And then I redeemed my week...

Last week was a week of mishaps, but all-in-all it wasn't so bad.  In between the madness, I got to see a lot of friends (these ones, these ones, these ones and more), ate a lot of really great food, went out for a night-on-the-town with my brother, and caught up on some much-needed housework. 

By the time it got to the weekend, the only plans Blake and I had made was to go to the pool and relax all day.  Well, it rained steadily all day, so that plan was a bust. 

It's a rare day that we don't have anything planned, so we took advantage and puttered around all over town cutting our perpetual, mile-long to-do list down to size.  We got our break lights replaced, went to a farmers market, went to a garden center to look for a lemon tree (I really want one for our dining room, but no dice!  They're surprisingly hard to find.), ate a leisurely lunch, went to Lowes to look at lighting options, went to IKEA to find inspiration for a side table and to give ourselves a headache, and then went to a really fun birthday get-together with friends.  It was a full day, but even with the rain it somehow felt relaxed and chill.

It's pretty slow-going furnishing a house.  It's takes a lot of money (which we usually don't have) and time (which we almost never have), so it's a continual work in progress.

We picked up a lamp on clearance from my favorite store (Arhaus) a couple weeks ago and it has been looking pretty forlorn on the floor next to the couch.  So when we were out in the IKEA direction on Saturday, it sparked my memory of an IKEA-hackers post about combining two Lack side tables to make a faux Parsons table. 

It was such a simple Sunday morning project, but for $25.00 I don't think it looks half-bad.  It's probably a little more modern than what we usually go with, but I'm really happy with how it turned out and love the way it looks with the navy blue couch. 

I want to get a large basket to put in it to hide games (yep, we're finally stepping up to our Mormon heritage and collecting some board games...I never though I'd see the day!).  But, design friends, is it blasphemous to ruin the clean lines with a basket?  What do you think?

Going Public

Yesterday was kind of a rough day.  It was a long day at work.  I got soaked in a torrential rain during a sudden storm on the way to dinner with friends.  I got some nasty bug bites all over my legs on my walk to dinner and they swelled prolifically.

The same sudden storm that drenched me on the way to dinner also toasted a transformer on our street and left our house and 10 others without power.  As I walked up the street in the darkening twilight I noticed that our neighbors had power, surrounding streets had power, but our house was pitch black.

Perfect.

Blake is out of town, so I got home to a dark, quiet, and warm house.  I was angry that I'd gone grocery shopping the day before to start re-stocking our food supply.  This anger spurred me to immediate action.  I found one of our trusty headlamps and set about emptying the ice box into a cooler to keep our floors dry and our ice cream cold -priorities.  (Live and learn, right?). 

I walked around the house making sure nothing else needed to be taken care of and could see our neighbors watching TV out of our back window.  At this point I started to feel rather sorry for myself.

So I sat down on the couch clad in my pajamas and a head lamp and ready to watch NetFlix on my phone (thank goodness for 3G!). 

It was right about then that Meg and Stephen dropped by with their little Ivy to say hello and pick up some left-behind toys.  I answered the door in the aforementioned jammies/head lamp combo and was such a pitiful sight (I'm guessing...) that they insisted on getting me out of the house, into some air conditioning, and filled with the fluffy goodness of a Potbelly milkshake. 

We spent the rest of the evening enjoying the cool jams and pleasant temperatures of the Silver Spring Potbelly.  It ended up being the perfect evening. 

So, thank you, Meg and Stephen, for rescuing me from a long, hot, lonely night.  Thank you for re-arranging your grocery shopping schedule and other Wednesday-evening plans for your pesky friend.  You guys are the best. 

And one more thing.

Did you know that when the power goes out and the ice in your freezer starts to melt, it will drip continuously out of the ice dispenser and soak the kitchen floor?

Did you know that when you remove the ice box from the freezer and place it in the sink, it will halt the dripping, but the when the freezer turns back on it will continue to make ice?

