I knew it was a possibility, simply by the time of year. It’s hurricane season. It’s the Caribbean. 1+1=2. But even then, no one really ever knows what’s going to happen. That’s the beauty of weather, right? Unpredictability.

Okay, beauty is a strong word.

Anyway, I’d kept saying this trip wasn’t really a vacation. Not so much in that it wasn’t time away in a beautiful place with lovely people, but that it wasn’t planned or anticipated for like your average trip. I primarily came to take care of the dogs, as I have several times in the past, and everything else is icing on the proverbial cake.

It’s just this time, it wasn’t really icing at all. Or, rather, instead of icing being sun, sand, and perfect days it was more so a new experience, people coming together after a storm, people caring about me and checking in, and about reconfirming what I’ve always said: it was no mistake that I was born in a time and place where there is electricity and plumbing. I appreciate those two things in a way I have not in a long time.

All in all, the area I was in (St. John, US Virgin Islands) is okay. There were no major tragedies or loss. Some surrounding islands had it worse, and I’m thinking of them as they recover. The photos are pretty sad. The sight of ruined, broken boats always breaks my heart especially.

There is, of course, my personal experience of the storm, the whole other part of the story to tell. But, for now I’m just concentrating on getting home, so grateful that it wasn’t as bad as it couldve been, and praying for those further north that still have to deal with this storm and any that may be to come.

I think the fastest way to start something you’re planning might just be to tell the Internet you’re going to do it.  In the last couple weeks I’ve repainted a room, rearranged furniture, found new furniture at thrift shops and yard sales, spray painted photo frames and accessories, and gotten estimates on flooring.  And it’s all because of the Internet. Or something like that.

I decided to start in my bedroom, for a couple of reasons. First, the room itself has the fewest things I wanted to change, and second, I wholeheartedly believe just as important as starting a project in your home is that you have a place to get the hell away from it. For me, in my small house, it’s going to be my bedroom.  Truth be told I could go crazy on that room, adding closet doors to the closet “area” to make it a walk-in, recover the ceiling (who ever was the person that thought popcorn ceilings were cool was friggin’ high in the 70’s, I’ll tell you that much), move a doorway, and change the flooring. BUT, this is still the same $17 project I set out to do a couple weeks ago, and so we paint!

Well, I painted, and the walls that have been white for seven years—please don’t ask me why—now have color. It’s a neutral color, but still color. I had a throw pillow on the bed that I’ve always loved and I matched it and that was that.

Here’s a photo, just for fun, but sorry the entire room is just not ready to photograph yet:

Second, I needed to replace some art.  I moved my long yet lean, huge, solid oak dresser out from the wall and it now sits at the foot of the bed. I know that sounds weird, but man is this a space saver, and one day I’ll share a photo of that, too. When my back forgives me.  But anyway, now that the dresser is in the middle of the room, it can no longer hold it’s attached bureau mirror, which is fine by me as I tend to kind of dislike them anyway.  Too matchy matchy.  Anyway, so out the mirror goes which means I have walls to cover.

I had these two smaller frames on the wall that held pieces of a print that I chopped up one day in my early twenties when I decided I liked it’s Parisian theme, but not that much:

Now those two frames hold photos I’ve taken.  This picture is a little blurry and hastily taken, but it gives the general idea and shows the colors that I’m incorporating into the room:

Would you believe, of all the photos I’ve taken, I have none of them on the walls in my home?  There’s something wrong with that, isn’t there? So that’s another goal of mine with this project. Your own stuff should be in your home. Duh.

Here are the actual photos, for your viewing amusement:

And finally, because I now have at least one wall that needs a pretty good piece of statement SOMETHING to occupy it, I will leave you with a little glimpse of what I came up with. To some it may be obvious what I did, to others it may not. I will tell you this much, the entire project cost under $7 and will be fun with what I’m planning for that wall, and that makes my budget-weary self really pleased.

After all of this, you might be starting to pick up on the color in the room, or the accent color as the case may be. It all started after staring at a blanket my sister made for me a few years ago. I’ll share photos of it next time, but when she gave it to me I remember her saying “these are all colors that remind me of you perfectly” and I thought, wow, that is what the bedroom should do for me, too.

In the next week, though, I am afraid I won’t be around much. I get to get away a little bit, and I am so thankful! And, coincidentally, those colors that are “perfectly me” will be all around!

Thanks for playing along.

Often in the last few months, people have asked me why I still have a blog.  Honestly, it’s been a question on my mind, too.  At the end of the day, I always decide it’s still something I want in my life, but it’s hard to explain that to other people.  I don’t seem to have much to say, and not nearly as frequently as I used to. Life is fine, good even, but only in the most boring of ways. And, at thirty, five years after I started this blog, I feel like a different person. Not a new person, just a person who doesn’t have a need to share like I used to.  How many times could I write about the same things?  Nothing is new.

