Another day

So I mentioned before I took my brief hiatus last week that my friend and decorator Holly Mathis had come to visit and helped me out with some decorating ideas. And I was ever so grateful because there are honestly things in this house that haven’t been moved or touched in almost nine years.

Which is what I explained to Holly before she even walked in the door because you know what’s stressful? Having a decorator come to your house to view all your decor. So I felt the need to over-explain that we’d renovated our house nine years ago and then brought Caroline home from the hospital two weeks after we’d moved back in and I’ve essentially been in survival mode ever since that time.

And the thing is, I used to love decorating. I’d spend hours browsing through furniture stores and even kept a little binder full of house ideas that I’d pulled from pages of Southern Living and Better Homes and Garden.

(Can we discuss how obsolete binders are now that there’s Pinterest? If I want to feel really bad about the current state of my decor or my craft abilities or the fact that I don’t make Caroline’s lunch into cute shapes, I need look no further than my Pinterest boards.)

But then I had a child and went without sleep for three years. Then I quit my job and it seemed more important to eat than to have a pretty living room. And then one day I looked up and realized I still had fake ivy on top of the china cabinet in my dining room and it was time for an intervention.

Thank God for Holly. She and I had talked about a few ideas over the last year or so, but I just couldn’t get it going. I talked a big game but then it was summer and then I had a hangnail and then I had to write a book and so that ivy just sat on top of my china cabinet.

Mocking me.

(True confession. The china cabinet doesn’t hold china. It holds six placemats, our wedding album, an envelope full of warranties and instructions for all our appliances, various craft supplies, and the game CatchPhrase.)

(This should be a clue as to my organization skills because, clearly, all those things go together.)

I promise Holly had only been in my house ten minutes before we had fabric picked out for the couch, throw pillows, living room chairs and dining room chairs. It was like Nate Berkus had walked in. But cuter and more fun.

She would walk around with her measuring tape and announce, “You’ll need two pillows here. Make them 12 x 30”. I didn’t even know you could get pillows that are 12 x 30.

So I just typed things furiously into the notes on my phone and bookmarked stuff on my computer while she basically redecorated my entire house in her head. I’ve never been so happy. Because at some point I became a person who just wants someone to tell me how to get things to look the way I want them and not have to think about it. I have enough stress worrying about Bethenny Frankel and Jason and hoping they can make it work.

And it’s not like I can do it all now because to redecorate the whole house would be right over my normal $15 price point. But it gives me a long-term goal. The sad news is it’s a lot cheaper to just look at pretty rooms on Pinterest.

Anyway, after Holly and I spent the early afternoon devising a plan (I think we all know that I wasn’t devising anything. I was just nodding my head.) we headed to Pier One, Target and World Market to look for a few things. And I was amazed because Holly would walk in each store, scan around and immediately find the two or three things we were looking for.

If I had been alone I would have walked in, spent two hours agonizing over everything, and left with nothing but regret.

We were basically looking for white pottery pieces for the top of my cabinets, some decorative plates, glass canisters and lanterns. Oh, and maybe a lamp. Or anything else that looked interesting.

The plan is to hang a fun assortment of plates on the wall in my dining room. Here’s a little bit of what we laid out so far. I need to pick out a few more which probably means Holly is going to have to come back because DECISIONS – not my strong suit.

Holly also suggested that some lanterns might look cute on the mantle. And to spray paint them red. Total madness. But I loved the idea. We found great tall lanterns at Pier One. Then I found spray paint at Home Depot in Colonial Red.

And then P spray painted them for me because he watched me try to do it and informed me I am a complete failure in the spray-painting department. Or maybe I’m a genius because guess who didn’t end up with Colonial Red spray paint all over my hands?

They turned out really cute.

Please disregard that frame and the wall color because all that is about to change since I’m also about to paint the living room and dining room and hallway and guest room just as soon as we hire someone to float and tape all the cracks in this house. Because you know what a drought does to an old house? Ugly, unspeakable things.

So the walls will eventually be a soft gray and there will be built-ins in the living room to hold the T.V. even though it looks super classy propped up on our church pew right now. Jesus and television, my two loves together.

Maybe I’ll put some fake ivy on top of the T.V. in the meantime.

