etc.

So, the Summer of Us turned into the Summer of Our House about 10 minutes after I published that last post. It started with the long-overdue purchase & delivery of a new washer & dryer. I can’t tell you what a treat it is that a full load of laundry now dries in 42 minutes. Forty-two minutes! It’s maddening to think of the 3+ hours it used to take with our old dryer. The waste! The waiting! We should have done this years ago.

Once the excitement over 42-minutes-to-dry wore off (OK, so it hasn’t really worn off yet), I turned my attention to other house matters. What other home-related annoyances have we been putting up with? If a dryer can bring me so much joy, imagine what some new bedding can do! I started making a mental list, and before we knew it, we had new bedding (which was, indeed, overdue — my favourite whites were threadbare, literally), a couple of rugs, and a lamp. Then I decided that it was time to get rid of the rug in the living room (an OK-ish sisal with a dreary blue border — the mister picked it up for a song at a sample sale a few years ago and it did the trick well enough, but I’ve never liked it much) and move the rug from under the dining table to the living room. Then we brought home a couple of dining chairs from the mister’s parents’ basement and I covered the well-used seats with a layer of batting and a delicious print (that has a tiny hint of orange!).

Then this past weekend I got a brilliant early birthday present — a pair of Bertoia Diamond Lounge chairs (deeply discounted, from Morba, for the locals). I’ve been coveting the side chairs for the dining room for a while, but when we saw the diamond chairs (deeply! discounted!) this weekend, we knew we couldn’t pass them up. So, into the living room they went, but that meant the whole room required re-envisioning, so we moved the coffee table out and into the basement and the ottoman (which has been a cat-bed for the last 5 years) is now the coffee table. The cats are beside themselves but the humans are quite happy with it.

Whew. Are you still with me? I wasn’t kidding about The House Talk.

So, now, I’m making some new cushion covers for the couch, sewing up some chair pads for the new chairs (ours didn’t come with any, and replacement pads for $220+ a piece? I don’t think so!), and rethinking the fireplace. It’s not a functional fireplace, so we’ve had some candles in there for a while, with a tired brass grill (scored from a garage sale) in front of it. I think we’ll toss the candles and find a new-old cover for it. Or something.

Also? Last night, I caught the mister browsing Flickr for bathroom renovation ideas. Uh-oh.

I can think of a few other things I’d rather do, but there you have it.

With apologies to those with delicate sensibilities.

That pile of laundry up there? Taller than I am. It’s a good thing we had the foresight to place our laundry hamper up against the wall, because, frankly, we couldn’t pile laundry that high without some sort of propping mechanism. The mister has suggested a game of laundry Jenga.

Lest you think it’s all white light, orange clocks, and domestic felicity around here, I thought I’d throw in a little offering from the keeping-it-real department to balance things out. That’s all.

To-day? Pretty much the same as yesterday. Yesterday? Cool, almost cold, and dull. In a not-bad way. I’m on vacation this week and I have no plans. No vacation-type plans, that is. I spent yesterday grading essays and tabulating final marks that were to be delivered to the faculty by day’s end (done!). To-day I’m reading a wad of documents in preparation for an all-day committee meeting tomorrow that is only loosely work-related. Tomorrow I attend said all-day meeting. Thursday through Sunday? Wide open. For vacation-type plans that are still in the hopper (and will probably amount to little more than three books and a couch).

Speaking of books, at the moment I’m reading Consolation by Michael Redhill. It’s been longlisted for the Man Booker (new word for me, that) and it is quite brilliant. Although I’m a complete pushover for novels set in Toronto so, of course, I’m biased. The other two books for the week? Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Also? I’ve got sore fingers and dirt under my fingernails from weeding and watering the front garden. The dry spell around here has been a blessing only because it has foiled the weeds’ plans to overtake our front garden and front walk. We’ve got Irish moss growing between the stones on our front walk and a certain weed (I think it might be White Clover. And, look, I found a whole weed gallery for Ontario!) has been conspiring to overtake the entire walk and, most likely, kill off the moss. I usually let it get Bad before taking action because they’re tiny little buggers and standing there, looking at the lot of them all at once sends me into a spell of paralysis, but to-day I realized that focusing on tiny patches at a time gets the job done in good order. Is this how people manage their gardens? I’m never sure, I just play at gardening, you see.

