January craft update

When the weather is cold outside, some of my favorite things to do include snuggling up indoors to catch up on my favorite tv shows (my current ones are Lost and True Blood), or going upstairs to the loft to work on a sewing project.

Projects I've finished recently:

A purse, thanks to this pattern:

It is reversible! Here's one side with a gathered look and a gray yoke:



And inside out, it's all the same pattern, and there's a pocket.



Next time i might make one with 2 coordinating fabrics but this worked out with what i already had at home.

This weekend I also went to the task of organizing all that pesky paperwork and mail that piles up. I always find random coupons, so i thought there had to be something i could make to keep all of that neatly in my purse. Tada...




And inside:




And lastly... After we took down our tree the other weekend, I made little sachets of pine needles to stick in drawers. Easy, eco friendly, and way cute.
There you have it folks!

Xmas tree

Step one: buy tree. Balsam fir.


Step two: wrangle tree into stand.



Step three: put some balls on it



My favorites are the sweet billiard ball ornaments from Target!

have Ikea, will shop

Ikea: to some, it's a shangri-la of cheap modern furniture, to others, it's a personal hell of self-assembly. You know you're in that first group when you have memorized the names of most of the pieces in the store, and even attempt to pronounce them in some sort of swedish.

Ever since my first trip to Ikea Woodbridge the summer before I started college, I have managed to acquire, at some point or another, what I estimate to be at least half of the items from their catalogue. Now that I live in the DC area, I have both the College Park and Woodbridge locations within driving distance, and that my friends, is the subject of this week's blog post. En blog om Ikea!

A good friend from college came to visit the other day. We went to Ikea (her suggestion, strangely enough), and we spent a few hours in the store, sitting on everything and rating it from "excellent" to "not terrible" to "terrible."

So, I think, that with my borderline-obsessive knowledge of Expedit bookcases and Malm nightstands, there is really only one thing left to do.

I will offer up my services to the public as a personal Ikea shopper. Hate browsing through the showroom and self serve aisles? Not a problem, I will do it for you. I might even assemble the pieces for you if I'm feeling feisty. Not only can I tell you the price and model of most of the items in the store, but since I have tested many of them personally in my own home, I can make a recommendation on whether you should buy a certain piece or not.

The Mikael desk line? Highly recommended. It's roomy and has plenty of shelving options. The Aneboda bed, on the other hand, is a no-go. It's squeaky and has rough corners. The Komplement shelving devices? Yes. So useful. The Lerberg shelf? Surprisingly versatile, and won't rust if you put it out on your patio. The tylosand sofa? No, it looks OK in the store, but it'll look saggy in a year, and it's harder to re-arrange than it looks. The Dignitet hanging wire for pictures and curtains? That thing should be banned, it's terribly difficult to install and cutting the wire is dangerous.

And as for my friend? She has kindly offered to marry the heir to the Ikea fortune.

New loft in the Sprung

I've been busy for the past month getting settled into my new apartment. It's a loft in sunny downtown Silver Spring, which is just across the DC-MD line. It's awesome because it has a huge ceiling, two stories, and a balcony overlooking the pool. Here's my living room:

Featuring... the Compromise Couch! Party (microsuede) on the top, business (leather) on the bottom. Slouch out with your couch out?

The dining chairs were ones that my boyfriend found in his former basement for free. I painted them and put new fabric on the cushions. That was a whopping total of $35. Just for comparison purposes, this is the "Before" picture:

Now I'm just looking for some artwork/interesting piece to put over the sofa, and a new entertainment center. Any ideas?

In DC events, I went to Screen on the Green this past week. It's an annual free movie event on the national Mall on Mondays during the summer. There's a huge movie screen and people gather on the grass to watch. They generally play older movies. This week, they were showing Dog Day Afternoon (a bank robbery movie with Al Pacino), which I unfortunately could not really get into. But, it continues for two more showings this summer.

Jet Lagging

Upon my return from San Francisco/L.A. (was there for a few days):

Jet lag is a beast - and I'm already an insomniac. Boy, am I out of it. I got on the wrong bus today going home from work, and it took me 30 minutes before I looked up from my newspaper and realized my mistake.

MICE!! IN MY APARTMENT! AAAH!!! What the HECK? I spotted 3 mice in my place. This is the first time I have seen ANY kind of pest in my apartment. I make sure to keep the place reasonably clean, too. I wipe off my counters like there's no tomorrow. The first time I saw one of the mice, I thought I was imagining something running into my kitchen. The second time, I thought it was weird that I would imagine the same thing twice. The third time, when I saw a mouse staring up at me from beneath the futon in the living room, I knew it was not the jet lag playing tricks on me. Gross!

