Lots of Seafood & Lots of Bourbon…

…does NOT describe my summer.  It does describe the season premiere of Top Chef:Las Vegas that I just finished watching…

So after my beautiful curtain installation at the end of June, I worked in Newport News for a month and visited my sister and aunts (and other aunt and uncle and cousins) in Murrells Inlet and Charleston, SC.  Now I am back and busting out a few house projects, finishing some reading for school, and doing TONS of doing nothing.  Nothing is something I will not have the luxury of doing once school starts, so I am happy to do it (not do it?) now.

Cousins and aunts at Fort Sumter.

In terms of my house, I have rearranged some furniture, done some minor yardwork, gotten the AC (hopefully) fixed (it got HOT in here), and made a skirt for my sink.  I’m going to try to take some pictures tomorrow and post them here.  I am semi-proud of my semi-funny-looking attempt at a sink skirt.  No sewing involved.  I think I spent about 7 dollars.

School books — I’ve finished The Lightning Thief (YA, cute, fun, might pair with the Odyssey), The Night Tourist (also pretty good…I bought and read it mainly because it was about a 9th grade classics prodigy, and I liked studying Latin in high school), Readicide (an interesting and ultimately helpful book about how teachers/tests are killing kids’ love of reading), and now I’m on Inquiry Circles in Action and the first book in the Artemis Fowl series, which  lots of my boys like to read.  I like it more than I expected.

As for nothing, TV plays a big part of my nothing time.  Tonight, as mentioned, was the premiere of Top Chef in Las Vegas.  I liked it pretty well, except none of the chefs seem all that appealling at this point.  They are mostly sort of rough and crude.  Perhaps they will grow more endearing as time goes on.  On the other hand, I did like Wolfgang Puck’s sass and generic burns: “If you cooked this at home, your guests would never come back!”  “If someone cooked this in my kitchen, I would tell them to leave my kitchen!”  Nice.

What I’m REALLY waiting for comes tomorrow night with Project Runway, now on Lifetime.  I wait with bated breath…

Curtained!

The other day my genius seamstress grandmother paid the Yellow Brick House a visit.  With the help of (several) drill bits, some drapery rods and rings, a little bit of patience, and my dad, we put up some curtains she custom-made for my sunroom.  They are just perfect.  It all started with lots of measuring and marking:

Well, technically it all started with me messing up and stripping a screw and making the emergency phone call to my dad, but who’s counting?  Anyway, we ended up with the rods hung nice and high on all three walls of windows…

Poor naked rod.  It looks much better dressed:

Beautiful!  Down in the righthand corner you can see the top of my ladder, which has little holes that you can fit tools into when you’re not using them!  I had never noticed before.  Brilliant.  And speaking of brilliant, here’s the seamstress herself (you can also get more of a sense of the curtains, which go basically from floor to ceiling and make the room look infinitely taller and cleaner):

And here are some shots with the furniture loaded back in.  I’ve just added the basics back so far.  The first shot is through the glass doors that lead to it, so it’s the view from the living room.

I need to take a picture from the outside, too — the house looks much more finished/lived-in with the windows dressed.

So there they are — my beautiful, breezy new curtains.  Stay tuned, as I will be adding an accent of one of current favorite things (navy grosgrain ribbon) to the mix.

Thank you, G-ma!!

Book Club

I hosted five members of my book club for dinner tonight —  it’s good that it was five, since I only have six chairs.  Anyway, I have read probably five books in the last month, but I only managed to get about 1/4 of the way through the official book club selection (The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon).  Everyone else seemed to like it a lot, so maybe I’ll try to pick it back up at some point.  For now, I was so busy cleaning and prepping and otherwise getting ready that it just didn’t happen.

I did read enough to know that the book took place in Spain, so I wanted to have some kind of Spanish-inspired dish.  However, I am no cook, and paella or whatever else was not an option.  So, “Spanish chicken salad” it was.  I think it turned out pretty well, and I did get to buy and chop up jicama, which was a first for me.  It was heavy.  Here’s what it looked like:

Starting with this, I went salad crazy…I also had regular chicken salad, tuna salad, pasta salad, fruit salad, and corn and black bean salad.  Um, I have a lot left over.  For dessert, I doctored a Ukrop’s angel food cake into this:

Here’s the table set for six:

And my latest mantle-scape:

Fun woven Target mirror + a few of my many green items + some bamboo from my yard (like I don’t have enough) = new mantle.  Finally, here are some cat pictures for the fam:

New friends!

