Okay, so yesterday I spent ten hours working in my room, replacing the rest of the furniture and hanging pictures, decorating the shelves that Dirk so expertly installed, and cleaning as I went. I even climbed a ladder several times, which should be a strict no-no for me but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. And even though today I've had to stay off my feet to recover, it's sure been worth it.

Here are a few pictures. The wall color in some of the shots is truer than others. It really is not the bright purple that it looks in some of these!

The picture over the bed is just sort of a "placeholder." I am going to frame two very large pieces of cross-stitch that I finished in 2005 and hang them over the bed.

The picture below is a much better representative of the wall color!

And this is on the wall with the darker color.

These milk-glass lamps are treasures from my mother's home...not sure if they were also my grandmother's but they are certainly her "style" and make me feel as if I were at her house. I've just now brought them to mine.

Another treasure I brought home from mom's is this old kerosene lamp which I simply adore. It sits on the chest of drawers that John's grandparents bought when they first married, around 1920.


And the bathroom...again, not quite the true color but in real life the new towels go nicely :-)

Still trying to find the right light fixture for the bathroom, so that part is yet to come.


So...that's all the pictures for a while. The house will be a work in progress for years, I'm sure, but we've made genuine headway this summer. A special thanks to Dirk for his hard work, patience, and willingness to work around our schedules and his mother-in-law's color-challenged decision making.

This week on the trip to Fort Worth, I finished the audio book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, the heartbreaking autobiography of a young boy in Sierra Leone who is captured and forced into service as a child soldier in the civil war there. Despite a rather unsatisfying and unceremonious ending, the book was more than worth the time and gives a painful window into realities that are far removed from our own.

Then on the way back, I listened to the first half of God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe by Amir D. Aczel, an author I've read before (The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity; The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World; Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science; Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem--all fascinating and well-written). A combination of astronomy, theoretical physics, mathematics, and philosophy, God's Equation has thoroughly captured my imagination and attention. I hope I don't die before I get all of Aczel's books read (or listened to!) Well, okay, he has some on obscure areas of business statistics that I may skip, but...

Bethany starts her first college classes Tuesday. Never mind the fact that we just brought her home a year or two ago and that she just lost her first tooth last week I think, here she is getting her first checking account and buying college texts. You'd think that on #6 of 9 we'd have gotten used to it. Nope.

And our forecast shows rain for the next seven days. When I opened the water bill last night and it said $29, I once again smiled at all the ways this very gentle, wet summer has benefited us. It's nearly September, and I never really felt summer hit us. No complaints...unless it decides to come late and steal our fall...

Whether you're starting school this week, already in the middle of it, waiting until after Labor Day, or whether your late summer is spent in work and other pursuits, I hope the coming week will be one full of God's mercies and loving surprises. Have a lovely Sunday evening!

Labels: Books, Decorating, Kids, Sundays, Weather