Merry, Merry.

Puppies, a lack of a husband, and the general Christmas season have interrupted my blogging.  I apologize.  I must say, I'm enjoying Christmas much more than I did last year (interpret--I am grateful for stability!) and my house is all decked out.  This weekend I plan to snap a few pictures to share with everyone, once I *hopefully* get my outside decorations up, and of course, my husband gets back with his snazzier camera.  While he's been gone I've been making things merrier.  Present purchasing is almost complete, I'm working on Christmas cards and wrapping, and I'm trying to get some baking done before he gets home on Saturday.  I've also gotten a little adventurous while Mr. Whit's been away and tried some new recipes, mostly ones that I know he'll never eat.  My husband is a meat, potatoes, and bread man--seriously, that's ALL he eats--so when I make meals that are mainly veggies and cheese, he normally eats McDonalds for supper.  In order to help him keep his physique semi-normal, I try to limit his McD's intake as much as possible.

Today I want to share my new favorite recipe.  It's not very Christmasy, but I think it's absolutely delicious and I've made it twice since Whit's been gone (because when I give you the ingredients, you'll see that he wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole).  It's asparagus soup.  Cold weather get me more excited to eat soup anyway, so I figured there was no better time than the present to try it.  Now, I cannot say that I'm so awesome I made this up on my own, I did actually get the recipe from a combination of Food Network stars, but I have tweaked it and made it my own.

1 bunch of fresh asparagus, cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4 onion, diced
1 green onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbsp butter
3 c. chicken stock
basil & parsley to taste
salt & pepper to taste
Generous dollop of sour cream

Garnish:
mix together equal parts of goat cheese and sour cream (I recommend using an herbed goat cheese)

Melt the butter in a saucepan, saute onion and green onion ~5 minutes, until translucent.  Add garlic and saute an additional minute.  Add asparagus and cook for 5 more minutes, then season with herbs, salt & pepper.  Add chicken stock, bring to a boil, cover and reduce heat and let simmer for 10-15 minutes until the asparagus is very tender.  Remove from heat and let cool about 5 minutes, THEN bring out your fun immersion blender (or pour this into your regular blender) and puree until smooth.  Mix in sour cream.  Serve with a dollop of the goat cheese/sour cream mixture in the middle to enjoy with your yummy soup!

The most fun part is getting to use my fancy immersion blender when I make this.

Try it, if you like asparagus I promise you'll like it, and let me know what you think.  If it's absolutely rotten for you, it's all the more for me!

Puppy Talk

Hi friends, in case you've missed the picture, we got a puppy!  Slightly spur of the moment for us, but we've talked about getting one for at least a year now and had really been waiting until we felt more settled to dive into puppydom.  It helped that our 1 year anniversary is coming up next weekend, so I've been told this is my happy anniversary present.  I'd also like to especially thank those of you out there who recently got puppies (or already had dogs), this is what I think really pushed Whitney over the edge...so thanks!

A little blurry, but it's from the camera on my phone people.  It's Bulleit--appropriately named after a brand of bourbon by my husband.

Let me say, house training is nasty.  DT told me that house breaking a puppy was harder than having Whitney as a baby--and he didn't sleep through the night until he was 12.  I'm very nervous.  However, all you dog people keep telling me it's worth the pain of puppy training to have an obedient dog.  So I'll take the bad now for the good later.

Oh, there's one other slight problem with the whole situation, kitty isn't the happiest right now.  Well, she's not unhappy, she's just making sure the pup knows who is still queen of the house.

The Fireplace

Yesterday I pulled out all of my Christmas decorations because I couldn't resist the temptation any longer.  Christmas is my absolute favorite time of year, and I normally pull all of my decorations out early then count down until it's "acceptable" to have them out.  I might make an exception to this self-inflicted rule this year because I'm so ready for Christmas.  I blame this Christmas craziness on two things:

(1) My grandmother could be Santa himself if she weren't a woman.  I know of not one person in the world who loves the holidays as much as she does, and
(2) Given my little wedding/new job/moving escapade at the end of 2009, I didn't get much time to enjoy the holidays to their full potential a year ago, so now I feel the need to make up for lost time.

