Sundowner

I can't believe I never instagrammed this. What an amazing place to eat a custom ice cream sandwich, as the cows are about to get their evening meal. Moomers, you are delicious. Chocolate salted caramel ice cream, amazing; cookies for the sandwich—underwhelming, will not repeat.

I can't blog tonight because of an intense sugar craving and irresistible exhaustion. Maybe tomorrow will be the day I actually write some posts.

Lunch Break Reflections (While Eating a Grilled Cheese Sandwich in the Cafeteria)

So last night, when I could have been blogging and SHOULD have been getting ready for bed, I decided to move one of the couches a little bit to test out a new idea I had—a new idea involving diagonals. I was pretty sure it wouldn't pass muster with Cooper, but I wanted to see. The big couch barely fit there, but shifting it did change the shape of the room, breaking free of the tyranny of not enough space and too many doors, which had forced us to line up every piece of furniture along the perimeter of the living room (and in the bedroom, too).

A simple solution is to just get rid of some stuff, so things don't feel so tight. On the one hand, I'm not as in love with my red leather couch as I once was, but on the other, I like having two couches with room for five people, since I still harbor fantasies of having friends over and I like to have a cozy place to hang out with them if it ever happens again. So fallen from grace or not (it's an insistent red that wants to dictate every other element of design; it's holding me back!), we keep the couch, because now is not the time for a new one, and two armchairs instead of a new couch would also certainly cost too much. I can't say the red Klippan sparks any joy anymore, but it seems I'm just not ready, and not rich enough, to fully accept Marie Kondo's tantalizing prescripts and throw it away. Instead, I succumb to logic and stubbornly and reluctantly hold on to this couch that still functions, dammit, even if its existence pisses me off once a week.

But maybe, in partial acceptance of the reality of our social lives, we can turn that red loveseat that Cooper and I rarely sit on away from the TV—since we almost never manage to have people over, the likelihood of a group movie night has plummeted to zero, and we like to share one couch together—which opens up one...or maybe even two! possibilities in this tight space. Because, you see, the diagonals really didn't work. Diagonal one was promising, but couch number two on an angle leaves a super weird open triangle of room behind it, which couch one (the only couch we ever use) has to stare at. So instead, I moved the big couch farther, ninety degrees from its customary position, and put the TV in a much weirder place so that the grey couch sitters (two humans, two cats) could still see the screen, and...I don't know.

I affected change! It's kinda cozy! Whether we try out the new layout or return to the old, we need a bigger living room rug. And the lighting is currently bad in this new arrangement, there's still an awkward useless corner next to the front door where junk will probably accumulate, and not a definite spot to add in an armchair (long cherished dream; ignore what I said about already having too much furniture).

Jury's out, and so's my confidence.

If you come back tomorrow, maybe there'll be photos. If it's sunny and I can get a good one. But that would take the surprise away from Cooper, who doesn't return from California until Sunday night...so, we'll see.

Photos 1 & 2: Before. Photos 3 & 4: After.

Stubborn

Looks like chaos. Feels like the path to a breakthrough.

An hour later, it turns out none of it was a breakthrough. Now I have an entire living room to move back. Some other time.

The Plus Side of Winter

Although the mountain country of North Carolina in the eighteenth century is a whole different world than this one in which we live, there are elements to aspire to. I give you Drums of Autumn, book four of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, which is sprinkled with beautiful scenes and feelings of homeyness:

The winter held off for some time, but snow began to fall in the night on November 28, and we woke to find the world transformed. Every needle on the great blue spruce behind the cabin was frosted, and ragged fringes of ice dripped from the tangle of wild raspberry canes.

The snow wasn’t deep, but its coming changed the shape of daily life. I no longer foraged during the day, save for short trips to the stream for water, and for lingering bits of green cress salvaged from the icy slush along the banks. Jamie and Ian ceased their work of log felling and field clearing, and turned to roof shingling. The winter drew in on us, and we in turn withdrew from the cold, turning inward. 

We had no candles; only grease lamps and rushlights, and the light of the fire that burned constantly on the hearth, blackening the roof beams. We therefore rose at first light, and lay down after supper, in the same rhythm as the creatures of the forest around us. 

