peace in the little things

i am coming off of a long, hard week and the hospital. i have been full-to-the-brim with chaos this week and have ended up working 10-11 hours days every day. this morning my alarm didn't go off at all and i woke up an hour later than planned. that little alarm signal was there, but apparently i pushed something wrong before i went to bed and set off a painful chain of events.

i can't think straight. i freak out about the most absurd things (that in hindsight are usually due to my oversight or error). it is time for me to sit down with a book and a few cups of tea. i need to recharge my introvert and savor my quiet side. brandon is heading out of town, my dearest laramie friends are all off galavanting about the globe, and i couldn't be more eager for the silence of this weekend.

i hate to admit how much the disorder of our house (following our mid-level renovation this past weekend) is getting to me. too much chaos in my work and in my head makes me crave a peaceful, calm, clean home. instead i have my kitchen haphazardly and temporarily rearranged, my dresser halfway blocking the closet, and piles of randomness spilling out all over the place. aiy!

my goal for the weekend is to find peace in shoring up some little things. like getting our taxes in order. rehanging things in the office we painted (and maybe blogging about that decorating update). and eliminating a few of these piles that are taking on a life of their own.

nagging tasks

we spent all day yesterday working on house projects and i am officially exhausted. 

brandon finished building our compost bin (all with salvaged/re-purposed materials!) which is a big step in my recently established zealous goal of reducing our waste output. i have been inspired by the zero waste family to minimize the packaging we bring into our house and maximize our composting and recycling. we are far from perfect, but i am trying to think about my actions a bit more. so the compost bin is one major piece in reducing our garbage. and making supplemental material for my summer garden. (just thinking about summer gardening makes me so excited!)

i decided to tackle a task that has been nagging me for a bit: removing [nasty] paint from the hardware in our house. this sounds minor and easy. in fact, it was a whole day process and i still have three door hinge/handle sets to work on. the skin along my nail beds is torn up and cracking. my back aches and i am pretty sure my hands are going to be stuck in their current claw like form from all the required scrubbing. but the results are pretty cool (thank goodness!). i used a cheap-o crockpot to get the paint off and followed this tutorial. 

the latches in their purple-ish glory. be gone you nasty paint!

the hinges with a few of the screws removed. 

(i haven't taken pictures sans-paint yet because we got done last night about 8PM and the lighting was awful.) 

our house was built in 1928 and the doors and kitchen cupboards (along with their hardware) seem to be original. stripping the paint felt like an archaeological journey through the story of "this old house" as i learned the kitchen cabinets have previously been a pinkish Valentine's-Day-Card red, a pale country kitchen yellow, and are currently a purple-hinted grey. we plan to strip them down this summer and either stain or paint them. but we need longer and warmer days to tackle that DIY project.

somehow spending all day sunday (before family arrives this week) peeling paint off of the hardware seemed like a good idea. i am really glad i did it and happy with the outcome, but feel a little sheepish for my choice to do this non-urgent project when a few others should have been the priority. c'est la vie, right? there is a sweet reward in tackling a nagging task (which i learned here).

a decade makes a great start

january 5th is a special day for brandon and i: the day we started dating. ten years ago. ten. whoa! 

how did i get so lucky to find this incredible man, loyal friend, and devoted husband while i was still in high school? we have so many shared memories, and yet, it seems our lives together have just begun. i am grateful that i think of this past decade as just the beginning and that i still feel all googly-eyed about him. 

---

i was thinking about what was going on in the world 10 years ago:

• enrique iglesias' 'hero' was a popular song (that i am pretty sure i sang while thinking about brandon. gag.).
• the enron trials were just beginning.
• women everywhere thought they were rocking in their velour tracksuits. we later discovered that not even j-lo looks attractive in a velour tracksuit.
• everyone we knew was forwarding us the doctored photo of the shark jumping out of the water at the Air Force chopper. and we forwarded it on to ten people for fear of sudden death if we didn't keep the chain mail alive. 
• americans were eagerly chowing down on bacon and blue cheese in hopes of atkinsing themselves into their skinny clothes.

predictability

ugh, i think i am guilty of saying all of these things.

and i have those bangs.