There is one slight (ok, major) problem with my Christmas plans this year.  It revolves around this thing (hint, it's on the left side):

Here's a closer view of it once the walls were painted:

Yes, the fireplace--or what's supposed to be a fireplace.  Is it heinous, or is it heinous?

Kind of hard to decorate for Christmas with that thing looming in the corner.  Kind of hard to decorate at ALL with that always starting directly at you.  We have great plans for it--put in gas logs, build the mantle and surround, put a tile surround on the front of it--we are just scared to tackle this thing.  We haven't been scared of much in this house, but this thing scares us.  Today I decided to pull back the board that's over the actual opening to the fireplace to have a peek at the inside again.  I'd looked at this when we took all the paneling down in this room and quickly covered it up because it was so scary.

Like I said, super scary.  And yes, that would be dirt on the floor in it.

This is after I pulled out the shop vac and cleaned out the previously mentioned dirt.  There's still some bricks missing in the back, so there's a sandy substance just chilling at the back of this fireplace.

We are at a total loss for how to tackle this thing.  We aren't even sure what type of professional to call about looking into fixing the fireplace to make sure we CAN put gas logs in there.  I've scoured the internet looking for options on how to fix this, but nothing gives me a straight answer.

So now I have no cover over this gaping hole in the middle of our living room and stockings that need to be hung by the chimney with care in the next 6 weeks.  I am open for ideas from anyone...because if not, I might try to tackle this scary project by myself.  Help!

Happy Election Day

Today is seriously one of my favorite days.  I know it seems crazy, but I love election day, and I always have.  I get all dressed up in my red, white, and blue and now that I actually live near my polling station, I get to go and put my card in the slot, cast my ballot, and wear a peach sticker claiming that I voted--except today, where I went first thing and the polls actually weren't working (little Sylvania made the news!)--so I didn't have my sticker on all day.  Some may blame a certain class I took in college called "campaigns and elections" on my insanity around election season, and yes this experience did add fuel to my fire and make me well aware of my political views.  But I truly have done this my entire life, so really I have my family to blame.

You see, one of my earliest memories was the Presidential election of 1988.  Yes, I was 3, and yes, I do actually remember it.  My grandparents had an election party for George Bush (Sr.) and I remember sitting around the large console TV with a room full of adults, cheering for election updates and waiting until they declared George the winner and the champagne was poured (I had ginger ale) and we ate cake.   I also remember having a conversation with my grandfather that night about why Ronald Reagan couldn't be President any more, and why we even had to have an election to get a new President, because as I told him "I just want Ronald Reagan to be President forever". 

It's a little scary how exposed I've been to politics.

But I wouldn't trade it for the world.  I love how informed I am.  I love how engrossed I get in the political process, learning about the candidates and their issues and what new referendums are going to be passed.  I wouldn't trade it for the world (although my husband might).

Happy Election night!

The Farmer's Daughter

For those who don't know, my husband has been on the job hunt for 10+ months.  Since he has a college degree, and has applied for at least 100 jobs, there's obviously a lot of people interested in jobs right now.  So the last few days he's taken up farming, with none other than my dear dad.

Dear gussie.

Right now is peak farming time.  Cotton needs to be picked, peanuts have to be dug then picked, and at some point soybeans will have to be harvested too.  Picking cotton is the first priority right now, and it isn't an easy process.  There's no less than 3 pieces of equipment used to just get those square things called modules you see on the side of the road made.


Someone has to operate each piece of equipment, and the more people participating, the easier (and faster) it goes.  That would be how hubby got recruited.  While my husband grew up in the Mecca of all things agricultural--Tifton, GA--he would be considered, at most, a novice for operating equipment.  However, after day one, dear dad has claimed he's learned faster anyone he's taught.  Considering that one guy who works for dear dad has attended school a total of two weeks in his life, and the other guy has worked in a dairy milking cows since he was 14, the odds were in hubby's favor. 