Anyway, it will be a work in progress over the next few months but I’ll keep you updated on everything as we go and maybe I’ll even get fancy and have before and after photos.

In the meantime, I’m motivated to get rid of all the junk in this house and am cleaning out every room from top to bottom.

But I’ll save that post for tomorrow because, seriously, this is already over 1,000 words and you’ve probably already quit reading by now anyway.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I will feature the contents of my nightstand. It will be riveting.

Just in case any of you have stayed awake at night wondering if Siri has become any more adept at sending text messages for me, let me assure you that she has not.

I’m not sure what she thought I was trying to say but this makes my life sound a lot fancier than it is in reality.

So.

It’s been a while.

How’ve you been? What’s new? What’s happening?

As the kids like to say, what’s goin’ down?

Or do the kids not say that anymore? I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here on my couch, buried underneath piles of paper and empty Starbucks coffee cups singing old hymns when I’m not rocking back and forth with a vacant look in my eyes.

Oh I’m being dramatic.

Truth be told, I finished the edits in plenty of time last week and decided to take a couple of days to regain some semblance of mental health. Even though I was sorely tempted to blog on Wednesday because you’ll never believe what happened.

We had a mouse in our house.

It was like God was testing me to see if I was serious about not posting on the blog.

P and I were watching T.V. late one night and all of a sudden we both thought we saw something move near our hallway. But it’s all dark and shadowy there and it was hard to tell for sure. P jumped up and turned on lights in the rooms off the hall and did a search to see if he could see a mouse or a roach or a hobbit that had made its way into our home.

He instructed me to stand at the hallway entry and be ready in case something scurried out. He also told me not to scream if it ran out because Caroline was sleeping.

Hi. Have we met? In what universe am I not going to scream if that happens?

But I tried to play it cool. He finished his search, kicked a few things to see if he could scare something out of hiding and then we decided we must have imagined it. Maybe it was just a shadow from the reflection of a car driving by or maybe it was the ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever. Just a long as I could convince myself it was anything less frightening than a rodent.

Plus, I reminded myself that P has a rich history of imagining he’s seen something. Over the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, he’s woken me up to ask if I can see the blue iguana hanging over our bed or the ninja standing by his nightstand or the squirrel running across our bedroom. I used to jump up in a panic because BLUE IGUANA! but I eventually realized that he just has very active dreams and a tendency to talk in his sleep.

Anyway, we went with denial and mutually agreed it was just in our minds. But P decided to set a mouse trap in the hallway just in case. Because like the old saying goes, better safe than infested with mice.

Then P went to bed. But I stayed up because I still needed to wind down and read Twitter updates and look at pretty fabric on the internet. I was engrossed in all this activity when I either saw or heard something, it’s hard to know which, and looked up in time to see what was undoubtably a little mouse running from the kitchen back into the hallway.

Which means it had already run from the hallway back into the kitchen at some point when I wasn’t paying attention.

Which means I kind of wanted to die inside.

I sat frozen on the couch. Not sure what to do, waiting on the sound of the mouse trap to snap. But that sound never came. And I did not, in the words of Buford T. Justice, care to be in HOT PURSUIT of a mouse.

So I just sat and tried not to think about it.

Then, just as the voices inside my head quit screaming, the little mouse came flying back through the hallway on his way back to the vicinity of the kitchen.

What is happening? Is this an episode of Tom and Jerry? Why is this mouse so active? Did he find a bunch of Sudafed in the guest bathroom?

I had no idea what to do and knew it wouldn’t do any good to wake P up because he’d just tell me to go to bed and that the mouse would still be there in the morning.

Yes. That’s the problem.

So I went to bed and rolled a towel to fit under the crack in our bedroom door in what I’m sure was an extremely effective and highly scientific mouse prevention technique. No way is a mouse going to break through a Disney Princess beach towel.

(Unless it’s Mickey. He’s always been bitter about the Disney Princesses.)

The next morning P and I whispered to each other about the mouse because in no universe did I want Caroline to be aware of our rodent issue. I told P about the mouse’s nighttime exploits and his possible addiction to amphetamines.

