ginormous wall = ginormous art

There is a ginormous wall in my living room that I am contemplating putting some ginormous art on. I'm thinking maybe decals? Did a quick search and these are my two favorites.

Minus the butterflies. This is from Walltat, and I love how sassy and bold it is!

I'm also a big fan of these circles from Funky Moose.

Rather than actually putting the decals on the wall, I think it would be cool to put them on a giant "canvas" kinda like in the first picture. I could use both of these and reverse them as the mood struck. Don't have a firm idea, but I'm toying with one :)

Did that just happen?!? REALLY!!!

 The day after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Until Journey started barking out the back window. She loves to sit on the bench by a picture window and look out. When one of the neighbors walks by she'll bark a bit, and then stop. She wasn't stopping. I got up to scold her see what she was barking at, and I couldn't believe what I saw!

 

 It was a cow! A COW IN OUR BACKYARD!!! Ok, we do live in the country, but not by any cow farms and we live in town.

 I sat down with Journey and praised her, after all, this was kinda a situation and she had alerted us to it.

 It was a solid black cow, and since we just got a heavy snow there was no missing him/her (I know nothing about cows besides they taste good in hamburger form)

 I got a little gutsy and went out on our back porch to snap a picture. It turned and looked at me and started pawing at the ground in front of it, so I ducked back inside.

 Justin called animal control and the cop showed up. At first he and a woman tried to corral it, but it was really pissed (and confused, poor guy) and charged them. Then it ran off, and we didn't see it for a while. The poor cop had been chasing the stupid thing all morning.

 

It came back about thirty minutes later, and this is where the story gets even crazier. Now I'm a city girl. I live way out here because my loving husband is a country boy and I love him. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

 The cop pulled in our back alley, and so did two trucks... everyone got out and the pulled out guns. YEAH GUNS!!! They were gonna shoot the cow right in our back yard! I kept looking out the window wishing I'd taken my Dad's silly advise to paint the poor cow white so it could escape and be free. I looked at Justin and said, "Justin, they aren't really gonna shoot it are they?" BANG! poor stupid cow!

 The police officer disarmed all the men who'd come to help, and the poor cow wandered a little before it finally dropped and, you guessed it, BANG! They shot it again! I couldn't believe what was happening!!!

 Poor cow, poor stupid cow.

 Apparently, some dumb kid was trying to deliver the live cow all by himself to Lehr's meat market up the street to be slaughtered. This particular cow did not want to be slaughtered so it ran away, to our backyard!

 They brought in a bobcat to haul away the slaughtered cow.

Gonna try to sell this shot to the local papers, because even though this was Bambi's mom traumatizing I just couldn't stop snapping pictures, and this right here is the money shot.

 And here is the cow being paraded past our front lawn. That's our walkway and truck. Seriously, this all happened right outside our house! I still can't believe it, even though I saw it all and I have pictures. It was seriously the craziest thing that's ever happened!

 There he goes, poor stupid cow.

 Elegy to the Cow

You left your prints in our yard

And you left you prints on my heart

Maybe if you'd ran a little faster

You could have avoided this disaster

Now you're gone my stomach is week

It'll be a while before I eat beef

Poor cow, poor poor cow

Poor cow, poor stupid cow!

My sweet husband

Yesterday I got home from work, and came home to the sweetest husband in the world. I knew he was going to take me out to dinner (sushi) and a movie (Dawn Treader). What I didn't know is that he was going to surprise me with two small household projects. First he did the dishes :) This is kinda a big deal in a house without a dishwasher. (And bonus, he actually put them away too.) And he did something else that I have been wanting for a while.

Here in the land of "where do you want this?"... "I'm not sure yet, babe"... Not a lot gets done. I've been pretty frustrated because the dining room has been tricky for me... don't think I've ever lived in a house with a dining room, we always had eat in kitchens, which you can usually only arrange one way. The biggest bane in my dining room is... the rocking chair... (I just deleted about two paragraphs of digression, lol... felt good to type out my real feeling about the rocking chair, but no one wants to read that!) Ok, back on track... The rocking chair's function in the dining room (Justin had to invent one to keep me from moving it farther) is a catchall for coats, scarves, and gloves... or a big fat cluttered eye-sore!

I recently found a little wall mounted coat rack we had bought for the apartment, and was trying to think where to put it. That last time Justin was home, he saw it out, and said, "Where do you want this?" and as per usual I said, "I'm not sure yet babe..." Then I played with a few different places, and discovered that little hidden spot by the door was perfect! "Right here."... "Ok, do you have the screws for it, honey?"... "errr?"

