a camera to get some shots of the leaves. I'd upload the pictures right now, but Todd has hidden his digital camera somewhere, and I can't find it. Maybe tomorrow.

I'm really not sure how I'm feeling about life right now. I seem to veer wildly between quite cranky and fairly mellow. It's a fun ride. *eye roll*

I still feel like I need that breathing room and I'm not getting it. Cheryl started at the store today and I was showing her the ropes and talking through some of the issues with her, and I am so sick of devoting precious brain power to that place. I desperately want to turn it all over to someone else and walk out the door and never come back. The problems are big...I've been unable to do anything about them...and now I simply don't care. But Cheryl does and she needs my help, at least for a while. Ugh. I can't believe I'm sitting here in the wee hours thinking about that store. Double ugh. It's sucking the life out of me!

Life in a Nutshell

(Stole my favorite Barenaked Ladies song for the title there)

I can't believe October is over. And that I lived through it. And that I blogged so little of it. And that November is supposed to be my "finally get a break" month and it's not looking good at all for that break. That nice little mental health, take a few days and make a plan break.

I guess I'm finally an adult. I've spent so much of my life avoiding being busy, now it's my turn for that crazy 21st-century lifestyle that I've been hearing so much about.

I've always been someone who needed lots of time to just think. Think my thoughts. Daydream and skygaze. It's part of the reason I don't have kids, since I have it on good authority that a mother doesn't get so much as an unaccompanied bathroom break until all her kids leave home for good. I need my alone time!

On the other hand, I am also a person who is prone to sliding into deep pits of introspection that lead into deeper pits of depression if I'm left unattended too long, so it really is good for me to be busy and have stuff to tend to and people to talk to.

I just gotta find that perfect balance. Ha ha.

In other news, look at what greeted me at the door last night:

I knew I was going to be getting home after dark, so I called Todd and told him to pick up some Halloween candy on his way home from work. I never know if we'll have T-or-T-ers or not...I didn't even really think about the candy factor until about 4 p.m. Monday.

So when I rounded the corner of the house, there was Sir Todd in full SCA garb, handing out Nutty Bars to the rugrats. Yes, Nutty Bars. His heart was in the right place, but Todd still doesn't grasp the concept of Halloween CANDY, apparently.

And he only bought three boxes of Nutty Bars, which he went through in about 15 minutes. And the kids kept ringing the doorbell. There ensued a mad rummage through the pantry, which only yielded a bag of little raisin boxes from some past healthy-eating kick of mine.

So a bunch of neighborhood kids were very disappointed at the end of the evening, to up-end their bags and find a box of raisins in with all the good stuff. It was dark, so Todd was able to hide the truth of what he was putting in their bags...otherwise, I think he might have gotten some really evil toddler looks.

But isn't he cute in his costume? Made my heart totally melt.

I had more stuff to share, but i think I'll save it for later.