Walking Backwards

This morning I woke up feeling a little better, at least stress-wise, but my asthma/allergies are driving me up the wall. They are driving me so up the wall I've started taking my allergy medication again. I should have known better than to brave the allergies around here without pharmaceutical assistance, but one of the weird side-effects of the allergy medication I take is that it gives you vertigo. I don't like vertigo. Okay, the first couple of times it was pretty cool, but it got old when I started being completely unable to predict when it would occur. Try pushing a shopping cart down a packed grocery store aisle when you're having an attack of vertigo and you'll understand why I stopped. The other down-side to having allergies this bad this morning is that I can't take Nicholas to the zoo like I planned. We don't get many weekday mornings for just the two of us and I wanted to do something fun. I'll have to think up something that doesn't require us to go into the dusty out of doors and steers us clear of all the retail trappings of pre-holiday shopping. Maybe we'll hit the museum, maybe we'll go to one of those "paint-your-own" pottery places; who knows.

I made progress on the re-claiming of my house this week, somehow. The bathroom is now mine again! We hung up a couple of pictures, cleaned out all the drawers and cabinets, replaced the shower curtain, and bleached every non-porous surface. I would have taken before and after pictures, but it was too frightening before. Now it is a lovely, meditative place like it should be. There is little in the world that makes my skin crawl quite as much as a bathroom that hasn't been cleaned in months. Especially a bathroom that is used primarily by a twenty-something guy who worked as a butcher.

The bedroom, on the other hand, has seen no progress. In fact, if possible, we took a step back. Joe and I discussed our floor replacing options and decided that now was not the time to replace the carpet with the expense of Christmas at hand. Upon measuring the room and picking out the flooring, we discovered it would cost about five-hundred dollars to completely re-do the floor. That is just going to have to wait. We'll get a rug in the mean time since it is going to play guest room to our holiday entourage. In case you're wondering, this is the floor we picked out: FLOR tiles Needlework and Soft Cord in Brown. Yes, I know, BROWN carpet. It will hide a multitude of sins, though. The room is going to be painted in light blue, cream, and brown, so it's working off of that. Now, I just have to de-funk the place and get started.

And . . . we finally got some of our Italy pictures online. You can check them out at this website. No captions yet, but I think you can figure out the major sites. Also, Nicholas is the child (obviously), most of the pictures of the guy with long hair are pictures of my brother, I'm the harried looking brunette who appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and my mom is in there as are some other traveling companions.