I spent a good chunk of my Sunday afternoon applying Doc Marten's Wonder Balsam to every pair of DMs in the house. I also added some Doc Marten's Dubbin (which should help to weather proof the leather) to my lace up brown boots and I'm debating whether or not the new fleece lined boots need some too.
The tin didn't have very specific instructions on how to apply the balsam, but I gather from the internet that you rub on a good amount and leave it to really soak into the leather overnight, the next day you wipe off any excess with a soft cloth. I'm really quite looking forward to doing that when I get home tonight, the boots look so nice when they are all shiny and properly cared for.
It occured to me this morning that I had not yet decorated the house for Christmas, but at the same time I'm right in the middle of reading "Miss Minimalist" (on my Kindle) and it just feels wrong to glitter the whole house.
So I compromised and hung up the faux vintage ornaments I bought in Boston last year on the twig arrangement from Halloween, then I added in a couple of other ornaments to balance those out and that's that.
I love the faux vintage ornaments almost more then I did when I bought them last year, they are delightfully tacky and rather adorable in their own very plastic way. Doc C is a particular fan of the angels, who are all holding their hands out in front of them in the manner of fisherman describing the one-that-got-away. They also all have black eyes, which gives them quite a creepy alien-being ambience.
Finally, on the dining table, I've put up the sad little Christmas tree beloved by Charlie Brown and all those who get a bit tearful when watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) ...*cough*Doc*cough*...
Having tidied and re-organised the mezzanine before the Halloween party (although I'm not really sure why now because it's not like anyone went up there), we had a nice bit of open space that was just begging to be used. Three of my bookshelves are there and it's probably the warmest place in the house, so it made sense to make it into a designated reading area; which obviously required seating.
I fell in love with this chair from Urban Outfitters, not least because it looks like it fell off the set for "Mad Men", and was even more enamored when one of the colour choices was inexplicably reduced in price to $199.99. Stylish and cheap? For me! On pay day I went on-line to order it, and was annoyed to find that despite there being free shipping on anything over $50 that my chair had been tagged with a $35 overweight fee - Well, this threw my very carefully calibrated purchasing budget for the month right out of the window, so I decided to spend Saturday searching the local antiques shops for an alternative.
The very first shop I went to, out of all three in town, had a very plain upholstered rocking chair outside that I liked straight away, but I carried on looking just to be thorough and then came back to it. Then I called Doc C to come and look at it (oddly he hadn't fancied trawling the antiques shops for hours, so he went to his office to write job applications), he haggled a bit on the price because it does need to be reupholstered (I don't think we'll have the spare cash to get it professionally reupholstered and re-sprung any time soon, so I'm probably going to DIY a temporary cover to hide that faded green nobbly fabric) and then we went to lunch to think about it. After lunch I paid $135 for it and stuffed it in the back of the Mini, so now we have a reading chair. Yay!
The cats disagree; they think we have a new cat chair and one or the other has been sitting in it pretty much constantly since we brought it home. I think this is an excellent sign that I chose well, because, as we all know, cats are discerning connoisseurs of comfort.
Halloween may be over for another year, but I still have photos to show you!
Bwa-ha-ha!
The Dessert Buffet of Halloween! Quake with fear at the coconut macaroons, almond cupcakes with chocolate icing, pumpkin tarlets, spiced butter cookies and chocolate frogs!
The Flamingoes of Halloween! In plastic champagne glasses no less!
The Dozen Battery Powered Candles of Halloween!
As the weather gets colder Edith gets distinctly livelier and wants to play more, she's currently loving playing "reaching through the stairs" and will play for as long as she has a human opponent.
Last week I bought some very elegant willow branches to arrange in a vase with a few whisps of cobweb, but it really didn't have much of a visual impact. Yesterday it occured to me that I wanted to make it a much bigger, and wilder.
So I went outside to collect small fallen branches from the maple tree at the front of our house, and added those to my arrangement. It looks as though I have a winter tree growing out of my bookcase now.
That's much more what I was hoping for!
This is the bird feeder (that's what it was labelled anyway - but I think it makes a better bird bath than a bird feeder, because surely it's just going to fill up with water when it rains?) I bought in Old Salem yesterday, the shell is about the size of a hand and the little metal bird is probably a little bit smaller than life size. It was only ten bucks! Score!
So far the birds have totally ignored it, but that's hardly surprising as it has nothing in it.
This is right next to our now empty seed holder, which Doc filled up on Thursday and which was then systematically emptied by the cheeky chipmunk that lives under our house. This morning I saw a squirrel hanging on the empty feeder - Sorry Nutkin, too slow! The chipmunk is quick and efficient!
