This past week I've been feeling a little...let's say, unsettled. For the longest time, my life has a been a fast blur of a hot mess. Too many things going on, with me just barely hanging on. I've become way to used to being too busy for everything. But now that's changed. I'm out of school with a stable job, and so is the husband. We're both settled into our new jobs and really like them. For the first time, we are both working normal work weeks (close to 40 hours, rather than 50 or 60). And without both of us being in school, we have time to come home and just relax. As terrible as this may sound, we live far enough away from family now that we aren't obligated to spend every free weekend with them. (For the record, it would be nice to have them closer, but I guess this is kind of a silver lining. It is nice that we can talk to them every weekend - yay cellphones!) With all of the above, I can actually watch TV or play a video/board game or knit or EVEN HAVE A BLOG in my spare time! Hah.
Anyway, this normal amount of spare time was starting to make me feel weird. Like I'm doing something wrong. Everyone else is so busy, I must be forgetting something out of the manual of life. But you know what? I realized I'm looking at this the wrong way. When we were both in school and working at the same time a little over 2 years ago, the type of person I am now is who I used to look at in envy. Past-me would have looked at present-me and thought that how unfair it was that my life is so easy. It's easy because I accomplished my goals. This is my reward, and I should be grateful about it and enjoy it right now. I shouldn't be looking elsewhere and worrying that my life isn't hard enough. That's silly. I was feeling unsettled for all the wrong reasons.
It doesn't mean that I've run out of goals; we're just transitioning between goals. We've finished our goals of school and getting started on our career tracks. Now we're just hanging out here for a bit and refining those goals and working down debt before tackling the next big thing. I'm sure once we decide that children should enter the picture, life will be anything but easy. But that won't be for a least a couple years. We like where we are now, and we want to enjoy it a little.
On a different, less philosophical note: I had my first Pinterest fail the other day. Let me start from the beginning. I was trying to rearrange our living area. This is what our living area used to look like.
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| Pardon the 2 minute photoshop job - I didn't have a "before photo" so I (BADLY) photoshopped the after photo. |
When we first moved in, we thought it would be great to put our monster of a TV up on the mantle. That ended up being problem #1 with the set up. If you were sitting on the sofa, you'd have to look up to watch, and you could end up with a crick after a long movie. Plus, the remotes weren't registering too well with the height. Problem #2 was that bookcase - we had LOTS of DVDs and games, to the point where we were stacking them two to three stacks deep in the bookcase. The problem with that was we never played/watched a lot of our stuff because it was such a pain to get it out. Plus, it looked cluttered and terrible. Problem #3 - if the curtains were closed, and it was dark inside, in order to get enough light, we had to use all three light source to get decent lighting.
So, my ideas were to move the TV and add a hanging light. We turned the bookcase on it's side so it's more like an entertainment center and put the TV on top of that to free up the mantle. Then I got a CD/DVD case binder and ditched the plastic covers movies come in. This opened up a lot of bookcase space - nothing is double stacked and is easy to access. Then I got rid of the paper floor lamp the husband found in the dumpster while at Emory and got a swag kit to hang a light from the ceiling without too many holes/destruction. This is where the fail comes in; I found this light on Pinterest and thought "hey, that's cool, I can do that!"
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| as found on http://www.craftynest.com/2009/03/hemp-pendant-lamps/ |
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| FAILURE. |
Actually, not so. I cannot do that, and it was so frustrating and gooey that I gave up. And went out and bought a regular lampshade that I thought looked cool. So I ended up with this. Still looks much better, and we only really need the one lamp to light the room. The other two are still sitting next to the sofa, mostly because I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet.
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| Final result: feels much less cluttered. |
Now, I just need to make up my mind on what to do with the mantle. Right now it's just holding a bunch of photo frames that I didn't know what to do with. Overall, I'm much happier with the result. Also, we discovered some movies and games we'd forgotten we had because they were hidden in the mess!
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