Abbie's Real Life Blog

If I don’t stop shopping for furniture, I’m going to crowd my car out of the garage, and then won’t I be happy?  My tornado-obsessed self worrying about my new-ish car out in a thunderstorm at 3:00am all spring- sounds like a great idea.  We’re probably about due for a monster hailstorm.

But I don’t seem to be able to quit shopping.  It’s not really an addiction, but I’m being so specific about styles (Danish modern, please; retro atomic, please; and it’s not like those are styles that are hip in my mid-Missouri town.) that I feel that I should be on top of the local Craigslist constantly.  It doesn’t help that I lost out on that cool chair last Monday.  That really made me a crazy person.

I went back to St. Louis on Saturday, ostensibly to shop for a dress for Tracy’s sister’s wedding, which is in DC this Saturday evening.  I have been fretting about this particular dress for months and months.  I wasn’t sure what the weather would be like, which matters because the wedding is supposed to be outside, with dancing to follow.  Our wedding was kind of casual, but I think there will be suits at this one, so although I did buy a dress a couple of months ago, I dismissed it as a possibility because I thought it might be too fancy (but I will probably wear it to Tracy’s graduation in June, which is a fancy occasion).  So I went out shopping in St. Louis, where they have many of the same stores as we do in Columbia, but they’re bigger and have a better selection.  I ended up with something really very similar to the one I already bought, but slightly different.  A less discernable eye would suggest that they are almost identical black wrap-front, empire-waisted dresses, and am I crazy?  and, yes, that is true and probably I am crazy.  But there are a lot of differences that make the dress I bought on Saturday more appropriate for Saturday’s wedding, and the older one less appropriate.  (These are all fake differences that exist solely in my mind.)

Meanwhile, it is supposed to rain all weekend in DC, so that will be fun.  Ugh, too bad for the lovely couple and their outdoor wedding.

Anyway, we were in St. Louis last weekend too, as you may remember, and went by two awesome stores that sold lots of vintage modern furniture, and I had eyed a pair of neutral chairs and a pair of end tables.  And I was not able to successfully rid myself of the need to buy these items before they were sold to some other person, so I borrowed my parents’ minivan and brought them all home with me.  The chairs are in the garage, covered with moving blankets, where they will stay until Tracy takes the living room furniture to Kansas City.  The end tables are already in place by my bed, with the blue-green lamps that I bought last week.  They look super.  Do you know how long I’ve been meaning to get nightstands and lamps for my bed?  Ten years, probably.  I finally got sufficiently irritated (by trying to read in bed by the dim light of the overhead bulbs) and motivated (by all of our antique store shopping, and car-borrowing) to get what I wanted.

Anyway, between two kitchen tables, six dining chairs, a large oak desk, and now these two side chairs (club chairs, maybe?), the garage is starting to feel packed.

I could alleviate this by finally selling my white dinette table and four country-style chairs, which I bought under duress, purely as a temporary measure, in 1999, then moved across the country in 2001, back again in 2006, and mostly ignored entirely throughout (though I did repaint the base and chairs around 2004).  Now I find myself feeling a little misty and nostalgic about selling it… all those memories!  Most of which have nothing to do with the table!  I am a weirdo!

I’m currently flirting with a couch that I just found on Craigslist.  I have no idea where I will put it if I don’t sell the kitchen table, and move some of the stuff out of the garage and other stuff into different parts of the house (I’m finding a lot of empty corners for odd chairs and bookcases, and right now aesthetics are less important than potential hailstorm damage to my car).  But if that couch is in good shape, I will have a hard time turning it down.

Over the rest of the weekend, I felt productive but I’m not sure I produced much.  Tracy and I have been going through stuff, room by room, deciding what she is taking and what I am keeping, and we covered both the book and the CD collection this weekend.  I started ripping a bunch of my CDs to Tracy’s iTunes collection on her laptop.  Perhaps we will get her an iPod before long, so she’ll have copies of my music and I’ll have copies of hers.  I spent a lot of time doing that yesterday, while watching movies and TV and doing laundry.

I am so proud to say that I watched five AFI movies (from my quarterly resolutions list) since January and I should finish a third book over the trip this weekend.  Yay, accomplishments!  I will round up everything early next week, but this weekend I saw From Here to Eternity, which was pretty good.  Of the five movies I saw from AFI, this was the second with Montgomery Clift (the other was A Place in the Sun).  I also saw two movies starring Elizabeth Taylor (A Place in the Sun and Giant).  I guess those are all from the same time period (1953, 1951, 1956- in order of appearance).  The other two films I watched were earlier (King Kong, 1933) and later (Dr. Zhivago, 1965).  We also have Ben-Hur (1959) at home, but as it is apparently eighty-three million hours long, I am not sure if I will get through it before it’s due back at the video store on Wednesday (as I have, you know, a life.  Or at least other shit to do.)  But if I watch it before April 1, it doesn’t count on next quarter’s resolutions, because I am strict like that.

And this week is Spring Break at MU!  That is awesome.  We celebrated by going for a Saturday night dinner at Flat Branch Brewery, where the line was atypically short.  This week is supposed to be chilly and rainy, but I am happy that traffic is light and downtown is quiet.  Very nice.

Not to mention that MU is doing well in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  They’re in the Sweet Sixteen for the first time ever, which is really great.  What a year for MU sports- winning the Big 12 Conference in both football (well, Big 12 North, anyway) and basketball!