Okay, okay already. Here's what's been going on. I keep trying to write this and going into more detail than anyone would ever care about, and since it's also more detail than I care about, I get bored with it and don't finish. So, Strega's Summer, the short version.

My car finally died. It was probably fix-able, but it was also 14 years old, and every year just maintenance repairs got more expensive, and enough is enough. So I bought a used Saturn from CarMax. Now I can drive on the highway without feeling vaguely nervous, so that's nice. And it's excitingly clean. The car loan was The Most Money I'd Ever Borrowed (I didn't have school loans)...

...For a few weeks, anyway. Because right after that, I got a letter explaining that my landlord was selling the condo I rent. And so I had to move. Buying a condo seemed more reasonable than going on renting, so suddenly the car loan was going to seem like small potatoes.

Props to Chris, without whom I surely would have had a nervous breakdown. And props to my brother, since without him I wouldn't know Chris. And hey, props to my parents, without whose generosity, I could not afford any of this. Anyway, with help from Chris and Sam, I went house-hunting, found a place, argued about money (well, Sam did that part), got a loan, closed, and got moved in something like 10 weeks. I'd begged an extra week at my old place because I the timing was so tight -- I was supposed to be out on July 31st, and we ended up closing on the 30th. Phew. The extra week was certainly handy since it gave me time to clean the old place, though. And also to get locked into my bedroom because the door latch was broken, and it's a lucky thing I had a screwdriver or lord knows what would have happened to me.

During all this I had friends from college visit for a couple of days, and then Niels, one of my best friends, moved to Germany, so we tried to fit in some time before he left, and my new nephew was Christened, and my Aunt came to town, and the last few Angel episodes had to be recapped, and it was Katie's birthday, and so on. So I really did have some excuse for not updating!

But now I have a really cool top-floor condo. In the same development I lived in before, which is cool because I like it here. And I really like my new home. Which is convenient, since I'd be kind of screwed if I suddenly decided I didn't like it now. Not that there aren't some things I want to fix or change, but there's nothing urgent; right now I'm focused on buying some new furniture. I dumped my old couch & a chair because they were hand-me-downs and getting pretty crummy, and I figured I might as well start over and try to live a little bit like a grown-up. I'm going to talk to some kind of accountant/financial planning dude to work out a budget. I tend to have an all-or-nothing attitude toward major expenses (see above re my driving my car into the ground before replacing it), so I'd rather spend more and take my time than go out and furnish the place from Target this weekend. Nothing against Target at all, but you know what I mean.

Actually, I just spent an hour fighting to enter things into Quicken, and now I may decide it's easier to never spend money again than to try to keep track of it.

I'm sure I'll be babbling about home improvements for the foreseeable future so there's no need to bore y'all to death immediately. I'm gonna keep this page as a little separate section so that I can ramble about furniture-shopping and (eventually) painting and decorating and how inadequate I feel when comparing my visual sense to Deborah's, and so on. That way I can vent occasionally without boring the pants off people who don't care (and I don't blame you).

So basically, over the summer I incurred massive amounts of debt. And how are you?

So, I went to JournalCon.

Even though I live about 30 miles from the hotel, I wound up driving about 300 miles in the course of the weekend, which doesn't entirely make sense. Stupid Beltway. I gave Monty a lift from BWI Thursday night, and then we had dinner and he'd kindly brought me one of Joe Bob's Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World (yay, presents!) so we watched that before I took him to the hotel. Johanna was originally scheduled to join us, but her cat had been puking a lot and so she stayed home to keep an eye on the kitty. I think she has only herself to blame next time people start wondering if she actually exists, because Monty pointed out that "her cat is sick" is the lamest excuse ever. Well, I guess she has only her cat to blame.

