So.
I love my room, but I find that I just want to stay in bed all day.
And all night. Forever.
Which is good, to a degree, because I don't spend any money when I'm in bed. But I also don't DO ANYTHING.
So today, I had to go help Kate move to the new office, which was unnecessary, because she had about 8 people and I was completely unneeded. So I only hung out for an hour and a half or so, and then I came back home. I'm pretty tidy, so the house wasn't really a mess when I got here, per se, but I attacked everything and now it's much cleaner than it even was before. I cleaned EVERYTHING. I washed my bed clothes, cleaned the dog yard and the cat box, swept the WHOLE floor, cleaned counters, stove, sinks, washed the dishes three friggin times. Then I attacked the shelves in my corner where my bed is. They're almost completely empty now.
This is the coolest room that I've ever had, mostly just because I've been able to do with it exactly what I want to. So now it looks exactly the way I saw it in my head.
And it's CLEAN. Which my room at home never could be. It just wasn't really an option. There are 200 years of dust on parts of that house.
Lady (the dog) kept staring at me all day. She followed me around and ogled me with her giant bug eyes. I know she was waiting for me to forget to shut the door to the library when I left so she could climb up on my bed. Or maybe she thought I would throw her a biscuit, or even just pet her. I don't care. I'm totally an animal person, but this dog is THE MOST IRRITATING DOG ever. She is pushy and needy, and she smells SO BAD. She also tries to get me back when she gets mad at me. I put a chair across the couch so that she can't sleep on it, and once she pushed it off, and another time, she climbed behind it.
I try, but I can't stand her.
The cat is growing on me. He is VERY NEEDY. He always wants to be pet, which is new for him, because he was a very aloof cat a year ago. Now he yells at me or sits behind me on the couch and slaps me in the face with his tail if I'm not petting him and I could be.
But now, mostly he just sits on the ottoman or in the bathtub (I don't know why. He's weird.).
I'm definitely an animal person, but these animals would drive anyone crazy.

This is how i paint walls. The photo doesn't do it justice really. All I did was slop paint on the walls and smoosh it around. After 5 minutes, I was rocking out to my mp3 player and dancing with the brushes and the wall. And it's a good thing I was able to have fun with it, because she made me do the whole room twice.
Good times.

I had pictured what it was like to have my bed where I wanted it.
It was very much like this.
I bought myself an amazing futon. It took hours to put it together.
OK maybe one hour, but I was VERY impressed with Face and I. With only minor confusion, and having it fall apart only ONCE, we managed to make the bed.
And I got new sheets and a comfortor, and I brought over my giant feather bed and a crazy mattress pad.
Now my bed is the kind of bed that is firm enough that my hips feel good (old horseback riding accident) but SO INCREDIBLY SOFT that you sink in and disappear.
Obviously I'm exaggerating, but you get the general gist. It's VERY cold in here.
But I don't care.
Because I have a monster jumbo incredible down comfortor.
And I'm very happy right now.
You can find me in the Library. :)