We had no sheep yet, and thus no wool to card or spin, no cloth to weave or dye. We had no beehives yet, and thus no wax to boil, no candles to dip. There was no stock to care for, save the horses and mules and the piglet, who had grown considerably in both size and irascibility, and in consequence been exiled to a private compartment in the corner of the crude stable Jamie had built—this itself no more than a large open-fronted shelter with a branch-covered roof. [...] 

With few chores to do outside, there was time to talk, to tell stores, and to dream. Between the useful objects like spoons and bowls, Jamie took time to carve the pieces of a wooden chess set, and spent a good deal of his time trying to inveigle me or Ian into playing with him. 

Ian and Rollo, who both suffered badly from cabin fever, took to visiting Anna Ooka frequently, sometimes going on extended hunting trips with the young men from the village, who were pleased to have the benefit of his and Rollo’s company. 

“The lad speaks the Indian tongue a great deal better than he does Greek or Latin,” Jamie observed with some dourness, watching Ian exchanging cordial insults with an Indian companion as they left on one such excursion. 

“Well, if Marcus Aurelius had written about tracking porcupines, I expect he’d have found a more eager audience,” I replied soothingly. 

Dearly as I loved Ian, I was myself not displeased by his frequent absence. There were definitely times when three was a crowd. 

There is nothing more delightful in life than a feather bed and an open fire—except a feather bed with a warm and tender lover in it. When Ian was gone, we would not trouble with rushlights but would go to bed with the dark, and lie curled together in shared warmth, talking late into the night, laughing and telling stories, sharing our pasts, planning our future, and somewhere in the midst of the talking, pausing to enjoy the wordless pleasures of the present. (Pages 380-383) 

Photo: Snowy evergreens in Bavaria, on a visit to Schloß Neuschwanstein in 2008.

Porch Season

I wrote this post about my fire escape in the spring, and never followed up with photos of what I did. Mainly what I did was buy mostly-boring pots, and set up a little kitchen garden outside the bedroom, and then unroll a colorful rug woven of recycled plastic during patches of good weather when I thought we'd go out there more just to water the garden. The rug is pretty great, but I think sunshine was also an essential component of my modest renovation.

Basil, parsley, tomatoes, basil. A cutie red Kalanchoe to go with a turquoise pot. Spiders lived in it all summer.

A pleasing setup with the rug, and our cilantro that went to seed almost immediately. Cats who desperately need to join their humans outside (streng verboten).

Everyone out for some sun. Our previously majestic thyme (now languishing in the sunny stairwell.)

Looking out of the bedroom to the fire escape. Picnicking on the floor with leftovers and champagne.

Mornings in Turkey

The first morning back in Europe, five years after I’d packed up my bedroom in Vauban, toured Aschaffenburg and Berlin each for a second time, and flown out of Frankfurt back to Michigan for my final year of college.

No fear or apprehension, to be back in Frankfurt Flughafen. I ate a pretzel, messaged Emma (still in Ukraine) on Facebook, wandered to find my gate for the next flight—the flight to Istanbul. I’m not sure how we landed in Frankfurt; it was dark still on arrival, I think, but soon morning gave way to this thick spooky fog out the terminal windows. I alighted in Istanbul at 1pm, waited a long time for my bag, couldn’t find the sign with my name, for the taxi to my hostel in Sultanahmet. Didn’t like it one bit. Once at the hostel, a fog of sleep, a shower (maybe), an unavoidable nap. I ventured out in the evening dark to see the Hagia Sophia and find sustenance, but couldn’t shake the overly friendly young Turkish man who just wanted to practice his English with me over some tea. I went home hungry to the hostel, couldn’t sleep. After that first night, Emma and I had no reservations for anything.

On the second day, I bought us plane tickets to İzmir for that afternoon, reserved the last room at a recommended pansiyon in Selçuk, wandered the gardens of the Sultan’s palace, and took a shuttle back to Atatürk International Airport, in search of meine Emma, arriving from Odessa. When her face finally emerged from the crowd spilling out of the international terminal, I was so happy. She was wearing a striped sweater whose twin I had also packed for the trip. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half.

Morning three in the Old World, morning two in Turkey, we climbed three flights of turning stone stairs to the pansyion's terrace, picked out for ourselves one of the little circle tables that ringed the bench that wrapped around three sides of the terrace, and were presented with a feast.

