I {HEART} TREES

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem, right? I was updating my favorites on Etsy the other day and now it's full of trees and tree-related items! I was actually telling myself no, you do not need to favorite yet another tree item. It could be worse though. I could be addicted to crack or smack. And trees are good for the planet. I should support them!

Here are just a few of the things I'm loving right now.

Coral Branches by ara133 photography. I love the colors, the bare branches, the ripples.

Ready for Summer notecards by 12fifteen. I love the design. I love letterpress. I love the color.

I've had this piece by Pistoles Press in my favorites for quite awhile. I love black/white pieces and I love the crispness of the drawing.

I really love this mandala. I stumbled across Nature Mandala's work not long after discovering Etsy and I have to keep updating my favorites with her work because the things I mark keep selling. I love the designs that are created from her photos and the colors (or lack thereof in this case) are always muted and beautiful.

Central Park Path by studioAK. Beautiful colors.

Updates Galore

I love my house. I really, truly love it and have no intention of moving anytime in the near or distant future. I’ve had more than enough moving, buying and selling to last me a lifetime thankyouverymuch. That being said, I think we need to discuss a little something called “Updates Galore”. Have you seen this sign before? I’ve noticed during our home buying/selling process that a lot of realtors like to put a sign saying “Updates Galore” above the “For Sale” sign. From my experience, it’s a big bunch o’ hooey.

Let’s have a little lesson and look up the definition of “galore”. According to dictionary.com it means “in abundance, in plentiful amounts.” That’s what I thought. To me, that means my house should have an abundance of updates.

To be fair, here’s what’s been updated (in list format seeing as I do love a good list).

• New roof
• New windows
• Fairly recently remodeled kitchen
• New stove
• New microwave
• Closets with nice organization systems
• Built-in cabinets next to the fireplace
• Mostly freshly painted walls albeit done by a crappy painter who left white spots and glops
  

There are some nice items on there no doubt, but let’s take a look at what has not been updated galore.

• An old fridge with lights and a water dispenser that didn’t work (Chris fixed those) and an ice dispenser that literally makes about one cube per day.
• Numerous “grounded” 3-prong outlets that are not actually grounded. Glad we didn’t plug our expensive electronics into any of those!
• A fuse box that wasn’t up to code (electrician mumbo jumbo about 100 amp vs. 200 amp and we are now upgraded to 200 amp. Yay us!)
• An old furnace
• An old A/C unit
• Two full bathrooms with all their original 1950s fixtures/cabinetry – one mint green, one pink – including tub diverters that were so corroded that the water would simultaneously gush out of the tub spout and the showerhead regardless of which one you actually wanted to use (Chris fixed after numerous trips to the hardware store)
• A basement “half bath” that consists of a toilet, a shower head and a plywood wall and looks like it belongs in a prison cell
• A garage door opener from the ‘70s that we can’t get a second remote for (the previous owners only had one to give us even though it’s a TWO car garage) because it’s old and dangerous. They stopped making it because it doesn’t have that handy dandy reversing mechanism that keeps it from squashing every man, woman, child and beloved pet that gets in its way
• Numerous outdoor flood lights that we can’t figure out how to turn on. Yes, we have tried every switch we can find and putting in new light bulbs.
• A sliding screen door that keeps falling off the tracks
• Three cable lines that are not in overly convenient locations. One in a spare bedroom, one in my craft room and one in the dining room. Yes, dining room. Yes, it’s really a dining room, not a kind of, maybe dining room, but a definite dining room.
• Mostly original light fixtures which are these big squares set into the ceiling and we haven’t figured out yet how we can replace them with new fixtures
  

As I said, I love my house and fortunately a lot of those issues are things we can fix ourselves being the handy couple that we are or that work for the time being. And for the most part we find it comical. Oh, the outlets aren’t grounded? That’s ok, the house has UPDATES GALORE!

PS - If you clicked on any of those linkies and saw pictures of my house, please note, that is NOT my furniture. MY furniture is still at my old house until it sells (hopefully very soon!!) and those pictures were taken before we moved in.

