Author: Staci

Staci blogs about travel at TheVoyageer.com.

First Things First

Moving into a new house.
Yes, you heard that right.
We’re going to be moving MUCH sooner than anticipated! We got the keys from our landlords (cough, cough, my in-laws) yesterday! Instead of late October, as our last news had indicated. The sign is out of the yard and the keys are in my hand.

Now, we’re not going to cart all of our junk into the house just yet. There is a LOT to do before establishing residency in our new abode. In fact, we are planning on staying in our current place well into September. Side note: the word “abode” looks like “adobe.” Which is ironic because the new house looks like adobe. You’ll see pictures tomorrow, I promise.

  • Take out all remaining nails (left over from hanging items on the wall)
  • Spackle all holes left by said nails
  • Wipe down all the walls with a wet (very slightly soapy) sponge
  • Scrub all the baseboards with a Mr. Clean magic eraser (be careful; the magic eraser can and will remove many kinds of paint. We plan on paining all the walls and trim so we aren’t worried about damaging the existing paint)
  • Sweep all the floors (there’s no carpet in this house, just tile and wood). After being vacant for a while, there are lots of cobwebs and dead bugs. Gotta take care of that before my lil’ pupster starts running around free in there.
  • Scrub the floors. Hardcore. I don’t know who or what was living in this house before it went on the market, but they were slobs. The floors are reeeeeally icky! Icky floors, meet Mr. Pine Sol. And Mr Elbow Grease.
  • The yard: I have left this one up to Doug and his family because I’ve never done a day of yard work in my life. They’ll trim some tree branches, Dig up some soil. etc.
  • Call the exterminator. Before moving all of our stuff in, I’d like to make sure it’s a bug-free zone. Especially the basement.
Other things on the “before move-in” to-do list but not imminent are:
  • Paint every available surface (you’ll see once I post pictures)
  • Plant some pretty plants in the dead-grass-patch in the front of the house
  • Replace the garage door (my in-laws are taking care of this–it is their property)
  • Take inventory of all the stuff previous inhabitants left behind, decide what to keep, what to trash, and what to donate to charity. (Free Christmas tree for us!)
The slip of paper we found on the kitchen floor, from a long-since eaten fortune cookie said, “All things are hard before they are easy.” Ain’t it the truth!
The next post will be less list-y and more picture-y. Get pumped, y’all; this blog is going to get exciting again!

Dorm Life

This time six years ago, I was getting geared up to move into my first dorm. Little did I know my room was going to be extremely long and narrow and my roommate would arrive a week before me and take the “big” half.

Over at Apartment Therapy they are talking about ways to dress up a dorm room and painting pictures of bleak, off-white cinder block prisons. Well, yeah, I guess this is how most dorms are, in reality. It’s easy to get really low-quality colorful carpets and comforters and spruce things up. Did anyone else ever notice how low-quality most dorm stuff is? I guess it’s cheap, and anything can happen in a dorm room…. yeah, cheap (replaceable) really is the way to go.

Anyway, I used my graduation gift cards and got my dream comforter set from Urban Outfitters. I was SO not about to get one from Target and match all the girls on my hall (this really was a fear of mine at the time). We packed up the car and drove from California to Kansas.

I was lucky, because my dorm walls weren’t white, or even beige for that matter. They were robin’s egg blue. Light, airy, glorious robin’s egg blue. I still think that it was the perfect color to go with my dorm decor (although it didn’t compliment everyone’s stuff. Oh well).

My dorm room, 2005-2006.

Although my half of the room was tiny and cramped, it forced me to think about living in a small space and adapt and be creative. The lofted bed was literally my only option, but I had just come from 7 years in a lofted bed at home so it wasn’t a problem. However, my sophomore year, I had a room to myself and finally had a ground-level bed.

Yes, the picture above is pretty messy, but honestly, on the small half of the room, there was nowhere for the “stuff” to go. I’m just grateful for the not-hideous carpet, the fact that I had carpet at all (not linoleum), and those beautiful robin’s egg blue walls. It could have been so much worse.

August Reading

What are you reading and why?

Last night, I finished reading The Last Empress by Anchee Min. It is the sequel to Empress Orchid, which I read earlier this year. This book is a thoroughly-researched history of the Empress’s life, and is completely 180 degrees from the way she is portrayed by most historians, like this one. Wow. If you read that link, and wonder how this woman could ever be portrayed as compassionate, loving, dedicated to her sons–in short, likable, then check out the book. (Literally, check it out, it is available at the McPherson Library).

This month, I have three books in my stack. The Help, due to the movie’s recent release, The Paris Wife, due to its current popularity and my love of Paris, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that is taking me One Hundred Years to finish. I expect that I’ll be able to finish The Help and The Paris Wife quickly, because books that are über-popular, let’s face it, usually aren’t terribly difficult. This does not mean they aren’t good!! They’re just easier.

Why am I reading the aforementioned? Well, I try to read for reading’s sake. It keeps a person’s brain engaged in a way that TV never can. It allows me to brush up on grammar and vocabulary, and (in a book written in an accent/dialect like The Help) my creativity. I’m sure there’s a term for “reading aloud in your head” to make the funny spellings of dialect-written books make sense, and it helps exercise that skill.

I haven’t cracked open The Paris Wife yet but I’m excited in getting to it after The Help. One Hundred Years of Solitude is on my list because I enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera and buzzed through that book very quickly. This one is proving much more tedious and less engrossing. But it won awards, and is supposedly the author’s best work, so I must finish it.

Click on any photo to be taken to amazon.com where the book can be purchased. Except I got them all from the local library.