**
I wanted to write about mornings. Early morning, when the light’s still a little blue and the breeze is so fresh that you always get a twinge of nostalgia for something – first days of school past, the end of hot summers, waking up early in a tent or on a lake or for a peaceful journey through a city still mostly aslumber.

Aiming Too High

Hello, November, and the depths of the fall. I've meant to be writing here so much more, but setting aside the time is never high enough on the list, and so it doesn't happen.

I have a misguided approach when I feel behind and overwhelmed, when there are too many things to prioritize, because simply facing the entirety of the list is enough to shut you down. I tell myself that none of the parts are imposssible, and I just have to start them, and they won't be so bad. That part's reasonable. But then I remind myself that once I have done All the Things, I'll have time to relax, breathe, reflect—in place of all the panic-procrastinate-go-to-way-too-many-unnecessary-websites breaks that I take all day instead of accomplishing things. Just do one thing, and the next, and the next, until you've done everything. Then you can start fresh with a system and increased satisfaction from your quick followthrough. I do this at home and at work, even though I know a better way to finish everything is to admit that not everything matters, and cut the unimportant and unfulfilling out of the list. 

But oh, I cling so hard to the dream of clearing everything off the list and basking in the glow of open possibility.

Luckily, today I finished a fairly deep clean of the living room, to add to the bathroom, bedroom, and reorganized (but again filthy) kitchen. The home sphere is ready for a new month.

A month of cooking regularly, to take some burden off Cooper and feel happy when I've made something, and cleaning systematically, because surely it's possible to live an easy, clean life when your apartment is under five hundred square feet. A month of exercise again, because obviously, I haven't learned this lesson about not being able to do all the things, and I strive for perfection. (Ugh, please no. But moving my body is one of the best things I can do to help myself cope with life.)

A month for cozying-up our living spaces for the dark months to come. New lighting for the improved kitchen, new rugs for our cold floors, and hopefully some good ideas for spaces Ali and Drew want help with. Oh yes, and a month for meeting and loving and cuddling Ali's and Drew's little son—arriving any day now. No one can wait!

And a month of reading—Elena Ferrante number four, I'm almost ready for you, finally!—and writing every day in this space, the things I've wanted to write all year, and whatever comes to mind now, because it's NaBloPoMo, and I've never regretted doing it before.

So, here's my manifesto. I'm not ready, but here goes.

Cue Christmastime

        

I'm almost ready for Christmas! Happy November 30th!

Edit: Apparently my phone always fails the first time I try to post? So much for blogging from the bar and actually getting it on the internet.

Can't Wait for December

This photo is from my last NaBloPoMo post last time around, and I still think it is so perfectly pleasant. I jinxed myself, back then, when I wrote, "I think, after all those false starts, I've brought the blog back." Ha. I posted four times that December (almost entirely about the great trials I faced in finally getting internet in my home), seventeen times for all of 2012, and then I made an effort in 2013 from January to April, before complete ignoring the blog until NaBloPoMo came around again. So that was a bit of a disappointment. I was going to say that I had totally forgotten the blog existed over the summer, but truthfully, I thought about it a lot. I battled with myself over whether or not I needed to start an entirely new blog, or just get a new template, maybe with a new name. I searched for pre-made, free templates; I despaired.

It's really thanks to this temporary job I have right now, which is, at times, even more soul-crushing than my old law office job, that I did NaBloPoMo at all. On November 1st, I had nothing to do. I had just received an email from BlogHer about NaBloPoMo starting. I thought, why not?, and so I tried a little harder to figure out how to make my blog look more the way I wanted, and met with some success. I went home feeling pretty accomplished. 

I still need to make a new header, and I am seriously considering changing the name. It's not like I've built any sort of brand recognition around it. Instead I have years—five and a half years—of personal identification with "der Landstreicher," even as I have lived in the same town for the past four and a half, "[spinning] out the fragile thread of [my] pseudo-career." 

Speaking of pseudo-careers, I have to be at the restaurant in just under an hour, so I should probably pile up a plate with Thanksgiving leftovers and prepare myself, mentally and physically, for six hours hosting at a downtown Ann Arbor restaurant, the night before the Ohio State game. Let's hope for the best (crazy-customer-wise; I'm not sure hope's gonna help the football game).

