This is the kind of messed up stuff my husband is doing in his overly copious amounts of spare time.

Necessity and Mothers and Invention and All That

So, I did have a wee breakdown yesterday.  I don't know if it's hormones or just that I've been working a lot or it's the underlying stress of having a major shift in our lives, but I did cry loudly and snottily for about an hour and then felt tons better.

Now I'm back to having a good attitude about the whole thing, but you wouldn't have wanted to see the swirl of dark thoughts that were going round and round in my head for a while there.  Thankfully, none of them were real.

Anyway, one of the very cool byproducts of being on a much stricter budget is that it encourages us to be creative when we need stuff rather than just going out and buying something new (which I was always pretty quick to do, since I was pretty sure I loved shopping).  What's funny is that I like making stuff a lot more.  

Remember when I used to make stuff?  And how much I liked it?  I had kind of gotten out of the habit, and had forgotten how much I liked it.

Anyway, it's getting cold again now and we needed a little sweater for Sargeant P., but of course didn't want to go buy one.  So...TADA!

Awww, yeah, I made him a HOODIE, yo!  Eric gave me a pair of crappy old pair of sweat pants and I chopped them up and after some seriously hilarious attempts at fitting him I think I got it right.  He looks like Chihuahua Rocky.  It's a little off kilter in this photo.  It covers him up a litle more in real life.  

We also needed a humidifier in our room because there's always this point in Colorado autumns where every last bit of moisture is sucked out of the air faster than a keg gets drained at a fraternity party and it pretty much stays like that until June rolls around again.  Which means you basically wake up with a sore throat every morning and feel a sudden and strange desire to roll around in a vat of Crisco just to ease the taut spread of your skin across the bones.

Anyway, humidifiers can be forty bucks, and that's for the crappy ones, and we had that fountain outside that was just going to get snowed on, so I cleaned it out, pulled it inside, and smacked a Buddha in the middle, and voila!  

No more sore throat in the morning.  It's not putting out mist but just having the bowl in the room seems to help.  Plus, it's pretty, and the gurgle blocks out the sound of E.'s egregious snoring.  Bonus.

Finally, sometimes you just find great shit by the side of the road.  Like this solid wood Crate and Barrel vanity that somehow had stuck out in the trash.  It was covered in drywall dust, but I could see the love in it, so I singlehandedly dragged that heavy fucker into the back of the minivan (thank you, Crossfit), brought it home, cleaned it up, and check it out:

Nice, right?  The top's a little messed up, but everything else looks great.  And then we could move the old chest that was there before up to our room so that E. could have a larger bedside table, which he had been wanting.

Of course, there are things that can't be found or made so easily.  Nolie accidentally broke E's classic guitar last night.  No money can fix that, unfortunately.  I had to turn down some friends' invitations to go out this week, and that smarted a little.  There are some fun winter things we like to do, like skiing, or going to holiday plays, that we probably can't do this year.  That stinks.

Still, that's just stuff, and figuring out creative things to do and make instead feels exciting and interesting.

My Kid is Weird.