Melon Mania

I'm a little frightened by my garden and I blame it on vegetable seed packets which are liars. Chris picked out a packet of "cool melon" seeds for our garden and I planted them in May. I followed the instructions which said to plant one every 3-4". The instructions said NOTHING about thinning out the seedlings which Chris and I both found a bit odd. My mother-in-law was over one night shortly after the melons sprouted and said we would need to thin them. I did pull every other one because I was already starting to get a bit scared of them. Every other one was definitely not enough! They're trying to take over my garden!! Do you see all those little yellow flowers? Those are future melons my friends and I have no clue what we're going to do with 200 melons. Give them away to every man, woman and child we encounter, I suppose.

The biggest one is slightly larger than a walnut right now so it's probably going to be awhile before we get to try one out. I hope they're good since we'll soon have enough for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In the non-scary gardening department, our purple beans are doing very well. Disappointing to both Chris and me, they don't stay purple when you cook them! Our snap peas have been most unproductive. I think maybe we planted them too late in the season which is sad because I love snap peas. We picked our first cucumber earlier this week and I think we're up to three now. We'll probably have enough of those for breakfast, lunch and dinner soon too.

Waiting Game

We're under contract to sell our old house! Now begins the fun part of the inspection and the list of remedies and waiting for time to pass until we officially close and moving all the furniture out and countless other things that I'm sure I'm forgetting. I'm praying that everything goes relatively smoothly. I say relatively because I'm not going to fool myself into thinking there won't be some issues along the way, but hopefully there won't be too much turmoil. I think we had more than enough when we bought our new house!

Another One Bites the Dust

I'm very happy to report that I've crossed not one, but TWO items off my to do list which brings me down to roughly 451. I finished painting my craft room and it feels absolutely wonderful to have that done. I honestly cannot describe how happy I am to complete a painting project. Of course it's that post-project euphoria that causes me forget what a miserable process painting is and take on another one. I suppose that's a good thing or I'd probably never pick up another paint brush.

Isn't it a lovely shade of blue? At first I thought it was going to be too dark, but I really love how it turned out. Now I just need some more furniture for the room (what you see is what you get) and some artwork and it will be fabuloso.

I also successfully finished removing the wallpaper in my bathroom over the weekend. On the plus side, it's removed. On the minus side, my bathroom looks like crap. I reaaaalllly want to get it finished, but I need Chris to replace some light fixtures (I leave all things electrical to him) for me first and do some light sanding. I can't describe how much I DON'T want to do the light sanding. It will probably take me all of about 15 minutes, if that, but the clean up is another story. That will probably take me at least twice as long provided I remove every freestanding object before I sand. Ok, so maybe that's only 45 minutes total but it's definitely not a FUN 45 minutes! The sooner I suck it up and get it done though, the sooner I'll be able to paint and have a bathroom that doesn't look like it belongs at a prison camp.

PS - Did you notice my fancy new 3-column layout? Despite my complete inability to properly follow directions, I did it! Shhh. We won't discuss how many tries it took me to get it right.

Independence Day

Happy 4th everyone! Columbus is a little weird because they don't have their big fireworks display on the 4th. Something about not competing with the smaller cities in the area so Chris and I went to see the fireworks last night.

The weather here has been unusually beautiful the last week or so and it was a great night to hang out down by the river (I don't think I'll ever be able to type "down by the river" without thinking of that one Chris Farley skit). Typically we're sweltering with highs in the upper 80s and high humidity, but we've had temps in the upper 70s with low humidity. It's almost like I'm back in LA!

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday and long weekend as much as Chris and I are! No big plans for us, but it's been awesome having some extra time to get things done AND relax.

Visitors

Meet the Chirpingtons! Our humble little condo out in the backyard is doing a booming business. The Tweetwells were there last month and now we have the Chirpingtons. They moved in soon after the Tweetwells. Mom and pop were in and out for probably 2-3 weeks and then a couple weekends ago we heard little chirps coming from inside.

A few days later we finally saw some movement and checked them out with the binoculars that now live on our kitchen windowsill. I stared at them for awhile and couldn't figure out what the hell I was looking at. The binoculars were definitely in focus, but what I was seeing didn't make any sense. It was some sort of weird blob that didn't look remotely like baby birds. Chris checked it out figuring I didn't know how to use binoculars since that what he's always inclined to think in such instances, but it didn't make any sense to him either.

Then he figured it out. Triplets! Their crazy stretched out beaks were piled on top of each other making it hard to figure out what they were. I don't know if the Chirpingtons are just super tired because they have triplets or if the Tweetwells were just overprotective, but we were able to get right up to the birdhouse to take pictures of these guys. Aren't they cute with their giant beaks?