Blogging like I’m famous.
I went by the ���plex today to take a couple of photos and I couldn���t help being a little sad. My front porch that I so adored, where Kris and I would say ���hey, you wanna go sit like old people?��� My walk-in pantry that held so much! All those beautiful glass doorknobs.
And then I ran something by the new house and felt it impossible to be sad anymore. Oh, the new memories we will make!
For my birthday, my mother-in-law gave me some Bare Escentuals eye shadows. The name of one of them is “Soirée” and every time I use it, I hear Xander saying “Hey, party in my eye socket and everyone’s invited!”
Thanks to our amazing moving posse, Kris and I now reside on another Circle.
It doesn’t feel like home yet, both because there are boxes everywhere and because we still feel like we are in project mode. I’m guessing it will be at least a month before we are really settled in.
We brought the cats over Sunday night but I have yet to let them outside. I want them to understand that this big, bizarre new place is home. Satine is doing better than Frodo. She was the first to go through the pet door and use the litter box and eat the food. He hid under the car, blew chunks in the basement and doesn’t seem to be eating.
Ben is frustrated because we keep changing things and so much stuff is off limits. As he keeps exploring the house, I marvel at how fast he’s gotten. He crawls up the stairs so quickly; he practically runs from one room to the next. When did he get so coordinated?
In keeping with this week���s theme, I share with you another ad. This one features another font I loathe: Clearface Gothic. It was one of the signature typefaces of The Gadsden Times before our redesign in 2006. It���s so bulky; I hated it and went out of my way not to use it.
I went looking for some graphics/layouts I worked on that used Clearface and found a whole bunch of stuff I did when we used to have a real Features Department. Sad. I posted a slew of them on Flickr.
Incidentally, the ad is for mortgage insurance. My new mortgage is with Regions Bank and they must have sold my name because I keep getting “offers” to purchase mortgage insurance from a third party company. It makes me mad because they include the Regions name, trying to lend authenticity and frame all the wording as though it’s imperative that I fill out my information and send it back. I understand that they are trying to sell me something and that I do not have to have it. But it seems an underhanded way to get the business of those unsuspecting.
Tomorrow, Kris and I move into our new digs. I wonder if my nesting frenzy will calm down then. Maybe a lot of people go through this when getting a new home. I never have before, but all my other addresses have been rental property.
This is the first home that Kris and I will make ours since we got married. The duplex felt like home to us as soon as we moved in, but we knew that underneath, it would always be rental property.
This house will be where my son grows up. We tried to find a house when I was pregnant and it just wasn���t time. I truly believe we were waiting on Donna���s house even though we didn���t know it.
Those things in mind, I understand why it is all so important to me. But I���m ready to quit stressing over all of it.
Every designer I know mocks Comic Sans. But not everybody���s a designer.
I���m sure there are lots of well-meaning Comic Sans users who just don���t know what their options are. To them I offer these alternatives, all available for free download (PC and Mac versions) at dafont.com.
As an homage to Comic Sans��� juvenile sensibilities, I used toddler-themed text samples:
Fonts (top to bottom): Blokletters, Two Turtle Doves, Milkrun, Hockey is Life, Tweed
This ad caught my eye. I think the icon in the logo is a nice blend of floral and diamond imagery. The serif font feels like a good choice to convey the delicacy of jewelry and the subtle variations (notice the absence of a serif at the foot of the capital N or the way the f and l in ���conflict��� blend together) echo nature.
They picked a good ring, with its leaf pattern. The way the photo is only in focus in the center keeps the text legible. And kudos to them for keeping the text limited to the name of the company and two lines explaining why you want to do business with them.
Bottom line, I clicked on this ad even though I���m not in the market for diamond jewelry and don���t particularly like yellow gold.
A couple of weeks ago, as Kris awkwardly painted the inside of the corner cabinet, he craned his neck to ask ���where are the pots going to go?��� He was eyeing the easy-accessible bottom cabinet I was painting.
���Well, I thought the plastics would go over here,��� I responded. ���Close to the stove, fridge and microwave.���
���I am not struggling to get pots out of this cabinet.���
���Okay. What do you suggest?���
���Pot rack.���
The next time I got online, I looked at Bed, Bath & Beyond���s pot racks. Gah, why are pot racks so expensive? I quickly ruled out any brand I���d ever heard of and kept looking.