And for the record, I am excited for NaBloPoMo to be done. I'm going to work out a posting schedule, and have plans for different kinds of posts, and I am not going to blog every day. No more cop-out posts with one picture that may or may not relate to the included words. No more staying up past my bedtime every night because of it. I would have much rather read a book on the couch before the sun set than stared at this damn computer screen in my post-workout-shower-M&Ms haze for two hours. Grrumph.

Feast At Our Place

We hosted our first Thanksgiving ever this afternoon. Cooper's mom and sister came into town with pies and wine, I made a corn casserole and set up the apartment, and Cooper did the turkey, gravy, potatoes, and broccoli. Straightforward and delicious.

I didn't take a picture of the full spread, which we served on our side island/cart in the kitchen, partially because I forgot and partially because we had some turkey difficulties. The turkey was ahead of schedule, so he turned down the heat to slow it down, and slowed it down too far. So the full platter of carved turkey was not on display until after I'd started putting the sides away. (We ate parts of the bird as they reached doneness, but most of it was in the oven 'til we finished eating.) We ate at a card table in the living room, because the kitchen felt like the inside of the oven, and because we can't fit four chairs in the kitchen even though the table is larger, and because there were things everywhere. Card table + tablecloth = good enough for me, though. Whenever we had big meals at my grandparents' or cousins' house the kids would eat at a card table. It feels good to continue the tradition.

Haroun pretty much spent the whole day in the living room. In the morning he sat on the back of the couch, meowing at us for attention while we cooked and cleaned. All afternoon and evening, he sat on the couch or on the floor and napped, with some fun interludes of mouse-on-a-stick play. What a people cat.

BTW: Yesterday's post, which I will admit I posted after midnight because we were en route from Grosse Pointe and it didn't occur to me to blog in the car on my phone, failed to upload but I didn't notice because I blogged in bed on my phone and my phone let me down. So I just uploaded it again now. Oh, and I found the errant leftover pie and I ate it for lunch. Delicious.

Thanksgiving

We got home from dinner at my parents' house close to midnight. What can you do?

Hope the cats don't find the piece of John's apple pie I brought home with me but stowed...somewhere. 

A bit of whole wheat in the butter crust, and oh so good. 

Let's Talk About Chairs

I'm not feeling inspired, especially not in this awful space in which I am currently "working." My supervisor is on vacation, his office is being moved down the hall next week, and today when I got to work at 12:15 there were no computers at our desks and a student was carting filing cabinets out. There was no one else around on the fourth floor; what people I could see were behind closed doors in the conference room. It was ridiculous.

Now I have a loaner laptop from downstairs, an awkward Hewlett-Packard with a weirdly soft, matte finish and a terribly pale screen I can't focus on. (I am thankful for my Apple computer.) The fluorescent lights aren't actually buzzing above me, but it feels like they should be, and the copier is humming and tapping, although it's accompishing nothing. We have a nice view out our floor-to-ceiling windows, but the desks face us away from the windows and toward the hallway all day long. Outside is just an impermeable grey haze; better than the dull taupe of the pinboard in front of me, if only I could stare at it, but instead I have this LCD screen surrounded by aging office accessories.

I am fully aware that this is silly, ridiculous, unacceptable—but one reason I'm averse to the office-drone life path is that it is dressed in drab patterns of nothing colors, accentuated by bad lighting. That alone is a good reason to work at home. At home, my tiny desk is a clean, bright white. Sometimes I light candles at it and in the cocoon of warm darkness I try to write. I still need to hang my pastel map of Germany, alongside my new Ikea corkboard, lovingly decked out in postcards from Europe and other mementos. It's too small, but it fits where it needs to fit, and if I stay focused on corralling the clutter, I can work in the space.

My desk and chair in the old apartment.

Except I'm using my broken chair at the desk, because I need the two intact ones for the kitchen. The back has fallen off, because the screws don't screw into anything anymore, and I haven't stuffed the holes with toothpicks and glue yet like my father does because...I haven't. I want a slightly sturdier chair for my desk, so I can cross my legs on it and stay there longer. I want to put a chair there, and put a (fake?) sheepskin on top of it. Then all the cats will be so jealous while I blog away on my pile of softness, and my life will be so design-y.