sunday, 4:00
(sorry for the lame bathroom iPhone picture)

sunday, 4:15

happiness and its bad rap

just this morning i finished the happiness project. i stumbled onto this book from brene brown's website, ordinary courage, and initially was quite resistant to the concept. i have never really been thrilled with arguments about how people should pursue happiness; it never seemed noble or honorable to work towards this {spoken like a true first-child with a martyr complex}. 

despite my resistance to the book and the concept, intrigue won. i am glad it did. i find myself referencing this book at least five times a day in conversations with friends or family and i notice myself trying to incorporate little slivers of the author's happiness resolutions. 

each month of the year the author set an intention for her life and established 3-5 measurable resolutions to work towards that intention. it sounds a bit hokey, but for me it wasn't. as i read the book i felt like i was reading my own journal towards personal betterment, the hurdles to the author's happiness are so similar to the hurdles in my personality and life. 

at the end of the book she provides the following questions to inspire your own happiness project:

• what makes you feel good? what activities do you find fun, satisfying, or energizing?
• what makes you feel bad? what are sources of anger, irritation, boredom, frustration, or anxiety in your life?
• is there any way in which you don't feel right about your life? do you wish you could change your job, city, family situation, or other circumstances? are you living up to your expectations for yourself? does your life reflect your values?
• do you have sources of an atmosphere of growth? in what elements of your life do you find progress, learning, challenge, improvement, and increased mastery?

ultimately my view on happiness {and its pursuit} have shifted through reading this book. what i once thought a selfish endeavor, i now see that cultivating happiness in my life is a result of my choices and that my happiness can greatly improve the lives of those around me. as someone who has always internally condemned the airlines' guidance to first put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others, i am learning to see that by being happy i can help bring happiness into the lives of people around me. {and that's how i stealthily resolve my dissonance around personal happiness!}

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on an unrelated note, the author included this excerpt from one of her blog readers and it fits me like a glove {and helps me see why my profession suits me so well}:

the way i bring people together is by connecting them via whatever may be of interest to them. i know i am gifted at connecting the dots and i use that skill in the relationships i build with others. i also have a tendency to collect and store what may seem like mundane information about people in my head. inevitably, i will run into someone who needs something, and because of the information i've collected i will have just the right person to introduce them to to help them achieve whatever they need. ironically, i am not a social butterfly at all, but i always seem to be able to connect people at the right time. 

photos, finally.

here are some pictures of our living room, which is the most finished of all the rooms of our new house. although the warm yellow/gold might be a bit much for some people, i wake up every morning thrilled with the paint color we chose! (bee by sherwin williams, if anyone is interested.)

a while back, i recovered that teal chair
in the corner and i love how it turned out!

my favorite corner of our house right now.

i picked this print up in santa fe this fall and i am so glad i did!

the view from the kitchen sink.

the pass through in all its glory!
(still waiting on barstools and ignore that internet
cable running across the floor. we obviously have a
bit of work left to do--like paint the trim on the pass-through!)

now on to work on other rooms so we can share photos of them!

initiation situation

we have been properly initiated into the realm of diy homeownership. when we initially considered buying this house i knew that i wanted to open up the wall between the kitchen and living room by creating a pass-through/bar. my dad confirmed it would be "easy enough" so we proceeded with the plan one sunday morning, thinking it might take a day or two. 

this is what the wall looked like on that fateful sunday morning.

one of the first problems we encountered was the plaster (concrete) walls. what we thought would be an enjoyable (dare i say therapeutic?) demoing project resulted in the demolition of two sawzall blades and a heavy dusting of our entire house. and two sinus-infections. the house was built in 1928, so we hope the walls predate asbestos.

the death of the sawzall blade and all we had was a 4" hole to show for it!

the walls in our house also feature lath beneath the plaster, so the demoing didn't go nearly as quickly as hoped because even when we broke up the plaster, we still had these wood slats to remove. as we hammered away, through the gaps in the slats, i noticed a pipe right in the middle of the would-be bar. ugh! i was completely disheartened and thought the project was impossible. luckily brandon knew we were too far in to turn back. he also realized it was just a sewer vent pipe, so no water needed to flow through the pipe and he could handle re-routing it.

our pass-through, looking somewhat like the outline of the lower 48.

me, trying not to be totally dismayed
by the pipe in the middle of our bar.

as i suspect is the case with most diy remodel projects,
this simple pass-through led from one project
to tons of other small projects. 

hammering away from the kitchen side.

brandon totally impressed me with his know-how and expertise.
and his ever-growing list of "required tools."

