CURTAINS!

As a manly male type person, I find it very embarrassing to be so excited about curtains. But then again, I do the cooking and my wife goes out to the office everyday. Maybe I should pick up sewing while I'm at it?

So I'm excited about curtains. Curtain rods are great because you can pretended you are Jet Li. (You should all go see Fearless, by the way.) Anyway, we have curtains now. It's really nice to think that the neighbors can't see into our bed every morning, but even more nice to see Lily's awesome zen-vision beginning to take shape in our bedroom. Soon the bachelor-blue bedding and other uglies too will be gone.

Due to my amazing fading powers of math, I had to cut the curtain rod an inch shorter so that it would fit on our incredibly tiny wall.

Darling it's better, under the siiiink.

Little Mermaid lyrics aside, we're suckers for IKEA's smart little storage solutions. Along with some nifty cutlery-drawer-organizers (which fit to the millimeter by sheer luck) we finally tamed the gobbed mess beneath our sink thanks to a sliding metal rack and a sliding set of bins.

I gotta say, what a difference it makes! Lily was so happy that she sat there and played with the trash bins for hours.

Lamp: reloaded

As much as we love Greek Mythology, the Medusa Lamp just wasn't cutting it in our kitchen. We tried shortening the cord, but it would require a real hack job so we just returned it. We got a new light that's nearly as nice, and half the price! And more importantly, it fits in our kitchen without strangling anyone.



We are, of course, just happy that we were able to finally throw out the cheapo fixture (third photo, above) and all of it's five-dollar-ugliness.

Let there be lamp

The folks that sold us our ghetto penthouse took the light fixtures with them, installing $5 ugliness on their way out. As such, we've been staring at naked bulbs and Home Depot grot for the past 3 months.

We finally found a light we like for the kitchen. (Shown here.) It's really cute, really nice, (and ahem, really affordable).

Although designed to be a pendant lamp, it retracts upwards to "desired height". Perfect! We bought it & brought it home.


Sean climbed up the ladder Sunday night, assembled it, and installed it. (his first do-it-yourself cieling fixture!).

As it came together, our kitchen finally starting to look homey. When we were finally done, tired but excited, we retracted it upwards to desired height.


But it seems the excess cords do not stow safely in the overhead compartment. The six-foot stretch of cords, retracted to 1 foot, is a noodled mess. We own.. Medusa Lamp.



Now we're not sure what to do with Medusa Lamp. We could:

1. try to retract the cords somehow. We tried last night and they don't seem to want to budge.


2. try to splice the cords and remove the excess... although this might leave visible splicing.


3. take the darn thing back apart, go an hour-each-way back to the store and return it... putting us back at square one.


4. Try for a "medusa" / greek goddess theme. Aphrodite Spatula-ta, Helen of Trivet, Pandora's Fridge...

Cash in the attic

I consider myself pretty web savvy and tend to try out new web things as they emerge. But for some reason (save one traumatizing eBay experience) I've avoided contact with eBay and Craigslist.

But Sean and I just have too much stuff. Unless we want our home to permanently resemble a storage unit or dumpster hall, we need to get rid of stuff.

We have 14 "outboxes", containing everything we want to sell, donate, or (last resort) throw away. We tried to give stuff to Shannon and Jonathan, but they don't want anything! Bah... you'd think college kids would jump at free stuff.

Since we can't give stuff to our siblings, we decided to try to sell stuff to strangers. So yesterday I ventured out for my first Craigslist expereince ... listing furniture and electronics for sale!

24 hours later - we've sold 4 out of 4 items. Not so shabby! $30 richer, we're looking around to see what else we can sell :)