Bullseye

I am freakishly addicted to Target. Their stuff is great and affordable... downright cheap sometimes. As a result, I suspect a lot of their products were probably made in Indonesia by eight year old children but hey, let's all look the other way, shall we?

I went to the new Target a few minutes from my house, which is in a less than awesome part of town and thus doesn't get a lot of traffic. They had clearance galore over there! I bought a couple throw pillows, a huge glass jar, a lamp, two Christmas presents, lots of picture frames, a clock, running clothes, and a few pieces of the Richard Chai, Go International collection. Grand total was like $100 for all of that.



Thank you Target.

Room to Work On My Double Axel

Sunday afternoon was spent doing some hardcore cleaning around the house. Matt even got in on it! We vacuumed everything, mopped everything, dusted everything. Matt also cleaned out his half of the closet and moved a lot of his stuff over to the closet in the spare bedroom. Now my dresses and shoes have room to breathe! I want to get one of those fancy California Closet systems. It can't cost that much since the closet is only about ten cubic feet...

We also did something completely unheard of and foreign to most people: We got rid of the TV in the living room! I know! GASP! What will we point all of our furniture at now?! It seemed kind of weird at first. I'd say that approximately 80% of my time at home is spent on the living room couch watching TV. But then I realized how pitiful that sort of is and I was more than happy to see it go.

So, we got rid of the entertainment cabinet and turned the living room around. I think one of Matt's favorite hobbies is rearranging furniture. He has a nice sense of flow. He should get a job as a feng shui master.

Before:



After:





And FYI: I have some awesome curtains for that window, they just haven't make it up yet.

It opens the living room up into the dining room and makes the room look twice as big. Now, when we have people over, guests sitting on the couch can see and talk to guests sitting in the dining room! Great huh? Plus, now we can slide down the hall and into the living room in our socks with a much less chance of slamming into the couch. Yes, we do that. Sock skating in your own living room is one of the great things about being a home owner.

Ringo the Dingo

Just because I love him and this picture perfectly captures his sweet little personality:

Halloween Spirit

Well, the most important thing on my list got done already this weekend, putting out some Halloween decorations.



It loses some of it's scariness with the perky little flag peaking out the back.

I want to go get some more decorations, but I want to get the cheap stuff in case it gets vandalized. And the best place for the cheap stuff is Wal-Mart. I have to bring myself to go there though. I hate Wal-Mart. However, I did one time have a old lady come up to me in a Wal-Mart and tell me that I was "cute as a button." That never happens at Target...

Now I'm definitely in the Halloween spirit. I got some stuff out, Matt and I went and saw Shelter Skelter at the Shelterbelt. Shelter Skelter is an annual Halloween themed production of one-acts. Our friend Chris E. was performing in two of them. It got me excited to watch scary movies and get dressed up. I have a great costume planned for this year. Maybe the best costume ever known to man. I'm willing to stand by that.

We also made plans with Chris to go to haunted houses in a couple of weeks. It's funny that I love haunted houses and scary movies so much, but I am terrified to watch Ghost Hunters and TAPS. Those shows genuinely scare me. We watched one a while ago, then in the middle of the night one of the frames we'd just hung fell off the wall in the office. I was terrified. I made Matt search the entire house. Ghosts are scary and I'm about 90% sure that they're real. When house buying, I viewed a house that I swear was haunted. The house just felt bad, ominous from the moment we walked in. The realtor felt it too. We went up to the second level (a converted attic) and it felt like I had an elephant sitting on my chest. It was hard to breath and I had a bad feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking over and over, "Something bad happened up here." The realtor tried opening a door to a bedroom and there was a huge bang and the door wouldn't open. Then she says, "I here someone on the other side of the door," and she turns around to me and screams at me to run. And we both ran the fuck out of that house. I was so scared I was crying.

I listen to my gut and my gut was telling me something wasn't right in that house. That's the first time I've ever experienced something like that, but Matt has lived in a couple of houses that were haunted. The house he grew up in in Florida is haunted. Him and his brothers all saw things and people in the house. His uncle and his family live there now and they've all seen people in the house too, as recently as a few months ago.

