I seriously love to post. I love to talk to whoever might be reading (I still don’t get why so many of you do) and I love to read your comments. The fact that I’ve been too preoccupied to post has left me feeling…… dissatisfied. Edgy. Mainly because taking the time to write a coherent post about my life and thoughts seems to ground me somehow. And thinking about it, I’ve been too scattered and distracted to compose anything organized and fluid. But the lack has been bugging me, so I’m going to try.

I’ll go chronologically.

A week and a half ago, Hayden and I went to see Stephanie Meyer speak at a local bookstore.

Hayden took a picture of me, too, but she is SO much cuter than I am, I couldn’t stand to see our pictures side by side, so you just get to see her. And Stephanie.

It was way fun.

Next, my friend Carol moved to New York. They’re buying 75 acres with a pond and sugar maples. I’m extremely sad. She had a combination birthday/moving party a week ago, and now she’s gone.

We bought her awesome couch.

but now I’m getting ahead of myself.

As you know, we’ve been painting. (Well, I’ve been painting). As I usually do, I wrote love notes to my family on the walls before rollering over them.

But for some reason, rollering over them didn’t hide the love notes. Color-wise they’re invisible, but no matter how many coats I added, you could still see the sheen. So I had to brush around the letters to fill in the gaps. It sort of worked. (See “Abby” on the left? And to explain the other wall, I call Veronica “Venus”. I really call her V-ness, but Venus looked better in print).

The basement was so lame. It was varying shades of painted and not painted white, wretched dark gray “accents”, and large, chunky patches of spackle everywhere. However, there was still a ton of hardware in the walls that I had to remove and spackle. For some insane reason, the previous owners didn’t believe in nails. Or pre-measuring, apparently. Everything they hung was hung on screws. Really thick ones, leaving enormous holes everywhere, and it isn’t because they were hanging heavy things. And then there were all the holes surrounding the remaining screws, clearly demonstrating that they didn’t like where they drilled the first 5 times.

I so don’t get it.

BUT, it looks significantly better now. Nate and I are extremely pleased. I chose a couple of earthy browns and a parchment color to bring out the brick around the fireplace. It has a richness to it that I love.

Like I said last week. Lame-o pictures.

I still have to finish the kitchenette (need more paint). Then we’re planning to order some wood or faux wood blinds for the two windows and either make or buy some curtains for the slider. (I was planning to curtain all three, but they’re all really close together, and it would have been an entire wall of fabric. I don’t think I’d like that look. Wood blinds will be nice with all the browns).

Then I need three lamps; a floor lamp, table lamp, and a hanging lamp. I saw some groovy lamps with a thin, wood veneer shade at Kasala awhile ago. I’m hoping they still carry them, and that they’ll work. That’s all I can picture downstairs.

And we’ll need to hang some art on the walls.

Painting has been difficult with all the monkeys around, tho’ I let them help some. Clark likes to monopolize my stepping stool. It’s been a very convenient babysitter, except that I really could have used my stool.

The girls go back to school tomorrow, and I still have the last sleeve on Abby’s cardigan to knit. It wouldn’t take that long to finish if I wern’t trying to do a zillion things all at once.

I wish there were 10 of me, so long as I’m the only me that gets Nate privileges :-).