Just stuff.

I'm not blogging from my phone today, so maybe I'll spell things correctly and use correct grammar this time. Maybe.

Life has been chugging along at a nice pace. We've been doing stuff (I'm not going to say that we're busy, because we are, but we always are so why dwell on that. And I'm not even sure if busy is a bad thing anymore. I think that it just is.). I mentioned in my last post that we had friends over for a end-of-season cookout, and you saw the remains of the beverages consumed. What's funny is that I don't think I had even one glass of wine or a sip of beer all night. I was spending my time talking, or eating, or swatting mosquitoes. Man, oh man, the mosquitoes are still deadly, even this far into October. Another effect of global warming that we have to contend with.

After our cookout two Saturdays ago my family came up to visit. We went on a walk in Boston and then ate dinner along the Boston Harbor. I am amazed at how little Doug and I go into the city. Even when we lived in Allston we rarely went into the city. However, when we're there, we ask ourselves why we don't spend more time there. We complain an awful lot about it, but what do we really know about it? For example, there was a movie being filmed right outside the Old State House. A big-budget flick, too, with Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Bacon. Who knew? Probably people who spend their time enjoying their city rather than wishing they lived anywhere but here. So we are going to change our mindsets a little and we are going to start saying things like, "I like Boston," and "What a nice place to live," and we are going to see how this goes.

We learned that Maria, my youngest niece, wants to live in a city when she grows up. And she wants to be on Broadway. So this means that she wants to live in NYC. She is pro-city and knows this with 8 year-old certainty. I like that.

Maybe this will be our backyard someday; the Boston Harbor.

It fills Doug's requirements of being near the water. It could fill the requirement of being near a public transport line that runs more frequently than the commuter rail. It could also fill the requirement of allowing for a better commute. If the Boston Harbor were in our backyard, do you think we'd actually go on a cruise of the Boston Harbor Islands?

Dreams of water views and twenty-minute commutes don't stop us from keeping things alive and cooking at home. In an effort to live our values, we rearranged some of our living spaces. I don't have many photos to share with you because I'm waiting until the rooms are "complete" to show you the final product, but here's a photo to give you an idea of what we're doing:

Where's the giant TV? In the basement. Where's the bookcase? To the left of the plaid armchair. Where's the computer and table? Out in the sunroom again. Now we have a more formal living space, but I hesitate to call it a formal living room. We are not the kind of people who have "formal" spaces. It is really more of a library, or a study zone. I have been sitting in the armchair to study. Doug has been sitting in the vinyl chair to read. And, without the couch and TV in the living room, we are eating meals at the dining table. The change has been good for us; helps us to structure our time better. We aren't watching less TV, either; we just have it on more infrequently. We use other things, like the radio or record player - or nothing at all - as background noise. There's something very civilized and natural about this arrangement.

But there's nothing natural about Sherman's arrangement with his cone. He has a new one now, because he destroyed the cone he came in. Scratched it to death. Last Saturday when one of our friends came over to our house, he took one look at Sherman, who he had never seen before, and said, "Ew." Maybe it was the ratty cone that elicited that response. Maybe it was the crinkly ear. Or the runny eyes (which are runny because he can't wipe them, thanks to the cone). Regardless, the poor guy needs help. And we just can't decide if we want to pay for it, because it seems that the kind of help Sherman needs is expensive.

Decisions, decisions. Life is all about decisions. Here's one decision that I just made and it was so terribly easy to make - I'm going to bed now. I wish they were all this easy.

Redecorating.

Almost more than I love getting new (to me) pieces of furniture, I love to move existing furniture around. I find that simply by moving a piece from one location to another you can completely recreate the feel of a room. Case in point: when we went to Brimfield last Saturday, we got a bunch of chairs. Five were for the dining room table, but two were rocking chairs that we really had no idea where we'd put, and we knew that we'd have to move something in order to get them to go someplace. Here's what we've decided to do with them:

The one that Doug picked out, a very modern kind of chair that reminds me very much of IKEA (but more grown-up IKEA), is now in the sunroom/library, where the green cabinet used to be. This means that we have moved the green cabinet, and so far we have put it in the dining room, to act as a mini buffet kind of thing, to hold kitchen-y kind of things that we don't have room for in our tiny kitchen. So far it's holding nothing but our fake sunflower and the vase that we got from a cousin for our wedding, but I'll think of something to put there soon. Maybe it can be our wine cabinet. You know, for all the wine that we drink.

Anyway, but then that left us with the second rocking chair that we got, the one that we plan to refinish sometime this summer or fall but that so far looks just fine the way it is (though I do plan to have my mother reupholster the cushion, to put that reupholstering class that she took to good use). We decided to put it where the plaid armchair used to be before we moved it out into the sunroom to create our library. And now we don't have any more room for additional furniture. This is bad, bad news for people who are addicted to collecting cool stuff from Brimfield.