Since I quit my job last November, nearly nine whole months ago, I feel as though I’ve gone through every emotional stage a voluntarily unemployed to mostly unemployed to temporarily employed  to questionably employed person can go through. I have felt great, panicked, hopeful, panicked, optimistic, panicked, depressed, and finally sort of settled. Most days I am not sure if that settled feeling comes from acceptance or just plain being tired of feeling so much. We’ve all exhausted our brains wondering and worrying about a situation put in front of us, right?  Try exhausting your brain when there’s absolutely nothing in front of you. It becomes pointless in ways you never knew were possible before.

And boring.  Really, really boring.

So sometimes I do wonder why I keep this site. It could fade away, sort of like many other things have in the last year, and life would go on. But that, right there, is sort of the point.  Life would go on. My life, yes, but also the lives of everyone I get to keep up with here. People, real people. Real friends. Friends who take me seriously and genuinely care and write words that tell me so. Some I have hugged in person, and some I still have not yet.  When I started writing blog posts five years ago, I didn’t even consider that possibility. I didn’t consider there was this whole community of people out there who literally would help me through some of the hardest times of my adult life. I didn’t consider there were people out there that would be so openly, genuinely willing to share in the joy in my life.

And while there were a lot of blogs then, there are so very many now. So many more than I’ll ever know, than I’ll ever see. I wonder what those people who start blogs now are thinking? I wonder if they’re actually shooting for something that just came to me by complete surprise? I wonder if they’ll ever know how cool it is to look back on five years of writing and see some of the very same names today that you saw in that very first year?

It has been such an unexpected but treasured privilege to share here, and that is not something I’m ready to give up right now. Not until I get to live next door to every last one of you or, at the very least, hug you.

Have you ever wanted to change things in your home? Like, just about everything? And you felt like if you didn’t make these changes, if you didn’t make things “better” then your life pretty much wasn’t going to go anywhere ever again? That is how I feel right now.

Alright, that’s dramatic. I like where I live.  When I stop and think about my house as compared to some dream house I may have pictured in my mind, there are a thousand differences and at the same time, none at all. Home is what you make it and I’m blessed to have it. Even if my neighbors occasionally think they are budding rap stars.  What’s really going on is there are a couple of things I cannot stand about my little piece of property and when I set out to improve those things, well a new part of the world I’d only admired from afar before now set up shop in my brain. And now, I cannot stop thinking and having ideas and being inspired.  Other than love, I think inspiration is probably the only other emotion over which we have no control.  It strikes and we have little choice in the matter.

And so my mind has been taken over by decor blogs and visits to the hardware store and I am finally cracking open all those design magazines I’ve had for years. I am not sure I ever knew why I wanted these stacks of magazines in my life, I only knew that some day, I would want them. And now that day is here.

But!  There’s always a but, right?  With my new-found inspiration surrounding my home, I have not yet found a spare income source to come with it. So, I have all these ideas and plans and a budget that’s almost too small to be called a budget.  If I were developing a tag line for this project it would be something like “Watch as I makeover my home, for seventeen dollars!”  Nonetheless, I’m going to go for it. I honestly believe that when you feel good about the space you live in every day, your entire life benefits.  And I am sure there are design-types out there going “um, duh” right now as this isn’t a revelation for most people, and yes those design-types will no doubt put me to shame.  But I’ll share it anyway, because I’m inspired to change things and talking about it is the only way I know how to start.

In the meantime, here are a few inspirational shots I’ve found that might keep me headed in the right direction:

With these you can see (hopefully) the direction I’m sort of going. Casual. Light. White. Cozy. Slight bit of beach but not, like, on the beach. Warm. Inviting.    Okay, so I need more refining.  But if you think you can help, please share.  In the meantime, I’m going to work on photos of what I’m living in now. As soon as I organize it. Or burn everything, because that’s easier.

Extra credit: Do you have a favorite design blog you frequent?  Maybe one that is less popular, but incredible?  Please share!

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall, and wondering if the brick sitting on my head was ever going to go away.  I know it’ll generate some eye rolling when I say this, but I think there’s a reason I was sick this week. I think there’s a reason for everything, of course, but as I stared at the wall yesterday trying to see and think straight for even just a moment, I thought of how lucky I am to have a place to be sick. The pillows and sheets to rest my head, the life structure (unstructured?) that allows for sick days, the people that will call to check on me and not mind my voice sounding like a sock is stuffed in my nose.  All of that is lucky.

I know it gets sort of old for me to write here about how lucky I feel and my pretty dang good life life but honestly, those are the things worth sharing.  All the things that are difficult or scary or bad have one thing in common: they pass.  The good can be and is here to stay, if you let it. It’s a conscious effort, every day. It’s an effort to receive thoughts and opinions and actions from everyone around you, including yourself, and decide what you’ll do with them. Here is the honest truth, Internet: I have no clue where my life will be in a month. I don’t mean in the everyday way that “we just never know” I mean in every way. Work, money, home. Some pretty basic things here.  And yet every day I find myself waking up, looking outside and being grateful for things like coffee and the Internet. It is a strange thing to witness the dichotomy of hope and fear in your own mind. Somehow they are coexisting, and peacefully.