Hmm, let���s see, how could we find one even more expensive? I know, let���s get it in copper! Who has the money to throw at the ceiling like that?
I love you, Amazon.com marketplace reviewers. You who have looked high and far for an affordable, attractive rack from which to hang your pots. You who have purchased such a rack and deemed it worthy to write glowing, lengthy reviews.
This pot rack (less than $50 ��� with shipping) was an Amazon Marketplace darling.
Kris and Chris hung the pot rack on Sunday. In our circles, the Woods are the Pot Rack Experts because they actually own one. Kris had been dreading the hanging of the pot rack, so he was glad for the support from Chris.
Other awesome things that took place this weekend: hey, remember when the kitchen bar stuck out a foot into the walkway? Not anymore, it don���t!
The alcove at the base of the stairs has been deemed the Historic District. That���s where the phone nook is, the chimes, the louver control panel and also where Liz hung the deco-looking light that came out of the laundry room.
The rooms are all mostly painted. The trim paint isn���t 100% complete in most rooms and the nook needs a second coat of ���cutting in.��� But those can wait until we move in.
I posted more progress pictures (including the powder coated brass bed and the refinished hardwoods) on Flickr.
Not that you might know it from conversing with me for, say, the past year or so, but I really like to be present in a conversation. I enjoy truly listening to another person, hearing their stories, thoughts, fears, inane ramblings. And I like sharing the same.
If Ben is around, my eyes and ears never fully belong to anyone else. Know that if you and I are talking but I’m not making eye contact and keep breaking you off to go corral my little one, that I mean no disrespect and really would prefer to give you my full attention. I just can’t.
But if Ben isn’t around, and I still keep interrupting you and seem really unfocused, that’s not because I don’t want to talk to you. More likely, I am very excited to be having a chat with another adult. So excited, in fact, that I keep hijacking the conversation. I’m trying to be better about that.
As this is our last work weekend before we move next weekend, the verdict is no built-ins prior to the move. In a perfect world, there would be time and money for built-ins. In reality, there is neither.
We would much rather get them done now and not have to have all those boxes sitting somewhere in the house for an indeterminate amount of time. (I don’t want to put the boxes of books in the basement as critter-bait.*) Nor do we want to create all that mess once the house is full of furniture. But them’s the breaks.
On the plus side, that’s a bunch of wood, nails and primer that we won’t have to put on the MasterCard and all the time that would be spent building them can instead go the longer-than-we’d-like list of things we want to get done before the move. Such as…
Painting the kitchen
Painting the guest room
Painting Ben’s “big boy” room
Installing a pet door
Mopping the floor in the nursery
Mopping the master bedroom
Fixing the grout in the pink bathroom
Cleaning the tub in the blue bathroom
Putting down the shoe molding
Chopping the kitchen bar down by a foot**
Yeah, do you see that list getting completed if there are shelves to be bought, built, primed and painted? Not gonna happen.
I’m a planner and a list-maker and strive to get things done quickly and efficiently. I cannot stop my brain from continually running some sort of scenario that involves when would be the best time to go buy a mattress, when do we transport the cats, how do we go about this or that… It’s driving me insane, and I would just like to be moved already so that maybe my brain will shush.
*Our new neighbors at the ‘plex have called the new landlords to complain of roaches. The new landlady happened to be getting Moxied this week, so she asked Kris if we’re having roach problems. He answered her that we are not. We’ve never had roach problems at the ‘plex. A roach or two, yes. Usually dead or slow-moving. Running across the kitchen counter? Hells no. And we have boxes all over the place and have had for several months. I think the new neighbors brought the roaches with them, but now it’s got me skeeved on the notion of roaches infesting the boxes and subsequently the books inside.
**I assume there used to be a bigger stove in the kitchen? Because the bar sticks out about a foot past the stove and I’m always running into it. My father-in-law graciously agreed to chop on it for me.
Scott Croley sent me a link to manbabies.com, and I decided I must try my hand at it.