But, maybe we can content ourselves with taking drives to really fun places, like Storrs, Connecticut, to visit with the cows and take in the scenery. Look at this: Tell me what there is not to love about that scene. Certainly not the green grass, the rolling hill, or all the cows. Say what you want about Storrs being sleepy and a tad boring, but I loved being there for college. Any place that has animals with this much personality is a place for me.

Just a few (!) things.

A few things. A few things! Since when have I ever had "just a few things" to say. But in the interest of time, I'll keep to my rule of three.

First up - the change in my employment, which really is more of a career re-set and not just a change in jobs. I haven't spent too much time on this blog talking about my job (hardly any, actually, at least not directly), and that's because I couldn't really speak of it. Bound to secrecy in a way (or more like signed away my life in a confidentiality agreement). Anyway, for the past five years I have worked at Bain Capital. I started as an information intern, working in the research library, worked my way into a full-time job as a research analyst in the research library, and spent my last two years as director of the research library. I could go on for days about that job, but let me be brief and say that it wasn't the best fit for me. I knew that the moment I walked in and saw the lobby on the top floor of the building, and heard Pat, the receptionist, answer the phone in that movie-star kind of way. But I plodded through, quite successfully, actually, probably because I thought it was easier to go through with it all then to stop and try to find something different. And now I have found something different. Something more suited to me - my personality, my interests, my goals (there will be another post on that soon, I'm sure), and I have left behind all of this: My name on glass, a corner office, and my little library. It's okay, though. It really is. I couldn't be more sure that it's my time to leave corporate libraries, and I happily wave goodbye to the past and hello to the future.

Okay, next up - Doug's mustache. Yes, Doug has a mustache. He's had it for a couple of weeks now. I'd like to think he changed things up in honor of my new job and all of our exciting adventures yet to come, or that he shaved the beard in honor of Movember and a good cause. While the push for the mustache - which came from me, by the way, and was met with every bit of resistance Doug could muster - was originally in honor of Movember, it turned into something else. It turned into a challenge. I wanted to see if Doug would alter his facial hair just because I was asking him to. And to my surprise he did. And to his surprise he actually likes his mustache and will keep it until he grows tired of having to shave around it on a bi-weekly/weekly basis. That works for me, since I was getting a little tired of the beard and actually like being able to see more of Doug's face. Plus, it's like waking up next to someone different - I still barely recognize him.

And lastly, at least for today - redecorating! One of the very first things that I did (after our trip to Sturbridge, which was the first thing) after leaving my job was redecorate the house. Definitely trying to start afresh. The first thing I did was move the cookbooks into the kitchen. I did that because I moved the bookcase from the living room into the sun room, and it didn't make sense for the cookbooks to be all the way out there. Along with the bookcase went the armchair, and now the sun room is its own little library, complete with guitars, cat, and man with mustache.

But you might be asking yourself about the table that was out there in the sun room. Where's that? Well, it's now where the bookcase was in the living room, behind the couch in the back corner. Like so: Now we can craft there, work on the computer there, or even eat at that table and watch TV instead of breaking our backs by trying to eat at the coffee table. The room is a great space for doing all the things we most love to do - all while watching TV.

And, we made a change to the dining room, too. New dining table! We ordered this table from the Darn Good Barn Wood guys in late September and didn't get it until the Monday before Thanksgiving. I almost forgot we had it coming. We saw the DGBW guys at Brimfield back on this trip and contacted them this past May to see if they were going to be at Brimfield again. The answer was no, so we thought all summer long about going to see them at the South End market that they were participating in to pick out a table. We took until the end of September to decide that indeed we did want one of their handmade-out-of-old-barn-wood tables for our dining room, in the spirit of saying goodbye to college and our youth and hello to more "adult" furniture, and so just called them up, gave them the dimensions we were looking for and the color stain we'd like, and here it is. And we can't wait to save up money for DGBW to start making us some more stuff out of barn wood. Benches for the table, maybe? Or maybe some chairs? A coffee table? A console table? A bookcase? We've got a lot more IKEA furniture to replace; our list is almost endless.

So. Those were my three things. There is so much more to write about, to tell you about, but I have to go and get the car inspected (Whoops! I noticed that our inspection sticker expired in November when I saw the ticket sitting on the window of the car this morning (can you believe that someone patrols the parking lot at Target looking for violations? That's where I got the ticket! In a parking spot at the Watertown Target while I was inside getting my niece Maria her birthday gift!)) and then pick Doug up from work, so I can't. I have to exercise restraint, and also save some of my stories for another time. Bet you can't wait! :)