Not Always Interesting

Yeah, that's life. Not always chock-full of fun crafty projects or helicopters landing outside your house (true story!) or interesting updates about the fetus you're incubating. But still, it goes on.

I suppose before I go further, I should qualify that statement about a helicopter landing outside our house. It actually landed in the school field just across the street from us and the BP garage and it was a med-evac chopper. I headed out to drop off some mail down the road at just the right time to see the neighbourhood event of the month: an apparently dire car crash right on our corner. There were little old ladies who corralled the mail man to explain the whole to-do to him after interrogating the police. There were two really classy kla$$y teenagers, one of whom kept screaming to anyone who'd listen that the poor unfortunate soul in the car was about to pop their clogs. (It's only because of listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks that I realised this meant, "to bite the big one" , "to take a dirt nap", etc. Is that sad?) A reassuring thing for the person being med-evac'd to hear, I'm sure.

Anyway, there were little knots of people scattered here and there all over the sidewalks on all sides of the junction, and the fuzz wasted no time in cordoning the whole thing off as they got the fire department to saw the top off the car to better facilitate victim removal. The last time I had a vaguely unifying community experience like this was when the Stables in Camden Town burned down when I was spending a semester in London. We lived right up the road from Camden, so it didn't take long for people to wander out to watch. There must just be something about living in England that lends itself to me witnessing disasters on various scales with crowds of anonymous neighbours/strangers. Though, nothing ever happened when I lived at Penfold Street, or in our last house in Farnborough, so we're only 2/4 at this point.

Now that yesterday's tragic excitement is over (I think they got the person out okay in the end), life is back to boring for the time being. I'm getting geared up to take some driving lessons. Not because I don't know how to drive, but because the test I need to take to get my licence is infamous over here. The Husband passed his test the first time, but then - he's seen people driving over here his whole life and didn't have many bad habits to un-learn at the age of 17. Whereas back in Maryland, if you had to retake the test, it implied substandard intelligence, over here it's not at all uncommon to hear that people have had to retake their practical driving exam. Not the most comforting of thoughts. Basically, I just need to learn what sorts of goofy behaviours they want me to pretend to do during the test and then I can drive like a normal human being again. I mean, really: who shuffles the steering wheel through their hands to turn the car? Hand-over-hand is so much easier...or do the racecar driver turn and keep your hands in the same position on the wheel throughout the curve. Honestly. And the idea that you can only be in neutral if the parking brake is on!? Where did this stupidity come from? If I have to keep the clutch in while my foot brake is on, doesn't that wear out the clutch? Isn't that a bad thing?

Other than that it's just teaching the girls' youth group at church, keeping the pregnancy fat away by religiously going to the gym, and organizing the junk in the nursery to accommodate the day when we buy Baby some more furniture. Since, you know, I imagine the baby would like a place to sleep and all. At this point "organizing" really means "looking at all our crap and viciously thinning the herd." I know there's a bunch of stuff I need to keep, but Seb and I are both packrats by nature. The only difference is that, doing most of my moves either by car or by plane, I've learned to be more ruthless in what I keep and what I resignedly throw away. I'm not heartless and unsentimental! It's not like I'll trash any scribbles the Piggly Wiggly makes if they don't look good enough to hang in the National Gallery, but unless it's the first one, or something insanely impressive, or a specific present for Mommy or Daddy, these things do have a shelf life. I mean, my mom kept the books I took to making in kindergarten, but she didn't keep every doodle I put on paper. I think it's a good rule of thumb to be able to weed through any collection of stuff you have.

Like just before the move: another brilliant time to force a clean-out of your junk. I made Seb go through the drawer I called Stuff You Never Wear and give me, well...all the stuff he never wore! I got a trash bag full of clothes to donate by the end. Really, the big point of that was that it gave me a trash bag full of stuff we didn't have to pack and find space for. As much as I love acquiring and keeping things (I am the person with a shoebox full of cards and handwritten letters my husband made me, after all), there's something therapeutic in having a huge purge of your crap, where you ruthlessly crumple and rip papers and shake the crumbs out of boxes until you can take them all out in a bag to the trash bins.

So on that note, I must get back to my own Giant Purge of Crap: 2011. Wish me luck!

Getting Organized

In the midst of fun decorating projects - the majority of which, I think, will end up being for das bebe - I've come to a realisation. We've just moved in and we aren't entirely unpacked. Shocking thing to suddenly remember, right? A stunning observation full of intellectual depth and cunning insight. Okay, I'm being entirely sarcastic, but the point was brought home last night.