I used MapQuest to get directions from my place to the hotel, and... they more-or-less worked, kind of. But after fussing with it quite a lot, I have determined that MapQuest always, always thinks that any highway is better than any non-highway. And while I can see how that sounds reasonable, it's not actually true. Basically, taking the GW Parkway down to DC and then going through four or five circles and getting slightly lost and then getting sorted out winds up taking just as much time as just taking the Beltway to Silver Spring and going down 13th, even if the latter does put you through more stoplights. There ought to be a way to tell MapQuest that you'd rather take the simplest route instead of the fastest, because sometimes being simpler makes it faster. I swear there used to be a mapping tool that would let you specify if you wanted to avoid highways. Come to think of it, maybe AAA's website lets you do that. (I will note that Suzy confirms that MapQuest is not entirely helpful.)

Friday I ran a few errands in the morning (so I'd have food the following week) and tried to get myself caffeinated before metroing downtown for the frivolity. There was registration and meeting people and scavenging pretty swag, and then Lisa and Phil appeared so Monty and I went off to dinner with them at Legal Seafoods. The food and the company was equally fabulous, and the waiter was charmingly obsequious despite our somewhat rumpled appearance, and I had the yummiest alcoholic milkshake ever. Although I swear that when asked if I wanted another, I said "No," but then he brought another one anyway, and it was yummy, but I couldn't finish it. Then Lisa and Phil headed off, and we went back to the Helix and socialized out on the bar's patio thingy. I mostly chatted with the extremely cool Sassy and sock-girlie, about whom I cannot say enough nice things. If they hadn't been so charming I probably would have talked more to other people. Damn them! And damn the fact that I'm bad at mingling because of the geekiness. Plus, the people I did chat with, I don't always have names to go with. More than three new names to learn, and I start getting lost. I think this is why people take so many pictures, so that later they can figure out who the hell they were talking to. Actually, there were a few times when I was all, "Wait, I recognize her. Have I met her? How would I have met her? Oh, I saw her picture in entries about last year's JournalCon!" But a good time was had by me, and that's what counts. I won't try to list names and compliment everyone as much as I should, because having written the rest and come back to this paragraph, there's at least 10 more people I should mention but, dude, I'm tired. Sorry.

That said, I must give a special nod to Mo pie, who, in addition to being cooler than cool, was clever enough to go around handing out her swag instead of putting it out on the tables. I think this is a Good Idea because it 1) was a great way to make introductions and 2) meant that even someone like me could remember who she was. If more people had done that, I'm sure I still would have gotten overloaded with names, but at least I could have a fighting chance by thinking, "Okay, she gave me this magnet, and on the magnet it says 'Mo pie,' so logically..." So yeah, my only suggestion for the next JournalCon is that having people hand out their swag the first night, and then leaving the rest out for people you missed, might be a good system. Oh, oh! I also must give Angeline a shout-out because she went out of her way to say nice things to me and gave me a nifty mix CD! As I said before, yay, presents!

I left around 11, since they closed the patio and inside it was all noisy with the techno, and it was going to take me an hour or so to get back home. Despite the late hour, it was very hot. I walked the half-mile or so to Dupont, and by the time I got onto a train there was sweat dripping down my back. It was still in the high eighties then, and I suspect the humidity was in the millions. I mean, I'm pretty damn sedentary, but I do actually get out into the sunshine occasionally and move around, and I cannot remember the last time I had sweat pouring off of me like that just from walking a few blocks. Blech.

Other people will tell you gossip and how pretty everyone was and who got drunk and what funny things were said. Me, I go into detail about the humidity.

Saturday morning I woke up several times, but never very enthusiastically, so I shamefully decided against supporting Lisa at her panel in favor of sleep. I have no team spirit. Then I went down to DC, picked up Monty, and we went off to the Dime Museum. Sadly, I did not insist that Pam and Sassy come along, even though they were right there and I could have just yanked them by their collars and pulled them into the car. Which also would have made for an exciting JournalCon kidnapping story. Ah well. Next time. I'll leave it to Monty to describe the museum since he has pictures but it was very cool and I'm glad there was finally someone around to make me go, because I've been meaning to check it out for at least a year.

