Early morning light.

It’s Saturday and I’m waking up very slowly. Still drinking my first cup of coffee. I have a brief review session with a client at noon, but other than that, I’m mostly going to hang out with my husband. A bit of work on the dollhouse might be on the agenda.

So far:

I currently have the dollhouse facing the exterior windows in the studio.

I remain on the fence about the built in fireplace on the third floor. I’m very tempted to close it off and wallpaper over it. Frankly, it has bothered me from the beginning. I spent a bit of time yesterday searching for this dollhouse on IG just to see what others had done with it. A lot of people got rid of it. I’m headed in that direction.

I need some kind of wardrobe for the bedroom and bedside tables. And bedding.

I have my eye on an easy chair for the living room. It’s really beautiful but a bit pricey. A refrigerator for the kitchen remains an open question. And I need more than  just the piano in that top floor room.

Why am I not independently wealthy???

Ah well.

Stay safe.

Happy Saturday.

This has been the strangest summer. We’ve had two rounds of dangerous heat – both several days long. We’ve had and continue to have smoke from the wildfires in Canada. Yesterday, we had thunderstorms all day long, big thunderstorms with lots of lightning and thunder, along with massive downpours that looked like solid sheets of water. And we’ve had long stretches of drought-like conditions.

It’s been exhausting. It’s also been maddening because everything out there is overgrown and very wild looking and I haven’t really been able to tackle it because of all of the above. I’m going to start pruning and cutting and cleaning it out today. Both Don and I feel like we haven’t been able to spend as much time outside as we normally do.

I’m taking a little break from the dollhouse renovations. I’ll eventually work on the floor for the second floor stairs/hallway. After that, I’m not sure. I have a very limited budget, as you know, so this will be slow going.

One good thing, I’m reading a lot again, which is lovely. I’m currently reading Ironwood  by Michael Connelly, the second book in a new series for him that takes place on Catalina Island off the coast of southern California.

We watched Oppenheimer  last night, something we’d put off because its SO LONG! We ate dinner a bit earlier so we could watch it and still not be up too late. It was quite well done and the acting was terrific. There were sound issues, which seems to happen a lot these days. The balance between the soundtrack and dialogue was really off and I spent the first hour constantly turning it down and then having to turn it up again. It’s really annoying and inexcusable, really. So we missed some of the dialogue. Something is or is not happening in the mixing process. Cillian Murphy was wonderful in the title role and Robert Downey Jr. was absolutely pitch perfect.

But it was too long and would have benefitted from some cuts.

That’s it for today.

Stay safe.

Happy Wednesday.

Not enough sleep last night and I have to do a short coaching session later this morning, so I’m writing this post earlier than usual. I have to do a bit of prep and clear some space upstairs for my laptop and the zoom session. Thankfully, I use the ‘blur’ feature on zoom so the current state of my workspace (very messy) will be softened!

I finished Land   yesterday morning and cried my eyes out. It’s exquisitely written – a story of land and family taking place in Ireland. Profound. Beautiful. At the end of the novel, I felt much like I did when I finished O’Farrell’s Hamnet. I wanted to hang on to the story. I didn’t want to let it go. I held it close to me all day long. What an extraordinary writer Maggie O’Farrell is.

I dropped it off at the library and picked up Michael Connelly’s newest mystery, which will be quite the change from Land. And I found of copy of Madeline Miller’s Circe, which I haven’t read, because all of the talk about The Odyssey  movie made me think of it.

The Dragonfly Blythe sisters.

This has been cropped because…

the original had Nina’s left foot turned backwards. I guess she’s double-jointed. Quite the trick, Nina!

Okay. I’m off to drink more coffee and get my head in gear.

Stay safe.

Happy Monday.