Ikea Spoils

So here you have it, the results of our Ikea trip last weekend. All the while I was lamenting that I didn’t want our apartment to look like an Ikea showroom and I bought two things that say Ikea the most. But I love them. It does open up the room, and it brightens that dark corner where nothing but dust and Husband’s bike had been living. The bike has been moved elsewhere.

Before (as in before mirror but also before couch and paint)

Not pictured is a light we purchased for the “kitchen” – one of those industrial,  hang from the ceiling jobs that Ikea sells for cheap. We had to rig yet another powerstrip (taped to the wall, this one) but oh boy can we see the stove now! No more guessing if we’re burning food, it’s so exciting.

After. (ooh, retro!)

In honor of being able to see in the corners where we usually relegated the dirt, we cleaned our apartment. Nothing like a fresh space with new things to make a girl feel like staying in her apartment for another six months.

Next on the list: Carpets and someone to do our laundry.

Spring Cleaning

The timing isn’t right to switch pills. The timing is never right to switch pills, really. No time is good to go wonky in the brain. Where things were mostly predictable now they are not. Predictably unpredictable, that’s how I am.

It makes me wonder what is really so bad with my brain. I went through years where I was supported by anti-depressant alone. I never threw things at walls then. I never cried and wanted to scream. What is different now that needs to be fixed? What has changed?

It’s February – not quite spring. The weather teases us with warm, sunny days followed by cold, rainy ones. I want to move out of my apartment. Everything about it seems dark. There isn’t enough light, that’s true. There aren’t enough electrical sockets, either. It leads us to the superfluous use power strips. Imagine power strips plugged into power strips and you have our apartment. It’s sad, really, because lurking just behind all those fire hazards are little blocks of REAL electrical connections right there on the WALL but not yet live. There has been promise of this “New Electricity” since we moved in a year ago but for now the empty sockets peppering our walls at nice, convenient intervals just taunts us.

We can’t move out of the apartment, not just yet. Husband needs a job first and we are supposedly trying to save money. Naturally our solution is Ikea. It’s cheaper than getting a new apartment and hopefully with its obnoxiously loud color palette I can find something there that will spruce up the space. Lamps will be bought. Space will somehow be made in the cramped living room / kitchen / dining room. How, I don’t know, but surely Ikea does. (And if Ikea doesn’t, Apartment Therapy does.)

And, in the meantime, we will continue.We'll do laundry and go to the movies and keep trying to make friends and I will keep going back to the doctor until things feel right in my head. We'll keep adapting to our space and I will keep adapting to the brain of mine because, well, love what you've got, right? Doesn't do any good to spend all our time wishing it was different. Make a change or stop whining.

That's the moral of the story.

Last Weekend

Washington was lovely. (I promise you there will be photos.) Our hotel was just three blocks from the White House and the weather was incredible. This meant we spent most of the weekend wearing out our feet and burning off the calories of vacation food. Not that we spent a lot of time thinking about the calories in our food – we didn't. We were on a mini break.

The weekend was exactly what we needed. For me, it has been over a year since I have taken anything resembling a trip (something with a hotel, eating out and sights to be seen). We went to the Poconos in the fall but somehow that didn’t feel like a break, I guess because we never left Pennsylvania. I had an awesome Bachelorette Party but that feels like a million years ago, now.

For Husband, the break was from his job search. Anyone who has looked for a job in the last year or so knows exactly what I mean.

We saw all the major sights to be seen. Well, we saw everything that was in walking distance of The Mall, anyway, most of which was under some form of construction.  It ruined some potentially great photos but mostly we didn’t mind. The weather on Saturday was practically balmy, forcing us to play with the placement of our coats – on or off our bodies, under our arm or over. We wandered in and out of the Natural History Museum (The Hope Diamond!) and the Air and Space Museum (where I spent a full thirty minutes sitting like a sleep lump outside of the Albert Einstein gift shop). We walked from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol.

“I don’t even know what they do in this building!” I scoffed. Husband took photos, despite the construction. I was pretty tired by then.

At dinner that night we chose a restaurant arbitrarily. We were uncomfortably wedged diagonally between two tables, one of which did not know that I could hear them when they were talking about me, the other occupied by a couple who looked all at once bored and uncomfortable to be with each other. He was trying too hard to impress her and she, frankly, couldn’t give a damn. To make up for poor dining we went to a pub and had overpriced cocktails. I insisted that Husband have a shot with me so we ordered a couple of very green Thin Mints. They were on the house.

Before leaving D.C. we went to the National Aquarium. Fun fact: I did not know that my own husband loves Aquariums as much as I do. This is something we had never spoken about before, but how often does a love of aquariums really come up in a relationship? When you have the opportunity to go to one, that’s when you talk about it. Suffice it to say that, despite the relative shabbiness of the aquarium, both of us enjoyed it. They had, for reasons that weren’t totally clear, an albino crocodile and a handful of snakes.

We decided that we would definitely visit D.C. again, vowing to return in about a year when all of the photo disrupting construction should be done. We want to take some Frenchies and visit the International Spy Museum. There will be time for all this.

For now we’ve shuffled back into the real world.  But only because we have to.