So I racked up so more miles on the Beltway, but we got back eventually and there was more socializing and I finally met JohnConstantine, who's been posting on TWoP and ChickLit and other boards since forever and lives around here, so I was happy that I got to meet him face to face before he heads off to Minnesota. Then there were vague attempts at making dinner plans, which wound up with us just glomming onto the 3WA dinner. Which was cool. I was at the end of the table (which was fine, because I would have felt awkward if the people who actually knew each other had to talk past me). So I mostly eavesdropped and talked to Jessi, who was incredibly charming and also quite patient about waiting for her pizza. She's another person I only identified later, which is a shame because I'd thought the magnets she'd brought as swag were really pretty and I had a hard time picking out which one to take. Okay, it would have only made for two minutes of conversation, but at least I'd have felt less lame. Let's see... Our waiter looked like Andy Dick. He probably wished he was Andy Dick by the end of it; the service wasn't exactly stellar but to be fair, they really, really should have had more than one waiter for a crowd of that size. My being at the end of the table came in handy since I was able to snag him and get my bill paid and escape before (apparently) everything became chaotic.

Then we went to the bar of non-karaoke. It was very loud. I wouldn't have minded the non-karoke-ness, really, since it's not like I was going to sing, and while I like watching other people do it... the TWoP staff gatherings have had a similar problem where one year there was Legendary Karaoke. And for years after that, we tried to recapture the magic, but you can't really do that when you're burdened with these incredible expectations and feelings of obligation and all that. Sometimes you just have to let the magic go, and find a new fun thing that doesn't have to compete with nostalgia. So yeah, if the bar hadn't had such a high noise level, I'd have been fine just hanging out in a bar being social. But a couple hours of staring around and trying to shout hellos and I'd hit my limit. So we wandered back to the hotel, and waited for a crazy long time until they brought my car around. During which time I gave what I hope were decent directions to the Dupont Circle metro to someone I later realized was Shmuel, and then I felt bad, because if I'd been less braindead I would have asked where he was going, because I probably could have given him a lift, although given how long it took to get my car maybe he was better off metro-ing, and I've lost track of this sentence. Um. I like Shmuel's writing and he made an awesome mix CD as his swag and so yeah, I feel bad about not offering him a lift. That was my point. Stragglers from the bar wandered by and confirmed the bar's karaokeless status, and the car eventually came, and I went home. And spent the next 48 hours or so being exhausted from the fun, and listening to all the awesome CDs by Monty and Angeline and Shmuel and Petrouchka and I'm probably missing someone because I left them (the CDs, not the people) at work today. Oops.

Maybe I should change the name of this section to "deficit spending" or something like that. Although I just rearranged things in this particular section yet again, so perhaps I should stop screwing around with the format and actually work on the content. Pfft.

Anyway, I bought some stuff. Whee! Last Friday I got a new futon mattress, which I really, really needed. I went to Abba Futons, which is conveniently nearby. Not that I think there are hundreds of people who are local and can shop there, but if you are local and want a futon, or new cushions for your couch, or whatever, yeah, go there. Oh, you should also like chatting. Kevin, the guy who runs the place is really chatty. In a nice, fun way, I mean. He mentioned bartender training, and he's definitely got the bartending shtick where you have a nice little chat about nothing very important and it's all very free-form and I'm not quite sure how we managed to cover housing prices, how to tell someone's age, and Ashley Judd in the 15 minutes or so it took me to buy something, but we did. But the important part here is that the new futon is so wonderful. He delivered it that same day (yay!) and it's thick and it's foamy-soft and yet it's plenty firm and it's so poofy compared to my old futon, which I think had less foam at the base, and was also compacted a bit from years of use. Oh, it's just so nice. I love my bed. It's still on my old trifold futon frame (not that I ever fold it up, but... it was free!) but I am considering getting a real bedframe as part of this living-like-a-grownup thing I'm trying. Maybe for Christmas I'll ask for a platform frame. It's not really urgent, though; there are more important things to buy right now..

For instance: on Sunday I went down to La-Z-Boy. I'm sorry, but Todd Oldham's "Snap" couch, the one in the TV ads? I could not resist. Largely because there's a very upscale furniture store iin the area, and every week in the Post Magazine, they have lovely ads showing their funky-cool curvy modular with arms and back cushions and little tables you can pop on and off. And I gaze lustfully upon those ads, and then I think about how much the couch probably is (and I'm sure it's several thousand bucks) and then I feel sad. So the little Oldham sofa is kind of like that, but without the spending thousands of dollars part. Well, I got the loveseat version, so it was under a thousand. And I really do like the style of the furniture as well. As a bonus, the chrome may look a little cheap, but they match a chair I got at a thrift store in Baltimore years ago, so that's cool. It'll look like it was all planned!