Did you know that the ice maker will continue to make ice because it does not feel a box starting to fill up?

And when it continues to make ice at a unceasing pace, did you know that when you open the freezer door after coming home from your trip, several hundred ice cubes (along with some suspect re-frozen fish and chicken juice) would cascade out into the kitchen?

We didn't.

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th started a little early for me this year.  It's basically been a whole week of mayhem.  You know how bad things tend to happen in 3's?  Well, I'm over that limit and still going strong.

1.  I got sick last Tuesday and am still sniffling.  I went through approximately 5 Gatorade's and 2 boxes of Kleenex per day for the first few days, spent half of my vacation in bed, flew with a sinus infection (which, I'm pretty sure is on of the seven circles of Hell), and still missed a couples days of work before dragging myself out of bed and back into reality. 

2.  Somewhere between packing in Pebble Beach and unpacking in Maryland, I lost my favorite watch.  The beautiful one that Blake gave me for our anniversary. 

3.  Last night I came home exhausted from my first full day back at work to a home that smelled distinctly of laundry.  This is not a smell I dislike.  But yesterday it was a smell the confused me seeing as I hadn't gotten around to doing laundry since our return. 

I wondered if I were just making it up.  My nose, after all, was pretty stuffy and I couldn't be sure I wasn't having an olfactory hallucination. 

But after sniffing all around the house, I opened the door to our laundry/unifinished basement and discovered that my almost-new, Costco-sized detergent had fallen off the high shelf, burst, and spread all over the floor. 

It's under the washer and dryer, under the shelves, soaked into the lawn bags, goo-ing up the vaccuum.  Not only did it restrain itself to the huge puddle you see here, but there were also splatter marks across almost the entire length of the room.  You name it, the blue goo got it. 

I guess it was a sign that I should do laundry.  In order to save some of the goop (detergent is expensive!) I dipped the clothes directly into the puddle and then threw them into the washer.  No additional soap needed.   

Embarassing?  Yes.  White trash?  Maybe.  But Genius?  Yes!

I spent about two hours trying to clean up the mess, but only made it about halfway before giving up and leaving it for a weekend project. 

At least my floors will be clean.  If anyone feels like having a picnic on our soon-to-be-pristine cement floors, let me know.

5.  Oh, and today I fell in the shower.  I'm not sure if I'm 26 or 86, but there you have it.  I was minding my own business, pumice-stoning my foot, and before I knew what was happening I had hit my knee, hip and head on the tub and tile in rapid succession. 

It must have sounded a lot worse than it was, because Blake came running up the stairs to make sure I was ok.  I briefly considered claiming amnesia (re: The Vow) and screaming at the "unknown man" invading my shower, but I kept calm and decided to dry off and call it a morning instead.

At this rate, it'll be a miracle if I can make it through the weekend.

Pebble Beach

We got back from Pebble Beach late Saturday night/Early Sunday morning.  Have I mentioned how much I hate Dulles airport?  It hardly even justifies a capitalization.  That's how much I hate it.  Remind me to avoid it and its inconvenient parking, horrible security lines, inept employees and slow-as-molasses people-movers as much as possible in the future.

But, I digress.

We had a wonderful time in Pebble Beach.  Even though Blake was sick for the first couple days and I was sick for the last half, there is no better place to recover.  At 65 degrees and sunny, it surely beat that 110 degrees and humid that was happening in DC while we were away.  As luck would have it, our house was actually without power for the entire week we were away.  Sick or not, we still picked the perfect week to be away!

My parents rent a house every summer that's just 10 houses up the street from this:

These are just iPhone pictures, so you can imagine how gorgeous it is in real life.  Hopefully when I pull myself together and quit the sniffles altogether I'll be able to load some of our real-camera photos and talk a bit more about the trip.

Now that finally lucid, I'm really ready to head back and do the trip all over again.  Who's with me?