Now, how can I explain my absence? Eh, I basically just got lazy. No, that's not true, because I haven't been lazy in other areas of my life, I've just been lazy in the blog part. Why, this weekend I single-handedly made some side tables for my living room! Does that sound like the actions of a lazy person?
Okay, first of all, let's pause and take the obligatory moment to make fun of the fact that my dreams contain things like side tables. Yes, I aspire to owning attractive side tables, so sue me. I aspire to other, more noble things as well, obviously—like owning an attractive coffee table, for instance, OKAY I'M JUST KIDDING—but I have, for the longest time, been fairly consumed with finding the perfect side tables. Some people may say that this is what is wrong with America today.
Recently, we've started going back to the gym again. I'm always surprised at how much better I feel—about myself, about life in general, about everything—when I get into the groove of doing regular exercise, and I'm always even more surprised at how this mind-boggling revelation strikes me anew every single time. Should there not come a point when my body figures out that it needs to send a continuous message to my brain that says "just keep doing this, don't stop, you like it when your jeans fit, remember?" Because mine doesn't do that.
Have you heard of Birchbox? Nobody is paying me any money to say this, swear to god—none of my Splendid Things are ever, ever sponsored or given to me for free, by the way; they're just things that I've bought with my own hard-earned cash and liked—but I have become sort of obsessed with Birchbox. Basically, for $10 a month, you get a box of high-end beauty products in the mail every four weeks. The catch? Well, they're sample-sized. Generously sample-sized, though, I might add.
Right now, my kitchen is a huge mess. I'm not talking about a dirty dishes mess or a whoops-I-spilled-some-orange-juice mess, though I'm pretty sure that both of those messes are going on in there too to some degree. I'm talking about the kind of mess that involves power tools on one's kitchen counters. There's a screwdriver on my cutting board. Some last minute grouting is going on. Two out of three lights have blown. You would hardly think a photographer was coming over on Sunday to shoot it for a national magazine.
Hold tight, because it's about to get really 1950s up in here. I have some questions about house cleaning, see. And before you wonder if, by chance, this has anything to do with my exciting news that a magazine crew is going to be visiting my home this weekend—a magazine crew, by the way, that I have since learned is going to include not just a photographer, but also a prop stylist and a "groomer" (A groomer! We're going to be groomed!
My photo shoot was this weekend and my kitchen is still currently the cleanest it's ever been. Like, literally: ever. I think it's cleaner than it was right after we finished remodeling, and that's saying something because it was brand new then. It's so clean, I would have no qualms about asking my mother-in-law over for dinner and then inviting her to eat off the floor. Or the stove. Or the side of the fridge.
Have you heard of this accent meme that everyone's been doing lately? (Incidentally, did you know that "meme" is pronounced "meem," because I won't laugh if you didn't. I didn't until.....ooh, about six months ago. Up until then, I was calling it—only in my head, thankfully—a "meh-may," sort of like "memo," I guess, which seemed to make sense. Not to worry, though; Sean used to think it was called a "mee-mee." Because, as he so succinctly said, "when you do one of those, it's all about me, me, me, me, me.")
It was all Steve Carrell's fault, really. The Office was a repeat on Thursday, and so we were trying to find something else to watch. "I have two ideas," I told Sean. "There's this reality show called The Only Way Is Essex, which is basically like Jersey Shore set in England. Or I've been hearing good things about Downton Abbey, which is a British period drama set right before the First World War."
You may remember that I decided to turn my spare bedroom into a home office approximately seven million years ago. Slowly but surely, I've finally got it how I want it, and I'd love to show you how it all turned out.
Thank you so much for all your lovely comments on my home office makeover! I was blown away by how kind you all were about the end result, and now I want to invite everybody over to work with me in there and I'll make us all pumpkin spice lattes* for our 4 o'clock treat. (What, you don't have a 4 o'clock treat? Why, sometimes I have a 4 o'clock treat and elevenses—which is, as you might expect, an 11am treat.)
Update: Raffle is now closed, I'm afraid—we reached $200 in record time. More details at the end of the post.
