Twisted, Nostalgia, Moving

I like to braid hair. Mine, friends, my nieces. I would braid Eleanor's but she just doesn't have enough yet (though I did manage to get a bow in it the other day!)

I just like it. It's soothing and pretty and I like it. I've been doing it for over 20 years now (which, when I figured that out, I immediately felt quite old) so my hands just sort of know what to do. I can braid my own hair just as easily as a head that's not mine. If I think about it and pay attention, I can do a dutch braid. Fishbone braids are a piece of cake and I even learned how to do a 4-strand round braid. What I can't manage is a rope braid. It is my nemesis. You twist the individual strands one way and then the rope the other way which makes my brains fall out of my head. I know the MECHANICS, how it SHOULD work, but my hands refuse to obey my head. I can sort of do it on someone else's head, but not mine. Except once, when I did, and now I think that I can, but I CAN'T and  without replicating the results it's not a triumph but a fluke.

So, my iPod got stolen so I've been listening to cds, which isn't bad at all. It's been really nice. And a bit nostalgic because when I went through my cds to grab some from my car, apparently I was channeling a little 2001--the year, not the movie, or book that it's based on. What I mean is that every cd that I grabbed is reminding me of college, specifically the year I moved into the Ghetto Chateau with my Nebraska girls and worked at the college radio station and wrote REALLY bad poetry with my friend Andrew and it's been a nice trip down memory lane. Which reminds me of the article that Andrew wrote for the Daily Nebraskan about how music affects memories and it had the very scientific test along with it. You were supposed to put on a cd, go make out with someone, and then months/years later listen to the same cd and see if you remembered who you were making out with. Well, I wasn't making out with anyone in 2001, so it's easy enough to remember. But I remember Andrew's white Toyota something that we rode around in and deciding that Whatshisface from OkGo made Robert Smith noises. And I remember driving up and down O St. looking for parking so I could meet Erin at YiaYia's while listening to Alkaline Trio. So, I'd say that it works.

I have this habit of always looking at houses/apartments/neighborhoods and deciding whether or not I'd like to live there whenever I'm driving. It's not because of any sort of wanderlust or desire to move. I hate moving. I hate packing and unpacking. I hate finding a new grocery store and transferring my prescriptions to the new CVS and deciding whether or not to keep the same dentist/optometrist/vet from the last house--and that's just when you move across town. But that's not the point I was trying to make. The thing is, I have some very weird rules about my dream house. I don't mean perfectly reasonable things like "a master bathroom with a tub and room for 2 butts at the same time." I mean truly irrational things. For example, my barbie dream house would be on a 1 word, easily pronouncable, easily spelled street. Having lived on Pope's Creek Circle and Caymus Court, I long for simplicity. Also, I don't want any one word that you have to specify is one word--combination words are right out. I'd like a house number that is 3 or 4 digits long. Not 1, 2 or 5. 6 is right out. I want a front porch that you can stand on and be dry if it is raining, and a mail box on that porch.

That's all the randomness my brain has in it at this moment. Now, back to my sleeping baby.

a little more to the left

Despite the title, this is not a post about politics.

I know I'm not the only one who finds joy in re-organization. After the Closet Swap, I've been wanting to attack all the other closets in the house. And the pantry. And the kitchen cabinets. And maybe move around some furniture.

Strangely, I've decided to start with the last thing first. I'm going to rearrange the furniture in several rooms. This pleases me because I don't think there is any room where I am 100% happy with the current arrangement. I don't know that the changes I have in mind will lead to complete room harmony, but I have hope that it will add some ease of movement and storage functionality. I should take before & after pictures... that sounds smart...

be right back!

Well, nevermind before pictures. The rooms are way too messy for showing on the internet. So, you'll just have to trust me that the layout wasn't ideal.

The first step in the rearranging process has gone flawlessly. I moved our baker's rack from one wall to the opposite wall. This opens up the wall it was previously on to a lot of possibilities, since I also moved the dog's food to the other wall as well. I think I'll put our buffet thingy there and set it up as the pseudo bar again.

Then, I'm going to take our love seat, which is at the moment facing the couch with a coffee table in between. I will move the love seat to where the buffet was, move the couch down, switch the current sewing-table-serving-as-a-tv-stand out and put the currently stacked end-tables down as the new serving-as-a-tv stand (or maybe mount the TV to the wall, but that requires putting holes in brick, which seems tricky), and wait... the couches. Yes, then the couches will be in a L shape, which may or may not drive me crazy.

Also, can I just take a moment to say that at this moment, I really appreciate laptops. I'm not generally a fan of laptops when it comes to my own personal use. I like my desktop. I like my keyboard and mouse just the way they are, and all that jazz. But right now, I'm very glad I can take my husband's laptop and blog from another room. 90% of the time I love that we have our computer desks in the same room. It's very helpful when I'm playing WoW, because I can ask him questions very easily. It is less ideal when he is playing Eve and talking in Skype with someone about some crazy details that I half understand and therefore try to listen to and get distracted by and can't even keep a thought in my head when I'm trying to type out very self-important trivia...

So yeah. I'm not rearranging the computer room* but I do love being able to take a laptop and go away when I want to. Technology is grand.

Where was I...