I spent a long time making these collages on the PicStitch app on my phone, because it seemed like the easiest way. Please excuse the image quality; they're made of iPhone screenshots. I was really into the way they looked on the phone, but not so much on this huge 13" screen. I don't really like the white chair on the top, but it's a cheaper alternative to my top choice: the Tobias chair, the clear one on the right. It has a cantilever base like my parents' old chairs, for some sense of continuity in the chair collection, but it's comfy and wide. So wide, really, that it can fit a person much larger than I and might actually look silly tucked in under my tiny desk. It's also $80—a lot less than comparable non-Ikea chairs, but a lot for me.

I'm not sure why the coloring in the two collages is so different, but whatever. I did it all with my thumb and finger on my phone, so it's hard to complain. I like the idea of wood and sheep, or black and sheep, maybe, but I don't think these would be as comfortable. They're just wood chairs, and I don't know if the sheepskin will help with that. They're all cheaper than the Tobias chair, but also not free.

Maybe after Christmas I'll take a serious chair-shopping trip to the Ikea in Canton, and spend my gift money on one.

Participation Was Always My Least Favorite Part of School

Hey, readers!

How are you faring this cold November? I'm pretty sure some of you aren't even that cold (cough, people in Georgia, cough) (people in California, cough). Tonight I saw a movie (Blue Is the Warmest Color) and I got a drink at a bar that opened...like a year ago...downtown (Vellum), but it was new to me and it was good. I also tried to pick my bike up from Main Street but I remembered that not having my housekeys with me and having to have Cooper lock the apartment door meant I also did not have my bike key with me. Whoops.

So, readers:

What did you eat for dinner tonight? How ready for Thanksgiving are you? I'm most excited to only work one job a day Wednesday-Friday, and no jobs Thursday. Also, Cooper and I are hosting his mom and sister for Thanksgiving, which will be weird/fun.

I also read this poem today, via The Hairpin. I like just the title, but also the poem itself. November: I no longer hate it so much, but I really used to.

Breaking News: Housewares

After two trips to World Market this weekend, I can now safely announce that I have a rug for my side of the bed. The first one I picked was a beautiful indigo rag rug with touches of purple and a couple shots of red, and I love it deeply, forever, but it made the side of the bed into a sort of black hole and that could not be borne. So I exchanged it for an aqua-colored one, less perfect as a standalone object but much better suited to its new surroundings. The following picture does nothing justice: the angle is bad, the lighting is bad (although better than usual thanks to my stealing the living room lamp for this purpose...we really need to get another lamp!), there is crap on the bed and the doorknob, and the cat is also better-looking than suggested.

I have a new picture frame, currently living on my nightstand. It is my pride and joy of the weekend. I've had the postcard since Janet and David took me to the Kandinsky exhibit at the Lenbachhaus in Munich over Christmas break. In 2008. Reitendes Paar (Riding Couple) is a squareish painting, but my postcard is 4x6, so that's a weird situation. On Friday, though, I finally tried to get a frame for it, and found one that works really well (although it crops out some of the sides). Behold:

I also picked up some red-tag fabric from JoAnn's tonight so that I can change the upholstery on Ali's old vanity stool that Emma re-covered and I then appropriated. We sacrificed the vanity long ago, but the stool has persisted as a footrest. Emma's fabric had turned an entirely new color, so now, voilà!

Cooper had been seated at that laptop, but he fled when he realized photography was afoot. The color's a greyish light blue-green. It was six dollars. Now I just have to attach the fabric—maybe I'll borrow my dad's staplegun at Thanksgiving. I also kind of want to paint over the wood, but white's the only idea I've got, and I'm not that into it. 

So that was the rest of my weekend. Plus a lot of cat-loving today. I think they really appreciate it when we're home all day, which rarely happens.

Or maybe I'm just obsessed.

Hello Winter

I didn't remember NaBloPoMo existed until around 8pm tonight, at which point I was at work, and it had started snowing for the second time today. More serious snow. It took Cooper half an hour to get from North Campus to Main Street to pick me up, and when we got home we found a car stranded on a patch of ice right in front of our building. More cars have hit that same patch of ice since then. Some guys were pushing cars up the hill for a while. It's sort of ridiculous.

