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Weekend, why must you love me and leave me so fast?! Today I had a super fun, busy day. It went like this:
Gym, breakfast, church, lunch, paint cupboard doors, sand office door, paint office door, help Amanda with yard work, eat popcorn, do homework, watch "How I Met Your Mother, sleep.
I love productive days like this.
Highlight of the day: We saw our first flower bloom on one of our huge trees that I cannot identify.
Out before the sun rises, in after the sun sets. Not my favorite!
This photo shows what the commute looks inside and outside most mornings.
Something terrible happened to me during December, which I failed to chronicle here: I lost my external hard drive.
This was a big deal because I had ALL of my photos and music on said hard drive. In early December I had FORTUNATELY and randomly decided to burn all of my photos to DVD, so I actually didn't lose a single photo. Still, I lost all of my music that wasn't loaded on my iPhone. That was a lot of music. Hundreds of albums worth. I spent a lot of time downlo... I mean, buying that music in college.
I tore my house apart on several occasions trying to look for it and had no success. I checked with public transit to see if I left it behind one day on the train. No luck.
You know that feeling when you can't find your keys and you're late to work? Multiply that feeling by five and extend it for weeks. I was devastated. My hard drive must have joined my Star Wars lightsaber in the lost bin.
(Tangent: Scott and I dressed up as Star Wars characters the Halloween after college. He was Darth Vader, I was Obi-Wan Kenobi. We had state-of-the-Toys'R'Us-art lightsabers as props. Our costumes were sick and everyone was super jealous of us. At the parties we attended people kept asking us to duel, which we gladly obliged to in our drunken states. Long after Halloween I got into a habit of bringing out the lightsaber and hitting The Wives with it. One day it went missing. I unconditionally accused them (namely Katrine) of throwing it away, until a day a couple years later when I found it in the back of my closet when I was moving out of the Ballard Burrow. Now I have a habit of hitting Amanda with it. The legacy continues...)
So I moved on. I downlo... I mean, bought some new music and restored photos back to my computer from the DVDs. I splurged on Black Friday and bought TWO new external hard drives. (Like women with shoes, I can never have enough hard drives.) I was again content.
Remember how I painted those kitchen cupboards? Yeah, well on Monday night I found that lost hard drive in the back corner of the tallest cupboard. I must have hid it from myself in the interest of safety and paranoia.
I was happy to have recovered some of the lost music, but I didn't really need it anymore. Like an old ex, I grateful for the storage we shared but had upgraded and moved on. It wasn't the hard drive, it was me.
I learned two important lessons during the Lost Hard Drive Fiasco of 2009:
1. ALWAYS back up your data, twice over.
2. When something valuable is lost (like a hard drive or lightsaber) clean out your cupboards and closets. Something is bound to be found.
When we first bought our house we went ballistic with paint. We painted nearly every corner of that house to make it our own and replace some absolutely gaudy colors that made the house feel gloomy.
Most of our color decisions were spot on and gave the house a facelift. The orange room is bright and cheery. The greens in our living room play well off of the softwood fir floors. The Caribbean blue in our bedroom is fun and zesty. (Yes, I said zesty).
However, some of the colors, as it turns out, were just too over-the-top. There’s a difference between a face lift and Joan Rivers.
Yellow was our mistake. It seemed a really good idea at the time. It really did. Just like that time in college when I thought it’d be a good idea to duct tape two 40 oz beers to my hands and force myself to drink them before I could pee. Bad idea.
Sergio took the initiative to take a light grey paint to the upstairs room that we had painted yellow during the summer. The dim color transformed the room from loud to classy. As soon as we get new carpet up there it will look like a total refinished attic makeover.
Now I’m halfway through a kitchen project painting our yellow cupboards to a “Swiss chocolate” brown. Oddly enough, the paint smells like chocolate, too. That could also be a side effect of paint inhalation. Hard to say. The brown is really tying in some of the browns in our living room, and we’re another step closer to looking like a Pier 1 showroom.
The funny thing about owning a house is having unrestricted freedom to do with it what you will. This leaves much room for error. Fortunately, we can just paint over some of them.