And so the next night, P came armed for battle. He brought a multitude of mouse traps and a bag of Starbursts because everyone knows the mice are crazy for them. Not to mention that it takes some dedication to get a Starburst out of a trap, guaranteeing almost certain death.

Sure enough, by the following morning the little mouse was no longer with us. God rest his little hyped up soul.

He met his end in the laundry room, with the mouse trap, and the Starburst.

Sadly, he didn’t fold any of my laundry before he died.

Y’all.

This is so hard for me to do, but I have reached the point where I have to cry “Uncle” if that were actually something I’d ever say in real life.

And it’s not.

I don’t know what I’d cry. Maybe “CHOCOLATE”.

The edits for my book are due at the end of this week. And Caroline doesn’t have school on Friday. Which means the edits really need to be finished by Thursday.

Which means that I’m just going to give you the heads up that this might be my last post until next Monday. Or I may end up posting here and there during the week because I won’t be able to stand it. I don’t know.

I just know that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and need to take a deep breath. Plus, Caroline has to take standardized tests this week so I’m going to be very busy cooking various healthy, nutritious breakfasts so she can move them around with her fork and not eat them.

But I have to tell you really quick that Holly Mathis came to visit this weekend. And I can’t express how much I love her. She walked into my house and immediately envisioned about 843 things that I would have never thought about. Or maybe I would have thought about them and then that’s all I would have done for the next three years. Just thought.

It’s going to be a work in progress over the next few months and is going to require me to do stuff like paint walls and cabinets and think about fabric and pillows. But I’m excited. It’s been nine years since I’ve really done anything to the house other than that time I painted the kitchen turquoise and then painted it chocolate brown about two weeks later because the turquoise made me feel like I was living in a Gloria Estefan video. And I assure you that the rhythm was going to get me.

In the meantime, here’s just a quick, very bad quality picture I took of the tops of one side of my kitchen cabinets after Holly and I made a run to Target and World Market to pick up some white pottery pieces to put on top.

I wish I could convey what a difference just this simple thing made, but I can’t because sometimes a picture isn’t worth a thousand words.

I’m not sure what that means.

Anyway, I’ll be back in a few days or maybe tomorrow or maybe later in the week or maybe next Monday.

This is going to be a really quick list of a few quick things. Seriously. No rambling or anything. Because it’s late and I worked on edits today and my brain is tired.

1. My friend and decorator extraordinaire, Holly Mathis, is coming to visit me on Saturday and help me figure out how to redo my living room.

With any luck it will look like this by the end of the weekend.

 

Or probably not. But a girl can dream. And Holly is the best at what she does.

I’ll keep you posted.

2. My friends Chad and Jamie emailed me to tell me about something a friend of theirs started. It’s called Humankind Water.

Humankind Water is a nonprofit that uses 100% of their net profits to help fund clean water filtration systems in underdeveloped counties. Walmart is having a contest called Put it on the Shelf, like American Idol for products and Humankind Water has made it into the Top 10 out of 4100 entries. The winner gets a free contract with Walmart and their product will be sold in all Walmarts across the country. The dream is if Humankind Water were sold in Walmart it could raise hundred of thousands if not millions to build water systems.

Because, y’all, I don’t know if you know this but there are a lot of Walmarts.

Anyway, they need our help to get there. You can visit their Facebook page to read more about it and text 4829 to 383838 to vote for them.

I just did it and it couldn’t be easier. You can vote once a day between now and April 24th.

3. My friend Marla Taviano has a new ebook out called Once Upon the Internet. You can download it on your Nook or Kindle or whatever else you have that has the ability to read an ebook. It’s only $2.99. Find out more about it here.

4. I wrote a post about Mad Men and another one on Downton Abbey over at Pioneer Woman’s blog. You can read them if you’re interested. And Sophie wrote a great post over there about music for grown-ups. It’s a must read if you’re looking for some good stuff for your iPod or Sony Walkman.

5. That’s it. Over and out.

See y’all tomorrow with fashion aplenty.

I’m going to go ahead and confess something that most of you probably already know. I am not a technological genius. In fact, I try to avoid dealing with technology as much as possible because I can’t be trusted with it.