My priorities right now are the bowl of popcorn I just made and watching TV cuddled up on the couch, but I burned the popcorn and Cooper can't stop watching the cars get stuck on ice. He called the police, and says the whole right side of the street might be ice. It sounds like spaceships out there when the wheels spin and don't go.

My hair was well-behaved tonight.

Let Them Eat Cake

My brother the bread baker took a cake decorating class last night, then taxied the finished product around town so all could admire/devour. Well. Three of us. Two houses. It took a while. Thanks, John!

You Can Drag A Horse to Water But You Can't Make Her Write a Meaningful Sentence (Or Can You?)

Or Cover Letters: Not That Bad?

For me, conceptually, cover letters and resumes are The Worst. Meaningless salutations ("To whom it may concern"), formulaic paragraphs that relate my personal identity to some boring job posted on the internet? Some unknown human is going to read this embarrassing letter? "Kill me now" is my official stance on job applications. I'm obviously not alone in this.

For some people, who I imagine must be both highly motivated and mostly or completely unemployed, cover letter tweaking and dispatching is a robotic nothing experience that they do for many hours each day, until they are offered a job or have to start working at a coffee shop. These people, I imagine, know what they want and have some baseline of qualifying skills, so they are just doing essentially the same thing, over and over again. They aren't casting about in the dark for any possible handhold, like I have been, and so they can be robots--whereas I must fabricate a bridge to each opportunity and hope everyone involved will join me in my wishful thinking, accept my persuasive tactics long enough to hire me. Writing the sentences, or even the basic sentiments one by one can be like forcing myself to tiptoe across a floor totally covered in broken glass, trying to land on the few safe centimeters of space.

Kill me now.

But I've been practicing this process for a while now, off and on, and so there aren't so many gaps to fill in the resume. I've had one cover letter that got a response, so I know now that I'm not fishing in a lake that is biologically dead, just one that's heavily over-fished. And what I've learned, with all this, is that resumes and cover letters can actually make me feel better about the lackluster jobs I've been spending all my time on. I realize that these jobs where I spend so much time doing nothing have actually imparted a number of useful skills. Despite the downtime, I have had many responsibilities.

So that one successful cover letter of my life thus far. This specific posting didn't require a cover letter, but I figured, I can do this, I can do this (just fucking do it), I can write a few sentences about why I want this tiny part-time job in the few minutes before I get out of work and walk to other work (an exciting Friday night). At the interview, she asked me if I was interested in going into that field, and I said I wasn't sure, but maybe. I wanted to find out. She told me she liked my letter, that it was confident. I got the job. (This was in September.)

The job is only nine hours a week, though, and so I hope they won't care too much if I find something that pays for a full life. And next time I get an interview, I will say YES I want to go into the field. Let's throw ourselves off the cliff, guys. We can always back out later when the going gets mind-numbingly awful. Or before then--file that under "Things I Need to Work On."

Gone Fishing

Okay, not really fishing.

I am also not kayaking in the slough/slue/slew with sea otters and seals. That was two summers ago.

Isn't it great how my life jacket matched the kayak? Isn't it great how I'm wearing that attractive visor? Cooper's life jacket adds a nice pop of red to the photo. And we're smiling, which is misleading, because much of the time I was threatening his life because he wasn't steering us exactly where I wanted and we were falling behind my cousin, who is a seasoned kayaker (we are not). It was a real workout to get back to where we started as the tide was coming in, but we succeeded in the end. We had just celebrated our second anniversary, so it was a good time to start bickering.

Today is not about recreation. I just found a job to apply for that I feel good about, so I'm getting this blog thing off my plate so I can concentrate on it for as long as necessary and get an application in today. Yikes.

(Good riddance, temporary position. Knock on wood.)

My Bedroom Is Like a Peppermint

Before we moved in, the room that worried me the most was the bedroom. When Cooper and I saw the apartment the first time, we were dazzled by the wood floors and actual closets and room for two human beings and a cat litter box. It also helped that the current tenants had some good furniture and nice things hanging on the walls. We signed the lease the next morning. The second time we saw the apartment, after we finally got in touch with those tenants about buying some of their furniture, the apartment was mostly boxes. I realized that the ceilings in the bathroom and bedroom were not so tall as in the living room, and worse was the cause: cheap ceiling tiles. The bedroom also has cardboard-seeming paneling, painted white.

