Where Personal and Professional Life Collide...

During the course of a GISHWHES item procurement (don't ask, I can't tell you yet), I realized that my wedding china (ironically bought closer to our divorce than our wedding) has been sitting untouched in the cabinet for... well, between 6 and 8 years, depending on the piece.

The traditional refrain for china is "the good stuff" and "for company." After my divorce I took a look at the silverware (actual silver) and decided I saw no need to buy inexpensive stainless for 'everyday' use, because if I wasn't good enough to use the "good stuff," who the hell was? (and what kind of message was I sending myself?) But silver can be put in the dishwasher, and polished at-need. Good china really needs to be hand-washed. And I am good enough for the good stuff, but I'm also lazy enough to groan at the thought of hand-washing dishes after every meal.  Ditto the lovely but really impractical-for-how-I-drink-coffee cups and saucers.

So what do I do with the china?  Continue to keep it in the cabinet, wrapped up?  Say the hell with it and start using them (especially as my daily-wear plates will need to be replaced soon?)  Or find somewhere to donate them, and hope they find a good home?

A dilemma.

(selling them really isn't an option - the resale value on these probably won't even cover my time/energy in taking out an ad and dealing with no-show buyers.  Unless someone reading here is interested?  Set for ten, including the errata - platters, bowls, etc).

The semi-occasional-not-quite-annual cull of the bookcases has begun. First pass netted 18 novels. This.... barely even made a dent.

(the rule for fiction is: if I haven't read it in a year and have lost interest, it goes. It I read it and felt no desire to read more of the author's work, it goes. If I read it and loved it but haven't touched in it several years/won't reread it any time soon... it probably needs to find a new home.)

If anyone's interest 'shopping' in the culled list when I'm done, drop me a line.


EtA: up to 42 books, one of which was a duplication and two were galleys.  Also determined that the first printing hardcovers of Elizabeth Lynn's "Dancers" trilogy and my much-battered, much-read copies of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit go nowhere.

Also, this will leave my possession when someone pries it out of my cold, dead fingers (or offers me a boatload of money for it):

In very good condition, with color plates.  There's no copyright page, but the inscription on the flyleaf reads 1933.

The annual co-op board meeting has been survived, despite impossible temperatures and only one working fan.  Our management company rep was probably wondering why he got the short straw tonight, since nobody except him seemed interested in cutting the meeting short.  However, our CPA is a man of patience and humor, and does not talk down to women any more than he talks down to men. *g*  And after increasing acrimony in the building toward the existing board (for many valid reasons), there was much rowdiness and discussion resulting in a new board being elected.

(No, not me - as with SFWA, I serve, but I will not serve.)


Thank dog we only have to do this once a year.  I'm TIRED.


These are the entertainments of the sophisticated NYC lifestyle.... (hah)

The new television* is successfully set up. The new blu-ray player is successfully set up and hooked into the home network (after a mighty battle** skalds would not scorn to sing).

I am going to celebrate by wailing on a scene that needs to be revised and put to bed. Hey, you have your victory celebrations, I have mine***.






*my friends insisted I needed a 46-50 inch television for the lounge area. My friends are size queens. The 40" does the job perfectly well without overwhelming the space.
** seriously. It was a battle of wills and ice-cold hate and steely determination, and in the end, the player blinked.
*** and, at some point after that, I need to rearrange the artwork, because moving one piece meant everything else had to be reconsidered, too...

the new desk/office set-up:



The laptop is hooked up to the monitor so I can run all the internet-stuff and research pages on the larger screen, where it's accessible but not a distraction, and work directly on the laptop. The thing to the right of the ledge is not an in-box, it's a kit-in-box. You know what's usually there...

Behind the chair is about 5' of open space (great for pushing back the chair and putting my feet up on the ledge).  The edge visible to the left is the cafe table I use for meals - it's covered in paper right now but easy enough to move it into the open space and have an Actual Dinner Table.

I wasn't sure how well this would work, with my back to the rest of the main room, but so far, so productive.... (and the cats seem happy to hang out in the box, or on the sofa/window ledge to the right.)  So yeah, I miss my beautiful huge workdesk, but in a "it was lovely but this works better" kind of a way....

I am not what you might call a fan of Routine, at least not where my living/working space is concerned.  As a kid, I used to come home periodically and Change Everything in my room. When I was in college, I routinely (at least once during the school year, usually twice) rearranged my furniture. Even when I was working in a wee cube, I found a way to change it up on a regular basis. It was, I suppose, both my rebellion against standardization, and a way to keep my surroundings from stagnating (monotonous surround = monotonous interior?).

When I lived in a larger house (we had 11 rooms, incl the basement. For 2 people. Insanity), the space overwhelmed me, and I could barely bring myself to do anything, even when I knew I needed to. An oversized living space is, for me, worse than a small one.  It sucks the energy out of you...

Now that I'm in a NYC apartment, where my 750+ square feet is considered good-sized for a one-bedroom, I find myself in the happy medium of not needing to change things, but having the desire/energy to do so. Over the time I've been here, the living area has been in a constant flux, finally - with the purchase of the new sofa - settling into a nice, flexible arrangement that can be changed-up according to the day's need. Plus, I have what I refer to as the Modular Office - the desks and chairs rearrange easily to create different working configurations (or to become a formal-ish dining area). 

This is probably the key to apartment living, for someone like me: make sure everything's flexible. Except the bookcases. I never want to move another bookcase EVER.

[random aside: my old boss, an architect/designer, haaaaated sectional pieces.  For a woman who specialized in smaller houses, she never quite 'got' the concept of flexible arrangements.]

Anyway: having more-or-less figured out the public and working spaces (and having had the kitchen renovated to my specs) is probably why, this weekend, I looked at my bedroom and decided that four years with one set-up was long enough.

[cue furniture moving, much consultation, and some moderately freaked-out felines]

The original set-up had decent feng shui, I suppose (except the beam-over-my-head), and it looked nice, but I always felt that the room wasn't being used to its full potential, with half the space "hidden" on the other side of the bed [and therefore rarely used], and having to walk past a large window to get clothes out of the dresser was, um, occasionally awkard. So now the bedroom has terrible feng shui (head to the window, feet at the door), and it's a little cramped on either side of the bed (about 3' of clearance on either side), but the dressers and the closet are now at the far end, closer to the bathroom door, so it feels more like a suite set-up.  Overall, it's a better use of the space - this is where I sleep, this is where I get dressed/have room to do yoga, and the tv rotates to either face the bed, or the open space (for Wii, etc).

I'm not sold on it yet, entirely.  I think I'll keep it a week, and see how it does.  But I will tell you - the past two nights have given me the weirdest, most vivid, reality-based dreams.  I know some people would consider that a negative: I find it fascinating.


So.  For those of you who made it all the way through, or just skipped to the bottom: are you a "set and settled" householder?  Or do you shift with your whims?