Sunday, July 22, 2007

i'm a settler

Oops. I just read through my New Year's resolutions, which I posted earlier, and I'm very sorry to say that not one of them has been kept by me. I'm blaming it on the about-face my life took on February 2nd, when I decided to get married, and on the rather intense unsettledness that has characterized my days ever since.

I should define "unsettled"--in my mind, it's that feeling of never being quite where you know you will perhaps be at some unknown point in the future. Errrrr.

All that to say: exactly three weeks until I will be Meghan Armstrong. Whoa nelly!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

living with women

As I’ve contemplated getting married, and even as I have looked forward so much to getting to live with Kevin, I’ve also been feeling a little grief as I say goodbye to this era of my life that has been “living with women.” Sometimes when Jen and I are going to bed around the same time and debriefing about life, I feel like crying.

So this is an ode to my six years of living with women in the form of a list of all my roommates:

Jenny Kreinbrink : 315 Hayden House, East Quad, freshman year
Ariane Boese : Africa, 2002
Lindsay Horan : 424 Tyler House, East Quad, sophomore year (this had to have been the biggest room on campus)
Karen Ostafinski (bedmate) : LT Orlando, 2003
Heather Lieder : East Madison Street and Sagebrush Circle; junior and senior years, as well as my first year as a working person
Meredith and Carey : Florence, Italy, 2004
Jess Hibma (bedmate), Jen King, and Kristin Roelofson : LT Virginia Beach 2006
Jen King : Medford Street, 2006 – 2007

Each of these lovely women put up with me as I walked in my sleep, talked in my sleep, and generally made a mess.

And I can’t leave out all the people with whom at one time I shared a front door and refrigerator space: Jenni, Michelle, Carlee, Vanessa, April, Katie, Sara, Nicola, Judi, Anna, Julia, Kendra, Jineane, Kristen, Natalie, Dana, Kendra G., Kaitlyn, Julie, Shawn, Hayley, and Charis.

Many of them (more specifically, my most recent roommates) put up with my obsession with the Food Network, my awkward yoga poses, my guilt-induced, anal-retentive recycling habit, and/or my falling in love with a guy who lived across the street.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

the gray kitchen

Kevin and I closed on our condo on Friday and boy, am I excited. We immediately began on some simple improvements like paint and hardware, and in three days, the kitchen looks like new. We painted it a lovely gray and added new brushed silver cabinet handles, and that was all it took. Fortunately, the thing is 7x7' so we painted it in no time flat.

Today I got to unpack my wedding gifts and put them on shelves and in drawers. It truly feels like this is OUR place, and I have never had that feeling before.

Our next project is painting one wall in the dining room, and I couldn't figure out what color to use until the gray kitchen was finished. Now it's begging for a subtle blue-green with some black shelves to make up for the wretchedly lacking cabinet space in the kitchen.

I think the reason this is exciting for me, along with the wedding, is the fact that I'm getting a chance to create a space; create anything, really, for the first time in awhile. Even though I pretty much hated photography during school, I miss all my art classes and the accountability that they provided. The deadlines were what I hated and what I felt stunted me, but I should have appreciated them more. Now we have this deadline of putting our home in order by the time we get back from our honeymoon, and the deadline is making things happen.