Family Room
This is where most of you will come. We are hoping you will plop down, maybe go to the pantry for a beer or wine, sit and talk, head for the refrigerator – we want you to feel at home. 🙂 I’m still working on this room, trying to get the right pieces in it, and take out those that don’t enhance.
The Living Room
The Living Room is almost finished. We still have carpets to gather from Seattle, carpets we bought in Damascus way back a long time ago, stored by my gracious sister Sparkle, under the guest room bed, lo, these many years. I grumble and complain as I unpack boxes, putting things away, but the carrot is always dangling before my eyes – figuring out how to use old friends in a new environment, a challenge that can keep me busy for a long time.
Just as with paint, sometimes you have to try something out in a space for a while to see if it ‘wants’ to be there.
In America, we never think of objects as having feelings. The world is full of people who understand the ‘fung shui’ of things, that putting things in some places is better than putting them in other places, that energy has a flow. I don’t believe in it like a religious belief, but I have come to accept that sometimes you have an idea about something going someplace, and then it just doesn’t feel right, and to trust those feelings. So I have stuck a few things in places where I think they belong in this room – and I thought long and hard about where these things would go. I will live with it for a while and if something is where it shouldn’t be, it just won’t feel right.
Light has to be taken into account, and bringing light into dark spaces, and protecting vulnerable textiles from too much damaging light.
For me, conversation is important, so I want people to be able to sit closely enough to be able to share their innermost thought, but far enough away from one another to feel comfortable and relaxed, not crowded or invaded.
We have extra chairs, so the number of people who can comfortably sit in here is expandable:
We created a small study area, with a good light, where we can look things up, or read something that requires concentration:
I wish I had more shelf top space in my kitchen for all my baskets, but I don’t, so the bookshelves and cupboards will have to do for now:
The room beyond is the dining room, but I don’t think we will ever use it as a dining room, so I am trying to think through how it may be used . . . it might be a play room for grandchildren . . . 🙂
Taming Chaos
My daughter-in-law has a genius for taming chaos, and I learn a lot from her just by being in her house. One idea has helped me a lot – baskets.
Quilters use a lot of equipment, and it can really get messy. I have baskets of scraps that I mean to cut into usable pieces, baskets of tools, baskets of my office supplies, and now – a basket of rulers.
Before:
After:
The Quilt Room is ready for me. It may look messy to you, but this is the clutter of creativity, the clutter of works in progress, not the clutter of chaos. Right now, I know where all my tools are, I know where to find all my blue fabrics, I can put my hands on just the ruler I need, the iron is up and ready to take care of straying seams and the sewing machine is plugged in. Wooo HOOOO on me!
Before You Leave Doha – No Regrets
I was neither the first nor the last of my group to leave Doha. Well, yes, actually, I was the first, I left Doha for Kuwait, but it doesn’t count because I came back and then was no longer the first to leave. The next to leave are leaving soon, so I want to share something with you.
All my visitors from Kuwait bought these at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. I didn’t get it. It just doesn’t rain that much in Kuwait, but the umbrellas are only 100 QR, and that is a reasonable price for a big umbrella, well made.
My last visit to the Museum of Islamic Art, just before leaving, I broke down and bought one, too, and packed it immediately for moving to Pensacola. I was with a good friend, she bought one too. I kind of wondered if I would ever use it.
We are getting some serious rain in Pensacola, related to Hurricane Alex. Do you have any idea how BIG hurricanes are, even smaller ones? They whoosh around in a huge counter-clockwise circle, and if you look at a satellite photo, you will see that the circular whoosh can cover hundreds of miles – thus, pouring rain in Pensacola.
I had put my umbrella in the car, as a just in case. Yesterday, I had an opportunity to unfurl it for the first time.
It is gorgeous.
Some things don’t translate well. Some things you buy, you look at and wonder ‘Why did I buy this?” It looks so good in Doha, but you get it back to the USA and . . . sometimes, it doesn’t look so good.
This umbrella looks GREAT. It is so classic, in the ivory, and I love the silver and gold pattern; it is subtle and beautiful. It really covers well, too, and keeps the rain off you and one other. 🙂 This is a very good buy!
Pensacola Oil Spill Editorial Cartoon
The editorial underneath, Death of a Fisherman, refers to the suicide of a charter boat fisherman. His business tanked, he joined the BP clean-up. After an early morning meeting, he killed himself. All he ever wanted to do was fish. His heart was broken.
Heartache in Pensacola
It’s a beautiful full moon over the oil soaked beaches of Pensacola. There is a beach advisory against children on the beach, against pregnant women or people with weak immune systems being on the beach. The surf is contaminated with oil and VOC, which is volatile organic compounds, whatever that means, it is bad.
Lost in Space
Did you think I might have dropped off the face of the earth? The truth is so much more mundane, I am just up to my neck in boxes, and the tedious task of unloading those boxes and trying to find the right place for each of the myriad objects is frustrating and totally not worth sharing with you.