That's where I really thought this whole thing was going to end, but I came home yesterday to this conversation. I walked in to find Justin playing x-box, so I asked if I needed to take the dog out. He said, "It couldn't hurt." (He was hoping when I walked through the back door I would notice, hello I am a blonde. So I took Journey out, and when I came back in, I started throwing my hat, mittens, scarf, and coat onto that rocking chair, and was interrupted by, "Don't you dare!"... "....?".... "Turn around.".... " :) "

 It's so beautiful! Justin is awesome :) 

Now to move that stupid rocking chair somewhere where I don't have to look at it we both can appreciate it.

Our date last night was really fun. We went to our favorite Asian restaurant, and since it was the weekend they had all the really good sushi out. YUM! Then we went to go see Dawn Treader at the Lincoln, a cool old vaudeville theater that was made into a movie theater. (I was in a vaudeville play there in high school... it's a cool place). I mention this next part only because it was funny. We got treated to the black man's commentary of Dawn Treader. There was a very funny black man sitting right behind us who was talking his girlfriend, who didn't appear to be watching the movie, through the whole thing. "Now he's about to hit him with that oar... I just know it's gonna happen... you wait, you'll see... Oooo! I told you!" .... "Oh sh** yall, the evil is all up over that ship! It's too late, it's just to late!"... "Oh, there's Asland, you see his shadow, there he is. Tell um, Asland!" Ok, so he had Justin and I kinda annoyed at first, but he was so into the movie that eventually we just had to laugh about it. I usually hate it when people talk during movies, but this guy was just keeping it real. (If you don't know what I'm talking about just go to a movie at Jamestown Mall sometime.) His commentary made me miss living in North County, lol. I really love different cultures. After the movie, and a smile and nod from me to funny black man, Justin and I did something we do every year. Belleville has a gingerbread walk downtown. There are gingerbread houses in almost all of the shop windows. There are bunches of different divisions: children's, masters, fantasy, historical society, etc. It is so much fun to check out all the different ginger bread houses... even though it's always freezing, lol. I will leave you with an example of the coolness from a few years ago. (We never remember to take our camera...)

It's flea market weekend, and I have a little more Christmas shopping to do :)

Did you know 12-5 comes right after 11-27?

Ok, so "pictures tomorrow" didn't happen, BUT pictures today is definitely gonna happen... riiiight NOW!

 

 Journey is really enjoying Christmas already :)

 My mom made this nativity forever ago. She cast the ceramic pieces then painted them.

 Scrabble tiles = instant awesome

Happy Birthday Jesus :)

 Saw something like this at Anthropologie while Christmas shopping. Seriously what could be cooler than trees made out of books :)

 Oh, and this also made a dent in that big ol' stack of books on our bedroom floor.

To carry on the book theme, I made a bunch of snowflakes out of a few pages from one of my "project books".

 Here's something else I've been making. Little amigurumi snowmen ornaments.

 I just finished all the ones for my family, now I'm working on the ones for my pre-K class!

 I also decorated my book shelf a bit. That cool card tree was thrifted.

 You may have noticed that Journey has been in almost all of these pictures. I did not plan that, she really is that big of a photo creeper. (Don't let her fool you!)

You may remember me showing you little bits of twisted wire... they were antlers.

 When I thrifted these deer, they were pretty sad, but some wood filler, a nice fresh coat of white paint, and one set of antlers later they are just pretty :)

 they have jingle bell tales (not too sure how I feel about the tails)

 I need some tapers...

 Christmas hit this vignette as well. Those of you who are observant will notice a cup is missing. That's what happens when I don't do dishes for a while and I run out of regular cups, lol.

 My take on a snow globe.

 I ended up only putting us one tree, and that was an ordeal. (I was going to use my colored lights, but there weren't enough, so we went to go get one more strand. Justin wanted me to try out LED's. We bought two packs, and drove the 15 minutes home. One strand didn't work. Justin drove back to exchange them. The strand he got in exchange wouldn't work correctly unless plugged end to end... we tried every configuration we could think of, and finally plugged them backwards and ran an extension cord up the tree to the middle. UGH! The lights change from blue to green. Kinda cool, but not worth the three hours I could have had trees one and two decorated in and possibly cuddled up with said husband to watch a movie. After I put on the LED's I decided that the changing lights were too sporadic for me and added my little white mini-lights. It's growing on me. Justin loves it because it's really colorful and has all our "special" ornaments. This is the first year I've come home and he's turned the lights to the tree on all by himself. Usually he doesn't care too much about the tree, so that kinda makes it worth it.)