I mean, just in the last six weeks I’ve managed to accidentally delete all my iTunes songs and everything else off my desktop. And I’ve never been so thankful for the people at the Apple store who took pity on me and made it all magically appear. I may have wept.

Basically my preferred method of dealing with computer issues is to close it and then open it again. And if that doesn’t work then I’ll bang it on something and see if that helps.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got. If neither of those things works then you’ll know because there won’t be anything new on the blog until I get to the Apple store.

It’s really a wonder that I ever started a blog. And when I made the switch to WordPress a few years ago, I quickly realized I was in over my head. Like Paris Hilton at a MENSA meeting.

Oh sure. I had big ambitions at first. I talked a good game about wanting to learn how to “code” things and make graphics and figure out how to change my design every month, but that quickly devolved into a simpler dream of just not causing the whole thing to explode because I don’t know what I’m doing.

So I found Cathy who owns a business called Desperately Seeking WordPress, which is, appropriately enough, a business that deals in WordPress sites. This isn’t an advertisement for Cathy, but I feel like she should get a shout out for all the misery and pain I’ve caused her over the years. God bless her.

And so Cathy works behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly while I just get on and type a few words every evening like a trained monkey. But occasionally I’ll see something I like on another blog and I’ll email Cathy with something like “Hey! Could I get one of those whatchmacallit things at the bottom of the thing on the right side of my main page?”

Then she’ll email me back and somehow know exactly what I’m talking about and then she’ll do it. It’s like magic. Or maybe it’s more like idiot interpretation. I don’t know.

And that’s what happened last week. Cathy was fixing up a few things on the blog because she knows I have no idea what I’m doing and she sent me an email and suggested that I might want to include a thing at the bottom of each post that would allow people to subscribe by email.

(That’s a fancy way of saying that you’ll get an email notification in your inbox every time I write a new post.)

(You probably already know that, but I had no idea.)

(It’s a wonder that I’m not sitting in a room somewhere with a legal pad and a pen just writing out stories in longhand to share with Gulley.)

So I told her that would be great. Sure! Let’s do that! Let’s join in and do something that other bloggers have been doing since 2001. I love being ten to eleven years behind technology. Maybe next week I’ll go wild and get an answering machine and see about this new thing called “Call-waiting”.

Cathy emailed me back and said she’d need the username and password of my Google account to access my feed settings. I sent her back the username and password.

Then she sent me another email that said those didn’t work because I’d never switched my feeds over from Feedburner after it changed to Google, but that would mean it had been three or four years since I’d logged into my Feedburner account and how was that possible?

(What? Is this email in English?)

I sent her back an email that probably made her want to mail me a legal pad and a pen with a request that I please get off the internet forever. I asked, “Are you sure I have a Feedburner account?”

As it turns out I have a Feedburner account. I’ve had one for six years. That’s why you internet savvy folks are able to subscribe to my posts on Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever else is out there that I have no idea exists. The problem is that I had no recollection of ever creating the aforementioned account.

Yet we needed to access that account to enable email subscriptions to the blog. And I could just create a new account but then all of you who have subscribed to the old account wouldn’t know if anything ever changed.

(Is this making your head hurt? My head hurts.)

So I’ve spent the last week trying every username and password combination I have ever used in my whole life trying to crack the code that I created when I opened that stupid Feedburner account six years ago. I felt like I was that Department of Defense computer in War Games. And I almost gave up. After six days of various combinations of my name and birthdate and Caroline’s name and birthdate and my childhood pet’s name, I was out of guesses.

But then it hit me like a bolt of lightning on Sunday night. I wish I could say I sat upright in bed and yelled “EUREKA!” but that would be a lie. However, I traveled back to my brain six years ago and remembered that I used to really like to use the number 1 after almost everything.

Lo and behold, it worked.

And so I emailed Cathy with the good news. She was able to fix all my feeds and now WE ARE VERY FANCY and you can enter your email in that little box under SUBSCRIBE at the bottom of this post and get all new posts sent to your email address. What? Is this 2002? What is this Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?

It’s not easy being on the cutting edge.

Cathy also suggested that I subscribe to a service called Last Pass that’s a free service that manages your online passwords securely so you never have to worry about losing them.

I’m not sure why she thinks I need that.

I’ll just write them all down on my legal pad.