Of course, there's also a certain song that was popular this summer that the two of us can't quit singing right now either.

I'll get some pictures of him operating all that large equipment as soon as I can find him in a field.

The Big C update

After an 11 day hiatus from the working world, I'm trying to psych myself up for tomorrow.  Yes, I realize I will be spoiled with a 3 day work week, but being out of the office that long also means mounds of paperwork and who knows how many phone calls and emails to reply to...not to mention the pile of work I still had to leave and hope to accomplish when I returned to the office this week.  Besides the obvious rest from the real world, this week of rest has made me realize something--I must be accountable to myself.  I may be the world's worst procrastinator.  Seriously (just ask my old roommates, they can attest).  Procrastination does not equal less stress in the working world, it typically equals more.  So, starting tomorrow at work I'm going to be accountable to the deadlines I set for myself and be accountable, most importantly, to the clients I work with on a daily basis.  That would be why I'm writing tonight.  It's my first effort in being accountable, because I said yesterday that I was going to update about dear DT, and I'm trying to follow through on that promise (because I know you all were checking all day to see if I had an update, right?).

Dear DT is still in Atlanta in the hospital, sadly.  She's actually doing quite well, but her doctors are waiting to see the results of some CT scans before they officially send her home.  Her surgery went very well, but 12 inches of her large intestines and rectum had to be removed.  They also removed 20 lymph nodes, and 7 of them tested positive for cancer, which puts her diagnosis in stage 3.  DT was pretty discouraged when she got the pathology results, because she was truly hoping the surgery would be the only thing she'd have to do.  Instead, she has a very long recovery and treatment process ahead of her.  She's met with a few oncologists, but is still trying to determine exactly where she wants to undergo her treatments, since she'll have 6 months of chemotherapy, with probably a full month of radiation wrapped in with her chemo.  With such an aggressive therapy ahead of her, DT's pretty nervous and is trying to stay upbeat.  The hope is that they'll send her home from the hospital tomorrow to let her fully recover for the next month before they start her treatments.  Hubby will be heading down to good old T-town over the weekend so he can help his parents out once they get home...

..so that's as brief of an update as possible on DT.  Prayers are certainly welcome right now!!

Happier Things

For future reference, let me say that I refer to my mother-in-law as DT. I don't call her this in person, it's just a nickname I use to reference her, and it's just her initials, but I think it's amusing because it's also the nickname for my vehicle. Tomorrow I will give a full update on DT's progress. Today I'm going to talk about something fun.

Things that are fun to me are not necessarily fun to my poor husband. I don't think he realized this when he married me. In fact, I know he didn't realize it. I told him once when we were engaged "I really like to do stuff...you know, crafts, flower arrangements, home improvements, and just Suzy-homemaker-style stuff". He has told me since that time that he didn't realize what that really meant. Or that when I get a notion in my head about what I want to do, that's all my mind gets set on. I see it as stress relief mainly. Poor hubby sees most of this as work, because most of my notions involve him doing something to make me happy and not something he particularly enjoys.

So this weekend, in light of our un-fun week, I decided to tackle our next project--the utility room--because I thought it would be fun. Let me first say, we have an awesome utility room, and I call it a utility room because it holds more than just our washer and dryer. For a house the age and size of ours, the utility room is amazing. I'm fairly certain it's larger than our guest bedroom. However, it's also become the black hole of our house. With all of the other rooms receiving some TLC, the utility room became the place where everything that didn't have a place went. Luckily, when I made the suggestion to hubby Saturday about starting the great utility room painting project, he agreed, but that's only because he's been wanting to tackle the black hole for at least 2 months. We made the agreement that as long as he organized all the stuff I would do the painting, because he hates to paint, and I'd rather live in clutter than tackle a pile of junk. Here's a few before pictures, clutter included:


This is the view from the door:


If you look closely on the left side of this, you'll see hubby's handiwork where he removed a door (and you can see me painting down in the bottom). Yeah, he's gotten pretty handy. I think I'll keep him:


My husband was also in charge of picture taking and somehow managed to forget taking a picture of the main point of this room, the washer and dryer...oh well, those will just be saved for after pictures. Now, the room is nowhere close to being done, but it looks SO much better:


Ok, not so much. It looks more like a teenage girl with bad highlights, but it's coming along. This is the one room we decided to keep the paneling in. In order to paint the paneling, you of course have to prime it first. I choose Kilz 2 (always...this stuff works miracles people).


In order to cover up these dark stripes, you have to use primer on them separately before you prime the whole room. It's what they say to do, so I do it. (They primarily consists of my mother and grandmother).

That's the stage we're currently in. Trust me, when you're the only one doing the painting it can take awhile. I'll update as soon as I make more progress.

The Big C

When I started this blog, one of the primary reasons I wanted to do it was to try and condense my thoughts and all the happenings in my crazy newlywed life. I will say that in our first year of marriage, my husband and I have dealt with a great deal--a new job for me, a lack of a job for him, relocating, and extensively renovating our house have been difficult to deal with, especially when they are combined together. However, nothing was as difficult as what I know we'll soon be facing (because we need to learn how to handle one more thing, right?). My mother-in-law was diagnosed with Colorectal cancer last week, and will have surgery Monday, followed by some type of treatment after the doctors determine what stage her cancer is in. For my husband and most of his family, starting this whole experience is very intimidating and scary. For me, it largely feels like old hat, not because I've had to battle my own personal "Big C" experience of course, but because my family has had it's fair share of Big C's; from my grandfather to many uncles, I've learned the ins and outs of dealing with it.

I know that out of this will come many blessings for my husband's family, as difficult as that is to think about right now. I also know that this will be a journey of faith for all of us. Today we were talking about how many blessings we've already seen as a result of our faith--his mother found a doctor and scheduled an appointment within 3 days of her initial test results, I made plans to be on vacation from work the week of her surgery well before we knew about any of this, or the fact that while hubby doesn't have a job, it will probably allow him to spend as much time with his mom as necessary. Ultimately though, we know it will be a true journey of our family's faith, and just another test of our young marriage.

kitty tales

So we have this cat. This is what she looks like:


Funny story about this cat...we kind of stole her. My husband found her around my old apartment complex right after we got engaged. She looked thin, had what seemed like an abundance of fleas, and seemed so eager for attention that after a few days of giving her milk, my soon-to-be husband felt so sorry for her that I agreed with him that she needed to be adopted. Well, big mistake. After a few days we learned that she was fixed, de-clawed, and her natural reaction to new people was to be eager for attention. Whoops. We named her Whiskers, because that's just the natural name for a cat.

Fast forward a year and half later. We still have said kitty, and sometimes she's sweet:


But most of the time, she's a bitch. I mean really, this lady thinks she rules the roost. She eats when she wants to (or annoys us so badly that we give in and feed her), sleeps where ever she wants to--including about half of our bed each night, plays with whatever she wants to play with, and gives this slightly demonic expression every now and then:


Just scary. What's even scarier is her wintertime habit of mouse catching. Since we live on a farm, there's a natural tendency for more mice to be around our house, it just seems that this gets worse in the winter. They enter in a certain spot, where you will find Whiskers 90% of the time:


There's only one problem with her mouse catching adventures. She does a great job catching the mice (which is pretty gross) just has a lot of trouble killing them. It's disturbing. She just brings them to us. I have proof:


That was in our bedroom, and yes, that's a real mouse; it's possibly the only one she's ever killed. Normally she brings them alive to us, any time of the day or night I suppose to get a reward for her good work. I normally scream and make my husband kill it. But let's just say that with the cooler weather right around the corner and the inevitable mouse invasion looming, I'm hoping that our kitty's mouse-catching behavior is a little more mature than it was last winter.