The Husband had an appointment to go visit a family in our congregation last night. It meant coming home (all lovely and sweaty, mmm...), running into the shower, getting changed, inhaling dinner, pulling up driving directions, and running out the door. Unfortunately, that last step couldn't be completed until we'd turned the apartment upside-down looking for some spare change for an object lesson for our friends' kids.

Neither of us could remember which box we'd dumped the jar of loose change. We looked in the nursery, in the boxes in our closet (there are a lot of those), and finally all around the living room. It was in a random Duchy Originals tin that we found the stash of pennies and Euro coins (do they even have names for those coins?).

(That's the stuff in our closet. I promise, that's an improvement. Half of this stuff was on the nursery floor earlier this week.)

Anyway, the whole penny-hunting fiasco really brought home the point that some serious organizational work is most definitely in order. And since it's the end of the week, and I feel lazy, so I've decided that the starting point will be the smallest organizational project I can find: label-making.

As you can see, we have lots of magazine holders for various and sundry pieces of music and important (and not important) papers. They're pretty inoffensive as appearance goes, but they could use labels. That way, I can keep all of the untidy-looking papers facing the other way, but still know what's in each folder. And what does that mean? The wonderful combination of neatness and cuteness all for free. Yup. Because I don't have to buy the labels (we got them earlier to leave some for the new tenants of our old place to forward any straggling mail still going to the wrong house), or the ink, or new magazine holders. I do love free projects.

So, labels in hand, the first step is to find a fun font to print all of my labels with. And here's the best part: all the fonts I'm about to show you are absolutely confidential absolutely free. Have I said yet how much I love that word?

Those are some pretty snazzy fonts, if I do say so myself. And again, 100% no monies required.

Another tool, if you want to go that route, is to have pictures on your labels and then edit and caption them in picnik. The handy thing about this web-based application is that it's free. The downside to that is that most of its particularly cool features do require paying to get the subscription...but you can still use it to do up some pretty nice labels or pictures or DIY artwork in just the free version.

The fun cartoon characters are "stickers" that picnik gives you to decorate your pictures. Though I admit, my personal favourites are the ones called "Whimsy Trees" which look all retro-revival and mod.

If only those were in the free version.

Anyway, whatever labels you get (we had some inexpensive store-brand versions) should have an automatic template for Word (or Adobe) that you can find on the Interwebz. A short 2-minute search got me to our template...and it was free. (I wonder how many times I can use that word in this post...) So, off I went to word to test out a few fonts (and some sneakily cropped Whimsy Trees from the above Google Image Search result...).

Simples. All that's left now is to print the stickers and make sure that all the magazine holders are organized accordingly. I like this idea because, aside from being easy and free, it also ends up looking a lot neater (at least in my case) than hand-written labels. I don't do very well with straight lines.

Pretty soon, though, I'll graduate from my respite in label-making and move back to bigger things. I still need some nice baskets and other containers to organize the remaining junk that doesn't fit in our closet. Either Ikea-style coloured cardboard boxes or nice lined wicker affairs would do best. They tidy things away no better than any other box, but they do it so much more stylishly. And, as Oscar Wilde said, "in matters of true importance, style - not sincerity - is the vital thing." Oh Oscar, how right you are.

For more tips on the actual organizing of your junk, I humbly submit to the authority of Young House Love...again.

light at the end of the tunnel

It has officially been nearly two weeks with no internet except the occasional trip to the public library or my tiny Nokia wannabe-Crackberry. The problems with these two outlets are, respectively:

1) The library computers are ridiculously slow...and you only get 30 minutes at a time.
2) My phone keyboard is tiny, complex pages don't loads, and the screen doesn't scroll down automatically with the text I'm typing.

Still. Thank heaven for small mercies. At least I still have basic Google search, maps, and feed reader, email, and basic facebook.

Our charming ISP has declared that the blessings of high-speed, full resolution internet bounty will be restored unto us as of Monday. Not a moment too soon. I have music to download, people to skype, and DIY projects to research and blog about!

As a taster: we've done quite a few little projects lately. One involving our hgue antique pine dresser, and another involving the framing of several pictures...including one for The Nursery! (cue angelic choirs and a single beam of sunshine through the clouds)

Updates will abound soon, my lovlies. (How much do I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West after typing that? Now I have to leave it!)

Just keep your fingers crossed that, come Monday, I don't have to go all Secret Window on the O2 people and make insane threats with a screwdriver to make them put us out of our misery and give us our Interwebz back.

Holiday for a Hanging

(First note: don't get too excited! This, alas, does not mean that my internet is back. What it means is that I found it worth my time to get in my exercise by walking the mile and a half to the library to use the free Interwebz there. BUT, it does still mean: a long overdue blog post! Also, there would have been more pictures, but they apparently refused the move to my USB drive and so are sitting, unhelpfully, on my laptop back at the house.)