To make matters worse, I got a letter from my apartment building company, Southern Management, a few months ago saying in order to cut costs, they would not be doing any more preventative mouse maintenance and would instead be doing extermination on an as-needed basis. GREAT, THANKS A LOT, SOUTHERN MANAGEMENT. I now have a mouse problem. I'm so glad my rent is being used wisely, as in renovating the lobby instead of preventing rodent issues. Every time I walk by one of those new faux-African sculptures in the new lobby, I'll remember how many mice could live because of it.

Sigh. OK, guess I'll be doing more cleaning after work tomorrow and figuring a better storage solution for my food. I'm not going to be encouraging this infestation if I can help it.

I'm sure I had other, less complainatory (not a word) items to talk about, but this whole jet lag this has really taken my brain for a loop.

In other news, the cherry blossom festival is coming up soon in DC, and the weather is finally getting warmer. And the DC bus driver who beat up McGruff got fired. Hooray!

GRE

Studying for the GRE to take this Saturday. I'm a little sick of vocab flashcards and 30-60-90 triangles. 

Today's "This really grinds my gears" moment - The PowerPrep GRE cd. You could say it makes me feel, hmm, what's a good GRE word? Irascible. There ya go. The CD (or the version of the program on the website) doesn't work on a Mac or on Windows Vista 64-bit. And when it does work, the screen resolution is like 640 by whatever. If I have to pay $140 to take a test, I deserve a forwards-compatible program to practice with. Luckily, my roommate is letting me borrow her computer tomorrow to use the CD. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will actually work.

Also, my neighbor is really, REALLY loud. Loves to shout at his TV while watching sports games. Occasionally I hear banging on the wall. He's a nice enough guy, but he's mentally/developmentally challenged, so I think he has no idea how loud he is. Which stinks, because I understand the situation and wouldn't want to get him "kicked out", but at the end of the day (literally - the noise often continues past midnight), he's still way too loud.  That's the dilemma - do you continue to try to be compassionate and understanding about it, or do you take the insensitive approach and complain about it to the landlord? It's times like these when the "quiet and comfortable living environment" clause in a lease just doesn't help out. 

In other news, things are going really well. I went to a really good Power Yoga class earlier this week, have been making more delicious recipes from my new cookbook, and am getting closer to finishing that sweater I've been knitting off and on for about a year now. WOW, that was the biggest dose of estrogen I have ever injected into a sentence. I also successfully wired some virtual reality equipment with a sound system this week. There, I feel better. 

Bewilderment, A Mattress, and a Steak.

Many of you out there have had quirky roommates. Some of you would call them "weird" or "a little strange" or just plain "crazy." Maybe they like to occasionally swipe a bit of your peanut butter now and then.

But all of these terms would not be appropriate words for my current selection of A-list housing companions. Here's a sampling of the bizarre interactions I have witnessed and/or been subjected to over the past few months. Such as:

The Mythical Roommate:

This roommate defies all definition or explanation, because he doesn't really live there. Some say it's because he lives with his girlfriend 99% of the time. I say the dog ate him. We're sending out a search party. And then I'm annexing his room.

The Non-Mythical Roommates:

These roommates certainly DO exist. They are very real indeed. They sleep in my house, they eat in my house. Once I even walked in on two of them sleeping, or not sleeping, on a mattress in my basement while going to get my laundry. The funny thing is, they don't actually pay rent here and I'm not sure what their names are, other than "The guy I didn't recognize who half-heartedly nodded at me once while I walked into the kitchen for a glass of milk." But I think they somehow know my other roommates, which must make them my roommates by default, according to my lease.

The "Guys Just Wanna Have Fun" roommate: 

"Don't you wish you could just be in college again and get hammered every day and do nothin'?" is this guy's motto. Imagine my surprise when I overheard him say this, because I assumed that's what he already did. Dreams do come true after all.

The Nonverbal Roommate:

This roommate doesn't talk. When feeling especially friendly, Nonverbal Roommate has been known to let out a grunt or two. He has a strict rule about speaking or grunting with friends and visitors. The number of times he acknowledges someone is inversely proportional to the number of times they have come over. So a frequent visitor, such as my boyfriend, actually attains a negative score of having spoken to Nonverbal Roommate. 

One night, boyfriend and I are about to cook a steak inside on a cold, blustery, below-freezing wintry eve in February. Nonverbal Roommate comes in and says in all sincerity, "We got propane for the grill if you want to cook that outside." 

Strangely enough, I'm not sure whether my bewilderment was more because he talked or because he suggested grilling a steak and freezing it at the same time.