Pretty Things

I’ve gone on kind of a spending spree lately. Tried not to go too crazy, but I did spend some $$. A few things were necessities; some were investments. Others were just because.

I finally broke down and got a real gold chain for my birthstone pendant. It’s about the width of a human hair, but I bought it cheap enough I can live with that. In fact, I bought it precisely because I wanted something delicate. I’ve had the birthstone pendant forever. It’ll be nice to actually wear it again.

Now that I’m working full time from home (YAY!) I needed to get one thing for sure: a footstool for under my desk. My knees were protesting without it. Mind you, G promised to build me one, and I’m sure he’ll eventually get around to it. Maybe. Sooner or later. Sometime in the next 5-10 years, anyway. With that in mind, I was looking at Amazon for an alternate approach when I came across this sweet option:

Each of the thumbnails is clickable so you can see bigger and un-squishyfied images.

This footstool has a couple of secrets up its sleeve, though. Not only is it gorgeous – that’s embroidery all around, by the way, not just printed on – it arrives empty. You stuff it with pillows, rags, out of season blankets, etc. So in addition to looking awesome, it’s STORAGE. The bottom unzips to allow you to fill it. And lemme tell you, it holds a lot! I put in several bath towels, three or four blankets, and more, and could probably have fit even more if I’d arranged things better. (I plan to arrange better because it’s lopsided as heck right now.)

As you can guess, this is a big piece when filled. The description says it’s 22 inches by 14 inches. The 14 inches I believe, but I’m positive it’s bigger across than 22 inches. It’s humongous. A cheap solution, too. They’re on Amazon here.

A few days ago I ordered this as a gift. The stone is genuine, but the setting isn’t real silver, unfortunately, so when it arrives the recipient will need to coat the back with clear nail polish to keep it from turning her skin green. (It might be a good idea to coat all the silver-tone areas, to keep them from tarnishing.) Y’all know how I am with my stones. I pick and choose and end up spending more for rocks for other people than for myself, seems like.

For the record, the photo doesn’t do this pendant justice. If it weren’t so late I’d take a better picture. (My phone doesn’t have a flash option, darn it.) It’s a statement piece and while I’m sending it with a silver chain, I suspect the person who gets it will add her own touches.

I’ve got a few crystal care packages going out in the next few days, if all goes well. They’re the closest thing I can do to offering concrete help with life’s issues.

I know you’ve seen this before, though it was nearly black in its original form. I bought this dragon figurine a while back, specifically as a photo prop. However, I finally today got around to dressing it up.

This isn’t the completed version. It’s the version after a couple of coats of sparkly silver paint, though. After this picture was taken, I hot-glued rhinestone “jewels” for eyes and in a couple of other spots. Since it’s going to be used on the cover of one of my books it’s going to have a couple of other embellishments, too. I bought all the goodies for it today and have most of it done. Once it’s all put together the husband person will be taking a photo because I understand composition but my hands don’t understand “not shaking too much to take a good picture.”

And if you follow me on Facebook you probably already know I bought an SSD for my laptop. If you’re unfamiliar, lemme fill you in. An SSD is a type of hard drive. Normally hard drives don’t have a lot to do with the speed of your computer: they only impact how much crap you can save on it. That’s not true for an SSD, however. My computer used to take nearly 5 minutes for it to boot up and be ready to use. Now it’s more like 30 seconds. HUMONGOUS difference. No pictures on this one because the computer doesn’t look different, but holy crap does it work faster!

Over the past couple of days I did what was, for me anyway, a shop-a-thon. We have umpteen smallish cereal bowls, but we also had a set of slightly larger ceramic bowls for pasta and such. The cereal bowls are too small for a meal, but the stoneware bowls were crap. We had six of them. We were down to three and counting, because they all but disintegrate once you use and (hand) wash them a few times. They chip and crack and split no matter how careful you are. Since we have the unbreakable Corelle stuff for everything else, I bought a set of four bigger Corelle bowls to replace the dying stoneware. I looked at pasta bowls, but they were too shallow to be practical. These are big, deep pieces, big enough to hold aman-sized serving.

Well, most men. My husband is known to go back for thirds and fourths. I dunno where he puts it, because he’s not a big man. However, he’s acquired a bit more tummy lately. Don’t tell him I said so.

And I got a haircut – no big deal, but I’m glad to have it done.