Eye Candy Day?

Little Miss A has such a wide-eyed take on the world, and she was snuggled down so sweetly in her swing!
It was a little chilly in the house, so she was wearing her lavender fuzzy sleeping bag and wrapped in a fleecy blankie. With, of course, whales on it!
But of course the cute smile evaporated when the camera came out. Oh well. Check her blog for the pics her mamma took today!


With all the commotion going on at my house, I'm amazed and delighted that this iris was able to survive and actually bloom! This was the second picture I took... the first one had a porta-potty in the background!

I also took a picture of a baby narcissus that is blooming out there. Gotta love bulbs--some of these have been coming back for years and years! Anyway, those pictures are on the Flickr page, which you can access from the Flickr badge over there. (Pointing!)

Today was supposed to be a knitting day for me, but I had to make other plans. Sigh! At least, I got the colorwork done on the Very Warm Hat for Audrey's daddy last night, so now it's just a question of going round and round and round in yellow yarn. Pics when it looks more like a hat and less like a grocery sack!

My big excursion today was out to the "tile place" to pick out some of the tiles etc for the new kitchen and bathroom. This photo is the kitchen cabinets (sample) and the floor tile. 18" and a lightish non-shiny ivory color. This will go all over the kitchen floor, through the former "mud room" and into the back bathroom. Since there are no windows in the kitchen or mud room, I wanted a light color so it didn't feel like a cave.
There is a window in the back bathroom, though. This photo is the shower tile and floor tile together. The color (at least on my laptop) is pretty true. The wall tiles will be 10" x 16" and will go all the way to the ceiling. Shower door will be clear glass.

Again, kind of neutral but we can spice it up with paint colors, towels and accessories. Oh, and there will be a wall cabinet in there in the same honey-maple finish as the kitchen cabinets. There's also going to be a built-in cabinet in the mud room which ought to transform it into a butler's pantry. Not that I have a butler... but hey, a girl can dream!

This last picture is almost-the-backsplash with the cabinet sample and countertop. The actual backsplash will be glass tile like this, but in different colors--the dark goldish-beige, a dark olive, and a dark taupe. The salesman assured us there would be a mix of shiny and frosted tiles, too, which is an effect we really liked.
The countertop granite is something called Emerald Pearl which is closer in color to the picture I took than to the color in the link--it's one of those that has a lot of flecks of iridescent color in it, so when it's photographed head-on with a flash it washes out. I think it's something we won't get tired of very easily, and the dark color will be an accent among all the light colors in the room.

There's something about shopping for the new incarnation of the house, and then returning to the cold dusty shell, that's a real disconnect. I guess the closest comparison is to a pregnancy--there's a lot that you have to take on faith, and it comes with a lot of uncomfortable times, but in the end it should all be worth it.
Stay tuned to see how long this optimistic frame of mind lasts!