love is blonde

My sister, brother-in-law, and super cute nephew are coming to DC this weekend. My BIL is running the Marine Corps Marathon and we will be cheering him on.

What else is making me happy?

MY NEW iPHONE4s! It was love at first sight. And do you like the girly case I chose for it?

The leather purse my parents brought back for me from Florence. I feel so Euro-chic when I wear it.

Oh, and you guys have got to make this salad that my sister introduced me to last weekend. It is so simple and yet seems so fancy.

• Baby spinach
• Sliced Strawberries
• Chopped up walnuts – put them in a pan with a spoonful of sugar and drop of water and heat it up until it gets caramelized (don’t burn!)
• This dressing:

It’s pretty sweet, so if you’re inclined to enjoy sweet, fruity salads you will love it. I’ve been thinking about adding goat cheese to give it some more savoriness.

Last thing? Nail polish. Which makes me sound like I’m nine years old again, but as one of my friends said to me this week (after we did a nail-painting girls night), “It is sort of like getting a new outfit for 1/1000th of the cost.” I’m really into gray polish right now, thanks to a bottle that Liz sent me. And I’ve added this to my Christmas wishlist:

What’s making you happy right now?

Have you ever been sad about losing something you never even had?

No, this is not a “deep thought.” I’m not talking about a lost friendship or lost pregnancy. I’m talking about a coffee table.

(Jet Set Storage Bench – Robin’s Egg Tweed)

I want this bench (to be used as a coffee table) so badly right now. But as soon as I buy it, it would become the #1 Worst Purchase Ever, because me and my caveman husband do 99% of our eating at the coffee table. And drinking, and feet resting. So it would be quite silly to fool myself into thinking we could keep it clean.

Instead I will just leave it in an open tab in my browser, look at it a few times per day, and sigh loudly.

Anything you guys are wishing for right now that you simply cannot have?

When the husband and I were mapping out a rough budgetary sketch for the year, we set aside a figure for fertility treatments. It’s not like we were excited to spend money on such a thing, but we just hoped it would be worth every penny.

And then! Through some combination of good fortune and the Obamacare Fairy (kidding), I was able to switch to new insurance that would cover our entire fertility treatment plan. The whole freaking thing, minus a few copays. It is awesome.

The only problem is that instead of mentally depositing the budgeted funds back into our savings account, I started to think about it as FREE MONEY. And Free Money is extremely dangerous.

Free Money forced me to buy the single most expensive furniture purchase in my life. Meet my four new Tolix chairs.

Free Money also made me buy a new purse, a bunch of new clothes, and way too many birthday gifts for the husband (which I never do because I am usually a grinch). I can’t decide if I should feel guilty, or grateful, or if I should just go ahead and make out with those chairs already.

Let’s take a little break from the fashion talk and move over to some house talk. Back in March of 2010, my awesome parents came to town for a week of house renovations, which included removing the most beat-ass front door ever known to man, and installing a shiny new glass panel front door.

The old door had about 14 layers of paint in various stages of peeling-off, a giant crack down the wood, and a knob that no one has owned a key to for at least a decade, which resulted in more than one awkward incident of getting locked out of my own house, once during a blog-friend party, which resulted in Jennifer and me trying to break into my house though the back door, but getting so scared halfway down the back alley that we ran back out to the street screaming like children.

So it’s an understatement to say that the new front door is a thing of glory. It’s energy efficient and lets in so much light, which my little rowhouse desperately needs since there are only windows in the front and back.

However, along with letting in light, it also let in peering eyeballs from the street. If you’re standing on the stoop, you can see all the way through the house to the back wall. Which means that my neighbors probably spent a lot of time staring at me throwing marvelous dinner parties staring at my television.

After approx. one bazillion hours of researching the best solution for the door, with a goal of maximizing light and privacy and beauty and minimizing cost and bulkiness, we decided to purchase Emma Jeffs window film from her USA retailer, 2jane.com.

Here are some before, during, and after pics of the installation. I’d love to hear what you think!

Here is what the film looks like on the roll. We had to measure and cut to size but it was really easy.

Here is my Handyman Husband, who is not really handy at all, but he is cute!

We decided to leave about 5 inches free at the top and the bottom, in part because I didn’t want to buy the gigantic size that was double the price, and in part because the cat likes to see what’s going on in the outside world. It would probably look more “finished” if we covered the whole thing, but it just made sense to do it this way.

Installation was surprisingly easy. You separate the film from the backing paper, spray everything with a mist of water, apply the film to the glass, and squeegee out the air bubbles. Seriously, that’s it. It should last a very long time, but would be easy for the next owner to remove, with no damage to the window.

The look from outside the door is subtle and frosted. Light and color shine though.

I searched high and low for window films (of all kinds, temporary, permanent, in-between) and these are by far the most modern and lovely ones on the market, especially in the USA. It seems like folks in the UK have more options, perhaps those Brits are on to something with the window film and we still need to catch up in the states? I am happy with the Pearl pattern we chose, but I also really liked the other patterns available.

At one point, we ran into a slight snafu because some moisture got trapped and was causing a cloudy bubble in the middle of the film. You can sort of see it in the photo above. We sent a question about how to fix it off to the Emma Jeffs website, and within 24 hours received personal replies from Emma herself (!) and Roxie, the owner of 2jane. Their advice helped us solve the problem (it just took one little pinprick and a little time) and I was floored by the stellar customer service. Although it wasn’t necessary, they even offered to replace it for free if we couldn’t solve the problem. I dare you to get that from Home Depot!

This was a fun little project, and now I can enjoy the light streaming into my house, as well as enough privacy to wear my pajamas past noon without fear of getting caught.

Disclaimer: We bought the window film ourselves. Nothing was given to me free, except Andrew’s three minutes of manual labor and his modeling skills.

Wow. Thank you all for your comments and emails on my last post. I went offline for the weekend, so I am still going through and writing individual replies, but in the meantime wanted to say thanks. Your comments, support, and personal stories mean a whole lot to me, and I guess I hope that by writing about it we can all feel a little less isolated.

I have been thinking about writing about the big I-word for months now. We’ve been trying for a baby since last summer (2009), so I guess we technically became “infertile” this summer, and I’ve been wrapping my brain around that label, and all the baggage that comes with it, for a few months now. On on hand, it’s true – I guess medically that’s the diagnosis that gets slapped on you if you try for a year without success. But at the same time I want to scream out that nothing is wrong with me, and how dare they call me that?! So perhaps I’m still a bit defensive about it.

I’ve never been a very secretive person – after all, I have a personal blog – and in the last six months if you have spent time with me in person you likely know something about our fertility issues. So while I don’t intend for this to become an infertility blog, I am more open about it than my online secrecy makes it seem, and if you guys want to ask questions in the comments or via email I will do my best to answer them (privately or on the blog).

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In the meantime, let’s just acknowledge that one of the benefits of NOT being pregnant is being able to drink delicious, delicious, wine. This weekend I found myself at a suburban Target with an extensive wine collection and found The Absolute Cutest bottles of wine ever, and just had to share them with you. I haven’t actually tasted any of this wine, so I can only speak about the labels, but seriously, how great are these?

It’s called Middle Sister wine, and each bottle has a different middle sister character – this one is “Drama Queen,” a pinot grigio, and she is wearing a sassy little outfit.

And here we have “Goodie Two-Shoes,” a pinot noir, looking perfect in pink plaid.

You can see all of the Middle Sisters here, and may I suggest buying a bottle for any middle sisters in your life? (I’m an oldest sister so exempt from any teasing of this sort, of course!)