Let There Be Light

There's something called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, where, when one learns, hears, or starts thinking about something new, suddenly it's everywhere. Lighting is my current obsession. I pay attention constantly, now that I'm considering which fixtures to buy and how they will look. On the face of it, it's not so complicated. Most of the new lighting in our house will be recessed, with some ceiling mounted lights and a few wall sconces. Perhaps it's because so many of the remaining options seem largely indistinguishable that it's hard to hone in on exactly what we want. Our thought was that we will choose mostly neutral lighting, but try for one piece in the dining room with a little extra oomph. To that end, I've been trawling online lighting stores at every opportunity and feverishly adding pictures to my houzz.com idea book when I can't sleep.

David and I watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night (the newer American version) after the kids went to bed. As I watched, I was distracted from the plot by the nifty lighting in all those Swedish buildings. So sleek! So modern and minimalist! My mind kept returning to those geometric unembellished fixtures- I must have them. The obvious next step was to venture to Ikea, done today (check), on a rainy Saturday no less. The waft of Swedish meatballs notwithstanding, results were a little disappointing. Maybe absent the muckraking journalist, mohawked antiheroine and Hollywood set designers, they were just regular inexpensive lights, only with names like umlaut and bergwenstrom.

perusing options at Ikea, above

In my online searching I did find one modern chandelier that was kind of interesting- round crystals forming a pyramid. David liked it too, but as he rightly pointed out,we could hardly host any future Passover seders with such an eggregious symbol of our oppression hanging over the table. Point well taken. The $2K + price tag didn't help much either.

We'll keep looking. Soon, everything will be illuminated.

Winter Pays for Summer

I love the HBO fantasy series "Game of Thrones" based on the George RR Martin books. I love the stoic Stark family, their home in Winterfell, the way they go around saying ominously to one another, "Winter is coming." The story also involves a Knight's Watch, a monkish group of outliers pledged to guard a humongous wall of ice in the North. Everywhere, cold dark characters, cold dark landscapes, brutal, cold, and more cold and brutal. Not for nothing, winter (not just in this series, of course) is associated with discontent, hardship, challenge, wanting and waiting for the fruits of spring and summer.

Here in Northern California, we've had the driest, sunniest winter on record.

The good news (and this is huge) is that our house is progressing well. The roof and framing are nearly finished, and it looks and feels like a house. The downstairs kitchen cabinetry, floors, and countertops that we wanted to preserve have remained intact and damage-free. Rough plumbing is completed and the electrical wiring will start next week. In every room there are views to look at and places to sit. All but one of the windows are framed out and await installment. That jumble of beams and rubble that faced us at the beginning of the project has shaped into a sturdy structure that no wolf can blow down (though on second thought, I'd better save wolf metaphors for the next post). We are getting close.

Despite the mild weather, however, this winter has been rough. In December I had a jarring bike accident on my way home from work. In January, a household lice outbreak had us laundering for ages. February brought a meniscus tear in my left knee, followed by surgery in the beginning of March. And the real doozy: a week later, we were told by our current landlords that they wouldn't extend our lease, as we had hoped, ironically because they are anxious to start their own remodeling project. We have to move out by the end of April, well before our projected completion date. Now that's cold. The thought of moving again, especially our entire household's worth of belongings, makes me physically ache.

But...

Have I mentioned that we are getting close? Knowing that warmer days are coming and this winter of winters is receding is a thought that will buoy us and help us power through for these last few months. We are waiting for the fruits of summer, and shit does make good fertilizer.