In terms of the colors, Oldham is a crazy man with his funky patterns, but we all know that, right? There are a wide range of perfectly nice solids to choose from, too, so that's what I did. If you're desperate to know, I got a purple-ish color, mostly because I lean toward conservative shades and I thought this one was brighter than something I would pick normally without being so goofy that I would hate it in a year. I wanted some bright colors because otherwise I tend to go for subdued blues for everything, and I don't want a houseful of blue furniture. The chairbed is blue. It's in a room with blue carpeting. (And it looks really nice like that; it's my favorite room even without being "done" because it looks like such a cozy little reading spot. The wo other people have seen it so far seem to have had similar reactions. So it's fine.) In the bedroom, I usually go for blue and/or purple sheets, and I have a blue comforter. Unfortunately, the carpet in there is a deep brown, which... I just don't understand. It's actually a nice chocolate brown, but for the master bedroom? I'm just at a loss for what to do with it. I guess white would look okay against it. I dunno. I suspect I'll end up recarpeting it at some point. For now, though, it's not a high priority.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Blue. The braided rug I have in the living room is also a dark blue, with some other random colors in it. So enough already with the blue. Plus, all of the walls are eggshell white, and I don't expect to have the time or energy to paint till next spring at the earliest, so having some brighter colors about the place isn't a bad thing.

I also got the "Arc" chair. I like the way it angles in at the base, and the high back, but it looked really.. solid. And stiff, and not comfortable. So at the store I sat in it. It's lovely! I mean, yeah, it should be because La-Z-Boy, right, but I was surprised by how very squishy it was even though it didn't look like an overstuffed puffball. The arms that look so stiff are actually very well padded. And the high back? Mmm. My mom was asking why I got the loveseat instead of the full couch, and was saying that the thing with a couch is that you can lay down on it... (Aside: Heh. See, it's not, "But where will everyone sit when you have giant cocktail parties" because, well, we aren't crazy and don't pretend to have giant cocktail parties. It's just, "But you need a big couch to lay down on when you watch TV!" I love my family.) Anyway, 1) years with the chairbed have taught me that I can curl up as needed when lazing about in a confined space is called for. 2) this is the point of having removable arms on the loveseat, yes? Just drape my legs over the side! 3) Recliner! Woo! I don't need the sofa at all! Screw you all, the chair is mine!

I like that chair, is what I'm saying. The only sucky part is that I have to wait for them to deliver it. And possibly to make it. They get something like 4 to 12 weeks for delivery. Wah. I want my furniture now! I'm ready to have people over (pretty much) but there's nowhere for them to sit. I say again, wah! I guess I should have gone shopping as soon as I knew I'd be moving, or at least as soon as I knew where I was moving to, but it didn't occur to me, and I can't see where I would have had the energy for it in any case. But again, on the slight chance that this may be useful information to anyone reading this: if you want to buy new furniture from La-Z-Boy, don't forget to factor in all the time they'll take for delivery.

All in all, over the weekend I spent about two grand. Yikes. But I got a new bed, a new chair, and a new sofa. And I at least have the new bed now. I think that's pretty good. I still feel slightly weird about spending that much money, but I'm pretty good at justifying it. I mean, I've lived for years on second-hand furniture, and that's fine, I had no complaints about it. But it is nice to feel like I'm picking exactly what I want, and that this is furniture that I do really like, and that I'll have for a long time. And which I bought myself. That's kind of exciting by itself; my bedroom furniture (minus the free bedrame) was stuff I got for my 16th birthday, and it's still lovely (minus a few dings and scrapes) and I'm totally happy with it. My dining room set is a housewarming present from five years back, and again, it's still fine and I'm happy to have it. So I feel okay about spending some of my own money on some nice living room furniture. As I think I mentioned, I tend to be all-or-nothing about this kind of expense, so it really was either get something I can live with for $50 from the thrift store or spend a few months paying off something that I'll really like.

