on perma-xmas, tea towels, and apple

Thank you for all of your nice comments on the office and for offering help on my Airport Express networking issues. Unfortunately, the problem has been languishing—I haven't had the chance to go back to it since my last post, but I'll shoot one or all of you an e-mail soon.

By the way, the office color scheme being perma-Christmas did cross my mind, but I think the greens being more limey than piney helps modernize it and makes it less overtly yuletide. What happened is that my existing storage boxes and media console already happened to be red, and I had other boxes that were green, so it all kind of fell into place and I decided that I might as well go all the way with it.

To continue with the theme, I'm thinking of getting one of these tea towels to frame and put on the wall.

 Or maybe of these:
Or this one. Just wish the green was chartreuse.

Speaking of apples, I can't wait for the "Back to the Mac" event on Wednesday. I've tired of all this iOS talk of late,, so it's exciting that Apple is finally going back to its roots. I could really really use a new laptop, so I'm crossing my fingers for a MacBook Pro update . . .

All of the tea towels, by the way, come from the brilliantly-named ToDryFor.com. I had a hard time choosing from all of the fun designs they have available.

the corner office

One thing I really like about living in Kentucky is that you get a lot of rental bang for your buck. We're really enjoying the new apartment we moved into in August—it's definitely the nicest place we've lived since getting married. The let's-move-to-a-new-apartment-every-year game can get pretty tiring, so I'm happy that we have this place to call home for at least the next three years.

And I finally get a functional office/craft room! So nice to have a space set aside for telecommuting and sewing. I wasn't planning on posting any pictures this soon because everything is still a work in progress (e.g., cord management problems and the other side of this room is a mess), but I can't hold back my excitement about these chartreuse chevron curtains:

I made the curtains using a simple tutorial for tab-top curtains from The Purl Bee. I omitted the tabs from my version and hung up the curtains using curtain rings. Didn't want to deal with a ton of yardage, so I got just enough fabric to hit the bottom of the window's apron. The medium-weight chartreuse chevron fabric, as well as the insulated white lining, are both from fabric.com—a great deal at about $7 and $4 per yard respectively, and free shipping to boot. Not too shabby, eh?

What's next for this room: put away the rest of the mess, finish and hang a wall quilt, find some under desk storage (I like these red filing cabinets from cb2), and get the Airport Express wireless printer setup up and running. I haven't been able to get it to work since we left Santa Barbara—I've reset it and fiddled around with a bunch of settings, but the last time I tried to connect it the home network slowed to a crawl and it took about an hour to print a page. I guess I'm not the most network-savvy person out there, so if anyone knows what the problem could be (cough JohnE) let me know.