So now, Riley Kilo reference aside, I have officially completed my first DIY project in our new home: hanging new curtains in the master bedroom!
The move itself was extremely tiring. 18 hours of lifting, moving, directing, shopping, disassembling, reassembling…it was a well-earned rest we got when we finally dragged weary bodies into bed at midnight. The two most memorable fights with furniture? Seb and our friend Gareth fitting our already-mostly-disassembled farmhouse table through the living room window at the new house (!) and my own bruised and skinned finger from trying to fit force the new couch through our new front door.
That last would have been made a lot easier if we hadn’t been so knackered after a full day of moving, and a drive to and from Croydon for an IKEA run. If we had been thinking, we would have unpackaged the thing on the lawn and fit it in without detriment to my fingers or the radiator mounting…oops.
But on to bigger and better things. The new curtains:

I’d originally wanted some eyelet-style curtains like the ones up above that I found on the B&Q website. Alas, as my colour choice of sage green (the better to lighten up the room with all our big, dark, wood furniture) was firmly settled upon, I found myself with a dilemma. All of the eyelet curtains in sage at B&Q were a good 10cm too short for even the lowest of installations. (Our bedroom window tops out at 199cm off the floor) And I wanted, not only to have properly floor-length curtains, but to follow the stylish and sensible mantra of hanging curtains high and wide (thank you, YHL). So, my £12 curtains were a bust since they didn’t quite measure up, and instead all I found in my desired hue were some “pleated” curtains that have a very respectable 299cm (90”) drop length.

I put “pleated” in quotes because these curtains needn’t be hung with a pleat. I had horrible images in my mind that I couldn’t shake of dated affairs with curtain hooks, unnecessary gathering (which gathers dust!), or box pleats like the skirt on a Catholic school girl. None of these were comforting thoughts. I even considered tab-hanging curtains in case they were a better solution: no dice. They, too, were too short. Curses; foiled again! In the end, I bit the bullet, bought the curtains with the right drop length and double checked that I could return them if they were defective, didn’t measure right, or simply sucked. (I can return them in the event of any of the three above catastrophes. Breathe sigh of relief here.)
Step numero uno: to take down the hideous curtains that I found upon arrival:

Say it with me: eeewwwww. [Disgusted nose wrinkle] Along with taking down the 80s-tastic curtains themselves, down came the distinctly cheap-feeling and useless hardware. A very flimsy plastic track for the oddest curtain hooks I’ve seen. To be fair, the above picture does no justice to how meh these curtains look when hanging. They just brush the windowsill as far as length goes, and they do the awkward pleating of which I was so frightened with my new curtains.

But now that I had a blank slate, it was time to get up the new hardware: the Beskåda curtain rod from IKEA. With these fun fleur-de-lis finials:

Step deux was to measure everything. With one curtain threaded onto the rod, I tested the height I wanted and then guestimated a good width to really cheat our window into a larger one. (For all my bump followers, this artsy overexposed self-portrait of me threading curtains is Baby D at 20 weeks gestation. The little monster is 13oz and obstinate. S/he refused to get into position for the sonographer to take more than one good profile shot and sat comfortably wiggling with his/her head lodged in my pelvis for most of the appointment.)

I then drilled holes into the wall, hammered in Rawl plugs (helps stop heavy things tearing your screws from the wall), and screwed in the brackets. Please note that if this all sounds very technical and impressive: I still really have no idea what I was doing. I’ve never fitted Rawl plugs or hung curtains before in my life – it’s a daunting experience!

So, up went the curtains. I fiddled around a little and then ended up with this relatively pleasing result:

However, even with my (mostly) beautiful curtain-hanging job producing satisfactory results, there was still one little niggling problem. The teensiest of flies in the ointment:

Holes. Holes where the previous fittings had been hung and holes where goodness-only-knows what fittings had been installed. Thankfully, since our walls are now white instead of “magnolia”, there was an easy solution.

Enter my hero: poly-filler. A few quick squeezes and a good going over with an old ID badge from my time as a DOD employee (this was doing stand-in duty for a plastering spatula) saw the entire problem neatly minimized.
I have yet to decide if I’d rather find thinner curtains (or just trim these and re-sew), or if the puddling around the bottom is too much (in which case, we will venture out for handy-dandy hem tape), but those problems (and the desperate need for ironing) can be fixed in time. In the meanwhile, yay for a new home!

How Very Pinteresting...