Ta-da! My Christmasy living room :)

tomorrow there will be some revealing

Tonight I drug up my two Christmas trees, nativity, ornaments, wrapping paper, and my box o' bows and ribbon.... there is Christmas music playing, and I'm ready to get my holiday decorating on! I've got a little bit of cleaning and reorganizing to do before the trees and decorations go up, but staring at all those holiday decorating goodies is going to be really good motivation to get the dishes done and the floor swept and mopped, lol.

Tomorrow~ pictures!

gettin' crafty for Christmas

Hop on over to my other blog IDIM and you can see what I did with these :)

And here's a preview of something I'm working on for this blog... hmmm what could those be?

Any guesses?

Inspirational photo search

Maybe you've noticed that I haven't really done any projects in a while. I'm gonna go on and blame that on how horribly the last two went. Yes, the afters were good, but getting to the afters was nothing short of hellish. But here I am with my home renovating and decorating blog and nothing to blog about... well, I've blogged about Journey and she is definitely something, something really special :) but you know what I mean. I want to get back into the swing of things. I want to get back to projects and making this house even more of a home... SO... I have spent the last few hours listening to sermons (yes, I'm a nerd, and my church puts them online and the series is actually really good and thought provoking) AND going through almost 300 pages of furniture on Etsy with no filters. SO MUCH FUN! Here are all the beautiful and inspiring things I found...

This is super cute and would be easy to duplicate...I'm thinking herbs and kitchen towels...

This little tree shelf would look awesome in a kid's room or play room! They also have adorable bookends, but be ready for some hardcore sticker shock... I advise not having a liquid in your mouth if you go look :)

This is my dream coffee table... As soon as I learn to make a box, I want to make one of these! (But, I won't lie... I have my fingers crossed to come across one of these at a thrift store or flea market!)

I would settle for a coffee table like this too, lol. (I laugh because this table costs more than my car)

I think I like the slab o' tree look better for a dining table though...  look at those huge beautiful pieces of wood (I know, I know... that's what she said... aren't you classy, Tara!)

While we are on the subject of dining room ideas... I would love a full set of these vintage school chairs to use as my dining room chairs. (I had a full set of six... I think that three have broken now, if not three than four...ugh... but in their defense, they were from the 1940's and had not been stored well... poor chairs) hmmm, $25x8 chairs... $200... it's not too much really, just too much for me right now... I was a fool a few weeks ago. The thirft store by my work had some cool vintage wooden school chairs that they were sealing for $4 each... I was afraid they wouldn't be tall enough for my table, so I thought I will measure them the next day... gone... stupid, stupid, stupid me! Always carry a tape measure!

These are fantastic as well and look uber comfy :)

I soooo want a card catalog. This would make the best side table/coffee table/ bedside table... whatever! I just want one, bad :)

Now that is 100% fabulous. Sassy, cute, and pink. Love it!

I would love to add this little guy to my owl collection :) so cute! (looking for a Christmas idea anyone?)

Someday I will find you vintage sectional... someday... (Yes, I know I just did... not paying shipping on something that will come to me via craigslist/thrifting)

 another comfy looking green vintage thing... oh how I would love to reread Sense and Sensibility in you.

These are my colors, and the upholstery job is really beautiful... someday I'll be that good...

wow...

While we are on chairs, I really want an Eames Lounger, but I honestly think I would be content just to sit in one. I want to see one and touch one in real life. This chair is the embodiment of my design point of view.

This would be so cute to hang Journey's leash and harness on :) I even love the colors.

love this... also, I could make it...

I could also make these cute scrap wood Christmas trees :)

oooo, ahhhh, love this.

hello yellow, you make me happy :) If I ever find a head board and foot board to make into a daybed, I think a sunshiney yellow will be just the right color to paint it.

This is Lucite, but the same look could be achieved with paint... and I love the look of this piece :)

oh wow, now that's a lamp! This would look awesome in any room, but if I could afford it I would put it in my guest bedroom. :)

Oh how I love these ottomans... they are a set, and what a fabulous set they are!

this one is super cool too...

now this... this is where I would like to be right now, but I will settle for my bed, lol.

OK, so I am feeling more inspired... and I just might go a thrifting tomorrow... I also might just look in my garage and see what projects I've started and not finished :) Probably a better idea...

Well, good night all... happy weekend :)