A Work in Progress

Things are changing around here. I've been working non-stop so the weekends are absorbing all of the projects I meant to do during the week. And by projects I mean things I want Adam to do. They include:

1. Build a garden so I can have tomatoes and squash to my little hearts desire. I won't lie, I'm bothered by the fact that I don't know where my food comes from and the radiation catastrophe has been a big influence on my decision to make Adam become a quasi farmer.

2. Build this bed. Mine will be stained a light pecan color and distressed. I am so in love with it. Obsessed really. However, Adam says it's not happening until I sell his current bed because, seriously, who needs two beds?

I do!

I. Love.

3. Build four of these for his kitchen bar area.

So cute in distressed black!

For now, that is all that I have lined up. I feel confident that these little projects will provide for great blogging seeing as how I'm always right and he's always right.

Hey, I may not know what I'm doing but I can always tell him how to do what he's doing better and more efficiently. 

And to think, a few months ago I was eating sushi in the city.

Off to find stains and glazes!

Focus... Focus... Huh?

My mind is mush. No matter how many Mountain Dews I drank today I could not get with the program. It wasn't until I saw that I only had an hour left at work that I actually became a productive member of society. I was a number crunching machine.

Anyhoo, I've got several things to tell you about but can't formulate a cohesive blog entry so I'm reverting to my favorite story telling method: listing.

1. My uncle's dog has recently taken up opossum hunting. She trees the opossum (or, "possum" as Helper insists I say/spell it.) and he shoots it. The end.

2. He likes this because the opossums are killing his chickens. I dislike this because I dislike the menagerie that is his back yard. If I wanted to wake up at the butt crack of dawn I'd set an alarm. I don't need the stupid chickens to start my day for me.

3. The dog is cute so I can't take it personally. She runs with one of her back legs picked up off of the ground as though it is slowing her down. And she pees when I talk to her. I like her.

4. Moaner, aka Caroline, sent me a box of clothes and I'm going to wear every single article at some point this week. I've already worn 4 out of 8 and it's only Monday. I'm certain that I'd dress like a homeless troll if I didn't have her to guide me away from the yoga pants and flip flops.

5. Helper's name is Adam and he edits my blog every day. I hate it when he finds spelling errors.

6. I hate it even more when he misses my spelling errors.

7. I shop at a ridiculously expensive grocery store called the Piglet because it is near Adam's house. I once paid $45.00 for soup ingredients because I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. FORTY-FIVE BONES! I could have bought a bra and made soup with that money!

8. Granny is making a quilt and I fully intend to somehow smuggle it into my room.

9. She'd scalp me if I stole her quilt.

10. Every single tv show that I watched today made me cry. Not sobbing like hearing Tim McGraw's My Little Girl, but misty like you get when you see the ASPCA commercial.

Ok so that makes me sob, too. I cry a lot.

11. I ate a honey bun for dinner and didn't even feel bad.

12. I'm pretty sure that #11 is absolutely a bad thing.

13. I'm going to find my tennis shoes tomorrow.

14. Goodnight.

Nailed

I am uncharacteristically awake at this hour on this night.

I drank milk before I got into bed, watched non-exciting TV shows and said my prayers.

And then I just laid here. And tossed. And turned. I finally wound up on my side staring at the wall that I like to call “The Shrine of Sunny.”

The shrine isn’t my fault and I don’t particularly understand it. It is a collection of Sunny themed things that I’ve gathered over the years. Ok so it used to be just two things but now there are three of them. 

Watching over me as I sleep.

Oh, what’s that? You want to know what these things are and how they got there? And why they are there in the first place?

Item one is a charcoal portrait I had done my senior year in high school when I was lucky enough to travel to New York City with Helper’s dear mother and a friend of hers.

Aside from the 14-block trek to the Sex Museum, it was a lovely trip. A very educational trip, too.

I also commissioned an Asian man to write my name in fancy Asian letters while I was visiting Central Park.  I had instant buyers remorse, but what are you going to do with a painting that says “Sunny” in letters of birds and butterflies?

I brought both pieces of “art” back with me, fully aware that I had no intentions of hanging them up or doing anything special with them. I had simply bought them in the heat of the moment. It was NYC, after all. 

Once I returned home with said articles, I put them in my closet and didn’t think much about them.

Time out. Remember the time that Papa took all of the decorative pillows off of my bed because he said that if he were to ever want to go and lie down on my bed to take a nap, he didn’t want to have to move the pillows out of the way? In essence, the decorative pillows were blocking his potential napping spot.

You never heard that story before? Well it happened. He put all 8 of my pillows in the utility closet on the other end of the house.

We have lived in this house for five years and I have lived with them for thirteen. He has never laid his head anywhere except the sofa or his bed. Or the recliner.

Back to the shrine. Granny found the portrait and had it matted and framed. She also found a frame for the awkward name drawing/painting. An arduous task it was, but she was unrelenting in her quest. 

I shall interject here to say that Granny and Papa don’t put a lot of thought into artwork placement. If there is a nail in the general vicinity of where they want something to hang, then they stick it on that nail and call it a day.

Exhibit A: I purchased a large oil impressionist painting and hung it in my bedroom beside my bed. It took a few tries but I finally got it just right. Papa always hated it so he took it down and left a few nails in its place.

Enter, Granny. The portrait currently hangs at about 6’ and the name is directly below it, centered perfectly. Somewhere along the way another random nail entered the picture. It now holds a family portrait of Granny, Papa and I that we had done back when I was still a blonde.  It’s an interesting collage to say the least. The Moaner thinks it’s hilarious.

Exhibit B: When we first moved into our house, I had three pictures flanking each side of my bed. They were level and symmetrically spaced. Once I decided that I no longer wanted pictures of dresses in my room, I took them down but the nails remained.

Currently, on the right side of my bed there are two pictures occupying two of three nails. One is of a friend from high school and another of Papa and his favorite dog, Susie. The pictures are 5x7 and 8x10. Nowhere near large enough to hang. Did I mention that they’re hanging at about 6 foot?

On the left side there is a picture that I had framed while I was in college of a couple dancing. It is more to scale, but the color scheme doesn’t exactly “go.”

The moral of this rambling story is this: it doesn’t matter how many beautiful things I buy or how many times I move my pillows back into my bedroom. If Papa doesn’t like it, it goes. That, and if there’s a nail somewhere, Granny will hang something on it.

**Granny, please do not take down my artwork. I’ve grown to love it and would be very sad if I came home tomorrow to find the shrine gone and my picture of Papa and Susie in a drawer somewhere. I love my yard sale room!

Love,

Me

Ps. Once I decide to stop being lazy, I'll take pics so stay tuned for an update to this post!