Being animal-loving softies we are secretly rooting for the chipmunk, and so we didn't chase it away or remove the feeder when we saw what it was up to. Of course that doesn't mean we are going to refill that feeder any time soon, the chipmunk has more than enough to last it for quite some time and the birds won't really need our help until it snows.
Sadly, there is a down-side to being animal loving softies. Apparently when you rescue a mouse from certain death at the jaws of your cat and release it from the front door, what the ungrateful wretch then does is run round to the back of the house and climb back in through the tumble dryer duct. I know this because I saw a mouse sitting in the middle of the downstairs bathroom when I got up this morning, and I am pretty damn certain it was the same mouse from last night.
I called Edith, who naturally ignored me completely, but when I got her and carried her into the bathroom she pretty soon figured out what I was trying, in my moronic human way, to tell her. The mouse slipped away under the washing machine, and Edith so has been on high alert ever since. She has been patrolling downstairs and checking all the likely places a mouse might hide, including a very close examination of under the sofa. She is very thorough.
If I were this mouse I would get the hell out of here, but, seeing as it came right back to where it was caught last night and then just sat in the open where even a dopey human could see it, I'm assuming it's Pinky and not The Brain.
There are some mornings when both of your precious darling cats have thrown up in various places, and, whilst you clean that up, the kitchen fills with smoke because your breakfast bagel has burnt in the toaster.
It is particularly important on those mornings to take a deep breath, and also to appreciate a moment of unexpected beauty when you walk around a corner to see misty sunlight shining on autumn leaves.
This weekend I made art - Well, I cut up a t-shirt with a print I really liked, stapled bits of it to canvases of various different sizes, and then hung them on the wall. That's art, right? Sort of?
Eh, whatever! I now have a panel of the TARDamask Threadless t-shirt hanging up on our bedroom wall right underneath a largish crack in the plaster. It couldn't be much better really could it? (Don't worry Moth, I darkened the crack in this photo to make it a bit more prominent.)
As you can see I also made some mini panels with just one TARDIS on them, this portrait one is ok, but I really like the square minis better because the whole design will fit diagonally rather neatly. I put one of those up too, on the other side of the bathroom door, so we have TARDIS whizzing off all over the place. That seems much more appropriate than them being entirely confined to nice neat rows, don't you think?
I still have half of the t-shirt left, it was a front and back all-over print, so I could make a larger panel, or a cushion maybe.
It being the first day of October Doc C has allowed me to kick off the Halloween decorating - It also helps that we got paid yesterday, because I needed one or two things to get this party started!
I'd already arranged the dried rosebuds, assorted foliage and ribbon (which all came from the lovely bunch of flowers I was given by a colleague who does weddings - So this is a recycled bridesmaid's bouquet!) onto the vine wreath, but it needed more. Specifically it needed moss, fake cobwebs and plastic spiders. The plastic spiders are rings that come in packs of 50 from the dollar store, but I had to get 2 packs because they ar a mix of the black spiders that I wanted and bright orange spiders which did not really work for this particular project. I wanted to make this look like a really lush wreath had been left on the door for years and was disentegrating, but was still just about being held together by the cobwebs -Actually the rosebuds kept falling out when left to their own devices, so the cobweb really is integral to this project.
With Edith's help (how do people manage to do any sort of DIY craft project without a cat around to helpfully try and eat everything?), it took me about forty minutes to get the whole thing finished and now it's on our front door.
I then spent a couple of hours watching old episodes of "CSI" and cutting the rings off the backs of the orange plastic spiders that I deemed totally unrealistic for the wreath. I then poked a whole in the back with my handy bradle and then stuck a cocktail stick in each one. I now have orange spider cocktail sticks, perfect for my Halloween party snacks and drinks! Thanks Martha!
Much as the end of Winter is signalled by a specific Groundhog leaving it's burrow, so too is the on-set of colder weather heralded by Edith Cavell-Cat's re-discovery of the cat tower.
At least, it is in our house.
Autumn! Woot! Woot!
When we are at home, going about our tedious human business, occaisionally one of us will notice that there is a grey pool of The Malaise on the floor and the cry will go out "Oh no! Edith has Flopped!" to which the other person in the house will reply "Oh no! Edith flopped? Whatever shall we do?"
It is always Edith, probably because Nancy is so convinced that the entire world is out to get her that her little cat brain is full of conspiracy theories at all times and so she is always on alert; Edith knows the world loves her, and sometimes she finds this beyond tedious. yawn. She is the very picture of boredom in these moments, just staring blankly into space and generally behaving as if sighing were far too much effort. Usually if you throw a ball for her, or try to get her interested in one of her other toys, she'll just ignore the toy and give you a look that quite clearly says that you do not understand her.
