Home for now. As much as I've been enjoying my dorm hermitage and the whole fiction-writing-residency thing, it sure is nice to spend the afternoon in my own surroundings. After much novel-writing and revising, I'm cleansing my palate right now by taking bad webcam photographs and running them through various filters to make them arty. Indulge me.
Here are scenes from my living room. That's what this post is about: scenes from my living room.
I mean, basically, I'm sitting in the living room. Don't make me get up out this chair. These are pictures of the living room precisely because I don't have to get up out the chair to take them. Or if I do, I don't have to go very far.
I never tire of bottles in the window.
When we had the windows puttied and painted, about a month back, the painter told us that houses the age of ours (built 1922) have some big percentage that I now forget more windows than houses built today, because windows are expensive. My husband remarked, "Back to the ol' glass tax." Not long after that, I had to fend off a door-to-door sales dude who wanted to give me a window-replacement estimate ("We're not interested. No, really. We just had them painted and puttied. No, please don't send someone. Don't call us either. No, really. DON'T," was more or less how my end of the conversation went).
He seemed to regard our windows entirely as liabilities – the kind of thing we couldn't get rid of fast enough. Now, there have been things about this house we couldn't get rid of fast enough: thigh-deep water in the basement, say, or, I don't know, the plastic poinsettias in the fake coal grate in the living-room fireplace, which were part of the staging when we bought the house, and still there on our August move-in day.
But we LIKE the windows. Yes, they leak heat and air conditioning. Yes, they let heat and cold inside. But whoever put them in must have meant for them to last, because they have. And they do show up nicely in photographs, even really poor-quality ones.
Anyway, it's good to be sitting here in the afternoon light through those windows. In a minute I'm going to need to hunt down some dinner for the kids and me, since we're all here. But for the moment, I'm just going to sit.