What's in a name?

In an attempt to be frugal, I shop at a very obscure grocery store that is dirt cheap and that we affectionately refer to as "the used food store". So as you can imagine, such a store is located in a rather run down part of town in a strip-mall with a few other obscure shops.

Well, yesterday as I was going there, one of the shops, "Campos Furniture" had printed up a huge banner of a sign that was hung on the side of big box-truck parked in the parking lot.

The sign read:

CAMPOS FURNITURE

Remodiling Sale

Our name says it all

There were two fabulously funny things about this sign. The first is that they misspelled "remodiling" on a huge printed banner (if you could see the area it is in, you would also appreciate the humor in them remodeling at all). And second, that the store's slogan is: our name says it all. Now maybe I am ignorant to the deeper meaning of the words "Campos Furniture" but to me, that name does not really say a whole lot, let alone, say it all.

Birthday Presents

I think I was 4 or 5 when my mom asked me if there was something special I wanted for my birthday that year. In fact there was. I had been eyeing the Mac'n Cheese sleeping bag offered on the back of specially marked boxes for sometime. My mom double and triple checked that a Mac'n Cheese sleeping bag was what I really wanted. She made sure that I knew that if she ordered it, that I couldn't change my mind and get a toy later on, etc. But I was positive - I really wanted that Mac'n Cheese sleeping bag. The sleeping bag looked just like the blue box with orange food on it.

She ordered it and I had to wait for the longest 6-8 weeks of my life in anticipation of its arrival. It finally came and I slept in it immediately and for the next few days, I would not sleep anywhere except in my new sleeping bag on the floor of my room. I remember some adult - probably my mom - commenting on how thin and flimsy it was, but to me it was heaven. I was sleeping inside a giant box of Kraft Mac'n Cheese. :)

Indigo Girls

The Indigo Girls are my favorite band. Now while my husband finds that as a convienient reason to tease me about having been a lesbian in a past life, I really just love their lyrics and their music. Oftentimes I disagree with some of their more political songs, but I still love their music because it feels very real and sometimes very raw.

Social Awkwardness

Ryan's Grandma died over the weekend. She was very old and had a great life. So we are headed out to the funeral this week.

I have only been to a couple of funerals in my life so far. The most recent was my grandfather's about 8 years ago. I felt a little uncomfortable at the funeral - which I think is normal. I must admit to feeling v. uncomfortable about this upcoming funeral - for more formal reasons. At my own grandfather's funeral any faux paus that I may have made in funeral ettiquete would have been dismissed as a grandchild greiving. At this one, I am hoping I don't just say something terribly strange or imprudent.

All or nothing

Life seems to be an all or nothing sort of game. You can be going along fine, maybe even feeling that life is a little monotonous and then all of a sudden, every big event in your life happens at once or everything that can go wrong does.

This week it has been the case of things going wrong. The weekend started off with Audrey having a fever, so we had to cancel our trip to Charlottesville to attend Ryan's bff's law school graduation dinner party. Then right as Audrey is feeling better, I lose my wallet, and her fever turns into a cold on the day the new babysitter started. Everyone knows when you are sick, you just want your mommy. Then Ryan's car has a flat tire and today it just plain won't start at all, so I had to drive him in to work at the last minute and then I am driving all the way to Baltimore and back to go to my BIL's medical school graduation and dinner party. Mind you, I still don't have a license and/or any money to even fill the car with gas and Audrey still has a cold. And to top it all off, we seem to have a leaking toilet that is pooling water in our master bath.

To be honest, at this point, it has become funny.

New Nanny

I have a new person working for me as Audrey's babysitter.

She is a home-schooled teenager, who can come over in the mornings. It seems to be working out pretty well so far. She is really nice and Audrey likes her a lot.

Plus I find that I am a little more comfortable bossing around people younger than me. So when Audrey takes a nap, I have no problem assigning little projects to her. I am hoping that having a helper on projects, is going to help me get some of the ever-present projects (like putting stuff up on free-cycle) moving along.

The bathroom project

All of my interior decorating for the whole house has started (and apparently stalled) with the entry bathroom.

We painted it a lovely light grey, replaced the towel rod with a towel ring, added some frameless glass-covered rose pictures and viola - we have a pretty bathroom.

I would still like to add a small white floor rug, paint the light fixture silver and put a couple of single flower vases on the main wall to put roses in.

Treasures

I was decluttering a couple of "treasure boxes" that I keep. Turns out most of my "treasures" were actually trash. Shells that I can't remember what beach I picked them up on, keychains saved for some strange reason, broken pieces of cheap jewelry, etc. Why in the world have I kept all of this stuff for so long?

