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Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
A hundred million years or so ago, I bought some black and white hexagon tile for our kitchen countertops. At that time I perkily predicted we’d get started on the tiling in “a couple of weeks.” Oh, that silly, silly 2005 me. How hopeful and bright and full of speedy renovation the future seemed then!
Now I accept that all projects will take not just three times longer than initially predicted but 10 times longer, 15 times longer, 100 million years longer. Take, for example, last week when Darwin was on vacation and I was at home, and I thought surely we could get the master bathroom finished once and for all. Of course, that did not happen. All it lacks is a little caulk and some touch-up paint, but I’m sure that will be enough to hold up the project’s completion for another century at least.
In the mean time, now that I’m working from home, staring all our unfinished projects are starting to get on my last nerve, especially the kitchen countertops. It’s funny how you can overlook for more than three years the paint-splattered, outdated, gold-flecked laminate countertops, and then one day you just SEE them and suddenly they have to go or your head will explode.
One hold-up all this time - besides laziness and busyness and countertop blindness - has been the backsplash. I bought the hexagon tiles for the horizontal surface of the countertops, but I never bought the subway tiles for the backsplash or the black tiles for the edges. The main reason for that is I could never figure out what to do with the backsplash behind the sink. It’s a tall, useless, empty space, like what most people have behind a stove, the place where the homeowners on Kitchen Renovations on the DIY Network (which I’ve had on in the background nonstop lately) tend to put some snazzy “accent tiles.”
That seems like a good idea to me, but I’m nervous any accent tile I choose will begin to look hokey and crapola to me in a few short years. I don’t want something trendy or too specific that I’ll get sick of. I just want something plain and black and white … I guess.
This is the kind of decision that always holds up our progress - so tiny yet so monumental. We’ll have the same conversation about it 50 times over the course of two years, always getting all worked up about it and then letting it recede into the back of our minds again for three months, while the project stalls.
So I need help, folks. Tell me what to do. One thing we’ve considered is making a band of black around the room with these square black tiles I found, and bumping the band up into the backsplash a few extra inches. And when I was playing around with it in Photoshop, I found another configuration I liked. So what do you think? Would something like this work?
I like the first one more, but then the faucet gets lost in the black tile, whereas the second one highlights the faucet. Remember the field will be rectangular subway tiles, so that may complicate matters.
Update:
Combined option
posted by Kristin | filed under Kitchen | 22 Comments
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Tomorrow is my last day at my first, real job. Until this week, I’d been giddy about leaving the job and starting the new one, about working just one job and working from home all but one day a week. I have big plans for my life-after-9-to-5 … I’ll learn to cook, I’ll clean more and exercise more, I’ll write that elusive novel I’ve been working up to since I was old enough to hold a crayon.
And yet … while I’m completely confident leaving is the right thing, now I’m feeling sad and nostalgic. Tuesday night was my big send-off. Several of my soon-to-be-former co-workers and I met for margaritas at a Mexican restaurant near the office, and they surprised me with a digital photo frame in a Hello Kitty gift bag, a present that was just perfect - one of the few things I’d like but have never thought to buy for myself. Even better, my boss had gone around the office taking photos of everyone, and my friend Todd figured out how to put them on the frame’s digital card. They did it half as a joke and kept saying how the first thing I’d want to do is erase all those pictures. But as each person’s smiling - or grumpy, in the case of Jack - face flashed on the screen, I knew, of course, I wouldn’t want to delete them. Then I read the card, the messages each person wrote - some wishing me well, some joking, some truly poignant, like my friend Jorge’s quote from a song that translates from Spanish to something like, “When a friend goes away, it leaves an empty space no other friend can fill.”
When I got home that night, I re-read the kind words on the card and began to see I really would be missed. I hadn’t expected to cry about leaving - I’m not much of a crier - but suddenly there I was blubbering on the sofa, feeling deeply sad about leaving the daily company of these people. Five years is a long time, long enough to make this feel a little like a family - there have been so many stories and arguments and make-ups and mishaps and laughter. They have tried my patience at times, made me want to scream at times, but mostly they have entertained me, taught me, molded me, and embraced me.
So this afternoon I sent the farewell e-mail:
“Tomorrow will be my last day at XXXX, so I wanted to say goodbye and tell you all how much I’ve enjoyed working with you, talking with you, and - yes - drinking margaritas with you. Randy keeps popping in my office and saying, “You know you’ll miss us,” and I keep acting nonchalant about leaving. Truth is, I will miss you. I’ve been here more than five years, and – though I’m excited about my new job at candyapplecostumes.com – I’m sad to leave you.
