shopping

The past couple weeks have been crazy for me so I was really looking forward to this weekend to finally chill out and catch up. Eric was out of town so I knew I’d be free to have do whatever I wanted without interruption. The one thing I really like to do when I’m alone is clean and make my apartment look pretty.

The reason Eric was out of town was because he was running a Ragnar Relay Race in Tennessee with people from his company. Have you ever heard of this relay race? During the 24-hour race, which is held in a few different locations around the country, twelve people run the 200ish miles that makes it up. From Ragnar’s website:

During the relay, each team member runs three legs, each leg ranging between 3 – 8 miles and varying in difficulty…Only one runner hits the road at a time. The rest of your teammates are on support duty in your race vehicles. It’s a relay, so as the each runner begins, the crew in the vehicle can drive ahead, cheer their runner on, and meet them at the exchange point to pick them up and drop off the next runner.

Eric ran his legs around 5 PM, 1 AM, and 6 AM, and did 14.3 miles total. On the one hand, running 5.5 miles at 6 AM after a night of sleeping in a van sounds like hell…but on the other hand, it also seems like it would be really fun to do with a group of friends. Anyway, I’m proud of him for training for it and then getting through it!

Anyway, on Saturday while he was engaged in all that fun athletic nonsense, I cleaned, which is an activity I find athletic and fun in a disgusting sort of way. I took down all my Halloween decorations, did some laundry and dishes, and vacuumed. At that point I realized that over the past six months, the puppies have taken the already-not-great carpet in the apartment to a whole new level of bad by tearing it up in several places and by peeing on it. I decided that rather than try to get the carpet to look better (an expensive/losing battle), I’d try to cover up as much of it as possible by buying some rugs. The rugs needed to be dark enough that they wouldn’t show further destruction and cheap enough that I wouldn’t care if they got destroyed.

I went to Target where I found one rug I liked that fit the bill before quickly moving on to the shiny things that had by then caught my attention: Christmas decorations.

I firmly, firmly believe that Christmas decorations should not go up until the day after Thanksgiving, but what’s so obnoxious is that you kind of have to start buying now because everything will be picked over in a few weeks. Furthermore, the rug I picked out was a dark red; it wouldn’t not match my dining room (which is brown and white) but I knew it needed something red to tie everything together. And what is red? Christmas decorations.

Still, I exercised a tiny bit of self-control and instead picked out some fall decor that would stay relevant through Christmas. I bought a glass vase, a package of acorns, walnuts, and leaves, and some fake cranberries. I didn’t use the leaves and instead combined the walnuts, acorns, and cranberries to make a centerpiece for my table.

I also bought the pinecone candelabra before dragging myself away from Target and on to more practical things. My next stop was HEB for a major grocery trip.

Part of the motivation for my cleaning bender, attention to decor, and big grocery trip is that I have a visitor coming next week: my aunt Kara. We had a blast the last time she was in town, so I’m really excited to have her here again. But having a visitor means cooking good food and having an apartment that doesn’t look like a crack house (gross carpet has that effect, especially when it’s gross from, you know…long nails and urine) and a fridge that doesn’t look like it belongs in a frat.

After everything I did yesterday, I’m starting to feel like my apartment is looking less I’ve-been-traveling-and-it-was-a-holiday, but it’s not quite to the sure-let’s-have-guests-over-and-make-them-think-our-apartment-always-looks-this-clean that I’d like it to be, so I’m planning to do more of that today. I need to get some food in the slow cooker and then get on cleaning the fridge, one of my least favorite tasks (and that I’m avoiding by writing about).

Other things to make your Sunday fun:

• Why Kim Kardashian’s Divorce is Good for America — & Women by Jennifer Pozner
• Real Life Friend Request greeting card
• http://stevegobs.tumblr.com/
• Bon Iver, an amazing musician/album I discovered last night reading Self Magazine (yeah, I was surprised too!). I’ve had it playing on repeat since I bought it; it’s great background music for reading, working, cooking, and relaxing.

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