I suspect that Edith in this mood is probably excellent experience for parenting teenagers. I should rent her out.
After breakfast (see previous post for details) we fed our friends' cats, which is always nice because they are so very pleased to see someone after a night alone - My Converse got a particular thorough loving from Molly Cat, but they are still cats so as soon as we had fulfilled our function and filled their food bowls we were ignored.
Doc C and I then went shopping, and I confirmed my suspicion that I have indeed gone down an entire size of jeans. This naturally called for trying on jeans in Levi's (even though I can't wear Levi's because my hips untuck the pockets somehow), Gap, J. Crew, Banana Republic and Old Navy. I bought very skinny (and very cheap - $10!) black jeans and wide legged blue jeans. Score.
We also needed stuff for the house, we bought a classic bamboo steamer, a huge stock pot and some nice firm cushions for the sofa.
Doc C and I compromised on these - He chose the floral (Ralph Lauren...) and I wanted the two London monuments (No name designer...). I'm usually skeptical about overtly British design elements, but these stark graphicsare so very fun and they look great; even more importantly they are really comfortable too.
Our new clock arrived! It looks like a cross between a vintage starburst clock and one of those cool molecular models made from huge beads and dowling rods.
Doc C collected out new clock from the post office this morning and brought it to me at work because he knew I would be super-excited. The packaging was a corrugated cardboard box big enough for me to hide in. Doc had to put both seats down in the car to fit it in!
We both thought, based on the packaging, that the clock was an awful lot bigger than we had expected. Had we mis-read the dimensions and ordered Clock-Zilla by mistake?
Well, no. Inside the huge box was another one which had the dimensions of a large pizza box, and the clock was inside that. It's Clock-Zuki, a much less intimidating time piece all together.
I immediately unpacked it and hung it on my office wall, firstly because it is such a great clock I wanted to bask in it's starbursty goodness. Secondly because the pizza-sized box had been in the me-sized box without any sort of packing materials, and you just know that it must have been tossed around a fair amount on it's way; so frankly I wanted to be sure the clock worked before we took it home and had to move furniture to hang it up.
Long story short, the clock works perfectly and we put it up above the TV as soon as we got home.
It looks great!
(We ordered the clock from Modcloth.com by the way, and they have more in stock. Not to mention all the other things I want to buy from them.)
How cute is Nancy? So cute! Look at her all curled up on a dining chair! Look at her little white nose, her little white paw and just a hint of white tummy! Adorbs!
And she's such a good cat too - We have yet to catch Nancy on the table, which is, of course, forbidden to cats.
Edith on the other hand has been on the table at least twice to my knowledge and displeasure. It's far cuter when Edith sits on the three-legged stool next to the front door. I put it there to leave things on that we needed to take with us when we left the house, such as Netflix DVDs or keys, but Edith likes to sit there so she can greet us when we get home. It puts her at the perfect height for fuss.
I was very pleased with myself when I realised that our wire shelves would fit perfectly under the stairs and be easily accessible from the kitchen. Perfect! What was less than perfect was the amount of dust and cat hair that fell on them, necessitating the washing of anything that was stored on them before use.
So Doc C decided to move the shelves out from under the stairs, and onto the narrow wall between the downstairs bathroom and the study. This is considerably less dusty, but it does mean that the shelves are pretty much the first thing you see when you walk through the door.
I've re-homed most of the baking trays in a cupboard, and tried to make this more pleasing to the eye with arrangements of objects and the odd pop of graphics. Oh, and Disco Chicken, of course.
I still don't really like it very much though. Suggestions?
Monday. Ugh.
Fortunately we don't have to dwell on the horror that is the first day of summer school classes, we have much more pleasant things to consider; such as our new TV cabinet.
I love being able to close the doors and shut away all of the wires, gadgets and accessories, it makes the whole room look tidier straight away. On top of that it's actually got a slimmer footprint than the hideous tables, so it takes up less floor space giving us about a foot more space in the living room.
Right now the only minor problems are the cats, who are both, naturally, fascinated by the new piece of furniture, all the more so because it usually has closed doors. Closed doors are an anathema to cats, and so whenever the cabinet is open both girls are drawn to it like a magnet. They didn't give a toss about the PS3 or the cable box before, this is purely because of the doors.
(By the way the images on the TV are from a game called "Red Dead Redemption", it's set in the wild west and I believe Doc C is currently hunting bad guys for the bounty on their heads)
This is our new dining table! Is it not magnificent?