Randy says there aren’t enough scandalous stories to tell about me after I’m gone, but don’t worry – I know plenty of scandalous and outrageous stories about all of you. That way, if I should ever fall upon hard times, blackmail is always an option.
Even if I don’t need to resort to blackmail, I hope we still keep in touch. My e-mail address is XXXX and cell number is XXXX – I want to know when someone has a baby, gets promoted, discovers new XXXX poetry, punches someone at a trade show, or gets drunk at the beach and injures himself (my personal favorite). For the local folks, I’ll be in town most Mondays and available for lunch dates, and I’m also planning to have a party at my house some time this summer (an invitation will follow when I figure out the details). As for the outside editors, well … there’s always e-mail, right?
This isn’t goodbye, I hope, but “see you later.” Either way, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you – for making me think, making me laugh, and now – damnit – making me cry.”
The flood of kind response e-mails made me think maybe it is possible to stay in touch. I hope that possibility is enough to help me leave without more tears tomorrow.
posted by Kristin | filed under Friends | 2 Comments
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, died one week ago today at the age of 83. Once upon a time, she was a fiesty woman who loved to gossip and never failed to shock us a little at least once each time we visited her. She was vain once, too, and kept a photo portrait she considered especially beautiful framed above the television set.
But for years now, Grandma had been in a nursing home, after her rheumatoid arthritis, strokes, and hip and knee replacements became too much to handle at home, even with live-in care. For years now, her pain has increased, and with it her pain medication, dimming her sharp wit and sharp eyes that once noticed everything. For years now, her five surviving children have said, “It won’t be long now. It can’t be long.”
And yet for long years, she did hang on, clinging desperately to a life that was - at the end - reduced to little more than pain. My mother was present for her death, and she says even the nurse cried to hear Grandma moaning in pain when the maximum dose of morphine no longer eased her into sleep.
So it is a relief - albeit a partial one, tempered with guilt - that she is gone. A relief for her, a relief for my mother and her siblings, who watched her suffer every day, a relief for her many grown grandchildren - those of us who visited often and those who were too cowardly (myself included) to do more than visit on holidays, hiding behind their parents.
The last time I saw her was on Sunday, June 8, with my mother. She’d been recently medicated and barely stirred while we talked brightly over her to a cousin visiting his mother in the next bed. I made myself look at her misshapen face, meet her watery eyes, which stared at me with no flicker of recognition, only - at most - a mild interest. Even if she didn’t know me, I wanted to let her look at me, hoping it would register somewhere in her brain that these features were familiar - like her daughter’s, like her own - and she’d get some comfort from it.
Two days later she was gone. Years before, she’d chosen and paid for her own funeral and pale pink casket - the gesture was so like her, practical in that she didn’t want her children to have to share the expense and frivolous in that she wanted something fancy, something pretty to be seen in one last time.
She was buried next to her second husband, my Grandpa, and near her favorite brother James, whose recent death was kept from her to save her unnecessary heartache.
It felt like an ending of one day and the start of another.
Since her death I’ve been thinking about my life and the new lives we hope to nourish one day. Darwin and I have been on the fence about having children - when and how. Now I feel like the when needs to be sooner rather than later. I want my children to know their grandparents the way I got to know mine.
The how is still up in the air, but I think about Grandma - what she would’ve said if I’d come to her with this problem, back when she was still fiesty and no-nonsense, able to skewer your issues with enough accuracy to make you squirm in your seat on her velvet sofa.
She might’ve said, “Biology doesn’t matter.” Our family has proven that is true. I’m not connected by blood to half the people I call mine, but who is a family but the people who share a past and a present and a future, people who can make you choke back laughter even at a funeral and, not 10 minutes later, swallow tears instead?
I’d forgotten how much I love these people - however we decide to do it, I’m excited to invite someone new into the family.
posted by Kristin | filed under Family | 7 Comments
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Darwin and I spent last week in that charming city by the sea, Charleston, S.C. We went there for our honeymoon six years ago, and I intended this to be a romantic, nostalgic anniversary trip. For once, my best-laid plans actually worked out.
It had been a year since we’d gone on a just-me-and-Darwin vacation, and I’d almost forgotten how lovely it is to just be alone together, away from the barking dog and demanding house and clutter and dishes in the sink. We get along so much better when the only thing to bicker about is which delightful restaurant to eat at tonight, which charming house museum to see next - and somehow we can’t muster up the desire to argue about those things. I plan, Darwin goes along, we sleep late and never make it down to breakfast.
