As promised...

Photos of the clean Gaultney Homestead:

Domestic Goddess

Perhaps the title of this post is misleading. As I’ve confessed in previous posts, I’m not the perfect housekeeper. Nancy Thorne, my darling mother, is – but I, her wayward daughter, don’t replace the shower curtain liner nearly as often as I should, nor the A.C. filters, nor even the smoke alarm battery… le sigh. How I wish I had her knack for maintaining a nest that honors her husband, reflects her passions (food, color, comfort, cleanliness, etc.), and welcomes others.

About once a month, however, something crazy happens. Be it hormones, out-of-town guests, or something else (in this case, roaches), I kick it into full “domestic goddess” mode, and I clean the entire house from top to bottom.

Two of my least favorite chores are cleaning the floors (I don’t mind vacuuming, but mopping and sweeping I detest) and putting new sheets on the bed. I don’t mind WASHING the sheets – I just hate that awful ordeal of figuring out which way the fitted sheet is supposed to go, tucking in the flat sheet, putting the pillow covers on and then remembering which pillow was Brad’s and which one was mine – ugh. What chores do you dread?

Anyway, I found two roaches in my bathroom within about six hours of each other. I killed one that had gotten into the bathtub and couldn’t climb out… I keep a can of Raid in my powder room at all times… and then I returned later in the day to discover the dead roach’s twin mourning his loss over the other roach’s carcass. The Raid was not taking effect on him as quickly as I wanted, so he quickly met his fate at the blunt edge of the Raid can.

(NB: I think I'm getting back into the swing of this blogging thing. I realized this as I was watching the first roach die, and I thought "I should take a video of this for my blog!" Clearer thoughts prevailed and I realized how disgusting that would be.)

This got me thinking. Granted, I live in an old house in a historic neighborhood – and this IS Texas, so there are bound to be roaches – but perhaps it’s time for an all-out scrub-down.

I keep my kitchen clean because I’m a bit paranoid about germs and I bake a lot (again, see here). So I figured I would ease myself into the cleaning madness and start with my cleanest room, the kitchen, and just make it that much cleaner. Check out my awesomely organized fridge:

And freezer (is this beginning to feel like an MTV Cribs episode?):

And my personal fav, the pantry:

I hope you noticed the vase full of limes and lemons on the top shelf of the fridge. I thought that was a nice, Stepford-esque touch. I’m very into room temperature water, no ice, with limes these days. I feel like it does wondrous things for my insides. Maybe it doesn't.

I also arranged a really lovely bowl of fruit. The vessel is a copper paella pan my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday. Really gorgeous! And the mix of bananas, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples, studded with black plums and cherries, makes for a pretty spread. I feel like the darker fruits look like little jewels of amethyst and onyx against the citron backdrop:

And with some mood lighting (I'm not as good a photog as Abby!):

Now onto other rooms of the house. Today I’ll focus on the den, formal living room, and my bathroom. The office I tend to stay out of because that’s Brad’s mad scientist lab and there’s no point in picking it up. The guest room is storing some extra furniture, so it’s not worth trying to make that room look pretty until we unload the excess at my little bro’s apartment. The master I tend to keep pretty picked-up. A girl’s gotta have a decent place to dress herself, right?

Look for more photos of the clean house later. :-)

Ode to a Profile View Counter

When I was a junior in college, I went through a bad break-up.

Well, ok. It wasn’t so much “bad” as it was a blow to my pride… and it wasn’t so much a “break-up” as it was that a boy who liked me -- and I liked back -- stopped liking me. Ouch.

Anyway, being the punk rock rebel I am, my broken heart found comfort in the music of Conor Oberst, also known as Bright Eyes. I played the anti-love anthem “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” over 200 times on my iTunes that Christmas holiday.

But then something really terrible happened. I upgraded to the new version of iTunes, and somehow all of my play counts reset themselves! I had worked hard to earn that 200+ number. And it just slipped through my fingers, like sand through the hourglass…

This blog resurrection has given me a case of déjà vu. I changed the email that my blog is hosted under and deleted the old one, and now all of my profile views have disappeared. Thanks to some really avid followers of my France trip, I had amassed a fairly impressive total of over 600 profile views. Now we stand at… looks like 24. And I’m willing to bet a third of those originated with my very own computer.

So this blog posting is an ode to the 600 fallen page counts. You served my ego well, and you will never be forgotten.

It’s also a plea. Click on my profile? There’s not much there, but it would do my heart good to see that number spike. I hereby announce a campaign: 90 views by ’09!

Birds of a Feather

The friendship shared by me and my kindred spirit, Stephanie Gahm, is legendary. We live parallel lives and know each other backwards and forwards. I could go on and on about how much I love this lady and why she’s so very precious, but instead I’ll focus on one of our mutual affinities: feathers.

Feathers? With all Stephanie and I have a common zeal for – Paris, Austin, Urban Outfitters, trying new things, men with last names beginning in “G” – I’m going to write about feathers?!

Well, yes. You see, feathers are one small piece of a litany of evidences showing how this girl and I just get each other. I have to give credit where credit is due. Stephanie actually pioneered a feather trend, fixating upon peacock feathers and incorporating them them into her wardrobe and accessories, design aesthetic, and more. She even considered working peacock feathers into the floral arrangements and bouquets at her wedding, which I still think would have been brilliant. Here’s a photo of Stephanie sporting her fabulous peacock earrings as we waged a chopstick war:



Stephanie knows about my recent fascination with vintage half-hats and clips. I scour eBay for these lovely little sartorial wonders about once weekly, usually sans success. Recently I’ve marveled at the ability that Kenley from Project Runway has for scooping up and sporting similar pieces, and I’m trying not to be annoyed with her for stealing my next great fashion statement… Sequins, feathers, knit or mesh – I LOVE half-hats.

