Retail Therapy

Alix and I have big plans.  The logical thing we should be planning is our wedding, but that's not really happening.  Something about having it be more than a year away puts a huge damper on any excitement that we might have felt about solidifying plans.  After all, I can't even get my shit together enough to schedule an optometrist appointment so that I can order new contacts -- do you really think I'm forward-thinking enough to plan something that's happening in 2012 when I can't even schedule an appointment during the next two weeks?  And yet, every morning I wake up and think, "Man, these contacts sure are feeling scrubby in my eyes..."  Yeah.  Life fail.  ANYWAY.

The big plans we do have are for our bedroom.  We've managed to spruce up the rest of the apartment so that it feels like home: comfy sage green couch, saffron-colored curtains, three bookcases chock-full of books, a steamer trunk for a coffee table, a thrift store fruit basket (that holds Clif bars and a bag of coffee beans), and five (relatively) healthy plants.  We also have fresh flowers in old milk bottles on the table our counter-top on a semi-regular basis, and our new shower curtain is a bright addition to the otherwise very bland bathroom.  The bedroom, on the other hand, is stark and white and reminiscent of a not-very-nice hospital room.  The two windows look into air shafts, so there's no natural light, and the entire room is painted the kind of bright white that only picket fences should be painted.  We splurged on a nice sheet/duvet set for the bed and we have a giant hunk of furniture called a dry sink (it's a cross between a dresser and a cupboard and we drove it all the way from West Virginia half-stuffed into the trunk of my Honda Civic - that's a story full of foul language and should be saved for another time.).

This is not the best picture, but it does explain a bit better what a dry sink is.  Especially one with a cat in the top.

It was a longggg drive from West Virginia to New York.

Since there's no natural light in the room, we depend on the electric kind.  Our floor lamp that we've been using came with the apartment.  This should be indicative of the quality of said lamp - if someone actively left it behind when moving, it's probably not the best specimen.  But hey, it worked, and it made light.  We also had a bedside lamp that I've had since I was in middle school.  It's been with me all through college and it's here to stay.  The base and the shade came from two different places, but I love it.  It doesn't give off a whole lot of light though, and when the floor lamp that came with the apartment broke, it was time to buy a new one.  THIS is what we got:

Now, you all are free to hate it.  I, on the other hand, freaking. love. it.  It has globes.  It's pretty.  It's the perfect lamp for a girls' room.  We even charmed the hardware store into giving us a 10% discount on it.  (The truth is, we have no idea why they offered us a discount, but we're just going to pretend it's because we're cute and nice and not because they were just pumped to have sold something so big.)  Rupert only barked at the lamp for oh, about half an hour.  Other plans for the room include: painting it lavender, getting curtains, installing shelves on the wall, rearranging our pictures, putting down a throw rug, and decorating the shelves with some of the books that don't fit on our other shelves, as well as filling them artistically with pictures and pretty, meaningful tchotchkes.

Other than the hardware store (insert funny lesbian/hardware store joke here), we spend money at the nearest thrift store.  It is indicative of how much I love my two new dresses that I'm willing to post pictures of myself in them on here.  I know that I look like something chewed me up and spit me out.  Get over it and look at the dresses.  They each have pockets.

It got hot in the room (new lamp --> lots of heat) so I had to put my hair back up for the last picture.  And then the photoshoot ended and I put on pajamas.  Back to my natural state.