Castle on the Third Floor

Hello / Jonathan Groff

I take a gym bag to work with me on my gym days and change at work before I go.  The department where I work doesn’t have a nursing staff and so there isn’t a locker room where I can change but they do have 22 rooms with doors that are all pretty much empty at the end of the day when I need one.  The only problem?  They don’t lock.

And I know, not many people in a hospital happen upon a closed door and enter… at least without knocking.  But it is my intense fear the entire time I’m changing that someone will barge in and see me partially undressed.  And the bigger issue: what if someone knocks?

How the hell do you respond to someone who knocks on a locked bathroom door.  Someone’s in here? (Um… duh!  That is why the door is locked) Just a minute? (What if I need longer than a minute?  And what if I don’t want you waiting outside when I slink out of the bathroom like I’ve done something wrong?)  The door is locked for a reason you retard? Some days I just don’t respond, it’s too much pressure.

And seriously?  I have bathroom usage down to a science praying the entire time that someone doesn’t knock while I’m in there.  I have problems.  The amount of things that cause me stress and worry throughout any normal day is leading me to believe that I need some Xanax… oooh look, I’m well on my way to being a good Utah Housewife!

when we moved into the condo all of the walls and ceilings were the same tan/gray color:

so the first thing I was thinking about was paint and making at least one room live-able so we decided to attack the living room first because we spend a lot of time in there.

we had decided to put a lot of aiden’s sport themed and movie themed wall art up and it was obviously going to be a room where a lot of yelling and cursing at the TV would be taking place – a place his friends kept referring to as the “Man Cave” which was fine with me but it didn’t have to LOOK like a cave.  i needed a calming color that wouldn’t clash with his sports teams so i settled on what I kept calling “Jazz Jersey Blue” but God and true Jazz fans alone know if this is actually the case.

Home Depot’s Behr line had the color I wanted and was $23 per gallon.  We also bought a gallon of Environmentally friendly (No VOCs) white for $25 per gallon since I didn’t have to worry if the color would mix properly.  Fortunately I had painting supplies from the last time I painted so the only other thing we had to buy was a ladder ($28) because we are both vertically challenged peoples.

i also went to my favorite store, IKEA, and got some media storage for all those DVDs we were keeping on the floor and i kept tripping over and at $6 a piece they were WELL within our budget.  We already had the couch, ottoman, TV, TV table, and wall hangings.  It was time to get started and what better time than a Friday afternoon – after a looooooong week of work.

So we moved out all the furniture, taped up the room, painted the ceiling and walls, put the furniture into the room and hung all the wall art.  Somehow, without killing each other, we put the room together in less than 12 hours:

I would really like to work on the bedroom and master bathroom next but we’ll see how much time we have in the coming weeks… Aiden is on a surgery rotation and Style is having some kind of Clean House marathon – pretty much my favorite new show – and we have DVR.  Lots of laundry, folding, and ironing is getting done but not much anything else is getting done unless it can be done while I’m watching Neicy Nash.

when aiden and i bought a condo we didn’t have a whole ton of furniture.  after two weeks of organizing, recycling boxes, and trying to find a home for everything we realized we needed more furniture.  we also realized that we didn’t have all the money in the world and we also realized that we wouldn’t be benefitting from his side of the income until mid-july.

so once i had our finances and budget in order we decided that we had about $400 to spend on furniture/home supplies until he starts getting paid and we can contribute monthly to a budget filling in the rest of the holes in our home.  it is going to be a process.  it is going to require patience… patience has always been a virtue i have trouble with.

so we took that amount and tried to decide what we needed (and i know that people don’t NEED furniture, let’s not go there) right now.  and what i needed right now was for all the barware to not be sitting on boxes on the floor in the dining room.  fortunately we saw eye to eye on that so we agreed that we would start searching for a buffet in a $200-$300 range.

i spent a little time over the next three days surfing the web and looking at our options.  we went the normal route of Craigslist and KSL but aside from a few pieces I could live with there wasn’t really anything that I was over the moon about in my price range.  everything from the store sites were WAY out of my price range or if they were in the price range the shipping knocked it back out.  the local furniture store is always having a sale so when I got fed up with web surfing we decided to walk around and see what they had to offer.

The sale gods were smiling on us because, with no help from the sales associates available on a Monday night at 8 PM, we found a buffet for $100 – a discontinued floor model which I thought was purely stuff of shopping legend.  Further, Aiden, who I’m learning pretty much saves every piece of paper that has ever been given to him, had a coupon for $25 off.  So we somehow managed to walk out of that store with a brand new $600 buffet squeezed into the back of my subaru for $82 and some change.

I hate the knobs and handles, which I can replace easily.  That went WAY more smoothly than I anticipated and left $300 for paint (so ignore the ugly brown/gray colored wall) and whatever we decide is next on the list.

Fools Rush In / Elvis

A few months before I was born, my parents went to Hawaii and while there decided to visit Ku kaniloko, or the Royal Birthing Stones.  So for kicks, my mom touched them, and then decided that this meant that once born I would be Hawaiian Royalty.  You see, I tell people that my mother is crazy and no one believes me.

So every time someone asked Aiden and me where we were going for our honeymoon and we told them Hawaii that person would ALWAYS ask, “Have you ever been there?”  Aiden would respond that he had and that I hadn’t.  Doing this in front of my mom would cause her to pipe in, “Yes, Charlotte HAS been to Hawaii but it was a very long time ago.”

The person, being polite, would then ask me how old I was when I was there and my mom, not to be swayed by any normal conversation etiquette decided to announce to the room at large that, “Oh, Charlotte wasn’t born yet.”  And add a cheeky knowing smile.  I wouldn’t know how to respond to that and I used to live with her.

But you know… the view from our table each day was just enough to wipe away any fear that I will one day haunt my children with my crazy… just enough.

Tik Tok / Ke$ha

i try to be a good hippie, i do.  two years ago i gave up plastic bags almost completely (i still get those bags for my fruits and veggies… boo!  hissss!)  I do my best to recycle everything i can.  i use cold water for my laundry and air dry whenever possible.  i do my best to conserve energy.

but i have one HUGE problem i need to work on: my water bottle obsession.  i used to think that it was ok because i religiously recycled my water bottles.  and then i watched this:

The Story of Bottled Water

I already knew about how Dasani and Aquafina were just filtered tap water from areas in North America, BUT THEY STILL TASTE SO GOOD!   If someone, say Kit for instance, decided they wanted to make money off of me she could very well sell me Seattle tap water, tell me she was selling me Seattle tap water, and I would pay good money for it.  I’m a water snob but it has nothing to do with where the water comes from and everything to do with how it tastes.  some tap (and bottled!!) waters have a very distinctive metal-like taste and i always know what to expect from Aquafina and Smart Water.

But I knew that something needed to be done if I’m ever going to truly be a hippie so I cut way back on my water bottles, from 6-7 a week down to 2.  I also bought two re-usable water bottles and i’m working on using those the bulk of the time and filling them up from one of those Culligan Water Filters at work that has yummy water.  hopefully i can kick the habit completely… i just keep thinking about those water bottles in india… and how many are probably mine!

if just about everything else i’ve done doesn’t do it… then that is DEFINITELY the reason i’m going to hell.