First Week Check-In

Today is the end of the first week of 2012, and I think I've gotten a lot done despite having my grandma as an out-of-town guest. She came up from Miami, FL to spend Christmas and my birthday (which is Monday). Despite being 85 years old, her brain is sharper than mine and she's kept me laughing the whole time. We've had a great holiday season together, which is what I wanted for her this year. We've gone to Concord, MA where we visited the home of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, which is the first "real" novel I ever read, thanks to my grandma, who gave it to me when I was 8, because in Cuba the Spanish translation was one of her favorite books as a girl. So the visit was meaningful to both of us as well as was fascinating. I now have a cute Little Women magnetic bookmark for my "real" books to remind me of the nice day we had. :)

I'm a little behind in my reading, partly due to an avalanche of orders for my services on Fiverr, and partly because, well, unfortunately I'm not enjoying Elizabeth the Queen very much. I'm finding it obsequious to the point of delusional, and in dire need of a ruthless editor. I mean, I just muscled through a whole 28-page chapter on the details of three parties. Every detail, down to the exact blend of tea the Queen ordered at one unremarkable luncheon (everyone cares, right?) and the myriad topics of banal conversations she engaged in (her Corgis, they are hilarious! And she loves Corgis! Which are hilarious! Which she loves!), is covered in excruciating detail. And I do mean excruciating.

This book is 537 pages long, and I'm slightly less than halfway through, and I'm not sure how much further I'm going to make it in. I like to finish books, even if I don't love them, but I'm also not entirely averse to just giving up when books get intolerable. A book simply being tedious isn't usually enough to get me to put it aside entirely, but a tedious book that is also written in a smug, self-congratulatory tone (see Founding Brothers, the only book I didn't finish last year) gets me there, and I'll just say... I'm getting there. I may stick it out, though, just because my next read (The Windup Girl) is much shorter, and may still average out to two books in two weeks, but we'll see.

Another reason I'm so behind is that my grandma, who has excellent taste in interior decorating, has been helping me redo my living room. I got a sweet annual bonus from my job, and I decided to use some of it to finally get rid of the used furniture I got for free when I first moved here two years ago from Craigslist and various other endeavors. I had really wanted to have a home office space in my weirdly shaped bay-window-having living room, but the couch was awful, the tables were dated, and my big-screen HDTV was teetering on top of a microwave cart. It served a purpose, but it was pretty dated and worn.

The "Before." Click to embiggen.

You know it's out of date when your 85-year-old grandmother tells you, "Honey, this furniture is too old-fashioned."

I'd never gone to an Ikea store, but we'd been drooling over the catalogue for a while, and my grandma and I both agreed that it would be a good place to fix up the living room in one shot and make it more modern and homey without spending a small fortune. So we went to the IKEA store in Stoughton, MA, which is so gargantuanly huge that, I am in no way exaggerating, the entire economy of the town of Stoughton seems to revolve around its existence. The first time I visited it, I described it on my Twitter as "A deranged Swedish strip mall in hell." My grandmother on our visit, her first time visiting the store as well, said, "Everything was beautiful. Great Prices. They seem to have something for everyone's tastes. Please NEVER BRING ME THERE AGAIN." LOL! However, the end result, I think, is really nice:

I rent an apartment, whose landlord is enamored with seafoam-green walls he won't let me change, so I picked a white and neutral palette for the furniture to tone down the greenness of it all. I kept my solid wood vintage desk. I think I'm going to add a couple of white book and media shelves around the TV and off the side of the desk, and some small track lighting under the shelf (and, well, photos in the photo frames!) but other than that, I'm pretty happy with the way it all came together. Even if it did TAKE FOREVER.