I have been sucked in and now have another way to turn spending hours on The Interwebz into another tendril of my new DIY/home decorating vortex: Pinterest. After a fashion, it lets me create mood boards of various lovely bits of inspiration that I find during my daily browse. I like this better than the mood boards I can create in the Picasa collage tool because Pinterest will let me tag each picture with a note about it, and it will keep a small link to the page where I found it. Just in case I have a forgetful moment and…well, forget where I found a particularly awesome thing.

My current Pinterest boards include a planning sheet for the nursery and bedroom, as well as a general likely/lovey board for things I find particularly gorgeous or spiffy, but don’t have in mind for a specific place. I think there are two extra boards on there I'm not using at the moment, but whichever.

I really like this because of how much easier it'll make things feel for me when I'm trying to collect inspiration for how to decorate the new apartment. (The move is tomorrow! Ah!)

In other, non Interwebz news, as I've said: the Big Move is tomorrow. We go in around 10am to scope our new pad for the second time (officially). This isn't counting the time when we sneaked by like stalkers swung by for a peek one night after running errands. It's really crazy to think we've only really seen the inside of this place once! And yet, Seb and I are both hugely excited by the whole prospect. Well, we're excited about a new place (both of us) and new DIY projects (me) and getting a place where we can - hopefully - live for the next 3 or 4 years as our family starts to grow (both of us again).

It's crazy to think that this time last year our apartment looked like this:

and I was getting things ready so my parents and sister could come over for our wedding! Time passes really quickly when you aren't thinking about it. Seb has still been consistently astounded to remember that it's June already. Aside from the baby-growing (which always makes me impatient) I can see what he means: it doesn't seem but so long ago we were in Provo shooting guns and hanging out with my family. Now we're staring down the days until our first anniversary, moving into a new home, and making plans for cots, strollers, and cloth diapers as we wait for our bebe (as I've taken to calling it) to make its grand entrance.

How weird do I sound when I confess that I've imagined having my water break in all sorts of dramatic locations? Like while teaching Sunday School, or driving in the car to see the in-laws, or in the middle of grocery shopping. I don't know if it's a fear of being in a random place when it happens or the idea that if I'm out in those places (car excepted), at least I haven't ruined the furniture by starting to give birth on it! Blech.

The one downside to the move: our ISP dropped the ball, so we'll be internet-less for about a week. Evil! At least I can take lots of pictures of whatever projects I get up to and post them all after the fact. I know I feel a bit like an HGTV show (in the highly self-concious sense), but that's what happens to be my big project in life at the moment. Pretty soon, though, I can get back to some characteristically (mostly) good-natured complaining about normal subjects...like having to sing at Seb's cousin's wedding in September. Without a piano of our own to practise together in the meantime. Oh, and the fun of finding a dress and singing in public with my waistline increased and lung capacity decreased by being seven months massively pregnant. Yeah. That's going to be fun. Did I mention that the song is in French? I don't speak French (unless singing Lady Marmalade counts...).

Should be a fun couple of months as we wait for the piggly wiggly to be born!

Things I Never Needed to Know

Well, really it's just one thing. And that thing is that sugary soda can smell like pungent boiled eggs after a while.

"what an incredible smell you've discovered!"

Disturbed? Let me explain:

It's now Saturday, which means that the Husband and I are clearing out all sorts of things in preparation for the move. That includes our emergency water supply. Now we have an emergency water supply, as the name suggests, in case of emergencies. If there's flooding or a big power cut, or our water pressure is out for a few days...these things needn't stop us from having water to drink and clean and cook with. It's the same principle behind our 72-hour kits. (More on those after the jump) There's peace of mind knowing you have all your bases covered.

Anyway, being thrifty as we are,we built up our emergency water supply by taking empty 2-litre soda bottles, rinsing them, and filling them with water, to sit in our spare room in storage until we needed them or needed to change them out.

Now aside from going flat, water should last a good long time. We've only been here a year, and didn't start our water supply right away, and certainly didn't get all of it compiled at once. However, we've realised that there were a few kinks in the system. First: never use bottles of sugary soda (we usually buy the kind with "no added sugar" which saves the daily calorie count). It was only in the bottles of normal sugary soda that we got the lovely aroma of sulphurous gases. Second: you can never rinse a bottle too much. Even the tiniest amount of fizzy drink left in a bottle would result, we found, in brown floaters in the water...like little creepy spectres of disgusting lurking in our water bottles.

The windows are now all open in an attempt to fumigate the evil from the air we'd like to breathe. The moral of the story is that we will be much more strict with water storage protocol from now on. Let's just hope there are no other surprises lurking for us in that spare room...

Side note: thanks to our Interwebz providers being a little on the slow side, any fun decorating updates and new pictures will be postponed for a week while we wait on O2 to catch up with our move. But rest assured I'll stock up my camera with lots of photos and be sure to document any fun adventures to report!