Transplanting a Seattleite

R. and I had lunch at Julie's Place today. Afterwards, we went to Circle Furniture, because the red couch is showing enough wear to cause R. to even think we should replace it. I may have accelerated this process after he pointed out the wear on the arm rest he sits next to and complained about how the fabric didn't last as well as it should have. I noted that it would be a lot easier to find a new home for the couch at this point, versus waiting until it is well and truly dead and we have to pay a junk hauler to take it away like the previous couch. We discussed it some; I wanted to at least think about a sleeper, because we do wind up having over night guests and having that as an option might be pretty awesome (there are other options, including the bunk bed, shifting people around, using the inflatable mattress, etc.). We had some reservations about the one sleeper that Circle carries and I found a place in Boston that had an interesting choice that would even let us use any material we showed up with. In the event, however, he decided he was okay with the sleeper Circle carries, found one with an arm style he liked and we got the queen size (not the queen plus or the king) and ordered a really cute pie cut out table too.

Having made such a major decision, I didn't attempt to do anything else cognitively demanding with the day.

R. took A. to his work for at-work trick or treating. T. hung out with his sitter for a few hours. I finished catching up on this season of Agents of Shield. And I wound up the day by putting stuff to give to the thrift in the car, thus clearing out a lot of the upstairs hallway where it was staged. T. and I will head out to the thrift first thing in the morning. A. is looking forward to going through some of her clothes to see what she has outgrown. She is excited to declutter the clothes, like she did her toys! She is also having fun finding all the little bits and pieces she is finding in her room where I put away the contents of the bin by the basement door. Which I am still feeling very smug about emptying.

I also had two hour long phone convos -- both really pleasant, one with a friend, one with a family member. (That was before the couch shopping.)

By the end of the evening, I couldn't stop yawning, so I took a half hour nap at around 6. That helped a lot.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-08/who-buys-bulletproof-sofas

If these become common, I see a potential new theme in action movies.

I ordered the desk today, but don't expect to receive it for a month or more. As I'm looking at these pictures, I am thinking, hmmm. Maybe we should have this room painted.

Looking from closet through space into master then the upstairs hall then A.'s room:



Looking from the master through the space into the closet:



We don't use the treadmill for about half the year, but then the other half of the year we are Really Happy It Is There. Since R. runs on it, replacing it with a low-profile walking treadmill to go with my new desk is, at least for now, not a possibility (we'd have to figure out a space for the treadmill that you can run on).

Yesterday, I took a picture of myself with Freshly Done Hair (purple!) in front of an empty bookshelf. Suggestions were made, like, hey, there should be a kindle on that shelf, just to sprinkle a little salt in it, amirite?

Today, I moved the books from a case in the interstitial space upstairs to the empty bookcase (I knew that wouldn't last long), creating a different empty bookcase, which I then moved into the upstairs hall, replacing one of the metal and wood decorative shelving units (it has since moved to the playroom downstairs, which I am not overjoyed about. Further rearranging will occur).

For that brief moment in time while it was empty, I put my current, soon to be obsolete paperwhite in its pink case, the original kindle, and the original kindles packaging all on a shelf and took pictures. I'm not overjoyed about the way they turned out, so I'll include two here: one that I like me in, and one where the kindles displayed well but I look like a dork.



And dorky:



Tomorrow, I'm going to get pictures of the upstairs hall; the new case is already loaded up with toys. Yikes. Also on the schedule for tomorrow: return the cable box (which we haven't used in, oh, a year or more) to the Verizon store so we quit being charged for it, and bring a couple old DVD players and an 8 year old TV (small flat screen) to HGRM. The TV is leaving because it doesn't have an HDMI in and we didn't have a clear need for it anywhere. The lack of HDMI in meant we'd have to keep around an old DVD player, or the cable box or something similar in order to play anything on it -- I couldn't just get an Apple TV and hook that up, which would be ideal if it was going to be a kid-tv in the upstairs hall. We had been planning on putting it on the deck (R. even got a bracket for it), but that was supposed to happen last spring and now it is fall and I don't feel like putting any more effort into it. Better to pass it along to some family that could make good use of it.

It does forcibly remind me, however, that the real problem with aging technology lies in the connectivity, more than anything else. Those pesky connectors, we love it when they improve them, but that's definitely where backwards compatibility gets tricky.

ETA: Looks like we're going to try a cheap Roku for a bit before moving the TV along, see how it works.

Back in November, I posted a couple of times about sifting through curios, deciding I wanted a very minimalist curio cabinet to display them in, having trouble finding such a thing and resorting -- successfully -- to Etsy.

Pictures!

Last July, I wandered around the house taking pictures of various home organization strategies for a possible blogging project that I haven't followed through on (and probably won't ever follow through on, altho you never know). Here's the curio cabinet:



A previous entry on the topic: http://walkitout.livejournal.com/929138.html

I had Acton Framers use a blue frame and a yellow matte; the string art itself is blue and green. Once again, I was trying for a contrasting blue and wound up with something that looks like it matches in most light. We could have put it almost anywhere (the blue and yellow I picked out work well with the colors in a lot of the rooms) and I was originally going to put it in the playroom. But then I thought, we have this Bright Green bathroom. How would that look?

