The floor is a floating wood floor. Our friend Jody installed the floor for us, and did an amazing job. Check out the pics to see how beautiful the room is!

Here is the mess in the living room.  Amazing how much stuff a tiny room can hold.

Jody installing the floor.

The floor clicking together.

How beautiful it is!

The new baseboard heater which offers the promise of heat just in time for spring!

On Saturday we toured the Capital Building. Our tour guide was incredible. He was knowledgeable and funny. He told us many wonderful trivia bits about the Capital building.  The tour was well worth it!  After the Capital we went to historic old town Alexandria. That was a lot of fun. We had super yummy fish and chips for lunch and then wandered in and out of the little shops. It was a little Smithie reunion, since it was myself, Rae and our friend Alicia who we graduated with, and who just moved to DC.  We had a lot of fun hanging out together. Nothing like Smithies!

On Sunday we went to the Holocaust museum. As always, it is incredible and overwhelming.  This was my second visit to this museum, and Dave’s first, and the depths of the atrocities are shocking and the strength of so many varied people is awe inspiring.  It is such a wonderful museum and an amazing and important rememberence to an abhorrant event in our worlds history.

On Monday we went to the Natural History Smithsonian. This one is my favorite, mainly because of the Gems and Minerals show. I love all the sparklies!  We got to see the Hope Diamond, which is amazingly captivating.  While we were there we also went to the Deep Sea Imax show in 3D. That was very cool. Jelly Fish and Sharks were flying at our faces!

Though the weather was a little chilly and rainy, we drove around DC and saw the White House, though you can no longer drive by it on Pennsylvania Ave anymore.

Our trip to DC was great. We got a chance to unwind, get some culture, and spend some time with friends.  It was a much needed trip!

On my way to complete reconstruction of my kitchen I have replaced all my appliances. I should say, I have finished replacing my appliances.  We recently bought a new oven and a cabinet mounted microwave/oven (which is also a light and a hood!)  This completes my kitchen appliances and wow are they AWESOME!  I love them all in their brushed stainless glory. Of course my kitchen still looks like crap, but now there is something shiney to distract you from the shambles that are my cabinetry. And who needs to look at a yellow sink when you have a microwave the size of a small car!

yes there is a little tiny dent..that seems very visible in this photo but really isnt in person….but that is how I got such an AMAZING deal on this oven. We will probably pop it out with a tiny plunger.

Here is the oven installed…ooo so pretty!

Remember those crappy cabinets I mentioned. Well, we are currently keeping our cabinet mounted microwave on the counter because we don’t trust the cabinets to hold much beyond our plates.

So as you can see the new appliances don’t exactly make you feel like there is a brand new kitchen.  It is just the first among a number of surgeries this kitchen must go through. But now I have something shiny to distract from all the other things that need to be replaced!

It was a year ago today that I decided to become a non-smoker. I can’t believe a year has passed.  I can honestly say that quitting was not hard for me. I read a book that really helped, but I guess I was just ready. I didn’t look at it as though I were losing something.

What was I losing? As a smoker I was losing money, lung capacity, blood pressure, good dreams, good sleep, good sex, thoughts, time.  As a smoker I was gaining stinky clothes, stinky breath, stinky car, full ashtray, illness, a false sense of solidarity and a bad habit.

What did I gain as a non-smoker?  money, breath, blood pressure, good dreams, good sex, good sleep, thoughts not tied up in when my next cigarette would be, freedom from smoking anxiety, time previously spent smoking, better body odor, good breath, no ashtray to empty, a better sense of identity and most importantly freedom.

This last gain I can’t really emphasize enough. I gained freedom. It was not until I became a non-smoker and was really seperate from the habit that I realized how much of my mental energy was spent thinking about cigarettes. Did I have enough? Did I need to buy more? when could I buy more? where should I go? Do I have enough money on me?  Do I need to smoke one now? can I smoke one now? When can I smoke again? what if I can’t smoke later, should I smoke more now? Can I make it through this movie/dinner/party/car ride? Am I really the only smoker? Do I really need to smoke now?

I was amazed at how much of my mental energy went to thinking about smoking and cigarettes. It was so apart of my life that in some fashion it was always on my mind, even if it was a peripheral thought.

I love that I have no anxiety about not being able to smoke, or about peoples perceptions of me smoking.  I always thought that the butts decreased my stress, but I was wrong. They created their own stress.

It truly is an addiction and one I am very glad to be free of. My life is so much better now that I am a non-smoker.  So today I celebrate my first year of freedom!

This is not to say that I did not have a nice season. Dave and I celebrated Yule by decorating our Yule tree and burning the Yule log.  On Christmas we opened our stockings that Santa never fails to deliver and our presents. We were overwhelmed by the generosity and thoughtful consideration of our family and friends. We anxiously waited for the reactions to our presents to those same family and friends.  But the holiday tingle was just not as tingly as usual.

Tonight I took the decorations off the tree.  As I did, I looked at each one and its unique beauty and significance. I thought of our first Yule in this house when I bought the first new decorations for the tree. They were each stripped a different color and each a different length and all of them were sparkly. Then there was fat santa which I bought with mom when she came to visit. There were the retro looking decorations I bought when Patrick was here and the Texas A&M star ornament he gave me for christmas that year.  I took down the little silver stars that Janet made me buy from her daughters school fundraiser and the pipe-cleaner angel that Ben made the first christmas away from my family. The star that Thor gave me is still on top of the tree. That will come down later this week. Every year I think about him when I put it ontop of the tree and how perfect that star is. I remember how I could not find one myself, so he found one for me and gave it to me for Yule. It has been ontop of our tree ever since.

So though the yuletide spirit did not take me as is normally does, I guess the remembered nostalgia did…though maybe a little late.

Here is a video from when mom was here for christmas…this always gets me nostalgic!

From Crackle: Christmas 2006

For Christmas we were expecting my cousin to join us, but unfortunately he was not able to.  Again, it was just Dave and I.  We popped on National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and dug into our presents. Because a number of people sent us gifts that were not necessarily wrapped inside their shipping boxes we decided to just wrap the shipping boxes. It was too confusing to keep track of what was wrapped and what was not. So our tree offered mainly surprise presents, who was it for?  was it wrapped inside the wrapping?  It was fun. This did leave us with an unusual amount of cardboard however.

We had a great Christmas and received some really wonderful gifts. Here are our photos.

Love to all of you who weren’t there.

I taped and mudded and sanded and swept the walls.  After three days of all this busy work the walls were a color other than natural plaster.  At first, I was unsure of our choice. It was more of a color than anticipated. Plus it was a switch in color palletts from the pink hued Taupe to a yellow toned “white raisin.”  But seeing it against the wood trim, brick of the fireplace and the wood floor made me realize that I am a color choosing Goddess!  The color really makes the grain of the trim really pop.  It makes the beautiful red of the brick stand out and makes our in-desperate-need-of-refinishing wood floors look good!  Not to mention the new sconces look amazing!

So after long last….the new living room color!

Another thing we did was finally replace the hideous bronze wall sconces with beautiful arts and crafts style new ones. The living room is starting to look as good in person as it does in my head!  Clean brick, new hearth slate, nake walls and new sconses!  yippee!

Here is the original…sadly hanging off the wall.

Here are the new ones…ooo so pretty!

Before:

Half done:

Close up:

All clean!