Decorating an apartment sounds like good, clean fun, but in reality, it involves a lot of sweat equity. There are walls to tape off and paint, furniture to refinish (more on that soon!), and—inevitably—way too many Ikea purchases to weld together.

In my opinion, the best part of the decorating process comes before the big move: picking out a color scheme! In our previous abode, I made the mistake of winging it when it came to the color palette, and those random stylistic decisions never came together as a cohesive whole. This time, I vowed to be more strategic about the whole process.

Here, my friends, is the result:

After living with blue walls that were just slightly too vivid in our old place, I knew I’d go for neutral paint this time. Enter: light gray, which is more fun than beige but just as low-key. A sane wall color would allow for pops of cheerful pigment elsewhere in red, gold, and navy—a modified primary color scheme. Against this palette, I figured that bright white trim and deep mahogany wood pieces would make for especially crisp accents.

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As we roll through July, and the office empties out with coworkers gone fishin’, I’ve been forced to come to terms with a certain unfortunate fact: I’m not going on vacation this year.

Since I’m only three months into work with my new employer, I haven’t been gifted with any days off yet (I’ll have to wait for the six- and twelve-month marks till that happens—and what glorious days those will be!). It could be a whole lot worse, since I’ll end up with eighteen days of paid leave once the year is through—um, yes please? But as Tom Petty so eloquently put it: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Weekend trips are out, too, as I recently passed my beloved old Bridget Honda on to a new owner. Again, no complaints: I’m elated that $4.50/gallon gasoline, car insurance premiums, and repair bills aren’t draining my bank account any longer. It means, however, that I won’t be leaving Chicagoland for a very long time, as enchanting a land as it may be.

When you have no time, no transportation, and no resources, you dream. So allow me to fantasize a bit about future vacation days, will you?

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about home.

I’ll start by saying this: I’m not sure I’ve ever really had one. My (divorced) parents changed residences a few times between them; plus, I spent my pre-college years bouncing between their respective places. I still do, whenever I’m back in Illinois. Maybe as a result, I started to feel twitchy about this lack of stability—I was always anticipating the next upheaval.

College didn’t help much in the way of stability, since students are generally condemned to spending each year in a new, cramped dorm room. And, as I’ve mentioned here, I’ve spent the the past two post-grad years floundering around in some pretty bleak parts of the D.C. metro area. I looked at this experience with rose-colored glasses for a long time, until the situation deteriorated (hi, bedbugs!) and it just became clear that I needed more for myself. Until recently, I’d been filling my weekends with travel plans and cooking sprees, but I came to realize that even a full refrigerator wasn’t getting me any closer to the safe haven I craved. My constant desire to leave town didn’t help, either.

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In a recent act of reverence, I visited a synagogue. It was still Hanukkah, and I’d definitely say it was a spiritual event: Andrew Bird was playing at the 6th and I downtown. I’ve always loved the lush, layered qualities of his songs (and, of course, that whistling!) but wasn’t quite sure how he’d be able to recreate them live.

He was completely sans backing band, looking lonely up on stage amidst a sea of instruments and blue light. But apparently that didn’t matter, because he became his own band in a feat of musical and technological wizardry: by recording himself onstage, then looping the track as he layered piece upon piece of percussion, melody and harmony. He only started singing after a few minutes of this strategic work, once he’d created a backing track from his own musical building blocks (see the method for yourself here).

It was humbling, to say the least.

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On the way back from work tonight, my usual route met me with its usual, miserable traffic jam. But this time, the cause was different. Instead of the normal volume-related pileup, tonight’s roads were clogged because someone had abandoned his car in the middle of Route 7. I reached, then passed the darkened vehicle eventually, but glancing at it sideways, I didn’t feel one twinge of annoyance. Honestly, I couldn’t really blame the guy.

Because I know what it’s like to feel like cutting and running, too. I’m confined all day by claustrophobia-inducing cubicle walls, y’all. There’s that aforementioned and predictably atrocious commute, plus a no-longer-homey apartment (it hasn’t been the same since my neighbor’s bedbugs invaded my own four walls. Yeah, let’s not talk about that). I have big plans in the works, of course, ones that (fingers crossed) will change all of the above. And I promise you’ll hear about them when the time is right. But until the day my lease is up, I’ve resolved to find inspiration in the parts of my life I still control.

Recently, I’ve found hope in the posts of two new-to-me blogs. At Makeunder My Life, Jess Constable has written about creating a home in the way that Michelangelo created his statue of David. (“It is easy,” he apparently said of sculpting a masterpiece from a boulder. “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”) Instead of finding peace in consumption, Jess talks about finding it through “exfoliating” unnecessary possessions, making her home’s trash-to-treasure ratio more favorable by subtracting, not adding. John and Sherry Petersik, over at the very fun home blog Young House Love (represent, Virginia!), seem to share a similar philosophy. It’s encapsulated in this post on living happily with less. And from their (very smart) posts on frugality, I’ve been inspired to start using and enjoying the things I already have—everything from pantry items to that long-ignored Netflix subscription.

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Virginia, I love you. Passionately.

I’m reminded of that fact every time I visit Shenandoah, especially when it’s autumn and the bright leaves almost have me convinced there’s a forest fire spreading across the valley.