It also looked a lot smaller than it had before, and I realized that they had one side of their bed pushed up against the wall, lengthwise, with no room for a nightstand. My long-held dreams of bedside equality, equal bedtime mobility, shattered.

Thankfully, when we moved in we found there was just enough space to position the bed properly—short side to the wall. But after the bed, we have two dressers, two side tables, one desk. They naturally all wanted to be on the same wall, but we were afraid the floor would tip if we left it like that. (Not really.) So I moved every piece of furniture to every possible alternate location (and I took so many pictures for comparison purposes, but I'll spare you our dirty laundry), and this is where we are today:

From the door to the living room. Look at that big empty wall!

From the door to the bathroom; toward the living room.

Bedroom equality. Cooper's nightstand is short, so you can't see it, but it's on the left side of the bed between it and the desk. My nightstand is beautiful, as is the cutey Ikea lantern.

My apologies for the fuzzy iPhone photos; I don't have any free time during daylight until next Saturday, but I wanted to go ahead and finally write this post.

I swear I didn't plan to make it red and white, and that's not really what I'm going for; it's just that I own a lot of red. I do want more variety, including a second duvet cover. The curtains are going to move to the kitchen, where they can be united in one window, show off their pretty border, and regain a little of their former glory. The black chest of drawers will become a color one day, but not now. The star lamp needs an actual hook—maybe above the bed, maybe somewhere else.

In late spring I made my bed with new floral sheets, a white blanket and a plaid blanket, and my cute silkscreened pillows. Reading in bed by the (meager) light of my little blue lantern reminded me of a cabin in summertime.

Cooper's side table, solid and rustic-looking (see this photo) and the weird paneling pattern fit with that as well. Even the star lamp does, a ray of Nordic hope in a time of growing darkness.

Alternatively or additionally, I'd like warmly pinkish curtains, and some sort of richly detailed lamp. Who knows. What we really need is to start putting hooks in the walls for artwork, and I have to go to JoAnn Fabrics to scout out curtain possibilities. Here are some of the things I've been coveting (World Market, Urban Outfitters). Just for fun, because one is discontinued, one is expensive, and one is awfully (neon?) pink, and I think I'm almost over it.

Magical Thinking

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of feeling I'm going for in the bedroom in my new apartment. I knew from the start that I wanted to add complexity, pattern and COLOR with the curtains, because everything is white, and not in the best shape, so it would be nice to distract from the bones of the place. (Though I'm not so sure about my impulse for patterns anymore.) Which colors, and what styles, I still haven't pinned down, but I do know I want to do something more romantic than my last bedroom, and my perfect bedroom senior year of college (one photo is here). By 'romantic,' I mean more magical, a little softer, with a little more (ordered) clutter, more bountiful details. I want to balance out the clean Ikea lines that you find in every other corner. 

The balancing books are magic in themselves. No, but done carefully, that could be a really cool (if also grossly contrived) look. Which Emma is a master of.

I miss visiting Emma all the time, because it's always fun to see how she arranges her things—both when it's tidy and when it's not. For better or for worse, my stuff is a big part of who I am, and I think collections of personal belongings—in their natural habitats—can be lovely. (Like the art of the mess.) So I'm thinking about Emma's old bedroom in our house on Packard, which became so atmospheric with those leftover balloons. (More photos, and context, here.)

When I was going through my extra hard drive to retrieve these pictures, I also looked at photos from Emma's and my attic apartment, which we lived in the year after I graduated from college. We had the entire top floor of an old, dirty, run-down house in downtown Ann Arbor. What it lacked in laundry facilities, heat vents, and peace and quiet, it made up for in charm. Okay. The charm couldn't take care of everything, but we picked it because we always pick the old house over anything else. My bedroom had three skylights and a peaked roof and westward windows (my favorite), and I made these beautiful curtains from antique Italian cotton with handmade lace. I hung my star lights, which have moved with me from home to home since freshman year of college, in drapes around the window, with my paper globe lamp to one side, like the moon.

So that's one room of mine that had some magic to it.