Oh, and, also? While I was out there attending to the weeding and watering, our neighbour came home and asked if we heard a ruckus outside our door a couple of nights earlier. Apparently her bike was stolen right off her front step — the bike that she leaves chained to our downspout (our houses are attached; it’s all very intimate). I said we hadn’t heard anything (because we hadn’t) and we proceeded to tut-tut at the ridiculousness of someone going through the trouble of sawing through a lock to thieve a ratty old bike. And take her son’s Tonka trucks while they were at it. It made me feel fortunate that the only thing we’ve had stolen is a green bin and had me puzzling over the apparent incomprehensibility of the concept of personal property all over again. I still don’t get it.

Up next: a walk to the library to return 7 gravely-overdue books. I might never learn.

It’s -22°C outside and I’m thinking about spring cleaning. In all fairness, I first started thinking about spring cleaning in early January, when it was +10°C outside, a temperature that put me in a right spring cleaning spirit, and justifiably so. The forecast for this week makes me feel like spring is never going to get here, but of course, that’s just a little bit of drama on my part.

So, back to the spring cleaning. Truth is, I get excited about the annual purge every year, and then, inevitably, I chicken out. I have terrible dust allergies and I always seem to remember this just as spring cleaning excitement reaches a fever pitch. And once I remember the sneezing and sinus nightmare, I start making mental excuses to scale back on purge plans, which really doesn’t do anything for my dust allergies in the long run, but oh well, some days The Easy Way Out is the best way out. This year, I have some sort of steely resolve that I’ve never had before and I’m determined to sweep away the stuff & scree that’s been making me feel both bloated and bogged down, domestically speaking.

Plans, folks! I’m making plans! I’m great at making plans, aren’t I? Here are some spring cleaning plans:

• trunk: empty out and organize memory-type things in it.
• fridge: empty, clean completely, restock. The mister did the same in the pantry the other day so I might enlist him as the lead on the fridge cleaning too. He always says, “the kitchen is my domain, don’t worry about it”, so perhaps it’s time to milk that claim for all it’s worth.
• coffee tables: empty out drawers, toss unnecessaries. (We have wicker baskets in both our coffee tables, and you know what that means, don’t you? Point of Opportunity Dumping Ground for Things that Don’t Otherwise Have a Home).
• basement storage space: empty completely & purge with impunity.
• basement organization: hats & gloves on on top shelf of closet; other winter woollies in top drawer of hall table. Organize rest of hall table drawers too. (We just bought a Pax closet for the basement and our coats have never been happier! And our shoes too: we got one of these & installed it in the bottom of the closet. Shoe organization heaven!)
• guestroom: clean, purge, reorganize closet.
• hall closet: clean, purge, reorganize.
• studio: clean, purge, reorganize closet.

OK, I ran out of steam at the end there, but you get the idea: there are a lot of closets in our crazy, little house that desperately need attention! Just thinking about it all makes me disappointed that I could have let it get so bad (I’m not even a pack rat!), so I’m really, really looking forward to putting these plans into action. They won’t be merely “best laid” for long!

Hells bells, it’s been 10 days! A busy 10 days, to be sure, with a conference in there somewhere, 1 presentation, 1 panel, the launch of an exciting programme at work, and some preliminary preparation for 6 upcoming presentations. Whew! Next week is all about dotting Is, crossing Ts, and getting some last minute to-dos off the list before leaving for 9 days in Florida! A vacation/trip in February is a rare treat for us, and with the bitter cold in these parts over the past few weeks, it’s a welcome respite.

I’ve been sitting on this list of household/crafty to-dos for months, it’s time to put them out there to force myself into action. After Florida.

• make window snakes for several windows (like this lovely one).
• caulk the holes in the porch (the holes are invisible but still allow in an alarming amount of moisture).
• hang shelf in kitchen (the mister bought a lovely little shelf from a garage sale about a year ago; it needs a coat of paint and as soon as it gets one, it’s going in the kitchen, where it will hold tins of tea).
• get pictures/stuff on the walls (I’ve been planning this for as long as we’ve lived in this house (31/2 years) but I’ve never quite mustered the courage to tackle the massive (and daunting) expanse(s) of white walls. I think I’m finally ready).
• quilt a couple of throw rugs for the kitchen and bathroom.
• make a lap quilt for use on the couch in the basement.