At home, I often don’t appreciate his company enough. His jokes get on my nerves, or I want him to just keep his hands to himself for five minutes while I try to concentrate on work.
But on vacation - on this vacation in particular - I can’t get enough of him. This trip I woke back up to all the things I love about him - how patient he was with me when I wore inappropriate shoes one morning and turned grouchier with every step, how he fanned me and bought me water when I got overheated on a pell-mell dash through the heat to catch a harbor cruise, how he made me laugh at myself when I inevitably dropped food on my shirt. He spoiled me - he always spoils me - and I was nice to him, too. I laughed at his jokes and scratched his back, and we tasted each other’s dishes at dinner and talked about the food and reminisced about our honeymoon. We went on a carriage ride with our knees touching and held hands in the dark on a walking ghost tour. We petted soft little rabbits and rescued a rooster together at Magnolia Plantation; we pointed out details to each other at the gorgeously restored Nathaniel Russell house museum. One night we tried to get drunk and when that failed, we - giggling and slightly tipsy - ate dripping ice cream cones in the parking lot behind our hotel.
Though we missed our animals back home, we hated to leave this little sanctuary of fun, this pocket of time when the haze of stress and household clutter cleared enough to see how much we really love each other, how we actually can be - in spite of all appearances - on the same wavelength.
We got back home Friday evening, and we’ve been go-go-go since then, with hardly 10 solid minutes alone together. And I miss him! I heartily miss him. I didn’t want to go back to work on Monday, mostly because I didn’t want to be away from him. I’m more eager than ever to have just one job, one with flexible hours so I can be less stressed and have more time with Darwin.
Today my boss and I discussed a last-day date - it’s still three weeks away, but at least it’s in sight. Soon - I hope - we’ll have Charleston all the time.
For trip pictures, see our Charleston photoset on Flickr.
posted by Kristin | filed under Travel, Mr. and Mrs. | 7 Comments
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
It’s been a while since I’ve had any interesting purchases to show off. For one thing, I’ve been on my End of Spending kick, and for another I’ve been too busy with my two jobs and all my travels to find time for shopping.
But this weekend was the Antique Alley sale on the square in Eutaw, and I dragged Darwin along with me on Saturday. I like Antique Alley for many reasons - I like to shop in general, I like outdoor events because they’re not just about shopping but also about seeing people and having fun, and I like to support local businesses and local events.
Don’t worry - I didn’t go crazy. It helps that the house is just about furnished to the hilt now, so I can breeze right past the pricey furniture. Now I’m looking for the small stuff, the quirky accessories and art that make the house a reflection of me. (I don’t worry too much about it being a reflection of Darwin - his taxidermy deer head is safely hidden in the front bedroom).
All I bought was a lily pad lamp with pretty pinkish shades (I’ve been wanting one of these for a while), a semi-circular yellow side table (though our number of side tables now nearly matches the glut of chairs), and two “The Kaldron” yearbooks from Meridian (Mississippi) High School, one from 1914 and one from 1924.
The yearbooks are my favorite purchase this year, maybe this century.
My favorite photo from them is this one of a boys’ gymnasium class:
The write-up about the newly designated (in 1914) gym says, “The High School students, with the co-operation of the Community Young Mens’ Christian Association, have fitted up a gymnasium within the Manual Training Building for their individual pleasure, as well as for the betterment of their physical conditions … Taking turn about, each squad gets the benefit of the parallel bars, buck, horse, wrestling and basket ball game, thus bringing all muscles into play.”
The yearbooks have the requisite personal portraits, complete with senior quotes and nicknames like “Piggy” and “Skinny,” and group portraits of sports teams fitted out in outmoded uniforms and gender-divided “literary societies” full of sullen-faced boys or smiling girls.
Until now, it never occurred to me there were high school kids in 1914. I knew it as a fact, of course, but I’d never thought about what that would mean. These yearbooks hint at all the ways 1914 (and 1924) teens were just like teens today - silly, competitive, obsessed with appearance - and all the ways they were different … the boys are wearing suits in shop class, for goodness sake!
And it’s weird to think about the fact that all the people in these pictures are probably dead, that some of them probably served in World War I and some probably died in the influenza epidemic, and some got very, very old and have great-grandchildren my age running around.
Oh, I just can’t express how much I love these yearbooks. They are little treasure troves of inspiration, and each page is a delight. Maybe they will delight you, too:
