Becoming Modern

So we got the IKEA furniture all assembled. It looks very sharp in the living room:

I'm still working on "merchandising" the bookshelves. This is harder than it looks, folks. So far it's become sort of a "Russian-tchokes" shelf. Which wasn't intentional. But I love our Russian tchokes, all the more for the fact that Tim and I have separately in our life come into Russian tchokes (he because he lived there, me because my father worked there). I'm not done yet, so cut me some slack, but any suggestions for improvement are appreciated.

By the way, on the bottom there are 8 drawers, which we painstakingly put together, to house our million cds. For those of you keeping track at home, this is solution number 342 to the "housing our cd problem". Hopefully it will be the last one. We finally decided we needed to replace solution 341 because they could not be anchored to the wall and we were afraid our daughter or one of her friends would pull the cd cabinets over onto them. Not good. The cabinets are currently on Craig's List, $25 apiece, but for you, my special blog friends, can get them for the low low price of $15 each. Let me know if you want them. They slice, they dice, they even-- nevermind. Maybe we can get back .01 percent of the cash we've outlaid on cd solutions.

We still have to put this cabinet, which is currently living on the floor:

above our awesome new HD BIG SCREEN TV!

I never thought I would purchase a BIG SCREEN TV! But then, at least in this new living room, I was noticing that when I watched letterbox movies I was squinting. I like my movies to look good. And I don't like squinting, dammit. We'd upgraded to the old tv because we had to move our couch in the old house really close to the tv to read subtitles. And because we were on Warehouse Warriors and they gave us $200 to use at Sears. Can't complain about a $16 tv. Anyway, the other reason I wanted a flatscreen tv, and I know this is a really weird, possibly lame reason, was that I couldn't find any tv storage solutions that I liked that would fit our old tv. They're all designed for flatscreens these days. So I casually mentioned this to Tim and he of course latched onto it and a mere 4 hours after we received the refund check from Newmark, we were buying a flatscreen tv. Of course, as with all consumer electronic purchases, things snowballed and suddenly not only did we need a flatscreen tv that was bigger than I'd originally considered, we needed a blu-ray dvd player. And then, after we bought the blu-ray dvd player, actually, no Julie, what we needed was a Playstation 3, which has a blu-ray dvd player but is much better because it's only $100 more and you can play games on it! As you can imagine, by this point I was too worn out to fight and I meekly accepted this flimsy excuse. (In his defense, Tim did throw his Christmas money in towards the price differential). So I am the proud owner of a Playstation 3. Which for some reason, rather than coming with a game came with Spiderman 3. And we haven't seen the first 2 spidermans, so Spiderman 3 is sort of useless. But I do love watching movies and tv on the flatscreen. I'm not ashamed to say it. And it looks sleek and beautiful and modern, so it doesn't need to be hidden like a regular tv.

Speaking of modern, I find it interesting that we've finally got our mid-century modern house and it just seems to scream for modern furnishings, not the kitschy "Atomic Ranch" sort of furnishings which I thought I'd want. Also, Tim and I have always loved blonde woods, but this house with the walnut floors demands dark woods. So we have become "dark wood" lovers. Our dining table is dark wood too:

(And by "wood" I mean "veneer over particle board".) It looks great with the white plastic IKEA chairs, and even better with our family and friends sitting around it for Christmas dinner:)

I feel really weird about spending so much money, I'm a saver, not a spender, but I am so enjoying putting together our house and making it perfect!

Wow, that very long post took my mind off the fact that I am sick as a dog with Cedar Fever. And that Tim and Stella are sick as can be as well. In fact, we are the sick family and absolutely miserable. Although we did have a bright spot:

Our dear friends Anna and Sean had their new baby girl, Georgia Grace Friday morning!

Isn't she beautiful? Thursday night we had Tim's company party (for which we looked like this):

that's my fab dress from Emerald's, the picture doesn't do it justice. We had a great time, Tim had some really fantastic coworkers and their wives who we hung out with. We also had fun at the blackjack table. I actually won quite a bit! Stella spent the night at Tim's parents' house because we didn't know how late we'd be. We'd been home about an hour when the phone rang. It was midnight. I said, "uh oh, I hope that isn't Anna and Sean." Well of course it was! So we went over and picked up a very confused sleeping little Daniel who cried "Mommy" in the most heartrenching way until we got him in the car. Then he was a little sweetie and even gave us some smiles before going right back to sleep in Stella's crib. I love that little guy, he is adorable! So we didn't have a night sans kids, but it worked out for the best since Stella's bed was empty and we didn't have to install a carseat in the middle of the night either. AND Daniel sleeps to 8:30 (lucky bastards) so we got to sleep in. Although Anna called at 8am to let us know Georgia had been born and we were too excited to sleep. We got to meet her Friday afternoon and I've already been able to spoil her silly with lots of cute little pink things. I had to be practical with the first kid because Daniel needed boring stuff like strollers, but it's all about frilly pink stuff with Georgia! (Lest you think I forgot about Daniel, he now has a peeing, wetting Cabbage Patch kid newborn named "Kaylee" to call his own. Glad to know that Cabbage Patch kids still have ridiculous names).

And Georgia is not causing any baby fever in our household, nope, no siree. Although Stella did agree that she wanted a baby brother or sister like Georgia. Okay, kid, be careful what you wish for, trust me, being Numero Uno is not the same after a sibling arrives!