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Do you ever wish that you were born into a different era? That you could experience the lawless underground of the 1920s, or revel in the gum-smacking, bell bottom-laden, disco ball ’70s? To me, that sort of time travel would be a thrilling proposition. And not only for the adventure; sometimes I feel I would’ve fit in better somewhere in the long-lost past.

Am I alone in imagining my anachronistic traits restored to their proper time period? For awhile, my letter-writing habit had me questioning my 21st-century surroundings, as did my later, unrelated fixation on psychedelic rock and the ’60s culture of revolution. And growing up, that was the appeal of American Girl dolls—or really, the American Girl books. I saw myself in all their protagonists: the headstrong little girls who performed heroic feats in their colonial-era petticoats, or who hunkered down with their families during World War II, planting victory gardens and collecting scrap metal for the soldiers of the Pacific front.

More recently, I’ve found that escapist pleasure in front of my TV, on Mad Men. I’m not as die-hard about it as many people are, but there’s something mesmerizing about the ultra-structured clothing—and the ultra-structured façades of characters whose brimming emotions simmer dangerously below the surface. (Plus, I love Joan’s hair, and really, everything else about her.) So you’ll find me on the sofa these coming Sunday evenings, projecting myself into the ’60s and enjoying a cold drink.

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For the past month and a half, it’s been all about the vegetables. So, unleashed at the farmers’ market last weekend, we lunged greedily at the berries and stone fruits with outstretched arms. Some people may have found all the lunging a little bit intense—awkward and socially out of place, perhaps—but we were okay with that, since our greediness was rewarded handsomely. Apricots, three pounds of sour cherries, a quart of sweet cherries, a ripe cantaloupe? Procured. And taking into consideration the quart of blackberries and the huge bag of peaches we picked in Purcellville immediately thereafter, the people may have been right in deeming us a tad overeager. But guess what? All of that fruit is either cooked up or residing in our bellies, save for two pounds of pitted sour cherries that lie chilling in the freezer, awaiting their sentencing (which will likely include significant pie time). And we still had room for the contents of our CSA share. Never fear, dear readers! Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

This week was all about food-blog inspiration, as we eschewed cookbooks and magazines in favor of some delicious things that Kristin, Andrea, Shannalee and David have all waxed poetic about. So I guess you could call this a shout-out to my homies, although I’m too much in awe of their talents to elevate myself to fellow-homie status. I am failing to hatch a more appropriate and deferential slang term, so maybe I’ll just quit while I’m ahead. Yeah, likely a good idea. And then I’ll make some more of their featured recipes, because they made my on-hand ingredients shine, fruit and vegetable alike.

Ahem. Stream of consciousness aside, here’s where all the veggies went.

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When you start a lifelong hobby at the tender age of sixteen, it’s virtually guaranteed to see you through a lot: various stages of awkwardness, confusion, frustration, epiphany, and change, for starters. It’s called growing up, and I toured those stages of adolescence and young adulthood quite literally on foot. For the past eight years, I’ve been a runner, each footstep carrying me though life as I know it. As you can imagine, I’ve worn through many pairs of Asics in the process.

As a sophomore in high school, I picked up the jogging habit that was already a constant in my dad’s life. Up until that point, my music knowledge had been gleaned from the same parental sources: I’d listened to a strange combination of Motown and classical symphonies forever, never really extending my own musical tastes past the edges of theirs. And while oldies and opera sufficed as the soundtrack for family car trips, my new running habit allowed for freedom of musical choice. Armed with headphones and a Discman, I added artists to my repertoire, slowly becoming enamored with the songs that propelled me on increasingly lengthy jogs. I discovered Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan a few years into my running career, at eighteen or nineteen, swam to the bottom of their discographies and drowned myself in sound. All the while, I was pounding pavement or snaking through wooded trails, running away from a few heart-ripping breakups and familial dysfunction, and towards new friends, new love, and eventual peace within my home.

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There is nothing in the world quite like a Japanese reality show. I was introduced to the oeuvre by an aficionado friend of mine, who would actually be the perfect competitor on Sasuke (“Ninja Warrior” to the uninitiated). But most recently, I heard about a particularly zany program, Denpa Shonen: in one episode, a Japanese man is holed up in an apartment without provisions, and magazine contests are his only lifeline to the outside world. Basically, he must enter as many of these contests as possible in order to procure the necessities and luxuries of life. Like I said, people: There’s nothing in the world quite like a Japanese reality show.

Being entirely uninterested in playing the odds, and uncompetitive to boot, I wouldn’t have lasted a minute on Denpa Shonen. So I was surprised and delighted last week when I won something myself, without ever having signed up for the chance. My coworkers chose me as “Most Positive” in my department, and I smilingly received a pretty glass award—and a bit of pocket change to boot. How sweet is it to be recognized for something so unexpected, and something that comes so naturally? I take pride in the way I comport myself, but it’s not often that you get outside reinforcement of such intrinsic characteristics. Really, I’m still smiling a week later.

Receiving the award made me think about how often we pat ourselves on the back. Too often, I know, we’re harder on ourselves than we are on others, and it’s worth a reminder that we’re good enough, we’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like us. I chose to give myself that reminder in the form of a few little treats. When’s the last time you treated yourself? (Because, sweet reader, you deserve it!)

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