The Last Weekend ...

I always love to do seasonal and holiday decorating ... or at least, I like the idea of doing it. I'm such a procrastinator that usually it's two days before, and I'm thinking "It would have been nice if I'd have ...".

In the new house, I'm determined to get over that. So I jumped on an idea this weekend that I'd been wanting to do for years, at the old house, and never got around to.


I also did a little fall decorating in the living room ... just a tad so far. I bought some faux fall decor at the craft store the other day, and created a little spontaneous arrangement in my kim chi pot.




I like it.

Yesterday I cooked the food for our vacation. Every year we rent a beach house. It does not come with a cook. We don't like to eat out at restaurants every night. Ergo, we need to provide our own food. The first year, with some misguided idea that it would just 'all work out,' we had almost nothing to eat all week, except junk food. I was not happy. Last year we went out after we got there and bought a bunch of groceries, but then we had to cook most evenings ... something that doesn't thrill me on vacation (who wants to drag themselves up from a gorgeous beach at 5:00 p.m., when the rum's just starting to settle nicely, and go inside and cook dinner?). And spent a lot more money than we needed to on a lot of food that ended up not getting eaten, anyway. This year, in my new Seal-A-Meal phase, I cooked up some stuff in advance and froze it. Then most nights I can just heat something up, and voila ... delicious, hot dinner without all the vacation effort.

I also cooked all of Tyler's food for the entire week plus a day or two after we come home, and froze that up in little individual serving portions.

Today will be laundry and packing. And painting the dining room, because I'm determined to get it done before we go. At least the walls ... we haven't picked our trim color yet, and I'm not rushing it. We have a little collage of choices we're thinking about ..



... but none of them have really jumped out and said "I'm it!" yet. I'm waiting till just the right color hits me.

It will. I have faith in my creative inspiration. It's often slow, but eventually, it gets me there. I think that I will definitely delay any decision till after vacation, because since the theme of this room is going to be 'beach house,' and we're going to the coast, I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly luscious color combination jumps out at me from somewhere on this trip ... a particularly nice sunset, an interesting shop, someone's boat, a random beach crab ... and I'll say, "Aha! That's the color we need!"