Stuff here I like.

[mrissa]

Things that were bad yesterday are bad today. You can ask on e-mail if you like. I'm going to talk about other stuff here, though, because the hard problems I'm dealing with right now are not hard problems because I haven't talked and thought about them enough. They're just inherently hard. Sometimes distraction is a good and reasonable thing. (Let's hear it for escapism! Forty-third verse, same as the first!)

One of you said, "I'd like to hear about what you adore most (or about some of the things you adore best) in your house (outside of the people)." Good idea: inside of the people, it's too dark to appreciate some of the things I adore most. Specifically, one of the things I love most about our house is that it has most of our books in it. I love having a library with books on all the walls that will take books and comfy blue furniture to sit on when we're reading (or talking). I want to finish replacing the current shelves with cherry stained shelves, I want to buy a new lamp, and I want to get it painted blue instead of yellow, but the way it is now will do very nicely.

I like -- can we switch verbs here? because I'm too Minnesotan to keep on with "adore" without squirming -- I like a lot of our house these days. I like the paintings my aunt gave us, one in the library and the other in markgritter's and my bedroom. I don't much like the living room -- it has awkward door/window/fireplace placement for our usage -- but I like the red couch that's coming a week from today. I like the prints we've hung and are going to hang soon: Budapest and Minnehaha Falls and snowy trees and tapirs and stuff. I like stuff on the living room mantle: the Mexican pottery immingpool gave us when they were here when Ellie was a baby, the three stylized hugging people, the little lizard bowl we picked up at a craft fair with porphyrin's crew.

I like the pitcher seagrit made me and the bowl with dragonflies on it that makes pameladean crow every time I serve her things from it.

I like -- no, actually "adore" is the right word here -- the little green tile that hangs next to the front hall closet, that porphyrin and Mike brought the very first time they met us, because it was just the right thing, just our kind of thing, and it went so nicely in that spot, and there they were, just our kind of people, too. I don't much believe in love at first sight, but I loved that little tile and the little hands that gave it to me pretty much right away. And the big hands, too.

I like the color of wood in our bedroom furniture and the way I can tell which kitchen chair someone just sat on by how it creaks.

I like our two pianos with their different stories and their identical lamps and the iron dragonfly and the little blue hippo and the bead calendar on them.

People are on against materialism, but we haven't just randomly grabbed material things and thrown them at our home. The things we have here are our things for a reason. And we like a lot of the same stuff, so it's not like I have very many things I'm sneering at going, "Well, that's his, not mine."

What do you like at your house? What do you like at my house?

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I like sitting in my living room looking at all the things I brought home from my foreign adventures. The photos I took of Icelandic geysirs. The clay moon lantern with stars punched in it to let the light out that I found in a little shop in Quito (really little. I could barely turn around in it). The plush Mooch and Earl from Tokyo. A wooden carving from Kenya. So many beautiful things that remind me of my beloved travels.

And I like the sofa very much, because I had it made for me so it's exactly the right caramel gold with red flecks, and both our cats look really handsome on it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We did not get our new living room furniture to coordinate with our puppy. It is merely a happy coincidence.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

I like the downstairs family room. I like my "spot" on the couch...even if the couches are different. I adore my Ansel Adams prints, with some of my photos mixed in. I adore my pottery scattered around the house.

I adore the people (and puppy) who live at your house. And your library. ;-P Your library and cadithial's library have influenced how I am setting up the office.

[windcedar.livejournal.com]

I love bookshelves full of books. (Alas, mine are mostly all stored at my parents' house far away, so am currently restricted to liking bookshelves located in other people's houses.) I think your library sounds wonderful.

I like the house I'm living in right now even though it's decorated in a quietly tasteful/subdued kind of way that is utterly foreign to how I would decorate a house if I had one - I have a fondness for vivid colours, if they're colours I like.

I like the cat, even though he only abides me on sufferance, as I am not His Person. :)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I didn't so much want to coordinate with my cats as I was determined not to have a cool or pale color palette. But I admit I considered the effect of pet hair when looking over swatches of fabric.