Bunk beds!

So, yeah…

…it’s been a while.  Here’s what I’ve been doing:

1. Not working on the house.

2. Feeling guilty about not working on the house.

3. Reminding myself that I signed a document stating that I would be paying for this house until 2039, so I think I can wait until school’s out to start on the projects I want to do.

4. School.  Grading.  Planning.  Thinking about grading and planning to come.  Dealing with kids who think it’s over because SOLs are over…newsflash, kiddos: not so much.  I am not going down without a fight.  And some creative summative assessments (eduspeak: sweet projects!).

5. Taking care of my sister’s cat and my parents’ two cats and my cat.  Add it up.  Four cats.  No  one needs to worry about me becoming a cat lady now — they are all precious but I could not handle four on a permanent basis.  Update: one is currently trying to attack/eat a rug.

6. Noticing new stuff about my neighborhood.  Exhibit A: it now smells like honeysuckle at night.  I normally don’t use adjectives like “heavenly,” but…heavenly.  Exhibit B: Flashing red lights went by outside tonight, and I was already up at the window staring down the street before I realized that I just jumped up to watch an ambulance go past.  At least one a day screamed by my old apartment (the one tonight didn’t even have the siren on), but this is the very first one I’ve seen in the months since I moved.  Not really commenting on it either way, but it was weird to realize it.

7. Finishing out the tv season…goodbye for now, 30 Rock and Bones.  Hello, Friday Night Lights on Netflix Instant and Real Housewives of New Jersey.  Lord help/forgive me.

8. Don’t you hate it when people include an item more than once on a list to emphasize how much they’re doing it?  Me too.  That said — school.  Grading.  Planning.

9. I did actually work on my house a little bit, now that I think about it.  I organized my closets and hung up a ribbon to hang my headbands on.  It’s cute.  I need to take a picture.

10. That about covers it.  Maybe I’ll be back this weekend with a post about whatever disasters I encounter while attempting to host my book club on Sunday.  Wish me luck!

In my battle versus my bamboo…

I am now armed  with:

• a sharp shovel
• an ax (axe?)
• a pickaxe (pickax?  pick axe/ax?  the internet is being unclear on this)
• a machete!

I will keep you updated on my progress.  Also, note to criminals: I store all of the above under my pillow.  Do not mess with me.

Bad Idea.

If there’s one thing I like more than working on/buying stuff for/thinking about my house, it’s watching television.  I know, I know, television is the devil, etc. etc., but hmmm…nope.  I disagree.  I think the television industry is where some of our most creative minds are working these days, and I am an English teacher, so I am all about supporting creative minds.  TV it is.

So I don’t have a moral dilemma with watching tv, but I do have a time dilemma.  It takes a lot of time to keep up with all of my favorite shows (of which there are…a few…several…), so I try to avoid watching new ones.  Yesterday after school, my brain the pile of Friday mush it usually is, I broke this rule.  Somehow I made my way to the “watch instantly” part of Netflix and even stranger, I ended up watching a little show called Friday Night Lights.

Friday Night Lights is about football.  Did you know this?  I did, and yet I started watching it anyway.  I am NOT a football person.  Not pro football, not college football, not even high school football — and I work at a high school.  In college, I lived, literally, across the street from a huge football stadium where I could have gone to games for free, and I didn’t.  Not once.  And yet…Friday Night Lights was on my computer screen.

And…ARGH…I liked it.  This is bad on so many levels.

First of all, it’s bad because it makes me question my identity.  Am I a person that can tolerate watching football scenes now?  Am I, oh horror, someone who was watching a football scene, PAYING ATTENTION to it, and CHEERING for one of the players???  Was I EMBARRASSED and SADDENED when he made a bad play, and then TEARING UP when he redeemed himself with a good one?  AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH.  This goes against all I know in life.