You know what I love? I love how a glance at this Flickr page provides a glimpse into the sights, colours, images, and textures that appeal to me at any given moment in time.

Notice all the paleness and white in this one compared to my last favourites capture? Quite a difference! I’m not sure if it’s the sudden change of season*, or a reaction to the mad rush of red and green I’m seeing in every commercial space in preparation for the holidays, but it is paleness and light, white and cool touches of blue that are making me come alive at the moment. Last night I had a fleeting thought about spray-painting our fake Christmas tree a sheer white (“fleeting” being the operative word).

*We had our first major snowfall yesterday, and guess who forgot to put the snow/ice scraper back in her car a day after she was all proud of herself for remembering to take it out of storage? Yea, that’s right. Lucky for me, when I got to my car at 9.20 pm last night, it was blanketed in four inches of the lightest, most shimmery snow I’ve seen in a long time! A faint sweep of the arm (fun!) was all it took to get my car into driving condition, thank goodness I remembered to wear my mittens.

Me? I clean up the studio! It’s been in a terrible state for weeks (here, have a look) with books piled all about, evidence of projects-in-progress littering both work surfaces, and about a metric tonne of fabric scraps, ribbon ends, and thread covering the floor. I’ve spent the last couple of hours doing some much needed organization, putting things away, sweeping up the floor, and wiping down the tables. Why? Because I’m starting on a bit of a craft project that’s going to require a couple of hours of studio-time everyday for the next few weeks. I’ve been planning this project for months and now that I finally have some time to devote to it (as well as a deadline – the best possible motivator), I can’t wait to actually plunge in! More soon.

I’ve been feeling decidedly uninspired by my surroundings lately. Part of it has to do with the fact that once we made the decision to get a cleaning lady, I wanted a clean house stat. But it doesn’t quite work that way unfortunately, finding the right person takes time, and we’re still very much in the early stages of the process (talking to friends & neighbours), so my clean house is still a bit of a distant hope at the moment.

The other part of it is my overall indecision about what actually inspires me as far as room design goes. A part of me wants to strip away all the clutter and embrace clean lines, wide open spaces, and white white white (all our walls are white); another part of me wants to surround myself with colour and fabrics and texture and objects that are meaningful to us (this pretty much sums up my studio, where I have been spending NO time lately). We haven’t been thoughtful at all about what we’ve done with our surroundings, so the end result has been a combination of neglected white walls (the white is fine, the lack of things hanging upon these walls is not), some clutter-free corners, some spaces dense with colour and character, and no sense of balance whatsoever. I’m starting to hatch some plans for a few additions (nothing major, just a few little things that I can whip together using my sewing machine and fabric stash) and whenever I’m in need of inspiration, I turn to Flickr (where else?) where I get absolutely lost combing through tags and groups and where inspiration is very easy to come by. Here is a mosaic of what I added as favourites this morning (while sitting in bed, waiting for the meds to take effect and allow me a last hour of sleep). Take a look at my favourites page to see these images individually.

As you can see, colours (blues, reds, pinks, yellows) figure prominently, as do fabrics and textures, which gives me a pretty clear indication of where my head is at at the moment. Looking at this mosaic (and I’ve been staring at it all day!) makes me want to beat feet up to my studio, fire up my sewing machine, tear through my stash, and reinvent my surroundings instantly! Of course, if it were that easy, there’d be no fun in it, would there?

I think I might have scared away the worst of the cold with sleep and that trio of warriors I cursed yesterday (Echinacea, Vitamin C, Cold FX). I’m still a bit mopey from the general malaise but I haven’t sneezed once to-day and no more throat irritation either!

Of course I’m not feeling near well enough to tackle the front yard, which is still not ready for winter. I know I’m playing with fire here because we’re probably perilously close to that first snowfall (I’m pretty sure this time last year we’d already had one) and the leaves have not been raked, the hedges have not been trimmed, the lavender has not been pruned, and the bulbs have not been planted. How about this, Universe? How about you give me a single hour of sunshine to-morrow and I’ll have it all done in time for you to rain your fury down upon us? Great, thanks.

And, lastly, it was brought to my attention recently that there are a few crafty librarians out there who read this blog but not my library blog, so I thought a little cross-posting might be in order. If you work in a special library that uses 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, RSS, IM, etc.), would you help me out by answering a short survey? More info here. Thank you!