The comforts of home : )

I feel like staying in a decent hotel is like getting a big hug, it's relaxing and serene and quiet and the stress of day to day life isn't around - but I'm glad to be home and have a kitchen and the pets around and do laundry whenever I like!

I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow I've turned into a high maintenance traveler.  It's a big deal for me because I used to pride myself on packing light.  Six years ago, I took a month long trip to Australia and New Zealand with only a school backpack and a messenger bag.  In college, my friend and I were quite pleased with ourselves for packing only a small rollerbag and carryon for our three week trip to London in the middle of winter, while some of our classmates had brought suitcases that were taller than they were!

I came to this realization while packing to leave Boston as I was placing a duvet cover and set of clothes hangers into my luggage.  Why was I packing up clothes hangers and a duvet cover, you might ask?

I like the idea of triple sheeting, but in practice, it annoys the #$%@ out of me!  I love down comforters and will always choose to stay at a hotel with those instead of the polyester coverlets given an option... but the sheets inevitably slip around and expose the comforter and it makes a big mess to fix when you make the bed in the morning.  I just don't want to have anything on a hotel bed touching me that I know for sure couldn't have been washed between guests.  After my first week, I decided that I would just scope out the duvet cover options at TJ Maxx... lo and behold, there was a yellow one for $30!  I was sold (with 3.5 weeks left, I thought it was worth $10 a week!)  It was so worth it.  Come to think of it, this wasn't my first offense with hotel bedding purchasing.  I got sheets for our two weeks in Cincinnati last year (I wish that hotels would use fitted sheets so that the bed wouldn't fall apart and expose the mattress the minute you sit down!) and a pillow for our hotel in Toronto last summer (another 5 week stay and I still use that pillow at home).

Most hotels seem to have fewer than a dozen hangers and when you're in a place for 5 weeks and sharing a room, you'll probably collectively have more than 10 things to hang up (especially if you're a girl... dresses, shirts, jacket, skirt, etc.)  I ironed my shirts and dresses and then ironed my husband's shirts - and I don't play around with my ironing.  I work in wardrobe, so I'm used to getting paid good money to iron, and I have yet to find someone to pay me for ironing my own clothing!  So I headed over to my old friend TJ Maxx and bought a set of 18 of those skinny felted hangers for $10.

On a side note - even though I haven't dressed a show that involved me prepping button up shirts in a year and a half, I timed myself while ironing my husband's shirts and I can still iron a long sleeve shirt in less than 5 minutes.  I haven't lost my touch!  One of our favorite touring wardrobe heads, Mike, used to put signs up saying "If you spend more than 5 minutes on a shirt, you're not ironing it, you're making love to it."  I was always a decent ironer, but after working Jersey Boys for a month and ironing over a dozen shirts every night and even more during work calls twice a week, I really got really good.

I wouldn't go to such lengths for comfort if I traveled for just weekend trips a couple of times a year.  When I travel, it's for a good amount of time and my husband is working the whole time, so it feels more like we're living there, not vacationing.

I've been back home for a few days now, and I've been really struck with how much I like our house.  I've always liked it, but didn't realize just how glad I'd be to see it again!  I can't get over how awesome our skylights are in the kitchen and bathroom and just how BRIGHT our house is!  I'm soaking it up, not having realized how dark our hotel room in Boston was.  I'm actually enjoying the sunlight so much that I haven't stopped to notice that I'm back in the southern summer heat!  My first night back, I was also surprised by how loud the insects and critters are even when you're in the house... it only took a month to forgot what nature sounded like!

A Wonderful Weekend!

I feel like I had a great weekend!  Friday night I made potato soup and blueberry muffins (not together as a meal)

It was amazing to be able to get the soup ingredients together and chopped up on my counter that's NEXT to the stove!  My kitchen rearranging project from this past winter is wonderful and a month later, it's still AMAZING to me!

yep, that's my Martha Stewart knock-off SlapChop!

Making the blueberry muffins was great too.  I still get so excited about making something all in one place in our kitchen, and I really love it when I use the new peninsula.  Check it out - all of my ingredients AND my cookbook are together on one single surface!  And then the muffin pan gets to join them too!  Wowza!

Most importantly, I'm feeling a lot better and seem to be doing well on regular old Motrin!  I'm still anxiously awaiting the results from the battery of tests they did on my blood last week.  I'm hoping for something nice and relatively simple like a random virus or Lyme.. not rheumatic fever or anything else scary (though rheumatic fever does conjure up some kind of romantic Gone with the Wind type of thought)

I didn't get much done, but going to work at the ballet this weekend was fun (except for the sauna-like temperatures that the dancers want!)  I've worked on and off with the ballet for over 7 years (wow that's a long time!) and I love getting to see the dancers who I've known since the beginning.  I haven't really been around much in the past couple of years and there are so many new company members who I barely know, so it's a fun mix!

After our show today, I zipped over to Durham and visited some friends who are in town with the Shrek tour.  Then I headed home and my Mom came over to check out the new look in our backyard in person!