Those sound like pretty convincing rationaliztions to me!

I got tired of sitting in my lone armchair. And the prospect of only having it as a TV-watching option until my new furniture arrives seemed tiresome. Especially when I had a long weekend of goofing off to look forward to. So since I have a new futon now, I dragged the old one out to the living room, did a Z-fold on it, and now I have a very low, very squishy couch. Better for laying on than for sitting, but if I want to sit, there's a chair, so that's okay.

It does look pretty lame, though. But there's just me and Scooter to see it, so that's not so bad.

This weekend I got a new hamper that comes close to matching my bedroom furniture (close enough) and abunch of stuff for the windows. Hung a curtain rod in the bedroom, took the Venetian blinds out, and hung blackout curtains. Which are awesome. I'll probably hang a scarf or something over them so it looks less bland eventually, but first I need to figure out what I'm doing in there as far a color scheme. I have become convinced that green will work best. But I suspect I won't be painting before winter, so eh. I'll keep an eye out for green bedding and then paint to match that in the spring.

I have... furniture!

Living room furniture!

It's neat.

Now I need a new rug. Sigh.

Unfortunately, I determined that the chair I'd kept (a comfy blue thrift-store find) doesn't really look good with the new stuff. The color is fine; it's blue and it actually looks nice against the violet of the other chairs. And it's got a sort of modern style that fits, but it's a very low-slung chair (hence the comfyness). Which means that if you're sitting in it, you're probably six inches shorter than everyone else. With the seat so low, if you put it next to a normal chair, it looks like it's a kiddie seat. Oh well. I guess I can put it in the office, but that seems like a shame since then I'll never sit in it. I may be able to put it in the living room if it's a bit apart from the other furniture, with its own table or something. It just doesn't look good if it's part of a grouping.

But the new stuff is super-comfy, and I got to play around with the Snap sofa a bit. For the curious (since I was): the cushions attach to the chrome frame through the magic of... velcro! So that's already cool. And you can rearrange them so the back is on the side, and make it into a chaise. And then the arm/back pieces you don't need can be removed, because they slip into little slots and then you tighten them into place with little wheels. Like on office chairs, you know the little wheel you use to raise or lower the back? It's like that. So you really can rearrange it all pretty quickly if for some reason you need to. I don't know why you would need to, but it's nice that it's not some big deal where you need special tools to do it.

Wait, there's more. I got a Palm, too. A Zire 72. And a collapsable wireless keyboard, which is way cool. It was kind of a whim. I just thought, well, it would be neat to have something laptop-like, but I don't really need a laptop. And this one has a digital camera and an MP3 player in addition to the usual goodies, so I figured that I could justify buying a single gadget that would take the place of several gadgets I coudn't justify individually.

So far I've mostly been playing Bejewelled on it, of course. That's not the point, though. I have put a few work-related things on it, although I'm somewhat uncertain about my ability to carry it around at work everyday and not lose it. Although it fits in my purse, and I'm pretty good about remembering to take that with me when I leave a room. We'll see.

Anyway, I'll probably take a few pictures of the new furniture (and Scooter!) this weekend. First I need to clean, and I think I have to wait till I'm home during the day to take pictures, since the camera isn't that great at low-light conditions.

Yesterday afternoon it sprinkled a bit. On the way home, I saw a kid who'd clearly taken a left turn too fast for the wet road, and skidded around 180 degrees, finally slamming into the cement median with enough force to bend the right rear tire in. I think it's worth mentioning that he was driving a big ol' SUV, which made the skidding much, much easier. I'm not sure what my point is, except that the parents who let a teenage boy drive a shiny new SUV should consider themselves lucky that they were that dumb and only have to pay a hefty bill for car repairs. I mean, yes, it could have happened with a sedan, but a sedan is less likely to lose traction because they aren't quite so top-heavy, and it isn't perceived as a super-vehicle that can handle anything when the truth is it's horribly unsafe.

But that's me.