we bought a counter top at the resource store to initiate this project.
while it was marked $10, we got it for $5!
this was the only cheap element of this project.

the upside of discovering the pipe in the middle of our wall was that we had to cut this pipe above the sink drain and found that the vent pipe was clogged. which explained why our sink was glug-glugging instead of draining properly. my dad suggested that this may have spared us from having future plumbing expenses, so it was nice to have an upside to the pipe predicament.

so gross! 

our entire house was covered in this dust,
in fact, i'm still finding it!

starting to look a whole lot more like a pass-through.

we enlisted the help of heath, who was far more confident than brandon or i.
perhaps because he has done his fair-share of diy renovations.
or perhaps because it isn't his house so he cares far less than us.

i went to albuquerque for a girls' weekend with kemi and sara. when i left the pass-through looked like the photo above. i felt awful leaving brandon with the unfinished mess on his hands. however, he pressed on and finished the project while i was away. i came back to this:

i LOVE it! it opens up the house and makes both rooms feel much larger. we have a fair amount of work  to do on the kitchen side of the pass-through, but we plan to replace the cabinet the sink is in, so i think we are going to live with it for a while. 

the living room is coming together, so i will share photos from that soon. however, when i sat down to put this post together it turned into a total kerfuffle where i thought i lost our 8,000+ photos in our iPhoto library. i managed to resolve the problem, but i am a bit tired of dealing with the computer at the moment. 

trading

i am coming to realize that i have great expectations. not the classic novel, but the condition. and it is a rough one to overcome--daydreaming about just how amazing or perfect something will be doesn't always lend me to actually appreciate the reality of that something. 

for instance, when i am at work i think about how awesome our dog is and totally miss him. however, when i get home and harvey obsessively follows me from room to room, or wipes his post-frisbee session slobber on our new couch, or overly enthusiastically greets friends at the door i get all scrunchy and grumpy. "why can't you be like the dog i think you ought to be?" he is bizarre and obsessive and not everyone's cup of tea, but gosh darn it i love that expressive face and those soft ears of his. why can't i dwell on that? instead i get embarrassed by the way he doesn't match up with my expectations (which are, of course, due to my lack of training, but i digress).

anyhow, i am thinking about the way that i build events up in my mind so much that they don't stand a chance of being great in comparison to my ideal, even if they are great in their own right. so i am working on that. i think that comes with this time of year and the reflection and gratitude it inspires. then on glutenfreegirl.com i found this quote:

Expectations are premature disappointments.

perhaps a bit pessimistic for some of you, but it inspired me to think about the way that my expectations lead me to be ungrateful. there is so much beauty in my life, friendships, marriage, family, even my dog, and yet i have to temper myself against the temptation of thinking of how something could be better. i want to enjoy what is, not focus on what is not.

i've been meaning to post photos of the house now that we are settled. and yet i keep waiting for the house to be clean enough, the lighting to be just right for photos, or some project to be finished first. i'll try to let go of those expectations and take at least a few photos soon. i really love our little house and i want to share it on our blog.

pop quiz

so this sums up my thoughts on the world:

and also is the reason that i think it should be an official "right of passage" that every person work in food service. 

two closures & a beginning

we closed on our house last thursday! we are really excited to enter the domain of home-ownership, although we keep hearing how much time and money a house consumes. while we don't want to be unrealistic, we are ignoring the naysayers for a bit and enjoying our little piece of the world. we haven't done much to the place, but keep forgetting to take "before" pictures of the few little projects we have completed. we will try to get a few more photos gathered and up soon, especially after we have the internet hooked up this week.

i finished the binding on my quilt, so that bad boy is finally finished and on our bed. i even used a ladder stitch {check out that oh-so-helpful link if you ever have to do binding} so my thread is virtually invisible. how did people make entire quilts by hand? ai, that tediousness is not for me! i am having a hard time loving the quilt because all i see are my mistakes, which is sadly a little too close to my view on my own life. perhaps learning to love this quilt--mistakes and all--will help me to get over this pessimism so i can learn to "let go" a bit more in life in general.

the best news of the weekend {other than brandon finally coming home} is that my brother ross is engaged to his girlfriend, jordyn. we are over the moon excited for them and will look forward to the big day {which sounds like it is going to be in june 2013}! congratulations to two incredible people who are perfectly suited for one another!