I watched the new Taylor Swift movie, Miss Americana, with my girl recently. I admittedly am not really a fan, but my girl is, so under the guise of quality time, I agreed to watch it with her. Not only did I walk away with a new-found respect for Miss Swift, I found some of what she had to say resonating with me, specifically, her perceived view that women in entertainment have to reinvent themselves regularly to stay relevant. As someone who has reinvented herself a few times over, I’d say that experience isn’t relegated to women in entertainment, I’d argue it’s something all of us as women either have or will go through at some point in our lives.
Continue readingThe Pink Notebook
Ten years ago this month, I started this blog. It was more of an experiment to see if I could keep my creative mojo around after one of my more rather alarming dry spells than anything else. The idea was that I’d make it a record of things I made, but somehow, keeping the record became yet another creative outlet for me.
Continue readingMy four legged friend.
When I first told my family they get could a dog as long as I didn’t have to be involved, I failed to fully think that through. Turns out, Betsy beagle has become my mostly companion which somehow wasn’t a surprise to anyone but myself. We even became those people who bring a dog on a college tour this fall and when I expressed surprise at this, I was generally met with ‘uh-huh’, as if we were the only ones who failed to recognize this about us.
Out with the old…
As years go, 2019 wasn’t entirely a bad one. But I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a good one either. Like any year, it had its ups and downs, celebrations and disappointments. We lived through a construction project, I had a milestone birthday and we toured colleges with our not-so-baby girl. We slide into 2020 knowing it’s going to be one filled with changes – change being the one constant you can count on in life. Having spent the last 18 years with my world revolving around being a mom, my every day is clearly about to undergo a vast shift so I’m not going to bother making any sort of sweeping declarations of what I’m going to do in 2020, beyond of course, promise you that I really am not coming back to run the orchestra poinsettia sale, so please, stop asking. Really.
Continue readingAn Oysterfest with Vows.
We went over to Urbanna for the Oyster Festival this past weekend. It had been a few years since we had been, but the beauty of Oyster Festival is that while it evolves, at heart it doesn’t change.
Continue readingFurnishing it.
With construction wrapped up on the sunroom, all that’s left is the cleaning and unpacking. Also, the reupholstering, because you simply cannot put the same old grimy furniture back in the space that you just spent so much money into getting spruced up. But, scope creep meant rolling up my sleeves and reupholstering furniture myself.
Settling the dust.
Construction has wrapped up on our little renovation project so now we are down to setting the house back to rights. Which at first glance probably seems like no big deal, but scope creep combined with the realization that the back half of the house looks so good we now want the rest of the house to match means the remaining part of the project – our portion – is bigger than we had initially realized.
Continue readingWe have a roof.
When I last reported on our back porch/sun room renovation, it looked something like this:
The Vacation where we shared a towel.
With three (!) busy summer work schedules and a house under construction, an actual, proper vacation was shoved to the back burner this year. Having spent the better part of the last year working 6 & 7 day weeks, I wanted needed a few days off. With school related activities starting just a few days after Edie came home from camp, I knew we needed to make the most of those last free days.
Ripping it off.
The thing about living in old houses is that something always needs work. The back porch was iffy when we bought the place twenty years ago. But as long as it stayed relatively intact, it was the house repair can we kicked down the road. Until one day this spring when a sizable enough chunk fell off that we realized there was no more putting off getting a new back porch. A temporary repair was made with a sheet of plywood, but clearly, the porch needed attention because someone, most likely the dog, was going to fall through it sooner rather than later.
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