Monthly Archives: September 2006

old medicine cabinet

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old medicine cabinet, originally uploaded by murphy_h2001.

This is the old medicine cabinet. As of yesterday it is banished from our home altogether.

Note the brown wood trim that matches nothing else in the house. Note the peeled finish on said trim.

It was ugly. It was old. It has needed replacing.

But we didn’t know how to replace it. It might be

HARD

to replace. We didn’t know.

But we finally decided that we would try it anyway. We measured it, and thought we would see how much it cost to replace a medicine cabinet of that size.

We found a medicine cabinet of that size. Well, very close to that size, It was not that expensive, so we bought it to see if it would fit.

I took a box cutter and cut the paint along the edge of the old medicine cabinet. If you do that, sometimes you can prevent strips of the old paint from peeling away when you remove something.

The gaping hole that was left was full of mouse poopies. Yikes! I’m glad we don’t have mice anymore. These were offal of mice long dead.

And I was about to put in the new cabinet when Chris had second thoughts.

Perhaps the new medicine cabinet was not good enough. Wasn’t it a little crooked here and there? Weren’t there gaps in the corners where the edges met?

Didn’t we deserve BETTER?

I glared at him. This medicine cabinet was perfect, considering the price. I mean, come ON.

But he wasn’t satisfied. He thought we should research further medicine cabinet options.

I did not have time for this. There was a gaping hole in the bathroom where a mirror should be.

But Chris wanted nice things for our home. Maybe if we put the old one back while he looked…

But no! That was retrograde progress. We needed to move forward, he said. He would find the right medicine cabnet for us.

I disbelieved him.

He promised.

Fine.

In point of fact, both mirror fronted medicine cabinets lived in our hallway, propped against the wall for that week. The cat spent a lot of time looking at himself in them.

But Chris was diligent. He looked everywhere, and found that I was right. I WAS RIGHT.

However, he was right too. That particular individual medicine cabinet was a tad crooked. He found another one with greater evennesss and we installed THAT one.

Also note, in the above photo, that there is a new shower head in the bathtub. It’s a fancy shower head that replaced the old sputtery one.

That shower head was the original purpose for the visit to Lowe’s to begin with.

Book Club for The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver

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Tonight was the first time I got to be the visiting author for a book club that read my book.

It was thrilling!

They asked me to have study questions for the book, which I created. We all discussed it. It’s so different to talk about my writing after it’s done! I’m so used to giving it out for critique. But this is in stone now, no editing etc.

Which means, I got to actually talk about the story and explain this and that. You’re NEVER supposed to do that during critique.

and at the end, I asked the ladies, “did you like it?”

And they all sincrely said, “yeah, it was good.”

and they all said, “We want to know what happens next! Are you writing a sequel?”

It was amazing.

Repetition

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Chris has been bugging me for years to go to Yellowstone. In his Chris-fashion, of course. He has a way of subtley talking about it in glowing terms and reminscing about how he enjoyed his trip there when he was a child.

He finds bits of trivia to bring into the conversation. “Did you know that inside Yellowstone is the cone of a volcano? that’s why it has geysers.”

“Did you know that it’s the first national park ever? Ullyses Grant signed it into being a park even before Yosemite.”

And finally, “Would you want to go there this fall? We could take a week and go there after school starts and the kids will not be crowding it.”

The fact is that, while I enjoy nature, I prefer trips to places of deep history. Like…Paris! Old buildings and interesting shopping is my idea of highly enjoyable.

Also, I like to see new things. I don’t want to read the same books again or vacation in the same place twice. The world is so full, and life is so short, I don’t want to retrace my steps.

But I hadn’t been to Yellowstone. And it did sound pretty good. Yes, Chris, I would go.

And we bought the books. And we gathered the maps. Chris handled the hotels, I handled the airfare. We were set.

Yellowstone was unendingly amazing. We saw so many animals and we saw the kind of landscape you can see nowhere else.

Old faithful was great, but the other geysers surpassed it.

The buffalo were majestic. The moose were focussed on their meals. The bears were funny, and the elk were….Well…it’s was mating season for the elk.

We saw antelopes, but they were not playing with any deer. Maybe that’s early in the season.

The coyotes looked so much like dogs, we wished we could give them treats.

Chris wanted to know if I would be willing to come back. I think so. It would not feel like retracing my steps.

Yellowstone is over

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I’m back.

I got back yesterday from a glorious visit to the first national park america made.

it was amazing and incredible and I spent the last three days sad that I had to leave.

I spent the first five days pretty sick with a cold. That adds up to 8 days, which is how long I stayed there.

Fortunately, I have the world’s most considerate boyfriend and he was able to drive me around and I saw a tremendous amount of the park and it’s wildlife.

Wow.

Wow.

I will post some photos (you’ll be sick of all the photos I post!) when I download them.

It’s just a quiet day at home now, getting used to being home.