opine, please!

I have a little decorating contest to share with you. Well, it's more like I need some opinions. I recently bought three awesome chairs (there was no fourth) at the Salvation Army to go with a round, drop leaf table I got at a local thrift store known as Two Sisters and a Naked Dog. (great place, tho I feel bad for the dog, who is real and who is naked... hairless, actually.)

These chairs are an awesome retro design that I really like. They're the real deal, not from Target, made from real wood with some weight to it, and they were $5 each! I don't love the fabric on them, which is great, because it gives me an excuse to figure out something I've wanted to learn for awhile: how to recover a chair. This leads me to my dilemma; over the past two days I've made two trips to Joann Fabric, and I still can't decide which fabric to use on these chairs... In part I'm having a hard time deciding because I'm overthinking the need for these to "fit in" with the other colors/patterns in my living room (these are in the "breakfast nook" which is just off of the living room through a wide arched doorway). I have greens/blues/khakis with highlights of orange and turquoise in the living room (so far anyway... but it still has a long way to go, esp on the floor and on the walls, since both are currently bare). I might use one of these chairs in the living room as a desk chair, so at the least it should not clash horribly.

living room:

anyway, here are the three current candidates for my chair fabric (I went for the green family, b/c that's what stood out to me):

1.
this one is nice... it's whimsical, a little folk artsy. The best reason for this one is that it matches colors I am already using elsewhere, so it would fit in nicely. I think the colors are a little on the bland side, though.

2.
I love this one; it just grabbed me. It's bold and fun. I think the geometric design would complement the design of the chair, since both are a bit retro...

3.
this design is beautiful, I really love it... the thing is, the walls of the breakfast nook are already a sage green color, so I think it wouldn't pop.

so, whaddya think??? please tell me your vote... esp you, my artistic friend Carrie, since your opinion will be highly valued (plus you may be the only one reading this blog! :)

living by myself

I have been living in my apartment in St. Pete's for about three weeks. On the 10th of November it'll be one month since my lease began. However, I only started sleeping here on the 16th because that was the day my bed was delivered, so I've been staying here overnight only about 11 days. and since then I've spent at least 3 nights staying over at someone else's house due to very late baseball games. In some sense I already feel like I've lived here a long time, but sometimes at night I feel like I'm sleeping somewhere unfamiliar. I have never lived alone before now; I have always had a roomate since I left for college, or I lived with a family. I feel very safe living here, because I'm on the second floor and have two locks for my door - no need for an alarm anymore.

In the evening I don't feel isolated because the tennis courts, which are half a block from my apartment, are lit up so that a few players can hit around. It's so close I can hear the sound of the tennis ball hitting the rackets and the murmur of players or spectators talking to each other. I can't make out their words, but I can hear their voices. I can sit at my living room windows and watch the tennis game. It's kind of nice to have them out there to keep me company.

I love my new place... the hardwood floors, the wide molding around windows and doors, the fussy old crank out windows, the breeze off the bay that flows through my windows. It's still a work in progress; I have a stack of about 25 cardboard boxes waiting to be picked up tomorrow morning by someone from freecycle. It's funny how progress in setting up my apartment is so linear. First get all the stuff out of the boxes... then get all the boxes off of couch #1 by posting boxes on freecycle. have a couple of offers that never work out so post boxes on freecycle a second time and hope this person shows. once the boxes are gone, then reattach the feet on coach #1 so that it can be listed on craig's list. list couch on craig's list so that the tv stand can be moved into the corner. once the tv stand is in the corner, then another bookcase can join the household. once another bookcase is here, then there'll be space for a writing desk.

I only like buying things that I know I need... that I know will fit some corner or shelf or purpose in my apartment. I like buying slowly, gradually, sequentially, so that I can be sure that each purchase is necessary and fitting. Well, that's how I operate most of the time. Other days I throw caution to the wind and end up at the store with no particular purchase in mind and get whatever jumps off the shelf as something I would possibly have put on a list, if I had made a list beforehand. I especially like the Dollar Store or Big Lots for these kinds of shopping trips... because you know you're almost always getting a good deal. I really like browsing by myself. sometimes I like it browsing better than buying, because you can just let your imagination go instead of thinking about whether or not it'll really work or whether it costs too much or whether there is anything else better out there. Today I browsed at Target and ended up with a new floor lamp for the youth room at church and some frozen dinners for dinner. Now I'm home and night has fallen, but those tennis players are just getting warmed up.

