very simple

Missed yesterday, so you get two today to catch up. Ended up having to go in to work this afternoon (it happens), but we weren’t in our office – we were back at another office down the street with great views. Here’s the bounty.

the remains of my fancy glassware. A few pieces have been casualties of my attempts at rearranging furniture. and Sadie. always Sadie.

The prolonged, multi-year planning process is finally over, and I begin renovations to my bathroom next week, a full two-years after my upstairs neighbor destroyed my ceiling and one year after I began interviewing contractors in earnest (it’s a really small bathroom and just not worth the time for many of them since there’s no actual plumbing work to be done). One guy wanted to charge me $25,000 for a job that amounts to replacing the drywall and tile.

In any event, I got all my paperwork submitted about two weeks ago, and I got Board approval yesterday. So we start next Thursday. It should take about two weeks at the outside, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

In any event, here’s a sample tile for the floor and shower area of the new and improved space. We’re doing 12×24 “planks” instead of the old school subway tile that’s in there now.

muji statue of liberty. quick pic before I crash for the evening.

Stuck super-late at the office tonight. It happens. But of course I had to find something completely innocuous to take a photo of on my desk so as not to accidentally give away any confidences.

Gifts for my brother. My little brother is currently working in Senegal, and my parents and he are meeting up in Amsterdam next week to hang out before he moves on to a possible new adventure. In the meantime, it’s really hard to get moleskine notebooks where he is, so I picked up a little care package of them for him. These, plus the dozen or so muji pens I also got him should be enough to tide him over for the next…month or so!

One of the many myriad projects I’ve got going on in this whole apartment refresh (a pending bathroom renovation being the biggest one) is to buy a new couch. My old one is 13, and is very much showing it’s age, particularly (as I have learned the hard way) since cats apparently LOVE to scratch up leather. I’m limiting myself to microfiber options for the new one for this very reason. Nothing may be cat “proof”, but if the microfiber slipcovers I got for my chair and ottoman recently have taught me anything, it’s that Sadie appears to have zero interest in even attempting to get her claws into it. It’s not the sexiest fabric, but then again, neither is something that I end up having to cover in blankets to protect.

These are from Room & Board. After the article in the NY Times the other week on couches, I started looking a little higher than places like West Elm (although there’s zero chance I’m spending over $10K on a couch!).

Sadie runs and hides when I pull out my iPhone, but the minute I get out the giant SLR, she starts posing like crazy.

As part of a daily ritual, my admin and I go downstairs to starbucks every day. Today, we encountered…this. You can’t really get the full flavor of this feathered headdress contraption without seeing the front, where it has scarf-like arm appendages that fall down to one’s knees, but as I am a coward, you only get the back.

As a bonus, here’s a picture of this morning’s snow as seen from our offices that was originally going to be my daily pic. It got superseded.

Finally went to the doctor today, and it turns out I have a “massive” sinus infection. So now I’m on real drugs. Can’t say I’m feeling that much better yet, but I’m hoping that these’ll kick in pretty quickly.