Gone Fishin'

I'm taking a little impromptu break the next few days and will be closed until July 14th. I literally hung a sign that says "Gone Fishin'" on both shop doors!

The great thing is, I'm doing it just for ME. No family tragedies to deal with. No disasters. Got a little envious seeing all the businesses closed this week, and wondered why I was sweating in there moving furniture and fretting about fall. It's JULY. It's summertime, and the living is easy, right? I know I am famous (infamous!) for my haphazard schedule for 2009. But it hasn't been relaxing time. Now I just want to relax a little bit. I realized that I am probably working a little too hard. I am a workaholic, but why am I having dinner at 10 or 11 every night? That sort of stuff should be saved for the 4th quarter, not now. The shops are running me, not the other way around, and that needs to change! So today I had a three hour nap, went out for Chinese, and ice cream, and am now puttering about the Whatever shop listening to the guitar across the street at Northpoint, and working in a RELAXING manner. Just enjoying the inventory and (calmly) getting ready for Dexter Daze (in a month). I know I probably shouldn't even be doing this much, it still qualifies as work, I should be sitting out in the sun reading a fluffy novel. Maybe tomorrow.

I am tired of living with a sunroom that has tiled floors but no grout! I am going to grout it! It's been two years since it was built, and I put down the tile, and it got too cold to do the grout out there, so I put it off. Time to fix that up. My sunroom is gorgeous, it just needs to be finished!

I am tired of this huge stockpile of ghetto furniture I have been saving up to paint! I am going to paint it! It's me and a can of primer this weekend, baby.

I am tired of living with my late 1990's decor in my boudoir. I haven't changed a thing on the walls since I started the shop. My tastes have changed, and I want to update that. But it's funny, in seeing how much some things have changed, I see how much they have really stayed the same. (How trite.) I was looking at this rose decoupaged vintagey plate I made with a flea market glass plate...back in 1994. That is totally the sort of thing I still love. But I'm a little less keen on taping photos to the wall, so that's gotta go.

It is so much easier to decorate a shop than it is to decorate your own home sometimes. At home, there are things that are Tacky with a capital T, but how can you get rid of them? They are part of your life and part of history. For example, I was soooo ahead of the curve, back in 1993, at the age of 15, I was scrounging around garage sales for junk to paint. Had I known 15 or 16 years later, that would be all the rage, I could've capitalized on that and dropped out of high school. Ha ha. But anyway. So I have this cool wooden shelf. But, it being 1993, I painted it COUNTRY BLUE with little sunflowers all over. Gag! I really want to paint over it, a nice creamy linen color, but I can't. It's history. I was really into that country thing in the early '90s. The country blue, the mauve, the ducks, the eucalyptus. Oh man. I went to a flea market this morning, and it was like stepping back into my teenage world. The scent of the dusty eucalyptus wreaths blew across the duck planters and the Welcome Friends painted wooden cut-outs. I thought that stuff was super cool back then. It's horrifying to me now. So when I'm 45, am I going to look back on the Frenchy-Parisian-rose-cottagey-vintage looks with the same horror? I can't imagine that, it certainly seems more classy and timeless than a big wooden pig holding a mauve-colored sign that says "Country Friends Gather Here". Please, Decor Gods, don't ever let the stuff I like now look dated. It can't possibly ever look like that.