A detour

The office is messy today, filled with sewing projects left over from the weekend. I don't want to debut the room like that, so instead I will show you the garden.

When we moved in:



And now:


The hubs tilled it up a couple weekends ago, and we mixed in the bags of manure that Grandpa dropped off (thanks Grandpa!) Now it's all tucked in for the winter and I have 7-ish months to plot (haha - get it?) what to do with it.

I know that I will not be growing zucchini. This is because everyone and their mom grows it and each year I get tons of freebies from other gardens. In fact, right now I have about half of this monster pile taking over my kitchen:


I gave away a few, and then used 2 (just 2!) of them to make 5 loaves and 2 dozen muffins of zucchini bread, along with 4 freezer bags of shredded zucchini. I'm tackling what's left of the pile this afternoon. And finishing the sewing projects, of course. Wish me luck!

Love, J

Projects and progress - Part 2

I always do this. I promise myself I'll take great 'before' photos of something and then I get so overwhelmed by all the work ahead of me that I just start the project and forget about pictures. Lucky for me, G came to the home inspection before we moved in and occupied herself with my camera, so these pictures of our living room are brought to you by her:

That's our awesome realtor Dale in the kitchen.

This time I'd like to draw your attention to the pink walls, pink, super-textured ceiling, and rusty baseboards. We replaced the baseboards with gas forced air. I turned it on one morning last week and it was so cozy, so quick! One of the many great things about having a small house. And not having the baseboards to work around made it way easier to arrange furniture in each room.

So that was then, and this is now:

I won't bore you by pointing out how many things in here are second hand (most of them are), but I do want to highlight the dining room set, because we found it on the side of the road in Spokane 4 years ago. I'm so excited because I love it but it's been in storage practically since we picked it up. In the 7 years we've been out on our own, we haven't had room for a dining room table until now!

I still need to paint over the spots where the old baseboards were, and when we feel ambitious enough I'm sure that wood paneling will go. Also the curtains aren't done, some of them are just pinned in place. But mostly we're good to go!

LOTS of good trees out every window.

I like the contrast between these two:




That 'Om' was a Christmas gift from Grant a couple years ago and is one of my absolute favorite things ever. It was the hardest thing to put up in the house because I wanted it to be everywhere!

Tomorrow we'll go down the hall to the computer/sewing/tv room.

Love, J

Projects and progress - Part 1

We've been hard at work on the house since we moved in, and it's really coming together now. I think it's time for some before and after pictures. Our tour begins in the bedroom:


Please direct your attention to the carpet (which smelled like cat pee) and dark blue walls (which I didn't actually hate, but the hubs said had to go). These pictures were taken before I'd unpacked my fabulous, fancy new graduation camera, so that will add to the contrast between the before and after photos.


And now, abra-cadabra, just like that (6 weeks after moving in), it looks like this:


Mostly we just painted and had the floors done, but doesn't it look better? And I sewed the curtains, which is good because supposedly the focus of my blog is 'stuff I've made' but I've sort of gotten off track lately.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that every single thing you can see in this photo (and a lot you can't, including all the clothes in the dressers) were either thrifted or gifted to us. I'm rather smug that we've been so successful at easing out of the consumer pool. Oops, wait, our wedding cake topper's in the back corner, and we bought that new. My bad. Smugness gone.

Anyhow, I'm sooo happy with how things are turning out, I can't even tell you. Tomorrow we will continue our tour into the living room...

From here you can see a thrifted vanity, mirror, dresser, lightswitch plate, curtains, curtain rod, laundry basket, and bedspread. Pretty good, huh?

Just when I think it's settled

Most days I am very (very, very) glad it's still just the hubs and me, living our life and enjoying each other. Most days I have zero desire to cart around a mini-me all day and night, feeding, cleaning, changing, blah, blah, blah. And most days I don't give a second thought to our child-free state or to when we might decide to end it.

But once in a while, I'll run across something like this:


And it makes me think.

Good grief, she's so cute I can hardly stand it.

It's still settled, for now, but what I mean is that I sure wouldn't mind having that little bug to snuggle on for just a while. And who could blame me, really?

Love, J

Post edit: If you click the photo to enlarge it, you can see her chin drool. Man, does she kill me.

Someone's coming to visit...

Who could it be?...


Some hints:

She's a very chic dresser...



She is always there for important occasions (even when you're a jerk and forget to invite her until the absolute last minute and she has to jump in the car and drive 2 hours through the city to be there for you):



She is wicked fun:



And photogenic:




And hilarious:


Any guesses?

Where dreaming (and not paying attention in class) pays off

In college, there were very few students in each of my classes who brought their laptops to class. It wasn't necessary to type your notes. The lectures were repetitive/slow/unimportant enough that you could easily make do with jotting down the big issues on a notepad and then get back to your crossword puzzle in the Daily Evergreen (this is all hypothetical, understand).

But in law school, everyone brings their laptop to every class. This is because a) we are told to do so at orientation, and b) because the lectures are dizzyingly-paced and the casebooks basically useless at exam time. But what really drove me to schlep my computer to and from school on the bus each day was the fact that everyone else was doing it, and if I didn't, then I was probably doing something wrong. I find fear and intimidation to be excellent motivators.

The difficulty was never in having the laptop with me in class. It was in having internet access in class. And because I've always been a back-row kid, I could see that 99% of my peers were taking full advantage of that access. Everyone had a favorite site: Facebook; MSNBC; Youtube (on mute - what's the point?); Zappos.

Mine was Zillow.

Oh, how I loved house shopping. Years before I had any inkling that we would be able to even dream about thinking about being able to afford one of our own, I still shopped. I shopped my way from torts through professional responsibility and back again. And then I shopped some more.

I found no less than 10 this-is-the-one-and-no-other-will-ever-hold-a-candle-to-it dream houses. Big brick manors on the South Hill, cute bungelows in the Valley, rambling farmhouses on acreage in Otis Orchards, it didn't matter. I wanted one of each.

I'm pretty sure this obsession stems from that desire I have to create. I love to make things. And to have a house to make beautiful, to have space to work on my projects and then display them, oh, my heart still beats faster when I think back to the anticipation.

And then, by the end of our time in Seattle, we learned that:

working + saving + (scrimping - still having way too much fun in a very awesome city) =



Heck yeah.

Love, J

What I'm not up to

Catching up on my friends' blogs, I see I made Natalie's blog roll. This means there is at least one person who reads this, which is weird to me. I was thinking of this as an exercise in self centeredness, like a public diary. But now it's feeling more like an actual way to keep people up-to-date with what's going on in my life.

I am too lazy to do a real post today. A real post would require photos, which means uploading them from our camera, which means changing the camera's batteries, and that's way more ambitious than I feel this evening. So instead of relating what I've been doing, here's what I haven't been doing (since I don't need pictures for that):

- I'm not starting school, even though it's September. Heck yes, no more school for me.
- I'm not studying. The bar exam is over, and good riddance to it. I'll get my results mid-October but (knock on wood) I think I'll be okay. It was very hard but I'm pretty sure I eeked by (knock on wood again).
- I'm not working. Because I don't want to yet. My summer vacation didn't start until the exam ended at the very end of July, so I'm taking it well into fall this year.
- I'm not having babies. No more school and hitting our 6 year wedding anniversary have started family and friends a-questioning. 'No,' is the answer to that question.
- I'm not living in Seattle anymore. We're back in Spokane! Yay! (Which also means, unfortunately, that I am NOT enjoying my thrice-weekly sushi binges, darn it.)

So that's what I'm not up to. But I'll put the whole batteries/camera/real post thing on my to-do list and be back shortly.

Love, J