Road Trip Booklist

I’m spending my day in full on housewife mode while the hubs is on military duty for the weekend with the National Guard. On my list today are laundry, washing dishes, making sandwiches, giving the horrible hound a bath, cleaning out the fridge, and packing. The hubs and I are driving back to the Midwest for a week to visit family and go to a wedding (1920’s themed – how fun will that be!). We’re taking Abe with us, and this will be his first long car ride, so wish us luck! After we get back, I have to take a quick trip up to New York to FINALLY get sworn into the NY Bar, which is exciting 🙂 I also anticipate that we’ll have some news on the house-search front shortly after we get back, so stay tuned!

To stay occupied on the long drive, I’ve borrowed a few eBooks from my local library (if anyone is interested, I can do a whole post on how to borrow eBooks, the process was far more complicated than their online directions let on…). Here’s my list so far:

 

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James – Not something I would have paid $10 (the Nook book price) for, based on the reviews, but I’ll borrow it from the library for free and see if it’s any good 🙂

The Assassin’s Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke – This one is only $6.50 for the Nook book, and I’m a sucker for easy-read YA fantasy novels, so I’ll give this a try too (my library doesn’t have a copy to borrow, so I’ll buy it). If this is any good, I’ll also probably buy the Nook book version of the sequel, The Pirate’s Wish.

And, just to prove that I do read serious/educational things every once in a while, I’ve also borrowed The Hidden Reality, by Brian Greene from my library. If I like it, I’ll probably go buy a softcover version for my home library. I’ve always loved theoretical physics (except for the math part, which is why I decided not to minor in it in college) and I own Green’s prior two books, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. This is about the only category of non-fiction that I read, other than a random biography or two and of course philosophy books. I’ve been looking for a good history of feudal Japan and a good history of the era of the Italian city-states (it’s easy to find books on the Medici and the Borgias, but I’m looking for a broader view) but I haven’t come across anything that is very well written or interesting… they all kind of read like Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which – while very informative – isn’t really the most engaging book…

Depending on how the drive goes, I may get through these rather quickly, so I’ll post an update if I add anything else to the list. Does anyone have any recommendations for me or a review of any of the books listed above? 

Blank Canvas

No, not that kind of canvas. I can’t draw anything, including a straight line, to save my life – unlike my dear friend Addie, who is amazing at such things. This blank canvas is our apartment. Beige walls, off-white carpet, and tan tile in the bathroom. Snore.

This is the doorway to our bedroom, the wall that our bookshelves/TV are on, and the left side of our living room windows.

Our blank bedroom.

The “hall” area passing between the kitchen and the living area. The left door is the den/man-cave/office, and the right side door leads to the bathroom.

The main reason we chose this apartment over the others in the area is 1) it has an additional “den” that we could turn into our office/the hub’s man-cave 2) it has engineered hardwood floors in the kitchen/living room area. Score! I’m a sucker for hardwood floors – my last itty-bitty studio had parquet floors that have probably been there since the 1940’s, and they were awesome. Plus, since we were going to adopt a dog, wood floors seemed like a way better idea than off-white carpeting in every. single. room. I don’t know what it is with property management companies around D.C., but they love their pristine white carpeting. Too bad it never stays pristine.

Luckily, our kitchen has a fabulous light grey granite for the counters, and the cabinetry is a deep espresso color, not oak (thank goodness!). The hubs and I are planning to stay here until we can afford a house of our own, so we were willing to pay a bit more for a place that was a really good fit for us, rather than just wherever rent was cheapest. The general consensus among our friends and co-workers is that we pay too much in rent for the area – until they walk into our main room, at which point they all say “Yep, your rent is totally reasonable!”

Our living room windows. Yes, they’re floor-to-ceiling. There’s a matching set of windows in our bedroom, and our apartment is south-facing, so we get TONS of sunlight.

Our kitchen, before I added in my appliances and other goodies. As you can see, I came to the apartment showing (when I took these photos) with coffee in hand. Coffee is always a requirement. You can see the front door to the right, and the “hall” that connects this room to the living area is at the right end of the kitchen counter.

So far the only room that I’ve cleaned and taken photos of is the bathroom – which is good, because there wasn’t really a “before” photo of that room. Above the towel rack on the right, you can see the edge of a photo frame where I put this printable, which I made myself. I guess I can be a little artsy – when digital design programs are involved 🙂 I put a white mat around it for a border, and it looks pretty cute if I do say so myself. You can find my Pinterest board with the link to the shower curtain and other goodies in our apartment on the My Favorites Page.

Bathroom – with color! The lighting in here makes the paint look weird, but it’s the same beige as the rest of the apartment. the other photos are very true to the wall color. Also the tile is very much like the wall color, and not as yellow as it looks here.

As for the rest of the apartment, well, I’m working on it. I think there’s some sort of universal principle that whenever I clean the apartment something else happens and it a) doesn’t stay clean or b) I get really busy and don’t have time to document it’s neat cleanliness. Oh, and I have the previously posted photo of our bookshelves in the living room, which I’ll put here again, just for kicks.

Bookshelves in Living Room, with our TV and video game consoles.

So much better than the blank before!

Domestic Goddess – Part 1

As I create more blog posts, there will be a definite theme, what I like to call my “Betty-Crocker” moments, or my “domestic goddess” days. I love to do housework. Some days, there is nothing more satisfying to me that imposing cleanliness and order on my living space. I love freshly washed sheets, clean laundry hung in my closet and folded into my dresser, or a neat desk with all my school work and other papers neatly organized and ready for use.

I’m also a big fan of cooking and baking. I cook all the time, and my general method is to throw a few things in a pan and see how it turns out. One of my aunts was a chef in the food industry for a while, then was a personal chef and live-in nanny, and then owned her own small-town cafe for a few years. She taught me just about everything I know about cooking, including that recipes aren’t necessary, and that one can measure by adding ingredients in the quantities of “some” and”until it looks good.” The measurements are a little more important in baking, but you can always substitute or make do if you need to (and I often do).  My baked goods often come to work or school with me, because I enjoy the baking and others’ enjoyment of the end result more than I do eating an entire batch of cookies or cheesecake by myself.

This all being said, I don’t like all housework – I loathe dusting, and most of the time I hate washing dishes  (which doesn’t coincide so well with the love of cooking and baking, unfortunately).

Recently, I’ve been trying to expand my “domestic goddess” urges into new chores, or things that I’ve neglected or put off. (For example, a new work-wardrobe of suits and blouses has left me with quite a few hand-wash-only items, and my washer doesn’t have a “gentle” cycle).

I’m also trying to get more use out of the things I have and love that still have some life in them, which requires some ingenuity. If anyone knows of a good place in DC to get a pair of high heeled shoes re-soled – please let me know! Ditto on a good tailor, I not only have some pants that need a hemming, but I’m going to wear my grandmother’s wedding dress in my wedding next June, and it needs some alterations.

Funnily enough, one of the book series that I’m really into right now has pushed me to do more of this sort of thing. Old Jane Austen novels, you might ask? Or one of those self help “de-clutter your life” books? Nope.

It’s the Sookie Stackhouse series, the books that the HBO series True Blood is based on. I’m not sure if the author does it on purpose, but Sookie’s character is a model of old-school-southern-belle-homemaker, with a dash of modern, self-supporting woman. She’s always making minor repairs, gardening, doing laundry, etc. in a way that makes me feel lazy about my own upkeep and cleaning habits. And when a fictional character makes you feel slovenly, you can probably take it up a notch. Stay tuned for more “Domestic Goddess” posts and we’ll see how it goes 🙂