Vacation

We just got back from a family vacation with my husband's family to Williamsburg, VA. It was actually a lot of fun. We went to Colonial Williamsburg for one day, the guys went golfing and the girls went shopping in the morning of another day, then we all just hung out and relaxed for the afternoon and on the last day we went to Busch Gardens all day and in the evening R and I took a lovely stroll around the market area of Colonial Williamsburg. And of course, we ate at really good restaurants every evening for dinner. And I think a good dinner really makes for a good vacation.

We absolutely loved the area. It was beautiful. I really liked Colonial Williamsburg. The revolutionary war period is my favorite part of American history, so I really enjoyed being in a restored city and seeing all of the houses and the little shops and hearing all the stories and such.

On our stroll we walked around the William and Mary campus. I am really hoping that R decides to go to law school there.

Discipline

Working from home takes a lot of self-discipline. I remember working at an office - (at some jobs) it was easy to putz around for a day (chatting with co-workers, volunteering to pick up lunch, and then afternoon snacks, checking my email, signing up for electronic bill-pay, etc.) if I wasn't feeling so great. It just doesn't work the same way anymore. When I check my personal email, it is now on my dime. Even so, the positives of working from home, especially when I have a little one, far out weigh the negatives. However, I definitely cannot do it without a babysitter. If you thought co-workers were a distraction, a cute little girl sitting on your feet, smiling and babbling, is just plain irresistible.

Tough to be the mom

I must admit, I may be a little bit of a softy as a mom. But I really can't just let her cry herself to sleep like all the books say.

Don't get me wrong, I will let her blow off a little steam if she is just overly tired or just being fussy. But when she really crys, I always go in and try to comfort her. It just breaks my heart to hear her crying for real. The times that I am trying to be tough, I will go and sit outside her doorway and cry right along with her. Finally it feels like my heart will break and I go on in and try again. I'll feed her, rock her, sing to her and just cuddle and kiss her. Sometimes, I think I am being selfish for just wanting to treasure as much of her babyhood as I possibly can. But is there really such a thing as too much cuddling and kissing for babies?

A rose by any other name.

I have been surprised by how buying a brand-new house has made me even more excited about home improvement projects. I think with our old house, there was just so much work to do to even start to make it look fabulous that it just felt daunting.

My current dream to-do list is:
-Paint color in every room (and I would love to paint the inside of the closets a complementary color, just for the fun of it).
-Put in a patio in the backyard
-Create an edible garden (veggies for the summer)
-Create a rose garden (to put on my table)
-Install the garage door opener and make our garage into a usable space (for both the car and other stuff)
-Put in a storage door (we have a lot of dead space behind a couple of walls that I would love to take advantage of)

This weekend we are going to start some home improvement projects. My husband, R, agreed to painting the bathroom (we are starting small, but it is still a start). I am hoping to do a lovely shade of warm grey. It has hardwood floors and white fixtures, and 4 frameless glass pictures of roses, so I think that will work well. Maybe I will take a before and after picture.

We also have a couple of people coming over to give us an estimate on how much it will cost to install a garage door opener and put a small door in the wall to access some space for storage. If the price is right, we can have that going soon too I hope.

A project I am really excited about is my rose garden. I bought 5 rose bushes - all different shades, and i want to plant them this weekend. In Provo, we lived in a little house right across the street from the BYU arboretum. The arboretum had lots of lovely little paths through the plants, but my favorite place was the roses circle. They had so many types and I loved to walk through there and just smell them. I also fondly remember going to see a beautiful rose garden in Switzerland when I was a teenager. So when I saw rose bushes on sale at aldi for really cheap I couldn't resist the chance to create my own little rose garden - in the hope that I will be able to cut flowers for my table regularly.

A New Addiction

When C&C came out over Christmas, I had no idea they would introduce me to a new addiction. I am a not-so-closet Sudoku Addict.

In fact, I own 3 different Sudoku books and whenever I am watching TV or just experiencing a little down time, I indulge myself. I have even come up with a number of very good justifications for why I should do sudoku every day - maybe even spend hours doing it every day.

-It is a great brain stimulation and no one wants alzhimers disease
-It is a social sport - I can still carry on a conversation whilst enjoying sudoku (R may disagree with this one)

That is all I have come up with so far. I did however, come across the greatest thing yet - samurai Sudoku. It is 5 intertwined sudoku puzzles - could it get any better? Well apparently it does! There is killer butterfly samurai sudoku - I haven't tried that one... yet.

(see www.djape.net to try out some great free puzzles)

Domestic Help

Today was the first day with a nanny - whose name, ironically enough is Nana. She is going to be coming over every morning for 2 hours. It was really nice. She basically just read to Audrey and played with her and fed her some food. Audrey really likes her - she always smiles for her and goes right to her.

I must admit, it is a little awkward to have someone else here working for me. I don't know how to set the whole thing up. For example, as I was going upstairs to my office, I realized I had not given her a tour of our house or showed her where I would be working or where Audrey's room was, so I did that quickly before I started to work. I think there will definitely be an adjustment period for us to figure things out.