In some ways, I feel like this has broken open a whole new part of me (the last 7 months of my life, not the head cold), a part of me I’ve maybe referenced here recently but didn’t really know I had. It’s pretty incredible, it’s motivating.  I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but I’m excited to see.

As always, I’m grateful for those of you in my little corner of the Internet here; the blog community has opened my eyes to support like no other single place. And even those of you who aren’t other bloggers, who read secretly, or who read but don’t comment and will reference something I say here three months from now, I’m grateful.  And I hope that whatever happens with this path I’m on and these ideas I have, that you’ll be with me then too.

Today I sat down to write about the art of sharing on the Internet (yes, ART. I believe it is an art) and how I wish more people got that because for every one of us that just shares a bit there is someone else out there who’s sharing EVERYTHING but perhaps even that is a misunderstanding because everything is relative and then how do we know what any of us is sharing at all and that doesn’t really matter because the Internet just like everything else in life is basically a choice and therefore what does it even matter? And, WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Do you see how that is a complicated yet ridiculous statement, not to mention a terrible run-on sentence and a mess? Which is why I stopped typing, took even more cold medicine, got in bed to watch Step Brothers and drink chicken broth and posted these pictures instead:

Last Sunday morning I woke to find my dog, Lola, with half her face swollen as if she’d had gotten into a bar fight Saturday night and had a lot of explaining to do.

For those that may not know, I worked in the Veterinary field a bit in high school and all through college and my entire life before that I grew up in a Veterinary clinic as my mother’s business was in the same building as the clinic. This lead to a life of not only loving and caring for animals but also getting to know Veterinary medicine about as closely as a person with no formal education can know it. I am a walking encyclopedia of animal knowledge, which is occasionally useful but generally just annoying. The good thing, I suppose, is that when it comes to common animal ailments, I can identify them most of the time. And when I saw my dog’s face Sunday morning I knew it wasn’t her raucous lifestyle that caused her to look like Rocky after a match, but rather just an abscessed tooth.

That is the extent to which I’ll go with the description, however, because I will admit that a tooth that has abscessed to the point of swelling a dog’s face is one of the more gross, non-emergency things  a pet owner might have to face. Even I, the person who learned to eat lunch in between routine surgeries, do not like to think about it.

A little further investigation confirmed my amateur diagnosis and even though all my background tells me that this sort of thing happens and most people do not examine their dogs’ mouths on a daily basis, I still felt like the worst person in the world.  I knew it had to be painful and, once again, although experience tells me that animals generally handle mouth pain so much better than humans, I felt like I’d kicked her in the tooth myself. Awful.  The following day Lola was in the vet’s office, having blood drawn, and started on heavy antibiotics. This is not the usual for this dog.  When she first came to me at ten weeks old, she was a rescued, mangy mess. I spent the next 13 weeks treating her and nursing her back to health.  Other than those first few months of her life, she has been a very low-maintenance pet, even if she thinks she’s too good to sleep on the floor.

She had surgery yesterday, Thursday, and was home last night recovering like normal. This morning she went outside when she woke up and tried to chase a cat, so essentially she’s back to her old self again, short one tooth and up a whole lot of sympathy and spoiling from family and friends. I didn’t realize how popular she was until this week, and it was such an unexpected reminder of what she means to me.

Over the last eight years she has been through everything with me; houses, jobs, friends, boyfriends, deaths, births, everything. She is a trooper, that’s for sure.

(I know this doesn’t fit the space, which bothers the crap out of me, but I had to include it.)

This was a post I originally began writing last night about how I felt run over by life yesterday and everything was just so angsty and inexplicably strange. But then the electricity went out just as I was ready to publish and I heard voices outside my house. It was only my neighbors, because apparently a power outage somehow signals them to all walk the streets shirtless, beer in hand. I would make a crack about how money can’t buy class or something, but I was honestly torn between joining them and screaming out the window to shut up, some of us are trying to go to bed! Perhaps it was a sign from above because today I am not feeling so much like my seventeen-year-old self, thankfully.

If you’d have told me at seventeen that at thirty I’d still have days when nothing but whining and eating Doritos made sense, I don’t think I would have believed you. But isn’t it exciting that we never really have to completely give up whining Doritos?!

Nevertheless, I did have these photos included in that post as I felt each of them illustrated something about how I was feeling yesterday, floating, not real, sort of loopy, sort of angry, sort of grounded, and fine.  It makes even less sense now, I think.  But I’ll still leave in the photos because although my seventeen-year-old self had a lot of things figured out, she also would have never believed she’d see all this.

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