[pameladean]

I love the light in our house, the way it is situated to catch more in winter than in summer, the way the sunshine lies on the worn but beautiful floors. I love the woodwork. I love that we have four sunrooms. Our stuff is rather battered at this point, but I like our artwork and photographs. I love the back yard.

At your house the books and the kitchen and the new comfy chairs are all very satisfactory indeed, and I also like the way it sits on its hill and looks welcoming after dark.

P.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I love the Witch Queen marionette in her black lace gown and dead-white face that I bought in Venice, and how she sits on my bookshelves guarding them. I love my small collection of Green Men and how they look on the wall. I like seeing my husband stretched out on our excellent "napping couch" with a cat curled up on his chest, sound asleep. I really enjoy being able to look around and see all my bookshelves, even though what it means is that we're in a much-too-small apartment and I have no separate room to be a library.

[ellarien]

Your library sounds great!

I'm fond of my golden oak southwestern dresser -- the first decent piece of furniture I ever owned -- and my big wine-red sofa, on which I lie maybe twice a month, and my books, and the second-hand hessian-shaded lamp on the side table.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you find colors cool the way people say they are, or does your perception of cool map differently than the standard?

I ask because I know of lots of cool yellows and warm greens, just to take a couple of examples. So the "warm = red, orange, yellow, brown" thing confuses me.

Ista does not shed externally, being a poodle; we have to brush her out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Which is your spot on the couch(es)?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When we're done painting, the colors in this house will be a good deal more vivid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It does, doesn't it?

It isn't quite in your house, but I like the way the trees all go in the fall, along your street, and I like coming in through a tangle of flowers in the spring and summer.

Also I like David's paper fish and several of the things in the downstairs dining room.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have a Green Man out on the porch, and I like him, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hope to lie on our sofa a good deal more often than that.

[rosefox]

I like our secondhand furniture. It will make it easy to make the living room feel like a small café, which is the eventual plan. (I like writing in cafés, you see, and there isn't one in the neighborhood.) I like that every piece of it has a story that's really the story of us starting our life together: this is the couch that we got when the neighbor died and his family didn't want his stuff and told us to take it all, this is the table we found on the corner and carried home and said we would sand all the varnish off of so that our friends could carve their initials in it with ballpoint pens, this is the folding chair a friend gave us because she knew we needed more chairs, these are the bookshelves I scored off a Wall Street firm that decided to get rid of all its furniture on Freecycle, this is the dining table sinboy named Spiny Norman and hammered nails into so that the legs would stop falling off, this is the lovely swiveling hand-wrought iron shelf some silly person left on the street that holds our tea and thus became our Tea Shelf, Bertie Iron. (I adore this pun above and beyond all other puns.) As we put these things in place, we made our house into a home. Someday I will be deeply glad to get rid of the aged, worn couches and acquire bookshelves that match, but until then, the memories give them a special gleam that makes me very happy. Plus, as they're all secondhand, I get to be a good environmentalist, and that makes me very happy too.

I love our cats. I love the way they sit on the windowsills, basking in warmth from the radiator below and the sun above, stretching and yawning and falling asleep with their black fur gleaming like obsidian. I love the way they sit on my bed at night after sinboy has gone to sleep, content to simply coexist with me. I love that they greet us at the door when we come home. I love waking up in the morning and wandering out into the living room to see them on the couch, suspiciously close together, as though they only bicker when we're watching and are great friends the rest of the time. I don't love their somewhat stormy relationships with the litterbox, but nobody's perfect, and having a warm purring cat curled up on my feet watching me type makes up for just about everything.

We've lived here almost a year and I haven't put any art up on the walls yet. This is highly unusual for me. I think it's because the whole place is mine in a way that no other place has been. The whole place is sinboy's too, of course. I've just never lived anyplace where the shared space was so genuinely shared. I don't need to stake out my territory and label my space, here. (Almost all of my art involves roses.) At some point I will--possibly after I snag some paintings from my mother's apartment when she moves next month--but it's so nice not to need to. So I like the bare walls, even though I don't usually like bare walls, because they're my bare walls and I really just haven't decided what to do with them yet and I have all the time in the world to figure it out.

I like the thickness of those walls, too. Hooray for pre-war apartment buildings. And when I do hear neighbors, I hear them making music--the pianist next door, the operatic soprano on the first floor--and that's a lovely thing.