Secondly, it’s bad because of the time issue.  So far, the (undisclosed number of) episodes I’ve watched end with cliffhangers.  Which means I just have to watch the next one.  Immediately.  I don’t know if anyone else noticed this, but it’s the most beautiful day ever outside.  I have got to give it up.

Finally, it’s bad because now I have go research this show.  I think it is still on the air?  Or if not, how many seasons, exactly, am I going to waste my life watching?  If it is still on, does it come on on Friday nights?  That part would be okay, because I don’t have anything else to tivo on Friday nights.  See, there’s going to be a lot of research involved here.

Now, since I’ve managed to tear myself away from Season 1 for this long, I am going to ride the momentum all the way out of my house to get my hair cut and maybe go to a bookstore to counteract all the tv watching.

In case you were curious, the top 5 shows that I am watching during the week right now (on actual tv, not netflix):

5. America’s Next Top Model

4. House/American Idol

3. The Real Housewives of New York City (lord help me but I love this show)

2. Bones

1. 30 Rock (also The Office, but it’s been disappointing for a few seasons and I don’t like to think about it)

Lest I forget…

Today is April 23, the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and, presumably, his birth.  My freshmen and I started reading Romeo and Juliet last week, so today we celebrated Talk Like Shakespeare day.  Unfortunately, we were limited by the fact that they had to take a county benchmark test for most of the block, but we still got in a few good “get out thy numbereth 2 pencils” and “methinks that testeth was of medium difficultyeth” (they mostly liked adding -th to things).  I hope you had a nice day.  Good morrow, ye blogge readers!

A Saturday Brunch

I bought the aforementioned idiot chairs so that people would have places to sit at a little brunch I hosted last Saturday.  I didn’t take as many pictures as I wanted — especially of all the beautiful food everyone brought! — because I was busy trying to be a good hostess, ruining the grits casserole, etc.  But it was a beautiful day, warm (even hot) and sunny, and I think people had a nice time.  My more successful dish was this:

My helpful sister sent me the recipe for these “donut muffins” while I was at school on Friday, so I picked up the ingredients on the way home and made them Saturday morning.  I wish I had made them just a little closer to when people got there because they were the best when they were right out of the oven and freshly rolled in melted butter and cinnamon sugar.  Then again, what isn’t?

Like I said, I wish I had taken a picture of the buffet table, but I didn’t.  Instead, here’s the plates we used (Cynthia Rowley at Target last summer) and my 6 dollar Kroger amateur flower arrangement:

And the FREE amateur arrangment, from my yard and my mom’s:

Such a pretty day!  I am going to mow the lawn tomorrow or Saturday, so I’ll also try to take some pictures of my new purple Adirondack chairs and all the pretty azaleas blooming in my front yard.  Ahh spring.  And after tomorrow, only SIX more weeks of school!  How is that possible?

I am such an idiot.

So the other day, I went to Lowe’s to buy some cheap plastic chairs for extra seating on my deck.  I don’t generally like going to stores like this, because they are huge and intimidating and generally lack, well, cute stuff.  Sure, there’s an occasional cute watering can or pretty light fixture, but there is also wood, and dirt, and chemicals, and other stuff that I have previously had no use for.

Well, this simple shopping trip turned into, to put it a nice way, a “comedy of errors.”  To put it a not-as-nice way, it turned into “how many ways can Taylor be an idiot.”  It started at the very beginning, when I entered the store and walked around the lawn and garden section for 20 minutes, looking for my cheap, plastic chairs.  Lots of nice, metal chairs to be found, but not cheap, plastic ones.  I finally got up the nerve to ask someone (it’s not that the people were scary themselves, it’s that they were doing scary things, like heaving huge boxes and driving mini forklifts).  I vaguely described what I wanted, and the guy looked at me for a second and said, “Didn’t you see those on your way in?”  I stared blankly.

Sure enough, he led me to the very entrance I had used — I could see my car right outside — and showed me about 30 eight-foot tall stacks of exactly the chairs I wanted.  Did I mention I basically had to trip over them to enter the store?  I blushed, and the associate, obviously sensing my ineptitude, asked me how many I wanted, picked them off the top of the stack, and carried them to the register for me.  You know, just in case I wasn’t able to locate the registers, too.

