Home: Shiny New Floors!

So the only downside with our new lovely home was the "cat pee" carpet in the back room. We got the smell of Scentsy out of the house and found out that it was masking the smell of the carpet. So a few weeks into our move in, we went from this:

To this:

And then two months of Tom sweat and tears and we have this beautiful-ness:

Home: Long Awaited Gallery Wall

This gallery wall has been a long time coming! I have wanted to make one for years, but sadly have never "owned" any walls. Now that Tom and I have bought our happy little home, I can hang things on all the walls! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! I may add to it or change around, but I've got some fabulous pieces up there now. Want to see? Here it goes:

1. This is a little handmade piece of embroidery I did a few years ago of a little owl.

2. A flamenco lithograph piece I picked up in Madrid when Tom and I were there in 2011.

3. Being a proud Connell, I've got a nice silver C.

4. A painting I made of lyrics to "Inevitable" by Anberlin, which was our wedding song.

5. Early Teacher Rules given to me by a dear friend.

6. A painting of the Sagrada Familia I picked up on the Rambla in Barcelona.

7. A little heart painting I made a few weeks ago.

8. A print of "The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait" by Juan Van Eyke I got after seeing it at The National Gallery in London. I stood in front of it for a full half hour crying at its beauty. Yeah I'm a sad Art History major.

9. A little owl face done by Arty Farty in Canmore. Tom and I picked it up on our first year wedding anniversary.

10. My favourite wedding picture made into a canvas.

11. Tom got me this frame for Christmas last year, and I filled it with our family portraits from our wedding. I love Tom's Mum in red, right in the middle.

12. A metal skeleton key Tom and I bought in Segovia.

13. A painting I did of every Scousers favourite line.

14. An owl photo taken by the talented Jason Leo Bantle from All in the Wild Photography in Canmore.

Here are some progress photos to see how I did it:

So high tech!

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

I've always been a war buff. I think it's because I grew up with a Dad who had volumes on fighter planes in the basement and who let me watch The Great Escape at a young age. WWII is a vein that flows through every countries history. It's a tragic common history. This is a book to add to my list of historic fiction that I've read from that time frame. Usually these books are told from a child's perspective. A la The Book Thief. This one is told from the perspective of a young blind French girl and a young German boy. The book cycles through their two time lines beginning at the time of the invasion of Austria. Marie-Laurie is our voice of innocence. She can't "see" the war but she talks of the emotional aspect of it. Where Werner shows us how a society could get duped into Naziism and how he was trained from a young age. We also see eventually how their lives intersect. I have to say though, one of my favorite things was the way Doerr describes things. Especially how he had Marie-Laurie make sense of the world. Beautifully written. Beautiful escape.