Oh yeah, the couches. See, the original placement left the couch & love seat so far apart that you couldn't really have a conversation, which is no good for me. My husband loved it because he likes rooms with wide open spaces. I like rooms with open space too, but not the room I want to hang out and talk in. That room I want to be close and cozy. So, hopefully moving the couches into a closer L will give cozy & open a chance to share the same space. It might also mean that watching tv together will require some adjusting of our normal butt-grooves, but I think that's good for us. That will help balance out the couches, right? The occasional rotation of the butt-grooves is recommended by couchs experts, right? Yeah, I thought so.

So here are the after pictures.

 Of course, you clean out shelves cats suddenly appear there

The living room would probably make more sense if the TV were opposite these couches, but it's not

our "entertainment center" and yes, the vacuum, because it needs to live right there!

the bar, such as it is

the new home of the baker's rack.
Also, I made those curtains. Yes I did. 

*Sometimes we call it the office, but mostly we always call it the computer room. This is a holdover from living at home (with my parents, as opposed to now, when I live at home with my husband) I think. "Office" sounds like work gets done in there... and, well, we all know that's rarely the case.

The spaces in my brain are full of fluff. There are so many things bouncing around my brain at the moment. Things I'm thinking about, want to talk about, need to write about. Not a stampede of ideas really, because that implies a force of motion that I'm not sure I've got. Maybe a swarm... tiny little thoughts that don't stay still and buzz around, getting in my way and annoying me. There are so many changes going on along the peripherals of my life while things essentially float on apace at our house. A new house, a wedding, a baby all on the doorstep of the season of holiday entertaining. These are the times I wish for the ability to focus with clarity instead of multi-tasking myself into a mess. But, this won't be a post about the things I want to post about, because that seems pointless beyond the level of pointlessness I usually promote here.


So, some moments of joy and peace amongst all the frenzy around me:

I have a new niece. She is a week old, not quite 8 lbs, and precious. I was lucky enough to meet her on day 1, and her very trusting mother even let me hold her when she was just hours old. (I think this being her 6th baby, she’s not quite as nervous about the handling of newborns as I am, who has only ever held 3 fresh babies.) She has blonde eyelashes, and what I could see of her hair poking out of the ubiquitous blue-and-pink stripped hat looked to be in the strawberry blonde range, which keeps all things even at that household when it comes to kids: 3 boys, 3 girls. 3 blue-eyed redheads, 3 brown-eyed brunettes. Anyway, darling niece #3 is tiny, precious, and has already learned how to scare the crap out of her aunt with only a sneeze. It seems like babies shouldn't sneeze for at least a couple of days, but no one told my niece that. Suddenly, this tiny, warm, adorable, squiggly mass of baby went from cute & cuddly to making a noise I didn't think possible from something that size. I'm sure my face must have been quite the sight as I tried to figure out what I'd done to break the baby...

One of my Nebraska Girls* is getting married on Saturday. All the planning is coming together as the sheer momentum of events keeps things moving forward. We assembled favor boxes last week, and last night—as her things are being transferred from her current home to her new home—prepared the thank-you gift bag things for out-of-town family, including a personalized Christmas ornament. I have to say, I’m rather pleased with the way those came out, and our little bride was such a trooper! The original idea was a complete failure, and yet, she never even batted an eyelash at it. She just picked up and kept going, trusting in the shared knowledge of her friends and family to make it all come together. So, I put my craftiness to work and that’s one more thing for her to cross off her list. Now, I've got an outfit figured out for the rehearsal dinner, but I've changed my mind at least fourteen times about what to wear to the wedding. Black, because the bride doesn't think black at a wedding is tacky. Red, because it's Advent at a Catholic church, so it's the primary wedding color. Khaki, because together with black, it's the bride's favorite color... Or a black dress that has a khaki ribbon trim at the empire waist with something to cover my bare arms and red shoes... or try to fight holiday crowds to get a new cocktail dress that I can then wear to my husband's swanky work party... oh, the decisions!

Moving isn’t fun. Last in the lengthy list of friends who have moved this year are some of my oldest friends here in Dallas. New houses can be fun, but the process of going from one to the other is rarely fun. Add into that the purchase of the new home, holiday travel, bank rules and regulations that seem arbitrary at best, and perhaps the cutest nearly-8-month-old baby I know, and you get a lot of stress. I subscribe to the “one less thing to worry about” club, in that if there’s ever anything that I can do to have one less thing to worry about, I love to delegate that responsibility out. So, now I can add house-sitting to my pet-petter and animal-feeder resume. While my friends were off trotting the globe (or at least the country), I had the pleasure of getting to see the new house, check the mail, play with the thermostat and faucets, and some other stuff… like stand in the kitchen and look into the other rooms and imagine making jam there with the lady of the house, or picture where the man of the house would be fixing me a killer Manhattan… I can’t wait for the settling-in process to start and see how they make that amazing house into an amazing home.

So that’s the life of the Bean, on this day.

*Nebraska Girls being my fabulous friends who attended UNL with me and then let me talk them in to moving to Dallas with me

Thunderbolts and Lightning...

I actually like the rain. It makes me want to snuggle up and read, and anything that makes me want to do that is good in my book.


I don't like floods or leaky basements though. See, there was this house in Richardson, a quadplex thingy, with a basement.


I'll give it a minute to sink in. A basement. In North Texas.


Yeah.


Anyway, said basement had no sump pump, concrete floors, and a leak.