I paid and headed back to where I’d come in.  A couple (different) associates were standing near that door, and they stared at me as I walked toward it.  I got nervous, since I was carrying the big stack of chairs — I didn’t want them to think I was stealing them.  So I awkwardly shifted the receipt to my other hand so they would see it as I walked by.  In the process, though, I crashed into the door, which had not automatically opened.  I looked over at the associates.  One of them said, “Uh, you can’t go out that way.”  I looked back toward the door, where two giant NO EXIT signs faced me.  Ahhhh not again.  I tried to laugh it off and turned back into the store.

The fun was not over yet.  I saw the real exit in the distance on the right, but every time I tried to go down an aisle to get to it, there was a huge gate blocking me off.  What in the world is this?  I have never seen these things!  In Target or a grocery store or whatever — you know, a normal store — you can cut through any aisle.  Not at Lowe’s.  They have gates to keep you in!  I guess so you will buy additional wood and dirt.  I finally figured out I could walk through the self check-out area to free myself, and I must have been walking fast and looking overly relieved while I did it, because another lady appeared out of nowhere and called out “Ma’am! Ma’am!  I need to see your receipt!”  I turned around one more time, showed her my receipt, and finally escaped the store.

I managed to find my car and shove the chairs inside it with uncharacteristic ease, which was a relief.  I think I won’t mention how my next stop was Food Lion, where I saw some cute pastel purple plastic Adirondack chairs and bought two on the spot without thinking of how they would fit in my car and then spent the next 15 minutes in front of said Food Lion trying to jam them inside with the other ones…or how a nice man finally helped me get them in, but then when I got home I couldn’t get them out…yeah, I won’t mention that…because then you would think I am an idiot or something.

Sigh.

The chair I bought (just so you know, they are in the front of the store right as you come in):

Spring Break, I Hardly Knew Ye

It’s over.  My glorious week of break comes to an end today.  The good news is — I got several things down around the house.  The bad news — I did barely any school work, and I’m paying for it today.  I guess I understand those teachers who would just give worksheets or show videos…sometimes a girl needs a break.

I was planning on doing this earlier in the week, but I was so busy relaxing that I didn’t.  Here are some of my accomplishments from the week:

I raked out a bunch of beds, filling a million trash bags, and I planted these:

And these:

It’s the same type of plant (hostas?  I can never remember), in two different locations.  My mom cut them from her yard, loaded them into a wheelbarrow, and then she and my dad pulled the wheelbarrow through the neighborhood to my house.  Haha.  They haven’t died yet, so I’m tentatively counting it as a success.

In other nature-related news, I did not plant them, but the azaleas are blooming nicely:

Indoors, I moved a double bed I had upstairs downstairs (all by myself!) into the guest room, and I moved the twin bed I had in there out to the sun room.  It may or may not stay, but I like the double bed where it is now.  That’s the room that’s painted not-my-favorite shade of green, so I decided to totally go for it and put in as many green items as I could find…

Including a green comforter, green blanket, green lamp, green curtains…it is still evolving, but for now it will be known as the green room.

The final project that took a lot of my time was removing the desk that used to be in that room and painting it.  I don’t have a shot of it “before,” but it looked something like this:

But without the hutch.  I got it at the Goodwill in Charlottesville a few years ago.  It’s not my style, but it has a big surface, and I figured it was always so covered with my stuff that you couldn’t actually see it.  Now, though, I had to make it white.

There it is, in my garage painting studio (please pardon the mess).  I hope it will look a little nicer when it’s in the house, not sitting on a sheet of plastic, etc.

So those are the Spring Break updates on the yellow brick house.  The last picture I’ll leave you with is of the rice krispie treats I made for a cook-out I went to the other day.  I think they turned out cute:

And now it’s back to reality, where reality = planning my Romeo and Juliet unit.  Insert Shakespeare joke about spring break being over of your choice here (e.g. spring break, wherefore art thou, spring break? OR parting with spring break is such sweet sorrow…etc.).