It was only a year ago I did this same move, on a smaller scale, the move from Kuwait to Doha. Only one year ago this month. This move is more complicated, with another whole household coming in, and now all our Doha goods have arrived, and I get to put everything away.
I decided to do things differently, and it worked for me. Normally, I am methodical. I choose a box, empty the box, put everything away, break down the box and move to the next box.
This time, I opened the box, and if I just wasn’t ready to deal with that box, I moved on to the next box. I would put away what could be more easily put away. Occasionally, I have had to run to the local Target store and buy some more put-it-together storage organization pieces, and that slows me down a little, but helps me store things for effectively and efficiently – I like to know where things are. If you have to go looking for things, and you can’t find them, then they are useless, no?
And, last and most freeing of all, now that I am working upstairs – when I finished with a box, I just tossed it over the landing, down into the entryway! LLLOOOLLLL! You cannot imagine the joy it gave me! Just toss, and it’s gone, and it makes a satisfying racket when it hits the floor, or the other boxes!
I also had a collection of boxes in what was called ‘the butler’s pantry’ in the house brochure. It is a room between the guest suite, laundry and garage, where there are two wine refrigerators – one for white and one for red – and more glass fronted cupboards, where AdventureMan stored all our wine and beer glasses. He also keeps beer in the white wine refrigerator, as we don’t drink that much wine.
Yesterday morning, once I had finished the last box, I broke down all the boxes at once. When you do it all at once, it takes like less than one minute per box. I had all the boxes broken down and into the garage in about 40 minutes. Wooo HOOO on me!
I still have chaos in two rooms, the room we call the Grandchildren’s Room, next to ours, upstairs. I have piles of things I haven’t used for years, but I keep hanging on to because I might want to use them sometime. Hmmmm. Actually, I love this room. It has the best light of all the rooms in the house, with a Southern window and a Western window. Lots of light.
And then, there is my quilt room. Quilters collect fabric, and being mildly obsessive compulsive, I like to have my fabric in order, by color, by type (floral? checked? baby quilt? Batik? Christmas?) and sometimes by nationality (African? French? Dutch?) or project (blocks from Germany? blocks from Doha?). Quilters often also have a lot of equipment, including more than one sewing machine and cutting tools, patterns, books, embellishments, etc. It is a real mess to put away:
You can see the chair in this room – to the right of that chair are two large bookcases, and in the lower part near the chair is also my “office.” That chair is where I do my morning Bible readings and where I write many of these posts, while AdventureMan is still snoozing. When I am working, AdventureMan comes in and sits in that chair to talk to me. There is an identical one in his office, where I sit when I am talking with him, and where I sit when we are watching the upstairs TV. AdventureMan jokes that we are wearing a hole in the carpet as we go back and forth to each other’s offices. 🙂
My kitchen has a couple clear counters, now, although there are still things I am trying to find places for. There are two ‘areas of sanity’ – the living room and the family room. I don’t have a lot up on the walls yet, but a few little things. Putting things up is fun for me, so I save that to encourage myself to get everything away – once I have everything put away, I can have a little fun. 🙂
As you can see, I still have work to do, but I wanted to take a minute to bring you up to date. 🙂
Lunch at the Tuscan Oven
We took a road we don’t usually take, and suddenly, there it was – The Tuscan Oven! I had eaten there before, and loved it, but had not seen it and had assumed it had disappeared. Restaurants do that, even good ones, it takes so much work and so much effort to run a restaurant, and they run on such a slim margin that we have often been disappointed to see good restaurants close.
We were joyful to see the Tuscan Oven!
The place is packed. People who love good food are here. 🙂 You can tell that many of them are friends with the owner, and they come here often. The menu has too many good things!
We ordered the Antipasta Plate, with delicious cheeses and sausages, tasty olives and a stuffed artichoke heart. Unfortunately, we dug in before I remembered to take photos 😦
We each also ordered a small pizza, but even small was too big after the antipasta plate, so we ended up bringing more than a full pizza home.
I love the decor – an artist has painted food ingredients for the meals – this is my favorite, the artichoke:
We look forward to coming back here often!
Checking Out Pensacola Beach
After our water aerobics class this morning, AdventureMan and I drove out to the beautiful sugar-white sandy beaches of Pensacola to check the damage. The clean up crews have been busy, and the beaches look gorgeous. People are sunning, swimming, and sharing the beaches with the clean up crews.
A big huge electronic sign announces that the road to the beach will be closed all day tomorrow. How can you close a major road? Is this Kuwait, or Qatar, where the will of the Amir says “Make it so!” and it is so? Oh. Wait. President Obama is coming, so the road will be his and his alone to go out to the beaches and see what we saw today.
The huge, gigantic glob of oil has only sent tendrils, so far, to the pristine white beaches, but doom impends as storms and winds blow the thick oily sludge toward the shores. God willing, President Obama will find a way to encourage British Petroleum to work with a little more conviction and energy to find a long term solution to this unthinkable TWO MONTHS and hundreds of thousands of gallons spewing into the Gulf.
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