Beginnings and Endings and the Stuff in Between

My gardening boots are nowhere near their tragic end, but I do think it's kind of funny to see how far they've come since August.

Mr. W and I recently started watching Breaking Bad and are already discussing how we'll cope when we finish the final season. Naturally, we plan to watch another series. Rinse and repeat.

It's funny how when certain things end, the only way you can get through them is to sort of try to relive the experience over again.

Then there are those other cases—like really demanding jobs—when all you want to do is rest and not relive the experience for awhile...

This is how it goes with Mr. W's most recent career endeavor. After a year and a half of very hard work, he finally wrapped up his movie. We got to attend its premiere last week, and it was so much fun (particularly because we saw Bryan Cranston right in the midst of our Breaking Bad binge). It was a very cool event to mark the ending of a very big project. (Big like, crushing skyscrapers and sinking air craft carriers kind of big...)

So now we begin the litany of remodeling projects. Again, rinse and repeat. Some of that mode of operating is "necessity"—in order to finish everything we want to upgrade, we have to start one thing right after another. But I also think it's just because we like being in-process. We like having projects. Beginnings can be tricky, and endings are often sort of sad, so we try to stay in that in between place. I've watched my parents do this for nearly four decades. It's the creative process, not the end product, that draws them in, I think.

This week we started demo on our main bathroom and the thrill of starting this transformation is only slightly tarnished by the amount of dust that is now coating all of my toiletries...

For those readers worried about the fate of the endlessly adorable seahorse tiles, fear not—Mr. W was able to extract them with a saw and expert technique:

We're so excited to finally have a big indoor project underway. Especially now that the chicken coop is almost totally finished (post to come). And we're not the only ones who are beginning new "projects" around here either. Our local mockingbirds have built a nest in our Meyer lemon tree and are expecting triplets: