Archive for the “Domicile” Category

Our house has two bathrooms, one of which has a regular tub/shower (the other has a shower stall). When we moved in, our tub surround looked like this:

It’s just a plain white plastic tub surround, but it had some issues, such as hair dye/paint stains:

… and sagginess/falling-apart-yness:

However! The previous owners also left us this:

They had plenty of leftover floor tiles from the renovations they had done in the kitchen and bathroom. Plenty! So!! Demolition began!

Apparently, when you put in those inexpensive plastic tub surrounds (which are just glued onto the wall, by the way), removing them is quite a procedure. It involves removing the plastic and then removing bits of the wall, layer by layer, so it’s like looking back through time to The House Before It Was Yours, then installing new drywall, THEN putting up the tile. Check it out!

The most recent wall with the swirly glue lines that attached the plastic:

The wall behind that…

In older houses like ours, there was plaster at one point, which was attached to these big planks of wood. The previous owners added the shower to this room, so it has a regular/modern wall with normal studs and drywall (I think there probably wasn’t a wall there before at all). Also, check out the awesome wallpaper that used to be in this bathroom:

Anyway! After all the time-travelly demolition, our new tile was installed, and now we have this!

Quelle difference!!

Brian and I made this awesome rainbow cake (inspired by this) in June to celebrate Gay Pride Month:

Update! I just learned an e-acquaintance of mine was so inspired by this cake and its gayness that he baked one for his own Very Gay Wedding in Provincetown this week. Congrats to the happy couple!

And then when a dear high school friend came to visit recently, we made this Smith Island-style cake with eight layers:

Check out recipes and more info for this one at Eat.Swim.Shop!

Apparently, I have a preferred angle for cake photography in my kitchen.

Remember all my little plant pots?

Well, while we were off gallivanting in Florida, the Garden Fairy visited our house. We returned to this:

Check it out! My tomatoes have stakes! There is mulch! There are now watermelon and marigold plants!!

AND the Garden Fairy also did this:

YAY!!! I am so excited. Now all I have to do is keep everything alive!! Thank you, Garden Fairy (aka Mom)!!

Also, I’ve recently learned that in addition to a couple of large pecan trees, we also have a fig tree!

And the fig tree is full of these:

I’m excited and hopeful!!

I have a confession to make.

I bought some plants.

It’s a dream of mine to have a functioning vegetable garden, but I’ve never really been in a good position to try it out. With our new yard, though, I’m hoping I can make it happen. Since I don’t know anything about anything and am completely intimidated by gardening, I’m glad that my mother is arriving soon and hopefully will take the lead on a gardening project!

For now, I picked up a few new friends at the Future Farmers of America sale a couple of weeks ago and put them into pots.

My dreams are in these pots, you guys.

Look at this totally cute flip book that Brian made at school!

Brian is doing a lot of interesting projects in his art classes at Delta State.

This semester, one of his classes is 2-D Design, and they were assigned a project inspired by the work of Chuck Close — the instructor took photos of everyone, then they cut them into little squares, then they hand-drew enlargements of the squares onto bigger squares using various patterns, then pieced them all back together onto a board.

Here’s a close-up of the piece so you can see the squares.

Brian’s final piece was accepted into the student art show:

If you’re in Cleveland, go over to the Wright Art Gallery at DSU and check out the show. It’s there until April 23!

There’s a lot of great work on display. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Brian will create over the next few years!

Meet our new town.

It’s a very different experience for us to live so close to the country…

But there are advantages. Check out our new friends!

We met some people who have an entire flock of chickens roaming around their yard. It was so fun to meet “the girls,” as they are lovingly called!

The couple who keeps these chickens can actually tell which girl laid which egg based on the color and shape. Awesome!

Cleveland has a little downtown area:

We also have a couple of nice municipal parks. When I was a little girl, my grandfather used to take me out to Bear Pen Park to feed bits of Wonderbread to the ducks:

And, of course, we have significant family roots here.