I like having all my books unpacked and on shelves for the first time in memory, all sorted and accessible and right there when I want them (except for the ones in the big unruly stacks that have been recently read and need to be reshelved). I like that we don't have a television because there isn't room among the books. I like that we found room for a stereo anyway.

I like the way we've arranged things in the kitchen. There's a rolling butcher block, and two big wall racks that we hang spoons and pans and spice racks and measuring cups and other cooking tools from. The cupboards make sense to me, and I can reach everything I need without getting on a chair. There's a gas stove and a sufficiently large fridge. It does everything I ask of it and is full of happy memories of cooking with sinboy and baking with regyt.

I'd like to see your house sometime. It sounds lovely.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

The corner closest to where the fish tank now is. =)

I always like that left corner, if you are looking at the couch.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I like that the layout of your first floor doesn't seem to line up with your house's footprint in my head. (The kitchen doesn't seem to extend far enough towards the street, and the music room doesn't seem to extend far enough towards the garage). I like that your library felt sunny, not just with the actual light, but the size and shape and number of books on the shelves, and the shelves themselves. I like that your house reminds me of my righthand neighbors' house, growing up.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So do I. In my case, it's because I can write on something leaned on the arm of the couch that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have had time to figure out our walls, too. I liked it all right when they were all bare, but I also like it that they're getting not to be now, because we've had time to make good decisions, I think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You came at the right time of year for library sun, but it does have sun at some time of day all year. And the warmth of the shelves certainly helps.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

I like the fact that there are books all over my house.

I like the wire dragonfly hanging from the ceiling of my sewing room.

I love my bed and all the piles of covers and pillows on it.

Oh, and my bathtub! I have a jacuzzi and it makes me happy happy.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

My trailer was furnished for me upon my return from NY by a group of well meaning friends, and friends of the family. I found out about it shortly before my return home, it made me cry. I felt like a bride.

Even those things I dislike, I love because without them I would be sleeping on an air mattress and eating in a folding chair using my lap for a table. Oddly, there are a few things donated that I love more than if I could have chosen them myself, including a mid-century modern sofa and chair (green and blue striped) and a heavy (modern) chest of drawers made out of some kind of light wood, with dark wood handles.

But I love my new bed, and the sheets I bought for it long before I owned it. (They are mauve/pink with blurry flowers, totally unlike me and somehow right.) I love the lamp I rescued and refurbished from the flea market. It is the right shape. I love the print of roses that my teacher gave me.

I love the light in the mornings. I love the nature path outside. I love that I have everything I need, and am gradually acquiring things I want as well.

I love my little maple desk, which is the only thing that travelled both to and from NY with me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some of the things we get as gifts turn out to be exactly right even if we wouldn't have picked them ourselves. I have some vases that qualify that way, although they don't sit out on a daily basis, only when I have flowers in them.

That sounds like a wonderful place to come home to.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

You'd probably understand what it's like to return to a place that feels right, even though the vast majority of people here are mystified why I would ever leave NY to come back to CO.

I don't know that I will live here the rest of my life; but I needed a place to come "home" to, and even with its drawbacks, I can support myself comfortably here. NY was a constant battle, culturally, spiritually, financially.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. Sometimes a place doesn't have to be bad to be bad for you, and living in the wrong place can be thoroughly draining.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I love our living room. It looks like our living room, without being my living room or her living room. One can pick out elements of Scottness and wifeness, but it works as a cohesive whole, as well. In a style that we both like (and I wasn't at all convinced that this was possible).

I love our bedroom, too, but in a different way. There's more wifeness than Scottness, but it's wifeness that's trying to be considerate of Scottness. Oh, and I love our map of Aruba in that room. We framed it and it looks just exactly right. Way cool.

And I love the radiators. Not for me (as heating elements, they're not so great), but for the cat. The cat is almost never so happy while sleeping as when he's on a radiator. It's apparently the most luxurious and decadent thing a cat can do (judging by the look on his face). And I love that even if he's asleep on the radiator, he'll come to see me when I come home.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I could sleep on a radiator this morning, I totally would.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Me, too.