All over the place

I have an incredible urge to throw things away!


In fact, as I’m thinking about it right now, I already know which drawer I’m going to start with and I know I will be doing it almost the second I get home.


I squandered the last bit of my holidays away playing with Mr. Fluffypants and watching television. I was trying to keep a cold at bay so on Friday I took the day off and slept most of it. Saturday and Sunday were both uneventful (except getting evacuated from Costco on Sunday afternoon… but that was barely an event!).


I’ve been doing very well in the past little while with ensuring that I cook and prepare all my own meals. I ate grain twice over the Christmas Holiday. Once on December 21 when I ate a piece of custom made birthday cake. It was a chocolate lazy dazy cake in which you use coffee for the liquid and it was covered in whipped peanut butter icing and garnish of more chocolate and peanut butter.

And then I ate two bites of stuffing on Christmas day because Janet makes the Canaday/Janzen stuffing recipe and it’s kind of kryptonite. I will say that I suffered IMMENSELY after both those indulgences… which relegated them right outside the indulgence category…


ANYWAY… One of my Journey Plan items is to continue to not eat grains of any sort, no legumes, no really starchy veg and a meagre amount of dairy. So far it’s working out great! I’ve been filling my freezer (soon to be deep freeze if I can figure out a way to get the effer home from Costco!) with home cooked grain free meals so that when I start into my 99 hours of training next Tuesday I’ll have good things to eat.


That said, I’m feeling in a very purgey way right now. I want to throw everything in my house away! Obviously I’m not going to but there are some areas that won’t be spared. The impetus for it was really a purchase I made on Etsy. Another one of my Journey Plan items is to continue to try and make as little impact on the planet as I can, while still remaining sane and not wasting spending all my time on worrying about it. One of the ways to do that is cloth napkins. Now, I’m sure you can go to the store and purchase some really heinous cloth napkins at Winners or Canadian Tire. But, always one for wanting something interesting and unique, I bought myself a set of four screen printed napkins from THIS ETSY VENDOR

In fact, the ACTUAL ones I bought are pictured below.

The other thing that I’m really itching to do is figure something out for my dining room. I love my dining room. When I first moved I repurposed a small loveseat to function as banquette seating on one side and two antique chairs on the other side. It looks great! The problem is that the sofa is far too low and you can literally scoop food from off the table into your mouth… no lifting necessary. It’s funny at first but it makes your stomach hurt, and it’s hard to get in and out of with the table so close. Cat toys go under there to die on a very frequent basis, which means I have to pull the two chairs, table and sofa out to rescue them for the whining machine!


So I’d like to do either two nice chairs that I can refinish and recover, or, ideally, because I like the banquette idea, I’d like to do this.

Thanks for the great idea pinterest! And if that doesn’t work, I’m considering trying to find some legs and making just the bench portion. In the scheme of things, that would work best with the way the room is designed and where the drapes are anyway!


So I went looking online just now for dining benches… and then it hit me! I have a 4’ wide incredibly sturdy coffee table that is currently the holder of stuff in my bedroom until I get a dresser! When I first got it I had them cut quite a few inches off of it, which I’m sorely regretting now, but if it’s pretty close to 18”, I should be able to shore it up with some layers of mdf or plywood and then make the bench cushion for it! The stain on the coffee table matches the chairs and I have plenty of the sofa fabric left to cover the bench!



I’m pretty happy right now because it means that my lost creative mojo (which I lost about three weeks before Christmas) seems to be coming back. Maybe I’ll even knit a little tonight, once I’ve thrown out a bunch of stuff and measured my bench (and let’s be realistic, moved the bench to the dining room, moved the sofa to the bedroom, rearranged the bedroom because the sofa won’t fit otherwise and then cleaned the whole place! Good thing dinner is in the crockpot as we speak!