Happy Halloween...snow!

Well, Halloween is all but canceled in Connecticut this year :(  I'm bummed thinking about all the little kids who won't be going out in their costumes tonight because of downed power lines.  The entire city I live in with my husband is in pitch blackness.  My office is closed until further notice.  I'm fortunate enough to have parents who didn't lose anything, so I'm mooching off their internet and electricity, hot water and cooking, until ours is back on.  It may be a week before the power is adequately back on.  Last time they said that, it was three days...but I have a feeling we won't be as lucky this time.

But we're lucky to have what we do.  Granted, a few days without power, internet, and Netflix won't be as convenient as we'd like.  And my husband, the video gamer, God love him, is preparing himself for the boredom that is impending (although he does have a charged Nintendo DS).  But we can survive.  And at least we can get heat and food at my parents' house.  Some people don't even have that.  So I'm counting my blessings today (and trying to ignore the baby fits that some of the people on my FB friends' list are throwing right now over the power failure), and planning on spending the day doing my best to keep warm.  I'm also right in the middle of Antonia Frasier's Marie Antoinette: The Journey and I LOVE it, so there's that to look forward to!

I hope all my friends in New England are doing okay today!

My own little room

When David and I moved into our current apartment (a 3-bedroom), we didn't really have current plans for that spare space.  We thought maybe it would be a baby room eventually, but without plans to start TTC right now, the room kind of fell by the wayside and became a junk room.  After cleaning the whole apartment top-to-bottom (with the exception of the den/David's "game room"), I decided I'd had enough of our having a junk room, and decided to repossess it as a craft room/den for me!

The results?

It's a START.  The walls are so white and desperately need some pictures or artwork or something on them.  And as David said when he came home yesterday, the floor could really use a rug or something to brighten it up.  But the room is definitely coming together, and at last I have a quiet little space for curling up and watching Law and Order: SVU or The Tudors while I knit.

The ottoman is actually a little $5 wire rack I bought for containing bathroom essentials while I was in college, which doesn't fit in our bathroom now.  I plopped a throw pillow on it and now it makes a great footstool!

This chair is one of the two white armchairs that my parents gave us when they upgraded their living room.  In a desperate attempt to keep black cat hair off it and cover up any unsightly rips, I threw two blankets on it.  The one on the back is the embroidered Irish throw that David's grandmother's "gentleman friend" (she refuses to call him her BF) gave us for our wedding.  The aqua and white quilt was a gift from my aunt Cathi for my wedding shower.  To the left is an old bench I found on the curb one day, which is covered up by the Red Sox blanket to again cover up any unsightly rips (my cats won't use a scratching post, but they LOOOOVE furniture).

My little bookshelf!  The top shelf has all of my knitting books, my pattern binder, and a binder of my articles from my undergraduate Journalism degree.  *confetti*.  The bottom shelf holds a box of needles that my grandmother gave me, and that creepy looking thing is a ball winder.  Next to that is my work basket, which holds my WIPs (Works In Progress).

I used my father's old antique desk as an entertainment center, that has a TV and a DVD player on it (no cable, but I barely watch anything on TV anyway, so NBD).  I put a couple of framed photographs on it.  Also not pictured is my big Rubbermaid container full of my yarn stash (which I DESPERATELY need to weed through -- that will happen soon).

So that's my new room!  I'm pretty happy with it.

AW: My "new" bookshelf, loaded, and GW scores!

After David came home last night, he was so kind as to drag out my three huge boxes of books, so I could put them on the "new" bookshelf.  It took a little finagling to get it organized the way I wanted it, but here is the final product!

Top Shelf: Fiction, historical fiction, and memoirs
Second Shelf: Non-fiction histories (including my Alison Weirs -- all nine of them and counting!), and in the corner, Dan Brown illustrated editions beneath my pile of theology books.
Bottom Shelf: Writing manuals (mainly from college), Harry Potter, and my knitting books.

Survey says?  I need another bookshelf if I'm going to keep buying books.  On the top left-hand corner of the bookshelf, you can see my Kindle, wrapped in its little blue quilted travel case that my mother made me a few weeks ago.  David says I can just buy books for my Kindle, instead of paperbacks, which is true, but most of the paperbacks I buy are on ridiculous sale!  I don't want to give them up.

Speaking of which, I ventured out to GW again and scored some good ones yesterday.

Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden.  I bought this one for a two-fold purpose -- I loved it and I haven't been able to find my copy in about two years, and I want to use it for the Spring Book Challenge (SBC).  I figure it can count towards "read a book you loved as a child or teen", since I became obsessed with this book back in 2000 when my friend Kim loaned it to me.  The "true" story about little Chiyo, the child who was sold by her family to an okiya (geisha house) in Gion, Japan, and the path her life takes as she trains to become a geisha herself, is a really beautiful piece, although it garnered some negative criticism after Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha whom Golden interviewed and whose life he based Memoirs off of, claimed that he embellished her stories.  Still, it is one of my favorites.

Me: Stories of My Life by Katharine Hepburn.  Most of us are familiar with  actress Katharine Hepburn, who was really the grande dame  of Old Hollywood and one of the most famous actresses of all time.  She starred in such hits as The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, The Lion in Winter, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and On Golden Pond.  She is the only woman in history to have won not one, but four Best Actress Oscars, and she lived only twenty minutes away from me in Connecticut.  She passed away a legend in 2003 at the age of 96.  Famously mum about her life, Hepburn published Me, her memoirs, in 1991, when she was 84 years old.  I have always wanted to read this book, and now I have a copy of my own.  Still not sure where I'm going to fit it in on the SBC, but I'll figure something out.

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, as retold by Joseph Bedier.  This was $.50 at GW, and I'm a sucker for a good historical romance, so I nabbed it.  The movie Tristan and Isolde came out in 2006, based on the legend of the knight Tristan and the beautiful love of his life, Iseult (I don't know why they changed the spelling of her name for the film, but there you go).  That was the first time I heard of it, and I've wanted to see the film and read the book ever since.  I saw it and snatched it up.  It's a short piece (only 224 pages, paperback), so I think this "original Romeo and Juliet" tale will probably be a quick, light read over this Easter weekend.

How was your weekend?  Did you get any reading done or pick up any new books?

Pictures of the redecoration!

Crazy, crazy weekend!  David and I spent the majority of it at our new place, laying siege to the kitchen, bathroom, and master bedroom, aided and abetted by my father, who shared his expertise on wallpaper removal and spackling with us.

Day One (Saturday) was spent in puncturing the wallpaper, pouring glue remover on it, and stripping the paper off piece by piece.  Unfortunately, we discovered that there was paint, another layer of wallpaper, and more paint underneath the original hideous pink and beige spotted wallpaper...so that was fun.  Renting a steamer would have been easier, but less cost-efficient.  We'll keep that in mind if we ever decide to buy a house that has wallpaper.

After removing the wallpaper, we scrubbed the walls with more glue remover to get rid of the last traces of glue.  That took up the majority of Saturday.

Day Two (Sunday), we came in after church to tackle the kitchen once again.  My father was a complete rock star and spackled the entire kitchen, going over the walls that I had scrubbed clean and patching holes and cracks with putty.  He did the whole room in three hours.

I made the rookie mistake of trying to sand the rough edges of the putty without wearing a mask, and made it about 15 minutes before my father noticed what I was doing and told me to stop.  Unfortunately, that was enough time to get the grit into my lungs, which I was definitely feeling last night.  I feel better today though.

After breaking for lunch at my parents' house, we came back to tackle some of the painting.  I went into the bathroom, which used to be the color of a radioactive lemon, and painted it with the Behr Premium Paint that we got at Home Depot.  The color is "Pure Snow", but it looks exactly like Marshmallow Fluff.

Meanwhile, David went into the master bedroom and painted the walls in there.  I don't have a picture of the finished first coat, but I do have some pictures of his work-in-progress.  The color is Sherwin-Williams "Peacock Plume".

I wish my good camera was working so I could show this color accurately.  It's a really pretty greeny-blue.  Unfortunately, all I have are cell phone pictures.

Might as well say "David Was Here".  This was on Saturday, he painted this wall and the others yesterday.  The first coat of the whole room is done, he needs to go over with a second coat in places today.

Suffice to say, there was little to no reading done this weekend, and no knitting whatsoever.  I don't know how much I'll be getting done in either department this week -- I'm going to the new apartment every day for redecorating purposes.  And we move in (the bed, the clothes, the pots and pans, the cats, the guinea pig, and the TV) on Friday.  Cable will be set up on Saturday.  And the big stuff gets moved next weekend!

I can't wait until we're in and it's all done.