I found on my doorstep today the most delightful little package with the most delightful contents: an Urban Outfitters headband with feathers on one side, very much resembling a vintage hat!!! And of course, my kindred spirit Stephanie sent it to me. I turned the feathers up on one end to give it some added "oomph" and proceeded to execute an impromptu photo shoot. Forgive the salmon cardigan that clashes with my wondrous headband.




Now trying to channel the mystique of a silver screen hussy:



I LOVE it!

Let Them Eat Cake – and Pies, and Tarts…

I’m a big believer in the joy of cooking. I have to be! Goodness knows I’m not the tidiest housekeeper ever. Both of my parents are meticulously organized keep their house spotless to the point that the tops of their ceiling fans could pass a white-glove test any day of the week.

In fact, I have a bit of a complex about how I inexplicably missed the cleanliness gene. The moderate germaphobe gene, however, I got. It doesn't compute. Elevator buttons, shopping cart handles, laminated menus and the like give me the heeby-jeebies because of all the pernicious microbes undoubtedly harbored by these surfaces. Then I found out from my colleague Alison yesterday that even my own wet laundry could be a disease carrier.

But I digress.

My point is, since my house never seems to be as spic-and-span as I’d like it to be, I have to play up my strengths. Baking happens to be one of them, and cakes are a particular forte. Brad and I celebrated his mother’s birthday yesterday at Mattito’s in Uptown, and the birthday-cake-baking honor fell to me. I’m not a huge chocoholic unless it’s DARK chocolate. The darker the better. So knowing Teresa’s love for the dark master, the cocoa bean, I created my most chocolatey confection to date. It was a dark chocolate layer cake with real fudge icing, chocolate ganache filling, and chocolate-covered cocoa beans on top. (The word "ganache" always makes me think of Stephanie's wedding, since Taylor's groom's cake was covered in chocolate ganache, which Stephanie described as "magic chocolate icing." So true.) I hope you don’t mind allowing me to indulge in a little show-and-tell:

(Love the Crate and Barrel cake dome and foot too. A wedding gift, naturally.)

The night before my birthday last year, I determined to make my own birthday cake. Pathetic? Perhaps. But it gets worse. I had decided on a pineapple cheesecake (combining two of God’s greatest inventions) and set about my mise en place. I had gotten no further than melting the butter when, through an uncanny series of events, I ended up with second-degree burns across my abdomen. I won’t go into details except to say that scalding butter + laundry night = pas bon.


This year I had more luck. Here’s my birthday cake from last month, before I dressed it with gobs and gobs of cream cheese frosting. The photo was taken from my phone. This was my own recipe, three layers of yellow cake with a pastry cream filling and chopped fresh strawberries mixed in:

Now the birthday cake I made my mom. It was a coconut cake with white lemon buttercream frosting and strawberries for garnish:

Last winter I got a case of cabin fever and decided to make a super summery cake. I love coming up with my own recipes, as I did with my birthday cake this year. The next photo shows one of my more successful dabblings. To fight some cold weather blues, I created this lemon cake with raspberry filling and orange zest buttercream icing. Summer heaven:

And a final Katie-penned recipe. This pear and almond tart had the richest, most gloriously spicy glaze and a chewy cream cheese dough crust. The perfect fall comfort food:

I owe much of my lovin’ of the oven to the Thorne women. Three generations of bakers:

Dipping the Big Toe

I’ve decided to give it another try. I’m not prepared to guarantee a high dive, cannonball, or even a belly flop, for that matter… but I am going to dip my feet in the water once again. Yes, I’m going to resume the blog.

I have to admit, I should credit much of my little foray to the good-natured “prodding” of many of my former faithful readers (Meagan and Abby, to name a couple), who hold the fact that they’ve linked their blogs to mine as leverage over me.

By most accounts, I don’t have a lot of exciting material to blog about right now. No extended trips to Paris in my future, like the adventure I chronicled in my first blog. I’ve been married for just shy of a year now, so no wedding planning to kvetch and kvell over. I bought my first house well over a year ago now, and I can firmly state that there are NO plans for babies in my future. When so little is “happening,” what is there to write about?

In fact, I have plenty of anxiety, enthusiasm, and just plain curiosity over where I am in life now. I can’t really put my finger on it, other than to say that I’m going through a sort of frenzied respite… A sort of “sitting down on the inside,” a state of coming to peace with who my Creator has made me – not for the sake of others’ approval, not even for my own satisfaction… just being “me” because God designed me. I’m not after the award for funkiest bohemian, most Stepford-esque newlywed, or any other mantle I may have consciously or unconsciously sought not long ago. I’m just getting used to really being.

Change is a constant theme in my postings, and indeed, so much has changed over the past 18 months. I don’t have to tell you all the ways my life looks different now than it did just a year and a half ago. God is good, so good. And he’s enriched my life extravagantly. I’m truly on the verge of contentment… strange.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve learned how to sit still, or that my postings from now on are going to be treatises on “boring.” I’m just figuring out this whole adulthood thing, and that, to me, is an adventure.

• I still daydream about what the future holds.
• I still have a persistent case of wanderlust. I want to live in France, Morocco, Costa Rica, Seattle…
• I want to write children’s books and create something every day (a painting, a tray of cupcakes, a blog post).
• I want to truly love my husband selflessly and become a woman who honors God with her body and her life, and inspires others to godliness.
  

I’ve got a long way to go, and I hope through this blog you’ll help me chart my progress. Thanks for reading. Here we go again.

I grow heirlooms!