Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Bittersweet

Today I am a bundle of emotions. Nervous, excited, sad.. all rolled into one. It is my last day at the Herald and I would be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss it here.
I've made a lot of great friends in my (almost) 3 years here and I am sad to be leaving them. It's been so fun getting to know the people here and joking about stories and sharing many, many treats. The people here is definitely the thing I will miss the most.
I am also a little sad to be leaving the newsroom and journalism. I will miss the adrenaline rush of writing on a deadline after a late night jury verdict, I'll miss writing every single day (although I hope that will be part of my new job) and since I like to know things, I'll miss being the first to know the news!
I am also extremely excited for the new opportunity a head of me. I am excited to not have to commute 70-plus miles to work every day, I'm excited to get to work in the health care industry, something I have been passionate about for years, I'm excited about using my skills in a different field and I'm excited to get to know new people and make new friends.
Change is always scary and exciting and I am feeling butterflies about starting a new job tomorrow but today as I leave the Herald for the last time there is only one word to describe it: bittersweet.

Monday, July 28, 2014

What did I get myself into?

Painting seems like a good idea until you are in the middle of painting.
This is what happened to me over the weekend, I got super excited about painting pretty much the entire new house. I was going to paint the kitchen and the master bedroom and the living room and entry way and master bathroom and maybe even the two guest bedrooms. Really the only room I wasn't going to paint was the guest bathroom. Lucky for me (and my credit card) I got overwhelmed with choosing paint colors for all these places and decided to scale it down and only paint the living room, entry way and one bathroom.
I spent probably 10 hours or more this weekend taping walls and ceilings and painting the living room. My shoulders and arms are sore from the actual painting, my back is sore from bending over to paint the bottom of the walls and my calves are sore from standing on my tip toes to paint the tops of the walls. And I am probably not even halfway done. Because the colors that are currently in the house are super dark I have to do two coats of paint on every service, meaning I essentially have to paint every room twice. This weekend I finished the living room and I am not looking forward to next weekend, which I know will be another 3-day marathon painting session in hopes of finishing everything else. Who's idea was this?

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Calm Down

Now that the long and super annoying process of buying a house is over I am getting really excited to move in and make it our own and by really excited I mean I have gone a little bit crazy.
I filled a shopping cart (and deleted it all) on Home Depot's website no less than 4 times. I have done the same at Ikea, WalMart and Target.
It is all so exciting! I just want to buy a million things: new curtains, new furniture, stuff to build a pantry, a new light for the dining room, a new vanity for the bathroom and the list goes on an on! Then of course there are things we actually need like new locks for the doors, smoke alarms, a lawn mower and handles for the cabinets in the kitchen.
And I want to do a million projects too! Like build a pantry, put a new vanity and medicine cabinet in the bathroom, put a shelf in the laundry room, paint some walls, add some shelves, change lights out and all this on top of making our backyard which has 3-foot tall weeds and no grass, look somewhat decent.
And of course I need to finally print some wedding pictures and hang all my other pictures on the wall for everyone to see!
In the two days since we got the keys to the house I have measured almost every room in the house, used online graph paper to try and decide how to arrange the furniture in our living room and bedroom (yes I know I have a problem) and crunched numbers a million times to decide how much of my craziness we can actually afford.
The problem with all of this, besides the money part, is that I am very much one of those people who get all excited to start a project and do really well for a little while and then lose interest and either never finish or take forever to finish. I can't start 6 projects at my new house because I know if I do a year from now at least 4 of them will probably not be done and that would make me crazy for a whole new reason.
I think it is probably a good idea for someone to take away all my credit cards and ban me from going to Home Depot, Lowe's or Ikea until some of the excitement has passed and I can make rational decisions again.