Face came over again tonight. Which made me happy, because I'm perpetually afraid I will have to sit in the dark by myself.
Instead, we went to the market and bought LOTS of stupid stuff that we definitely didn't need (Note to self: Do not go grocery shopping when you are HUNGRY. Bad idea.).
We got back to the house and made ourselves a lovely little dinner of some lasagna-like substance -- freaking awesome -- and tater tots. We also got strawberries and a pineapple for a chocolate fondue, but we stuffed ourselves so much on the real food that we just never got around to the chocolate.
We set ourselves up for a little dinner party in the library complete with candle light, and had our dinner in upholstered chairs with cream soda in pink plastic champagne flutes.
It was amazing.
My new favorite movie of the moment is Elizabethtown, which I bought as a last minute, completely unnecessary purchase, and which we watched with dinner. I nearly cried about 7 times but caught myself. He's such a pitiful character in so many ways, but he has so much that I want.
And then there is the love interest, Claire. At the end, she gave Drew a "map" which was really a binder full of notes and CD's and things to do and people to meet on the longest solo road trip of his life. And Face said "Just like you."
And then we discovered that aside from the superskinny, superblondeness of Kirstin Dunst, she was me. She's creative and intuitive and a bit crazy. She makes the best 44 hour map of everything and everywhere she knows he needs to see, and she takes control in moments of crisis.
I would rather be her than Julianne Moore's character that was the last person we thought was me in a movie. The problem with her is that she was more of a control freak than even I am. Or maybe, just more than I am now.
I think the best part of the movie, and defintely the part that made me cry more than any others, is when he started scattering the ashes. Because he was visiting these really incredible places, like where Martin Luther King was shot and the Mississippi river and he started scattering his ashes because he felt like his father would have wanted it.
But really it was the fact that he had always put off taking this road trip with his father, so this was the chance they had to bond. Even though one of them was dead. And that made it meaningful.
Anyway, my point is that I liked the movie.
And I liked the dinner, and I like that pretty soon, I will have a bed, especially now that I have 2 nice pillows to put on it.
I have NO idea how I'm going to sqeeze in everything I need to get done this weekend.
Bed shopping, jaking, dinner party, finish data entry, paint the new office, game day, etc.
I will be a happy girl when Kate is safely moved into her new office, even if she is giving me a ton of money to make it happen right now.
The stress is almost too much for me.
Almost. Not quite.

Weird conversations.

Joe and I sure have some crazy talks.
He called me at about 11:45 last night, just to tell me about this new girl he's seeing (sorta) and how his day was. We talked for almost an hour about things like how you know if someone is flirting (I SWEAR Joe is a girl sometimes), and exactly what it feels like to get hit in the balls.
Which apparently, as he describes it is "nauseous, but not in the pukey sense. Like you feel when you get the wind knocked out of you, but without the wind part." Which doesn't clear that up at ALL for me. And then he asked what really bad cramps felt like and I said it was super bad internal achiness. Not throbbing or stabbing or stinging, but constant and unbearable.
In the end, we decided that they were probably very similar feelings of badness, but we really would never know for sure.
We also talked about why we prefer milk chocolate over white chocolate and why Valentine's day sucks.
My life is pretty darn good at the moment. Aaron left yesterday morning, to spend a week in Mass. for work. So even though Carissa and Donny are upstairs, the house is so much more quiet and bearable.
Face came over last night and we played loud music and laughed a lot and ate rice pilaf. We occupied our time (in true Face/Face style) by looking up cute baby animal pictures online and trying to outdo each other. I love laughing for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I love having a bright green room too. :)
I'm late for work already. I'm still painting at Kate the acupuncturist's new office and I keep saying I'll be there for 8 but I just can't bring myself to do it. Today I'm working at the new office painting till early afternoon, then 3-7 I'll be at the old office in reception, and also doing some data entry.
I don't have to sneak on the internet anymore though. :)

Ivan

I used up a whole roll of b&w film on Ivan and the snow this morning. Ivan, of course, is the perfect color for b&w. He's that nice 18% grey that we had to use to compare light and dark, and he was made for modelling.
He goes where I tell him to go, and stands there and waits for my camera to click. And sometimes, he moves his head around slowly and opens and closes his eyes, or looks me right in the lens.

I swear he knows what he's doing sometimes.
We also convinced he's learning to spell, because we always spell out words like "car" and "go" and "squirrel" and he's starting to recognize them. Add that to his repetoire of opening doors, identifying toys by their names, understanding sign language, and having his own language in barking (and I literally do mean that. We always know what he wants by the way he barks.), he's damn near human!
There is no other dog quite like him.

There was meant to be more with this post. But I can't remember now what I wanted to write. So it's just an interesting picture now. enjoy that.

This is the funniest dog ever.

This picture was taken when Hollie and I were trying to keep each other company from 400 miles apart. She was at work, I was in front of the TV (as usual.)
We were both bored.