Strictly speaking, the piece is Much Too Small for the space. But I can live with that. Also, R. is going to have to fix the way I put it up, because I didn't get the two hooks quite level.

Note the unbelievably perfect match between the bath towels (really, they are so huge they are more like blankets) hanging on the rack and the paint. R. spotted those towels at Costco after the room was painted _without having a swatch on him_. Kind of amazing, really.



A close-up:



Every time I look at this thing, I think, "Why can't I remember actually doing this thing? I remember having it. I remember it being mine. I remember dismantling it from the sheet of construction paper they mounted it on."

And then I think, well, the only memory I have of learning how to scale a fish is tactile. And I have a tactile memory of doing this thing. Sometime in my early 30s, I was watching my then boyfriend pick out the wrong knife to remove scales from a fish, and then pick the wrong direction AND the wrong angle. I decided I did not care about his Sensitive Male Ego, yelled at him to stop, picked a nice dull knife, and got those scales off right Quick with minimal damage to the flesh of the fish. He looked a little stunned, and then wanted to know where I'd learned to do that.

I still don't know.

I must have had a very odd childhood.

This has become sort of a reflex. I am unconvinced it is a good one, because it feels incredibly manic (R. concurs with at least the manic part), altho I get uniformly positive feedback from other people when I mention this is the current project.

Anyway. I poked at the upstairs hallway closet today, and saw a previously invisible pink dish bin, pulled it out and sorted through it. I was going to get rid of the dish bin, unfortunately, dish bins are so Useful, they are almost impossible to part with. So I cleaned it off and it's going to go up in A.'s room (which is pink) and become a corral-toys-while-appearing-decorative item for the bookshelf.

I have also been taking occasional swings at A.'s closet. There were numerous plastic crates stored there, mostly of clothing and shoes and so forth in upcoming sizes, but also some blankets and items in previous sizes and similar. The past tense items are moved along to the next step on the way out the door (trash in some cases, friends in others, clothing donation bins in still others). I'm down to two crates in there and still thinking about it. I pulled a leather duffel off the shelf in her room, finally accepted its probable unrepairability in conjunction with age (it dates from 1994 or thereabouts) and sent it along the way. It was _such_ a nice size, with really great organizing pockets, for a previous time in my life.

The laundry is ticking along, blondies are in the oven, T. is making a lot of complaining sounds in conjunction with a really serious attempt to play Angry Birds (he usually plays Rio, but this is the original game and I think it's harder) all the way through, and I'm working on a decluttering addition to my website. As part of the writing, I've been looking at various sites (books, etc.) and really starting to understand why they are the way they are, and why that annoys me. Which is good -- it means my thinking is becoming much clearer as a result of engagement with other people's ideas.

Yesterday, A. and I dropped off a rice mosaic at the framers. It's a square foot, which is pretty ridiculous when you think about it as a project for a 3rd grader, which I believe is when I did it. Very few people in the class completed the project; I did two, and I did them meticulously, lining up the rice in horizontal rows (except for hair, which went the direction of the hair, for example) and arranging the skinny ends of rice to match together and the fat ends to butt up against each other. I remember vividly doing this, even though I only have one of the mosaics (I have the Raggedy Ann and Andy one; the Snoopy one is presumably still in my mother's possession), and I didn't have it for the years between when I did it, and some time in my late 20s.

I did some googling to find out if this was a craft project that anyone still does. That's when I learned that a 6 inch square was considered a substantial project. That's also when I really realized just how obsessive my work was and how odd my choice of tools was (I used a toothpick to transfer the rice from the pile to the mosaic -- tweezers, a more typical choice judging by what people write about this, would have exhausted my hands but involved less precise technique). I asked R. if his teachers had them build toothpick houses; he said they used popsicle sticks. There was something really off about my teachers.

In any event, as I've been sifting through the contents of my closet (which has acquired things that are no longer sitting on top of my dresser, for example) and trying to figure out what to do with them (a Wonder Woman Pez dispenser that was given me as a gift. I probably should throw it away, but I might not get around to doing so for another year), I've been thinking more and more about converting some of these things that I like into decorative objects. I do not often have a strong visual idea, but this time, I do. I wanted a shallow, wall-hangable, hinged curio cabinet (where the whole front swings open). I found one on Etsy that was quite perfect but quite expensive and did another round of looking and turned up one even better for a fifth the price. It'll hold the silver punch ladle (it's much smaller than you are envisioning -- the bowl of the spoon is about a shot glass of liquid or a little less) from my first cousin once removed who I named A. for. It will also hold a few other odds and ends. I'm thinking one of the elephants from R. and maybe the pot with the lizard from I. Presumably other things will accrete -- that's how these things generally work.

I'm also trying to figure out a way to display R.'s typewriters, since collecting vintage typewriters has become Trendy while I was busy being glad that at least he wasn't collecting wooden console stereos from the mid 20th century or something similarly huge. It would be nice to have my punchbowl out, too, but that may be asking a lot. Figuring out a safe place to put a large glass object that is attractively visible but safe from two small children, well, that may be over-constrained.