This is the library where my grandmother was the director for many, many years.

She even has her own room inside:

We like going in there to visit with her. She is missed by so many in this town. It’s hard to believe she has been gone for an entire year. I often wonder what she would think about all this business with us living in Cleveland!

Hi everyone. Remember us? Sorry we haven’t updated in so long. We’ve been very busy with some major life changes.

First of all, we bought this:

That’s pretty crazy in and of itself, but what’s even crazier is its location: Cleveland, Mississippi. After being here a few months, Brian decided to attend art school (which he is loving) at Delta State University here in Cleveland, so here we are! We got the house at the beginning of February, and my mom and I went to Austin to fetch all our stuff from storage. Pre-stuff, our house looked like this:

Ahhh… so fresh, clean, and full of potential….

Now, our house looks like this:

Gah!! At first I had these really lofty ideas that we would be totally unpacked and organized in a couple of weeks, but those dreams were swiftly destroyed by the crushing force of reality and the fact that we have soooooo much stuff. Whoops! I’m no longer on a timeline, but someday before we move away, I’m hoping we can actually have people over comfortably.

Anyway, it’s all very exciting because we have lots of space and a yard with room for a garden and a fence to contain my canine sister Trixie when she visits, and I have a new stove and a laundry room and a lot of other fun homeownery things I’ve not had as an adult. We’ll share more about our new home as we slowly (but surely!) get set up!

Also:

Brian and I got married!

We met (at a Starbucks in Dupont Circle) on February 26, 2005, so we decided to marry on Friday, February 26, 2010. Brian had class that morning, so we chose a very simple, very small mini-wedding at the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is another little Delta town about an hour from Cleveland. It was a truly lovely, low-key affair, which was just what we wanted. My parents attended in person, and Brian’s mother, sisters, nieces & nephews, and brothers-in-law attended via Skype. Hooray!

Our ceremony (performed by a Justice of the Peace) was just about 3 minutes long, and then we said goodbye to our web conference guests:

… and went to Giardina’s (the Alluvian’s restaurant) for dinner, cake, and champagne.

Then Brian and I spent the weekend at the Alluvian for our mini-honeymoon and enjoyed the amazing Alluvian Spa and many of Greenwood’s other exciting attractions, including downtown Greenwood:

Note the dentist office with the Coca-Cola ad!

We also visited the Cottonlandia Museum:

And that was that. It was a perfect weekend! Thanks, the Mississippi Delta!

More adventures to come!

(Brilliantly apropos comic from xkcd!)

Hey guys! Sorry we haven’t blogged! Um… we have been really busy? Whatever. It doesn’t really matter. What DOES matter is that we went on another trip. Settle in for a bunch of new posts!!!

Oh, and also, sorry about all the spam. We’ve neglected the blog (obviously) and as you can see, we’ve been absolutely overrun with spam comments. We’re trying to figure out how to get some better spam blockers going on here. In the meantime, please don’t click on anything weird or gross in our comments! Deleting them is really time consuming (especially when there are 15,000 of them), and we’d rather spend our blog time uploading new posts and photos for you to enjoy.

My dad sent me this great article: 10 pieces of Americana you must see this summer. Check it out!

They mention this really awesome looking world’s largest bison buffalo in Jamestown, North Dakota. Y’all may remember North Dakota is on our 5 as-yet-unvisited states list (with Nebraska, Iowa, Alaska, and Hawaii) — so I know what we’re doing next time we take a vacation. The whale in Catoosa, Oklahoma, sounds pretty cool, too. We’ve only visited a couple of places on this list: Paul Bunyan in Bangor, Maine, and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by a Single Person in Darwin, Minnesota.

As always, we have a backlog of photos and other fun things to post. Turns out that moving halfway across the country, traveling constantly for business, grieving a loved one, and working full-time isn’t as conducive to pleasure blogging as being on a 6-month vacation. Who knew?! But we figure eventually things will stabilize a bit and we’ll be able to share more. Thanks for staying tuned!