Good God, who put all these boxes in my living room??

Hey y'all. So I'm having a super crappy couple of days here, for no particular reason other than the non-stop torrential rains, cold, muddy dogs, and my nasty stinging dripping allergies. Nothing to get too bent out of shape about, just enough to turn me into a real crab. I decided this morning that I've barely been shooting anything at all for the past couple of weeks and that this must be part of my problem. Shooting always make me happy. Editing the photos makes me happy and then doing a little bit of post production on them makes me even happier.

I didn't even know where the danged camera was, which tells you how bad things are! Thought I'd show you all some of the wreckage that I'm sorting through in the living room. Way back in January, we packed up all those boxes. I think I even posted some photos of that -- hold on, yes here. There were at least a dozen of them and they took their good old time going through customs, rode on a container ship across the Pacific Ocean, then somehow made their way across the US to Ohio. It took a while, and I really had no idea how long it would be or I wouldn't have packed my kids' winter coats and some other essentials that I was very happy to see.

No, I'm not even kidding about being so happy to see these lids. I need them all the time and they were on that ship! The orange one has been with us since before I was even part of us. It's the last remaining piece of an orange enamel cookware set (I believe from Sears) that Dennis's mom gave him when he moved into his first apartment in college. That lid just seems to fit everything and so I've held on to it all these years. I wonder where the rest of that set got to.

Amongst the necessary items were tucked some strange little keepsakes, such as a few New Zealand beer bottle caps to stick in the drawer where I keep the cooking utensils and into which my husband likes to flip his bottle caps when he opens a beer. I don't know why he does this, but I figured that as long as that drawer has a bunch of bottle caps, it should have some from Monteith's, McKenna Whiskey & Cola, and Steinlager to liven things up a bit. (A small aside here: for a few months back in 2002 our awesome friends from England, the Carleys, stayed in our house and Pat was so bored without her usual work and gardening, etc. that she cleaned out my kitchen drawers and put all the bottle caps in a Ziplock bag, as if to say, "I'm not sure what this is all about, but if they were in the drawer, I'm afraid to throw them out, so here you go.")

At this point, I have most everything sorted and put away, but what remained was the six months worth of paperwork that needed to be filed or shredded or recycled. Shoot me now!!!! The kids' school stuff and farewell cards were fun to see again.

And I was especially happy to see this bottle from my birthday dinner at Dine in downtown Auckland our very last week there. I didn't know what an antipode was until we moved to New Zealand and Dennis brought it up one night. Then we continued to hear this term while we were there, so I have some meaningful associations with the word. I asked our server if I could keep the bottle and of course he couldn't have cared less. Makes me smile to see it here again, unbroken.

Well...there, there. I guess my little exercise is working. I do feel better. Yay me.

Hope you all are feeling considerably less cranky than I have been. Somebody send me some sunshine!

xoxo, K.