Sigh.

Ok. I've failed again. No post in 5 months, and trust me, there's been plenty going on for me to chat about! I primarily blame my job, which doesn't seem to be getting any less stressful (I'm 9 months into it, I would have thought that by now things would be easier, or at least better?). Working roughly 60 hour weeks does get time-consuming, especially when the remaining time is devoted to eating and sleeping (I have priorities) and then house renovating. We've made great progress on the house--I mean, it's been 3 months, let's hope there's progress--so I'll do my best to get updates on all of our projects, plus other fun things I've discovered in newlywed life.

BUT this time I have several friends who are venturing into blogland with me, so I feel confident I can stick with it this time...if nothing else than for us to all keep up with our crazy lives!

Hardwood floors, part deux

Remember those hardwood floors? I know it has been awhile, but several weeks ago, they were finally finished!


Aren't they beautiful?? Hubby is overly critical of his work and keeps telling me (and anyone else who will listen) that they are not professional quality, but I don't think anyone is going to look THAT closely at them. It did create a nasty little monster in hubby after all of his hard work though--it would be the "we cannot walk, touch, or move near the floor with shoes on" monster. That gets frustrating very quickly. Every time we plopped on the couch to watch tv it would scootch just a little across the floor and he would moan. And I do mean every time. I was also banned from wearing heels across the floor, or any shoes for that matter. Bare feet were banned as well, which meant only socks were allowed on this hallow ground. All of these rules also meant I could hardly function as a normal person in the room.

About a week after the floors were finished I went to Lowes and ordered rugs. Problem solved. Now we can not only use the room like normal people, but it keeps the floor warmer, helps eliminate echos, and adds just the right touch the room was looking for. Of course, the only reason I think hubby was ok with it was because our cat (details on her reserved for yet another post) refused to walk across the hardwood floor because it was too cold for her paws and would leap around on the furniture to get to her favorite window perches. She's happy now too.

Now if we could just attack this beast in the corner the room would be complete.


Alas, Rome wasn't built in a day, and clearly, neither will this house.

Brief Hiatus

What usually happens to my blogging ventures has occured yet again--life gets busy, I get away from this for a few days, and suddenly it's been 3 weeks since a post! Not much has happened in these 3 weeks, but an update is still necessary. Primarily, the beginning of "wedding season" has begun for Hubby and myself. I refer to this as a "season" because for the past several years we have had what could only be described as the Iron Man of wedding attendance. This year alone we will have invitations to 10 weddings, and we will/have already been in 3 of these...needless to say, March to November has turned into a hectic time of year for us. We honestly don't mind it, most of these people are close friends of ours, it just leads to very busy weekends.

I digress. Work on the house has been slow. Very, very, very slow. If nothing else, I have learned that patience is a necessity when it comes to doing work on your home. The last few weeks have been devoted to "finish" work, or all the little stuff that no one really wants to do, but is completely necessary for your home to look presentable.

This leads to our very interesting Tuesday night. Hubby had exhausted his supply of crown molding trim, so we decided to trek over to trusty Lowes and pick up a contractor pack, not thinking that my trusty SUV--DT (Darnell Tyrone) as we refer to it--might not be able to handle the size of the load. Off our happy selves went, purchased three contractor packs of molding, each "pack" holding eight 12 foot pieces of molding, only to get out to my car and realize that it is not 12 feet long. So we did what every good redneck does--improvise. We opened the hatch and drove the whole 30 miles home with an extra 4 feet of molding hanging out of the back of my car.

Talk about country come to town!

kitchen ideas

So today I'm home from work due to this lovely pollen-induced crud that's been going around. I'm not complaining about spring finally getting here, but the sickness the accompanies it for me each year is never fun. At any rate, a day at home in bed trying to recover has given me ample time to plan future projects. Primarily, I've been looking up kitchen ideas. We have much to get done around here before I start on the kitchen of course, but it always helps me to start my ideas, because I'm not exactly a decisive person, so I'm sure it will take some time for me to decide what I really end up doing.

