So. Quarantine.
We’ve been here for a while. 43 days to be exact, and we’re not going anywhere soon. We know we have at least two more months of this, but ask the Actuary how confident she is that this will be over then. Part of my actual job is to study pandemics. We’ve been doing this since before it was cool. Ask me about what happened in the fall of the 1918 flu.
Sometimes I feel like a canary. Desperately trying to sound the alarm that the house is on fire while everyone else calmly sips their tea. The truth actually lies somewhere in the middle. A lot of times I’m overreacting to a non problem, and occasionally other people are a bit slow to see a problem that is clear to me.
So on a recent Saturday when I was panicking that the house was about to blow up, Tom wasn’t sure how to react. I was smelling gas in the basement, and desperately trying to convince myself that something had just died down there instead. But I didn’t, I smelled gas.
There are certain things in life that I have an irrational (or maybe not) hatred of, and that make me incredibly angry. And I’m always puzzled when other people don’t seem bothered by them. One sign that Tom and I were right for each other, was that we tend to agree on which things we hate.
One of them? Those wire, ventilated, closet rack systems. They usually come standard in any closet, and they’re the absolute worst.
Sorry Bubba.
But seriously. It's an idea I've had for a while. When the time was right and we were in the right place and feeling settled, it was time to make it official. Permanent.
And I feel like I'm finally there. So I went ahead and bought myself the best present I've gotten in a while. It's so amazing and I can't stop smiling when I look at it.
Bet you didn't expect one of those fora while...
We have a long list of projects on our wishlist of things we'd like to do to our house. Years and years worth of projects. I wish I could be working on all of them right now, but with current circumstances, that's just not possible. In fact I'd pretty much come to terms with the fact that we wouldn't get anything done ever again. (Okay that's dramatic, but maybe for the next few years).
I'm not going to lie, there are still a lot of unopened boxes in our house. There are entire rooms that are either empty or just full of things waiting to be unpacked. It's not easy to furnish and decorate a whole house!
Lately we've decided to turn our focus on our office. At some point we decided that if only our office was set up, we'd be able to unpack a majority of our boxes. All of the books could come out, computer equipment, important papers... they could all find a spot.
From the minute I saw our house, I knew it needed one thing - a painted front door.
The house is beautiful, but the light color of the siding combined with a stark white door was too washed out. I'd been watching the trend of brightly painted front doors for a while now, and been waiting until I could follow suit. I'd had dreams about a bright cherry red door, or maybe a happy turquoise. Unfortunately neither of those colors would look great with our house. Instead, another color was screaming out to be chosen.
Owning a home means you get excited about really weird stuff. Like programmable thermostats. And I'm not talking "Oh that's kind of nice" excited, I'm talking highlight of your week.
This probably has something to do with the fact that Tom and I are both pretty bad at remembering to turn the thermostat down when we're not home. Which means we are often mistakenly are heating or cooling our empty house. There's nothing more annoying (okay maybe I'm exaggerating a bit) than coming home to an excessively hot/cold house, and realizing all the money you've just wasted getting it like that.