On the Mend!

I'm feeling a lot better and am on the road to recovery!  I wish I knew what was going on, but the doctor hasn't really figured it out yet.  I'm getting more blood stolen from my arm tomorrow morning and they're going to run more tests and hopefully we'll find an answer soon.

I'm SO READY to start doing cool stuff again!  I'm not one who ever gets bored, but this past few days I've really been getting close to boredom since I'm at home with all the time in the world to do stuff, and am unable to really do things.  My hands are working better, so I'm thinking the map project is next!

I'm also thinking that this is a great time to work on the projects that we need to hire other people to do!  I love this gnarled old redbud tree, but for the first time, I've noticed that we have a completely gorgeous giant double flowering cherry tree behind it!  The redbud is dying and has dropped two large branches in the last year, so I'm going to have it taken out so that we can better see the cherry tree, dogwood, and Japanese maple behind it!

can you find the double cherry behind the ivy tangled gnarled redbud?

This is another project I'm hoping to push through soon... our treacherous but totally awesome pergola.  Hey carpenters, see any structural issues?  hehe.  I'm thinking that adding lots of screws and replacing the cracked and bowed columns will make it safer.  We love the size of it and it seems costly to try to build a new one.

it's listing out just a little : )

we have 3 of these holding the 20' x 20' structure to the fascia board (hopefully they're also attached to the roof joists or something as well)

some of the pretty flowers growing in our yard right now!

This is the latest of my grandmother's orchids to bloom!  Mom soaked all of the orchids for me on Friday night, and she took this one down which I never do.  It just gets water poured into the plastic tray underneath so I just leave it hanging.  When she took it down, we were both amazed to see 3 fully formed flower stalks just days away from blooming that had been growing facing out the glass door out of sight!  She put it back with the blooms facing us and today they popped open!  I'm thrilled and I guess getting to see these blossoms this is the silver lining in my mysterious illness.  I never would have seen them if she hadn't taken the whole basket down!

My walking iris plant bloomed again today!  The blooms only last a day so it's a precious fleeing excitement!  It's growing lots of little buds and this is only the 3rd day in 2 weeks that I've seen blossoms, so it's still very new and exciting.  This was also my grandmother's plant.  It's HUGE, about 3' across and all spiky and tropical looking.  It's really cool!

If I believed in that kind of stuff, I would think that my grandmother is still looking after her plants.  They were pretty much her favorite thing and she had LOTS of them!  We split the plants up amongst the family and we all seem to be having good luck with them so far.   She died in November and so far, I've had blooms on the walking iris, cactus, and 4 orchids (one of which bloomed from November until the end of March!)

Mostly Mobile!

I can get out of the bed all by myself again!  Woohoo!  I'm so excited to have turned the corner and be on the mend!  I'm not really hobbley today and while I am still in a bit of pain, my body is mostly mobile!  My very kind mother in law spent the night last night in case I needed help.  It's been a weekend of mom sleep over parties!  My main project for today is making waffles for breakfast!

My new favorite App!

I saw this app listed in a magazine last night and downloaded it immediately... it's called "Painting Walls" and it's amazing!  You snap a photo of your room or house and then try out different paint colors on the picture!  If you're a really visual person like me, it's perfect because you can actually see how that room would look before you commit to painting!  What a fun app, right?

So far, I've just been checking out different colors for our shed that's in desperate need of real paint (it's currently whitewashed, like Tom Sawyer's fence... when you touch it, white powder comes off).  I think that I'm going to remove the shutters (one fell off a few months ago anyway) and put a cute painted trellis on each side of the window so I can plant some climbing flowers!  And the removal of the giant ugly boxwoods goes without saying...  they will be replaced with some pretty azaleas!

I'm feeling a little better today which is great!  I can lift my right arm above my head!  I was so pitiful last night that my mom stayed over... I literally needed help getting out of bed in the morning  It's so charming that I get to try out a sample of feeling totally old and decrepit since I am just months away from a benchmark birthday!

Hello World!

Now that I'm officially a housewife, I feel like I need to step it up and immerse myself in a whirlwind of "getting things done."  More projects, more crafts, more to show for my time spent at home.  My thought is that if I share what I'm doing and working on, I'll feel accountable and more likely to keep up the pace!

I have celebrated my last day of work and as of Thursday, I found myself in the enviable position of housewife.  I was the alterations manager at a lovely bridal salon for a while and I enjoyed many things about my job (mainly the pretty wedding dresses and copious amounts of sparkle and glamour) - the problem with it became the brides themselves (you try doing fittings on bridal gowns all day and see if the brides don't drive you nuts too!)

I have an amazing husband who is happy to support me while I stay home, recover from the brides, and gear up for my journey into entrepreneurship this summer!  I've had so many ideas over the last several years and we've decided that This Year is definitely going to be The Year that I start something!  I can't say what it will be because I have to sift through my ideas and see which ones are viable and which are totally ridiculous.