To start with, the kitchen currently looks like this:


Not attractive. The scallop soffit on the cabinets, is quite possibly, the worst thing I've ever seen from a decorating standpoint. Maybe at one point in 1964 it was really "in" but I'm pretty certain it went "out" the next year and no one ever thought about updating it after that. We do love our old stove though. It has double ovens and works perfectly, so ideas for what to do around it as well as the other white appliances have helped guide our kitchen ideas. And don't worry, the brown stove hood will be painted in the near future to at least match the white.

There will be a fair amount of work involved with the kitchen, but right now we're thinking green cabinets...I know it sounds intense, but we live in a farmhouse cottage, so green just fits. I've found some green that I like, but I'm really not wanting people to walk in and think "green", so something more subtle than these is what we'll likely go with:





Aren't they darling? I'll keep an update for what we finally decide to do and when we we get started.

New Old Stuff

One of the goals of this whole house project is to find "new" things as frugally as possible. This includes re-purposing existing items found in the house, finding family left-overs that we can re-make our own, doing numerous (alright most) fix-up projects ourselves, or doing something new the most cost-efficient way possible. Pretty much, we are newlyweds on a very tight budget, but I still like things to be nice gosh darn it, so I will do everything possible to make them that way!

That's why, in the past week, I've had two gem finds. They don't happen often because if we've learned anything with this old house, it's that boards settle, wiring goes out, and nothing is EVER as simple as you expect it to be. First, I found a NEW chair at none other than Marshall's, and even talked $10 off the price for little scratch on the front. I have to give my sister credit for finding the chair, but a new find is a new find, and considering this same style chair is selling at Rooms To Go for $300, I consider it a STEAL at $110.


The second gem find was through my aunt. I actually picked this up over three years ago when my aunt cleaned out an old storage unit filled with antiques that I plundered through and snatched items from because I liked the style or lines. Of course, being a wee college Senior at the time with no storage room, my parents held onto these items until I could find a suitable place for them. However, with the house approaching near-complete rooms, I recently decided to look over my "finds" and see what could be used. Several of the items are the subject of future posts, but my favorite was this:


My other blog-savvy aunt, who squealed with excitement over rediscovering it with me, described it as an old sugar chest. Through some research and mainly my blog-savvy aunt, I've discovered that a sugar chest was used in families to lock and store their sugar supply because it was such a prized commodity. In fact, the sugar chest is really a unique Southern form of furniture due to the old plantation culture in the South, and the status symbol with keeping sugar. Well sign me up for that! Naturally, this one isn't a really high-class sugar chest, but it's one nonetheless. With a little cleaning, it is ready to go in the living room, and I paid $0. I might even call this a diamond find.

What are people thinking?

Today was day 1 of finishing the hardwood floors in our house. It has taken quite some time to get to day 1, so we'll start at the beginning of this floor story, way back in December.

When we first moved into our house, the floors looked like this:


Super attractive. Hubby described it as "Sunday school classroom carpet", only in a lovely shade of mauve that I'm pretty sure they stopped selling in 1987. So after prodding around the edges of the room, we saw promising glimpses of hardwood floors and we, well mainly I, made the executive decision that Sunday school carpet was coming up. Hardwood floors couldn't be that difficult to do.

Little did I know what awaited us. With surprisingly little effort, up came the carpet and padding, only to reveal the biggest mess either of us had ever seen on a floor.


Yes, along with the normal tack strips and staples, the carpet padding had been held in place by tar. TAR. Who ever thinks "tar on a hardwood floor is a brilliant idea"?? So we went to work with every idea people threw at us to remove each little patch of tar. We scraped, Windexed, scraped, Orange-glowed, scraped, glue-goned, scraped, paint-thinned, and scraped a little more with very little result. I suppose my father either felt really sorry for us or was tired of the complaints that lasted at least a week, and rented the fancy drum sander to take off the tar. It did the trick and in one 20-grit pass, our floors went from tar-central to remotely normal looking.