moss & stone

The picture above is from one of my few days traveling alone during my whole trip to England. I was in Oxford, restless, done revisiting that city but not sure where to go next or how to get there. I was longing to go north, and I kept thinking of the beautiful youth hostel where we stayed during Wheaton-in-England that sits right on the edge of Lake Windermere. At 10am I left the youth hostel in Oxford with my pack, walked to the train station not sure what would happen. I asked about getting to Windermere and was told that if I took the next train to Birmingham and switched trains a couple of times, I could be there by midafternoon. I paid and took the train to Windermere and then took the youth hostel shuttle to Ambleside.

During my one full day there I took a boat/hike trip, where a lake cruise boat took me across the lake and dropped me off at a remote dock next to an old boathouse, and I then hiked along the edge of the lake for several miles until I reached another boat cruise stop where I could be picked up. It was a typical Lake District Day - gray clouds and mist hovering over and around the green fields that border the lake, a little drizzle here and there, and a few moments of sunshine now and again. I had planned on doing this excursion but that day I hesitated to buy my ticket, worried the rain would pick up and I'd be left stranded on a remote edge of a lake with a couple hours of hiking through the rain ahead of me. But I dreaded the prospect of spending my one full day sitting inside the youth hostel. I was a little tempted to curl up with a Jane Austen novel and consider it a "stay inside and read and drink tea" day, but my room didn't even have a lake view, so if I did that, I could have been anywhere. Determined to not be paralyzed by indecision (which was a big issue for me when traveling by myself), I marched over to the ticket office, got my ticket, and hopped on the boat to begin my adventure for the day.

This picture is the bottom of the door of an old boathouse, many of which sit along the lakeside hidden in coves and under the low branches of trees. While the boathouse looked so old and battered and "in need of a makeover" by tv standards, it also drew me towards it with its humble, beautiful, stone architecture and this little door on one of its side walls. I loved this door - its age, the layers of paint peeling off and the spreading moss and mold adding their own colors, the dampness of the air seeping into the wood, and that strange little keyhole, installed so low that I had to kneel on the ground to get level with it. For some reason the builder put that keyhole only a few inches from the ground. I loved the mood of the grey gloomy day and of the mysterious stone buildings, sitting there by the lake alone, no longer in use as far as I could tell. I wished I could slip inside and dangle my feet over the water that lapped under their slate roofs. I wished I could know the stories that lie behind a door like this.

Below is a link to an album of other pictures from this day of solitude. Despite the gray, it was a beautiful day... probably because of the gray weather, actually.

Ambleside Revisited

time & traveling

the quote in this blog's title comes from JRR Tolkien. traveling has been one of my great loves since I was 15. before that, I think I had only been on a plane once, to visit DC on an 8th grade trip. I feel like my life has been one great adventure since I got on the second plane of my life to go to Nepal 11 years ago... sometimes it has felt like progress has been made made a little at a time, as Tolkien suggests, at other times the progress seems to be of epic proportions in a short amount of time. It is dizzying to think that a few months ago I was graduating, and then I was in England... and now I'm in Florida with a place of my own getting to know St. Pete's. the past can seem so far away when the blur of transit has been rushing past you for months on end. now that I'm here in Florida, though, the blur slows to reveal daily life again... I'm reveling in not having to pack my bags every night :)

have you ever been asked whether you're a past, present, or future oriented kind of person? I'm pretty sure I'm future oriented. I realized the other day I don't tend to think about staying places. I tend to treat the places where I live as temporary, as stops along the way... as another albergue along the camino. I think there are both good things and bad things about that. the bad part is that I can end up acting like a tourist, as Amy Laura Hall warned us against at Duke Div. or I can come across as thinking I'm above daily, mundane life... which no one can avoid, no matter what stage of life or circumstances they are in... at least not eventually, even if they seem to be living their fantasy life. I think the good part is that being future-oriented can also make you purposeful and focused, if you can figure out how to bridge the distance between your present and the future that you envision. I'm still working on that... and grateful that I'm not on my own trying to craft the perfect plan to achieve my vision for my life. if anything, I look back and am amazed at how I ended up where I am. I would never dare explain how I got here as simply the fruit of my own efforts. surely there is a bigger plan, a greater vision, at work.