Category: At Home

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.

Living Room, #3.

While Doug was at Royal practice (made up of 75% I Heard A Lion), what choice did I have but to single-handedly rearrange the entire living room? Seriously, I get these drives. And I’m not satisfied until everything looks completely different.

I love how the couch and coffee table are “floating” on the rug in the middle of the room. I’m not too crazy about the armchairs in the back (not nuts about the armchairs themselves, in general, actually) but all in all, it’s a comfortable room to be in.

The thing is, we discovered that by using a splitter, we can, in fact, get cable. I don’t know if the not-to-be-named-here cable/internet company knows about this (it’s evidently common in this town), or what it has to do with what data is flowing down the cord, but so, now we can get cable. Which means ESPN for Doug and HGTV for me. So, the room re-orientation kind of had everything to do with this fact: moving the TV where the cord would reach. This meant sacrificing our setup with the big speakers–they really did make the PS3 sound good, but the TV sounds OK on it’s own anyway.

The tennis racquet is the the beginning of a possible art installment. Haven’t busted out the measuring tape, hammer and nails yet.

Here’s the deal: I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here before (I’ve tried not to since the timetable is hazy), but we’re going to be moving into a house within the next few months! No, we haven’t taken the plunge into homeownership, but we will be taking the plunge into homerentership. More info on that as the situation progresses, however. Anyway, that little diversion is to explain: although this setup is not ideal, it is not meant to be permanent. Depending on how quickly the house thing goes, it could be this way for a few weeks to a few months. Either way, it’s nice to have a fresh arrangement every so often.

Want to catch up? Learn about the record shelves, coffee table, and the new (old) couch!