Break, with reality

plus pot-lit Miss Marple

There is a ritual for discussing winter break. You have to say that it was relaxing, even though everyone knows that it is, if you have little kids and a computer job, more strenuous than work. You also need to address whether you went anywhere, especially if you and your spouse are known to come from elsewhere. Well there was no trip, not to New York or Belgium, barely out of the neighborhood. I’m not entirely sure what we did, beyond unpack and tidy and laundry and meals and snacks and oh right there was the expedition to get a new dishwasher because the one the house came with was pouring water out the front, onto the floor, every cycle, which it has of course since stopped doing almost immediately after we ordered the new one. A mysteriously self-healing dishwasher. But the plan had been to replace it soonish regardless for other less dire non-functionality reasons (most notably, leaky or not, it does not get dishes clean).

Basically we spent a vacation-level amount of money but on a dishwasher, rug, side table, and coffee table. Maybe that seems nuts—‘experiences are better than things’—but if you are experiences are better than things-ing this, I sure hope you do not have these items in your own home, because they have to come from somewhere. Also, this side table is better than most experiences.

I had been visiting this side table on the used furniture store’s website for MANY months and then we brought it home on the bus.

Home improvements were like 2% of what was going on, though, time-wise. The rest was the continuous-with-kids-home thing that I know was done during the pandemic and that I know homeschool attachment parenting Substack is into but this does not seem to be the way for my household. Or maybe it would have been easy-breezy if it were not arctic here, such that the usual things you do with kids on break, namely parks, playgrounds, walks through the neighborhood, are inaccessible due to how cold it is or, as we learned the day we tried sledding, hailstorms. Library and movies, yes. Everything else, and anything active, not so much. My kids found a loop to run at home and that worked for them except when colliding with furniture or walls. My treadmill has not yet arrived nor was there downtime for something so luxurious as gym so I’m Summer of George here.

In my moments between fetching things from the kitchen, I read Kierkegaard (stared vacantly at my phone). Instagram is now my source for ‘what other houses look like’ because you can stare at those indefinitely, unlike if you’re in someone else’s house, where it’s considered rude. This led me to a House and Garden UK article about interior decor don’ts, and a big one is “recessed lighting.” I had to look this up to see if they mean pot lights and they do and guess what, I share this opinion, but whoever last renovated this house (it is not Edwardian original, but not ‘renovated’) must have been in love with a pot-light manufacturer or something, I don’t know, but there are pot lights EVERYWHERE. They’re all over an otherwise historic-looking living room ceiling. They are the only light fixtures in the bedroom and dining room. But like, what are you meant to do about this, short of gut renovating your house? Can’t you just have these eyesores in your ceilings but mostly use other lamps? (She says, theoretically. We do not have these other lamps.) If a British decor critic swings by and sniffs at my pot-lit Miss Marple set, so be it.

Oh, and? It’s apparently a design faux pas to have overhead lights at all. The only way to be chic about lighting is the sorts of lamps my kids would knock over within seconds of our owning them. Porcelain vase table lamps. Floor lamps incompatible with using the perimeter of your home as a running track.

The lamp that I saw and thought, not bad, then noticed cost about the same as the rest of our furniture, old and new, combined. But I am on the long-view hunt for a gold base and a bright pink lampshade to emulate the general idea.