sister conversations

Today I was chatty chattin' with my sister on the way home from work and somehow we ended up talking about birth weight which led me to sharing with her that at one point early in my life I believed that when I was born I weighed 8 lbs 7 oz. Only later in life (read: middle school or early high school) did I receive clarification on the issue. The truth was, I weighed 7 lbs 8 oz., and for some reason, this was both a relief and a source of great distress for me. I had shared this false and robust information to countless of my friends, only to find out that I was a normal, smaller sized baby.* (Having a little sister who weighed a mere 6 lbs 4 oz. at birth is a lot to live....down to?) I genuinely felt like I owed it to those people and to my reputation to go back and inform everyone I could think of about my correct birth weight.

After I told my sister this she responded with the following:

"Yeah, it's kind of like when I found out a couple years ago that my half birthday is actually June 5, and not on Cinco de Mayo like I always believed. I guess I could have just done the math, but you know."

*I know now, being an adult, that 8 lbs 7 oz is not abnormal. Please keep in mind that the girl feeling those feelings was young and without birthing experiences of her own to draw from.

fun with poses at work!

Long time no blahg.

To break up the monotony of not blogging in quite some time, I've decided to post a couple photos of me doing dumb things at work:

I call this "A Penny for Your Thoughts":


And this is "Art of Cube":

Hope everyone had a great Easter!!

On my turntable....

DFSG Wintery Mix 10-11:

1. Doll is Mine - Blonde Redhead

2. Wolves - Phosphorescent

3. Fake Empire - The National

4. Helplessly Hoping - CSNY

5. Winter Winds - Mumford & Sons

6. I Am On Your Side - Ryan Adams

7. What Light - Wilco

8. Fidgeting Wildly - Centro-Matic

9. Still Afraid - Bosque Brown

10. I Believe, I Believe - Murry Hammond

11. Lovely Day - Bill Withers

12. I'll Believe In Anything - Wolf Parade

13. All Thoughts Are Pray To Some Beast - Bill Callahan

14. Heartbreaker - The Cardigans

15. Bruises - Chairlift

16. It Aint Easy - David Bowie

17. A Black Wave is Comin' - Doug Burr

18. Home - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

19. What a Day, What a Day, What an Interlude - Castledoor

over the river and through the woods...

Hipstamatic edition.

Last weekend, the husbo and I drove up to Kansas to visit my mom, sister, uncle and grandparents and split the difference between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I've always loved my grandparents' house - from the decor to the layout to the exterior - just about everything. But I think as I've gotten older and now have a house of my own to decorate, I've come to appreciate it way more...and to see how, though our style definitely incorporates more modern elements, there are definite similarities in aesthetic.

Here are some of my favorites:

My mom cross-stitched the piece hanging on the wall behind the old fire extinguisher turned lamp...

Favorite place to hang out as a kid. So many moving pieces...



Canes galore...

Get your education on!



Vignettes...



She sits, therefore she is...

In the key of C minor...

To catalog or not to catalog...

All year round, folks...


And non-hipstamatically...

Sigh.

grocery sexism anecdote

Having Mondays off, my beloved K-Ho often takes care of running errands or doing things about the house on this day. Today we're having some good friends over for dinner, and Kevin was in charge of going to the grocery store for "our" famous chili recipe that is actually not "my" recipe at all.

So we're talking on the phone and he's telling me how amazingly cheap all of the stuff was, and I asked him if he had trouble finding the chili seasoning since our usual grocery store is in the middle of a remodel and who KNOWS where they'll decide to put the seasonings! He said that he found it will relative ease, but that while he was looking for it he overheard two women talking who did not notice him standing there. They were joking amongst themselves how funny it is around the holidays to see men shopping in the grocery store who clearly have no idea where to find anything.

Kevin promptly cleared his throat, walked up to them and said,

"Excuse me ladies, can you please tell me where I can find the groceries?"

dining room before & after

Okay! After a "long and grueling" process comprised mostly of me finally just rebooting my iPhoto.....my before & after pics finally showed up! Here are some before shots:

Sans furniture:



Looking from dining room into our living room:

We were thinking that since we have our cute little chair rail that we might try doing a different color on top and on bottom - LOOK OUT - we're crazy! Who knows what we'll do next! We had been on such a roll with the den and the kitchen and wanted to get our paint on again while we were in the zone, so we picked our colors and I went to the store one glorious Saturday. I wanted the top color in the dining room to be the same color we will end up using in our bedroom - a light gray leaning more towards the blue end of the spectrum than the brown. Since this is a dining room where food will be eaten (and occasionally thrown), I was thinking that it might be a good idea to get a satin finish for that room rather than flat like we'd done in the other two rooms. This is what I call Mistake #2. Mistake #1 was my overconfidence in my new abundance of painting experience (one large wall) to the extent that I didn't think I needed to tape the floor boards or chair rail. I love those new edgers, but in my experience they do NOT eliminate the need for tape if you want to do the most clean paint job you can. NOTED!

I started with the bottom, darker section of the dining room first (dark gray), and I notice as I'm going along doing the edging that 1) Man it probably would have been a good idea to tape, and 2) this paint isn't drying as seamlessly and magnificently as the other rooms we did. Hmm....and it looks a little shinier than I imagined....Hmm. NOT COOL. I went ahead and finished the bottom section, Kevin came home and lovingly confirmed my suspicions. It was looking like crap. So before we proceed, Kevin patiently and manly-ly (shh) taped off all the top section and we decided to do the top using the flat gallon we'd purchased for our bedroom and just exchange the satin gallon for another flat version since we hadn't opened it.

NOTE: Sherwin Williams has great paint, and I'd been able to get all the paint we've used thus far at deep discounts, but they have really inconvenient hours and a horrible return policy - in that they won't do it if they've colored the paint. While I'm really glad to know that if I happen to buy 10 gallons of UNcolored paint I can return it no problem (???), it was irritating that we had to wait two more days to go and talk to a manager before finally getting an exchange. I think we'll be Home Depot paint customers from now on.

We also bought a flat half gallon of the same paint color we'd used on the bottom, so we could sand and paint back over it. What we thought would be a one day job turned into four, but at long last we finished!! Here are some after pics:




And with a little floral styling:

We still need to put more stuff up on the walls, but I already think the house is looking so much cooler and so much more "us" with all this paint! Who knew!

I'll make sure to take more "during" pics when we do our bedroom! PAINT!

Paint Colors:
Below Chair Rail - SW Wall Street
Above Chair Rail - SW Evening Shadow

snafu!

This morning it was made clear that my camera & computer are in cahoots against me to sabotage my before and after documentation. Boo for malicious cahoots! Boo I say! I uploaded the pics to my computer and at the very end of the importing process, iPhoto "unexpectedly" quit, deleting the photos from my computer AND MY CAMERA! What?! Irritating! So I've contacted iPhoto help and they're supposed to give me a call so we'll see if they can help me restore my precious photos!

In the meanwhile, here's a photo of the sweet hound we'll be dog-sitting this weekend for our BFFs. I present to you Sir Charlie Technology!