the long road ahead

I'm tired. The house is still quite a mess, but I'm tired. I've taken two hour long naps today, not a two hour nap, but two separate times of one hour naps. I am however very proud of how lovely the house is coming together. Mark rebuilt the shelves in our closets last night and he did an incredibly impressive job especially with him being new at this whole home improvement thing. I'm so happy to finally have a usable closet after living here over a week. My clothes now have a home too. Our bedroom is officially done now. We put our headboard up this weekend that we've been making for a couple of months now and that really helped to tie the room together. Other rooms still have a little ways to go. We don't have anything hanging on the walls yet, which is starting to bug me, but we'll get that started soon. Probably tonight. We paid our first mortgage payment yesterday so it's all starting to sink in.

The title of this post however doesn't really have anything to do with our house. We are leaving for Maryland early tomorrow morning. Very early. It is an eleven hour drive and we are going to make it there by tomorrow night. Yes, we will make it! I'm looking forward to the weekend in Maryland (we're driving back Sunday). We're going to Mark's friend's wedding, meeting his aunt, and going to chill with his Grandma whom I love dearly. Not to mention that I get to shop with his mom and probably clean out his old room. Should be fun. But, the thing I'm looking forward to the most is our stop at Ikea on the way. I've never been to an Ikea before and we discovered that one is directly on route in Woodbridge, Virginia. This is very exciting. I've heard it is quite an experience. I have a wishlist for Ikea, but the budget is not going to support all the purchases we crave, so hopefully there will be more stops in the future. I must come home this trip with a bed for our guest room. We need one. We like theirs. But we refuse to pay almost the price of the bed in shipping. So, Ikea here we come. Back in a couple days.

can I just lick the walls?

Last weekend, Mark and I finished painting our master bedroom in the new house. We move in Saturday, and as we have a platform bed, we really wanted the bedroom done so we could setup the bed and not have to paint around it. We did some great horizontal stripes (I'll be putting pictures up sometime in the future). The bottom stripe is this gorgeous deep brown color that reminded me so much of fudge. Every time we poured it into the paint trays I really wanted to taste it. Over the course of the painting, I started wondering what it would be like to paint with chocolate. Then I could just taste the walls whenever I needed a chocolate boost. The practicality of it isn't there, but I'm sure someone like Willy Wonka could have done it.

a little introspection

I have always thought blogging to be intriguing and yet a little bizarre. I have had this blog for many years now and cannot call myself an avid blogger as my times of writing are always few and far between and most often I don't really enjoy it. I do however, read several people's blogs daily. Most being people I know or know through someone and find relatively interesting, or some just being design blogs by pseudo well-known design people. This morning I stumbled across an old acquaintance's blog and skimmed it for content to see if I was interested in reading it. This is where I found an article from the New York times by a used-to-be-public blogger. It is very long and I did not intend to read it all, but I did. I found it to be interesting, thought-provoking, and a little sad. It blows my mind how far this blogging practice can be taken and how it is used societally to share gossip, stalk people, and as this article seems to think—turn into a way to comment and ridicule someone else without even having to know them. I'm not against blogging by any means, I've just never quite understood why people take it so far.

Turning back to my personal story on blogging, I feel like a phony. Somehow, I enjoy writing on my blog on rare occasions even though I don't think anyone actually reads it anymore. And I don't know that I really care if they do or not. Of course, it would be nice if someone found me interesting enough to follow, but I don't really set myself up well for that. And I don't think there is a chance of me being very interesting in blog-form. I know myself to be more of a sit-and-have-coffee-with type.

I keep stopping and staring off into space attempting to figure out why I keep this blog and continue to post when I don't think anyone reads it except perhaps my husband on the rare occasion that he thinks about its existence. I never enjoyed or felt the need to journal or write in a diary. Oh, I had plenty of diaries growing up, but none that have more than 1-5 posts in them. I always received diaries for everything. It seems that a large majority of women, especially an older generation, finds diaries and journals to be necessary to everyday life and hoped to urge me to write my random daily activities down for someone many years from now to find and read. I think I received 3 for engagement gifts—none of which I used. I wanted to. I do find the idea of them nostalgic and almost beautiful, as I would greatly enjoy coming across my now passed grandmother's diary, but every time I sat down to start this journalling thing, nothing I had to write down seemed remotely within the categories of nostalgic, beautiful or readable.

And yet, when I do want to write, I keep coming back to the blog. Perhaps it is because I am of the technological generation and I prefer typing to writing. I've always appreciated the quote from "You've Got Mail" when Meg's character says "Good night dear void." Or maybe it has something to do with me getting tired of so many diaries piling up in the bookshelf with only a few pages written in. Maybe I do want some sort of documentation of my existence over the years. Or maybe this is just my way of actually verbalizing thoughts sometimes, especially those that I would not be able to communicate well in person or would have anyone that might find the verbalization compelling. No matter what, here I sit, writing yet again in my unpatterned way and wondering why I do.