Heat

Temperatures are soaring here on the East coast and more than one English rose is wilting a little. Dan and I have been getting acquainted with our air conditioning and have learned to love it in recent days, despite the cacophony of white noise it produces. The key difficulty it has to be said is continually making the conversion from Fahrenheit to Celsius. There was a general lack consensus about what temperatures were suitable and constantly checking on my phone was getting tiresome. I made us a little temperature conversion chart to stick beneath the thermostat. Dan's observation was that the scale didn't go far enough - I pointed out that it was the limit of what I deemed acceptable. For a compromise Dan settled on the graffiti addition of simply, 'Too Hot!!'. 

Now I look at it I see I managed to spell 'Fahrenheit' wrong. If anybody else is in need of a conversion chart, you can download the correctly spelled version by right-clicking on the image below.

Furniture

After trying to contribute to knitting and crochet blog week I found my creative and blogging energies completely sapped. I just don't have the time to commit to writing that much guff in a week, let alone reading all the other entries. There were some brilliant ones out there and it was fun to start with, but towards the end of my short stint I found my creative energy and enthusiasm crushed rather than charged. Together with a toxic combination of getting anxious about a brief trip back to Blighty and some temporary work angst, what I ended up with was an unplanned blog holiday. Which is kind of a shame because I was rather enjoying the relative frequency of my posts until then. I think I've probably learnt that lesson now though and in the past few days I've had itchy fingers again - so here we are.

This last weekend we finally got a decent crop of furniture - after being mostly furniture-less (apart from our sofa) for the last six months. The continual annoyance of never being able to put anything away was beginning to tell, so it came at the right time. When we landed in Philadelphia with little to our names except some bags of clothes and a bit of sentimental tat, the plan was to accumulate second hand furniture we liked gradually. I don't think I realised just how gradual that would be at the time, but there were good reasons for the plan:

1. We didn't want to end up with identical Ikea furniture to the stuff we'd never liked and left behind - particularly the dressers with the drawer bottoms that continually drop out of the bottom.
2. Second hand furniture is both more ethical and less likely to loose all it's value when we need to re-sell it for the trip home.
3. Being surrounded by things I don't enjoy aesthetically makes me cross. Hence the need to exorcise patience when waiting for good things to turn up in the second hand furniture shops and flea markets. We could have kitted the apartment out with ugly furniture months ago, no problem.

But we got two dressers (one with a giant mirror we've no clue what to do with) and a bedside table for a bargain price, so I spent Sunday taking great joy putting things away just so. Especially Dan's things for some reason...