I have some things that I would like to discuss. The first is that Jared Leto is currently at my office and I am not. Trust me, I'm not even sure how this actually happened—how he came to be at my office, I mean, not why I'm not there; I know why I'm not there and it's because it's after 8 o'clock at night—but I have deduced, through a flurry of tweets and Facebook messages, that this is indeed where he is. What's he doing there? Eh, probably just wearing a jacket with a sheepskin collar and leaning against things, I guess. Does my office have a boiler room?

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You may remember that Sean wrapped up a tire for my birthday a few months ago with the promise to build me a tire swing. And it turns out he's a man who's true to his word!

Go on, add your swingers joke right here. Just try not to. 

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Oh god, I've become the sort of person who gives her blog posts titles from TS Eliot poems, have I? Apparently I have. I do apologize, but every time I've had to lie on one of those crinkly paper-covered chairs in a doctor's office, that line from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has popped, unbidden, into my head. Blame the in-depth critical analysis of it I had to write for a foppish professor in 1999, if you must, but don't blame me.

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We are currently in the middle of a bathroom renovation, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, which for some reason I saw fit to write as though I was rapping it (there are just so many good words that rhyme with renovation!)

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I am recapping, excruciatingly slowly, the two-week trip we took to South Africa last year.Here is part one, about our layover in Paris; here is part two, about Cape Town; here is part three, about Cape Point and the penguins of Boulders Beach; here is part four, about wine tasting and stroking a baby cheetah in Stellenbosch; and here is part five about shark-diving in Gansbaai. Expect me to be finished with this sometime in 2014.

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I am fueled, for the most part, by instant gratification and so the idea of getting our house in shape slowly has been one that I've had to adjust to. When we moved in almost two years ago—almost two years ago!—there was so much I wanted to change and fix and decorate that it felt like I'd never get it to a place where it felt like home.

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This isn't going to be anything you haven't heard before, but I am a compulsive list maker. I know, I know; you probably are too, right? There are tons of us, I've discovered, who wrest control from an otherwise insurmountable project—whether it's planning a wedding or just getting through the day—by breaking it down into bite-size musts that we can cross off methodically once they're done. There's a reason lists have bullets, I think; so we can kill off the things that have been worrying us. 

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So far this year I seem to be reading at a far slower pace than I was last year, and I know this because I did that crazy thing in 2011 where I wrote down everything I read each month and then told you all about it at the end of the year.

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This weekend, we were in the slightly unusual position of having two housewarming parties to attend (plus, oddly enough, a book launch and a two-year-old's birthday party. Is there something about the second weekend of April that makes everyone feel decidedly social? Parties, man. They're like buses. Wait for ages in the rain without an umbrella and then suddenly they all come at once.) 

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Quite honestly, I can barely stand to watch this video anymore since it took me seven bajillion hours to make it and if I never hear the opening bars to Paul Simon's Graceland again it will be far too soon, but if you don't mind the fact that you're going to get the chorus stuck in your head for the next two weeks, here's something that captures pretty accurately the trip I took with my parents and sister last week to Memphis, Tennessee.

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