We were amazed. We admired the floors and thought that surely there couldn't be that much more sanding to get done, in the back of our minds knowing that every time we'd thought that, we were normally very wrong. Unfortunately, the floor work had to take a back-burner to many other projects, the future topics of many posts to come, and after about 6 weeks, we decided it was time to get the floor work going again. So off hubby went to trusty Arrow rentals for 2 sanders and at least 60 sheets of sandpaper to get our floors in tip-top shape, after of course getting a long lecture from my father about how to properly sand a floor. The dust literally flew everywhere, but hubby worked diligently through it (the haze in the picture is the flash reflecting off the dust).


That was a week ago. Hubby has spent all that time trying to get all the aforementioned dust off the floor and out of the room, cleaning the floors at least twice a day with nearly every cleaning product imaginable. But, after many weeks of waiting, he completed day 1 of polyurethane-ing today, and was so proud he emailed a picture to me.


We of course still have re-sanding the floor between each of the two additional coats that will have to be put on the floor, but the end is possibly in sight. So much for a simple, easy project.

Laundry Woes

I have a problem, and it's a problem I've had for a long time. I admit, I tend to be a messy person. My mother claims college brought this out in me, but she secretly knows--and under her breath occasionally admits--that I've always been messy and only living under her roof for 18 years kept me tidy for about 10 of those years. She is probably the perfect example of tidy living, so its not that I don't know how to be tidy, I just choose not to do it. This being said, being messy does not equal less stress in my life, in fact, it equals more. Being messy is why a fraction of our pile of unpacking and laundry yesterday looked like this:



It's bad. Realizing that we had not really unpacked or done laundry--sans underwear and towels people--in 6 weeks because of my travel schedule, renovations, and my husbands lack of laundry knowledge, we tackled the piles, both vowing to never let it get that bad again. That much laundry would make anyone have a panic attack, let alone someone who is attempting to simplify her life. Vowing to avoid this laundry dilemma in the future and actually avoiding it are totally different items, but realizing that we actually had to put off renovating just to handle the laundry made me realize that my messy lifestyle needs a major makeover. So from this time forward I truly vow to never, NEVER, NEVER, let my laundry get that bad again. We'll call it the first part of life simplification, or perhaps that I never really want to do 8 loads of laundry in one day again.

Less Stress

At dinner this evening with my sister, she explained that in one of her management mumbo-jumbo college books they had recently studied how stress can affect people. There was some magical chart that evaluated your impact from stress based on current life events and circumstances, and that depending on where your stress registered on the chart dictated you or your employees overall health condition and productivity. Common top stresses included various marriage issues, job changes, moving, illness, having children, etc... Since I had experienced most of the top stresses on her list, excluding illness and having children, she decided to evaluate where my current stress level was, and on a scale of 300, I scored a whopping 250. Apparently at a 200 level you run the higher risk of developing a serious illness (which I am still trying to avoid, I'm thinking this is not something you would like a perfect score in). Aside from my new job, new town, and new marriage, my husband and I decided in young ambition to "fix-up" our "new" old house, meaning our lives have become slightly consumed with renovating a 100 year old house. While this amount of stress would worry most, we recently found a quote from Dr. Hans Selye that makes this whole journey a little easier:

“Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.”

So, at the poking and prodding of many--ok maybe just a few--I am venturing back into the world of blogging. We'll consider it a little glimpse into the attempts of de-stressing and simplifying my life since it is obvious that needs to happen, with a focus on how our home renovations seem to only add to these stresses (maybe once we finish it will make things simpler?). I approach it all like this--a home, like your life, is only as strong as the foundation, and since those two seem so co-mingled in my life right now as my husband and I start many new ventures, I find it only fitting for the blog to reflect this...we'll see where the construction takes us.