Nana has agreed to help by doing some light cleaning if/when Audrey sleeps. However, I don't even know what to tell her to do. Flylady suggests everyone keep a control journal to keep the house running smoothly, so I think I will try to use that. In the meantime, today I noticed that Nana had organized Audrey's bookshelf - so she may just find little things to do on her own anyway.

24

So I am finally, after 4 seasons, starting to watch 24. And last night they had a 2 hour 24. During which 40% or some other extremely large number of people working at CTU were killed by nerve gas. The premise that CTU only found out about it with 2 minutes until it was released and sent everyone running out of the building and only was able to seal off 3 rooms in the whole building, and so anyone in the building not in those 3 rooms died, was just crazy.

I used to work at DARPA - a rather small DoD agency. I knew within 10 minutes of starting exactly where each safe room in the building was. In fact, they gave me a card to attach to my badge that listed emergency procedures and safe rooms for each floor of both buildings. I also knew that each safe room had enough hoods and masks as well as other emergency supplies to protect each person in the building. None of these rooms was more than 30 seconds away from me at any given moment and at a panic run, I am sure that I could have found one very quickly.

A few jobs before that, I worked at a law firm in DC. Not exactly the sort of place known for high security measures. Even so, each employee was fitted with a mask - that we were given to keep at our desks - for any sort of emergency.

My point is, I appreciate non-realistic shows as much as the next person (Gilmore Girls is my favorite show), but this was a little too far fetched even for me.

Spaving

I consider myself to be quite frugal. My husband, R, does not yet see it that way. In fact, whenever I do something particularly spendy, he makes me repeat after him the phrase, "I am not frugal". My friend Charlie calls it "Spaving" - spending to save.

Finding my Inner Interior Decorator

Ikea is my happy place. So many rooms with all kinds of neat organizing and decorating ideas and gadgets, good food and soft serve at the end of it all. It is just a fun and exciting place.

So when my sister E was here, I was thrilled to go and wander around. I saw several things that would look great in my home, but I didn't buy them. Why? Because I couldn't decide if that was the best look, or if that was the direction I really wanted to go in that room, etc. Later on, I was reading an article on finding your inner interior decorator and realized that I have "IDA" - Interior Decorating Anxiety.

The article said that if your walls are still white, and more or less bare because you can't decide what color to paint, pictures to buy/put up, etc. - then you are probably suffering from IDA. I was reading all about me. The article suggested starting small and not trying to conquer the whole house at once. Since I have recently decided to start working from home seriously, I am going to start by decorating our home office.

R and I decided to allocate a small amount of money to the project. My plan is to paint, do some sort of window treatment, get some shelves - and put them up on the wall, get a printer (not a decorating thing, just a home office thing), and if there is any money for it, some sort of comfy chair/love seat. I think I basically need 3 zones - a crafty zone, a computer/work zone and a household files/office supplies zone.

First things first - I agreed to get the paper piles and clutter cleaned up/filed/shredded before I would paint. So I guess I better get going on that - yikes, no wonder I have IDA.

Thai Chi

I *love* Thai food, so I thought I would give Tai Chi a try too. Turns out they really don't have much in common.

But, I just found a new thing on our cable - we have free on-demand movies - including (and this is the new-to-me part) free fitness programs. So I thought I would mix things up a bit and try some Tai Chi.

I really liked it and was surprised at how good it felt and also at how difficult it was to do. I think the difficulty came mainly from the fact that it is really fluid, so I had a hard time with hand and foot placement. This was not at all helped by the low-budget nature of the show. The camera would be showing someone's face while the instructor was explaining hand or foot placement.

My uncle David actually does Tai Chi religiously every morning - outside. As a kid, I kind of thought it was weird to see our guest outside early in the morning waving his arms about slowly while moving back and forth on his feet. However, his fluidity made an impression and I tried to find that myself today - rather unsuccessfully.

The instructor talked about how certain exercises and stretches were good for various organs and muscles, so apparently it is a very healthy thing to do. I am going to do some more research on this. In the mean time, it is a nice bit of variety in my exercising.

My Sweet Hearts

Having a baby has added a new dimension of joy and depth to my life. I now have two sweet hearts!

We are all standing underneath one of my all time favorite prints - Ecstasy by Maxfield Parrish. While it does not make for a great photo, it does remind me of moments of ecstasy in my own life. And many of those moments are found when I am with these two people.

To see this print go to http://www.imagenetion.net/matrix/mparrish/mp21.jpg

Life in fast-forward

Some days seem to go by as slow as molasses and others go by at the speed of light. Today was an interesting time warp all in and of itself. Today, I did the taxes for the investment club that I am in with some girlfriends. That was a huge task that feels like it was monumental to complete. It turned out to be more of a mole-hill than a mountain, but even so, it was looming large for the past month.

Then Ryan got a new job. Yep.