Doc called me at mid-day and he'd been able to borrow a truck, but we had to go right then. So we did, and there was a parking space right outside the shop, which was remarkable, and very fortunate indeed. It turns out that chrome and laminate dining tables are quite heavy, as are chrome and vinyl chairs, particularly when carried in stacks of two.
We got the table set up at home and then had to race back to work, so I am really looking forward to playing house when I get home. I may have a tea party with the cats, just so I have an excuse to set a couple of places.
Now I know you'll be looking at the photos and thinking to yourself - "That is an epic dining set for $250, but does it really go with the $50 tartan sofa? Or what about that mustard coloured armchair and ottoman?" I cannot lie, it all clashes horribly.
Fortunately, after three progressively uncomfortable years, we already had plans to change the sofa this summer, so now we can try and find one to co-ordinate with the table. I also loathe the tables that the TV are on, they are beyond hideous and I want them gone, so they are also on the hit list to be replaced with red lockers from Ikea. Whilst we're in Ikea I think we'll try out some armchairs for the living room, and move the current armchair and ottoman to the study or the mezzanine.
In other words, this summer we are not planning to travel anywhere or eat anything other than beans on toast because we are resigned to spending all our money on getting furniture that is actually comfortable and looks co-ordinated.
I tied the white wooden letters that Mum gave me to my bedside lamp, by way of an experiment and I was pleased with the effect; so I've also embellished Doc C's lampshade (as you can see neither our bedside tables nor lamps match precisely, but I quite like that even if it wasn't exactly a design choice).
His decoration is a badge that I bought for him in Philadelphia.
It says "Handsome" just above a cartoon devil.
I pinned it onto Doc C's bag when he wasn't looking, but it was taken off pretty much the second he noticed it, because he thinks it is inaccurate. I've attached it to the lampshade whilst he's out this evening, so I don't know if it will be suffered to stay there or if this will be a fun new game where I pin it to something and see how long it is before Doc takes it off.
By the way, I attached it to the lampshade by making two pairs of holes, one at the top and one at the bottom, with a light weight paper awl (I had to buy that, how often have you found yourself thinking "Damn it! this awl is far too heavy duty for paper!"?) and then I strung a length of heavy cotton thread through in a loop. The badge just is then pinned around the cords, and can be slid up or down quite easily. I also tried it out with larger badges and that worked too, so I could imagine it would be possible to have a whole column of badges if you so desired.
The cats are loving the warmer weather, because that means we have the windows open and they get a whole new world of smells drifting in to them.
Mum gave me these diamond bunnies magnets for my birthday about five years ago, and I think they go particularly well with the "Irony is Not Dead" magnet on our fridge door.
I have a huge cup of green tea with my breakfast every morning, and when I saw that Whitards had the same style of tea cup on sale I asked Mum to buy me a couple more. That was about six months ago, and they travelled back with me in my hand luggage yesterday.
I love how well the new cups co-ordinate with the colours of the original cup's stars. The added bonus is the new Union Jack tea-cosy being in a satisfyingly similarly colour-way.
Gorgeous.
Slices of Marks and Spencer's Battenberg cake arranged on a china cake-stand from John Lewis.
Happy sigh.
Mum had a meeting this morning so she took me into Norwich with her, and turned me loose for two hours. It's always disconcerting to realise how much a city has changed, but I could still find my way around without too much difficulty.
One of my first stops was Waterstones, where they had a Dalek plonked next to the escalator apparently browsing the Classics section. He was suitably grumpy, and threatened to exterminate me, which was thrilling. There was a sign taped to the front saying to please be gentle with him because he was very old, but I don't know why he was there or if he was an original cast member or anything really. Still, a DALEK!
Then I went to the bank to see if I could remember what the PIN for my cashcard might be. Now sometimes when one is writing a blog one has to consider the likely audience, and I know this week that Doc C will be reading this, so I'm almost reluctant to blog about this... But I thought it was funny, so bugger it!
I put my card into the ATM, and typed in the PIN that I thought was most likely. The machine happily brought up the screen asking how much money I wanted, I decided on £50, whereupon it told me by card had expired and spat the thing out. Oh. Hmmm. Good thing Doc C gave me his cashcard and PIN before I left, eh? That worked beautifully, so I do have access to British currency whilst I'm here. Hoorah! Iknow that Doc will now fret about what i would have done had he not lent me his card, but I'd have been fine. If necessary I was thinking I could have transfered the money into Mum's account and she could get it out for me. No problem, just a touch more complicated.
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