We will not be staying there when we visit Florida.

Does anyone else have ghost stories?

Weekend's To-Dos

Once again, a list of things to do this weekend that I neglect during the week:

01. Seriously, mop. Need to do this.
02. Finish 2 or 3 small design jobs that I'm sitting on.
03. Get out the Halloween stuff.
04. Go to an antique store on Leavenworth that I always used to drive by but never went into.
05. Oh yeah, call Cox.
06. Have honeymoon pics printed.
07. Finish cleaning out my office.
08. Perhaps clean out the inside of my car.
09. Put away everything in the backyard.

Office Inspiration Board

When we moved into the house, the room I claimed as "office" was painted some horrible beige color, including all the trim. Who would do that? So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to fix it. I repainted all the trim white and painted the walls a color that I have been dying to paint a room since I was sixteen but was never allowed to: dark gray. Ya. Better on paper than in life. Apparently, I thought my dad was lying when he told me that painting a room a dark color makes it look smaller. The room went from beige wasteland to industrial coat closet.

I love the color but the room needs some help. My desk is metal and glass, I have some wire storage racks, and my computer is a sleek white iMac. I'm kind of digging the accidental industrial look. I want to warm it up though. I bought some black and white curtains at Target that have a chandelier and damask pattern on them. (I can't find them on the site or I'd link to them.) I also hung up a couple French movie posters and now I have an idea for the room: Faux-French Pop Industrial. Is that anything? Can I do that? An interior decorator, I am not. I just make it up as I go along.

I made my very first inspiration board to illustrate:



Items from Target, Pier 1, CB2 and Office Depot.

I want to stick with gray, black, white and pink. I think it's kind of hip and graphic. Right now the room is full of junk and I'm a wee bit broke from vacation, so it might take a while to actually decorate the room. Everything in the picture maybe totals $1000 ($400 for a chair? Really Pier 1?) so obviously it's just inspiration. I want to hunt around for some thrift crap that I can fix up on the cheap. There's a possibility though that I need that mouse immediately. And the hot pink desk chair. My current desk chair is a $2 metal garage sale chair with no padding. Hurts the butt.

It really excites me to have an idea finally of what I want the office to look like. I'm kind of anal about my workspace and I find it hard to get work done at home when I'm distracted by my surroundings. Not having an office was rough. My last "office" was a kitchen table in Matt's and my bedroom at the Dundee house. So not conducive to my productivity.

Things I'm Excited About Today

01. Oscar Watch! - It's here! The time of year when all the good stuff comes out. The Oscar ceremony in itself is boring and anticlimactic for the most part. It's the tidal wave of great movies being released that I love. Critical reviews are also really strong this time of year, so it's usually pretty easy to narrow down the really great movies worth seeing in the theaters. There's nothing I hate more than paying $10 to see a bad movie. On my list so far:

• Flash Of Genius
• Rachel Getting Married
• The Wrestler
• Appaloosa

And although they likely aren't going to be Oscar favorites, I also really want to see Religulous and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

02. Junking! - Junking is basically antiquing for crappy stuff. You go around looking for crap you can fix up, then you haggle on the price and tell everyone later on what a great deal you got. (After it's all fixed up and pretty of course.) Nebraska photographer, Becky Novacek, is a marvelous junker. Just look at her house! Check out all that great stuff she's got!

03. Project Runway! - It's down to the last four on Project Runway and it's getting intense. The preview for tonight's show featured everyone crying. I love it. People crying on reality TV is wildly entertaining. Jeff and I are going to gather tonight to watch it together just like the good old days. (FYI! Be careful if you go over to the shows page on Bravo's website. They have spoiler pics up of the runway show from fashion week. MY EYES! OH MY EYES! I saw something I should not have over there...)

04. Feta's! - Going there for lunch. I plan on gorging myself with hummus and pita bread.