I shopped around for a new internet home for quite a while.

I packed my bags.

I painted the walls.

Finally, it’s time to make the move to the new place.

All of the archives are there, although I can’t guarantee there aren’t broken links.

This blog will be here for a while, to give people time to find their way over. Then it will start to redirect, and eventually maybe it will even go away altogether.

I hope you’ll join me at the new blog. It fits me so much better now than this one does. This isn’t goodbye. It’s a new beginning.

Photo Credit: trickhips

I’m over here on my photo blog talking about snow holes and frozen feet. You had to be there.

Because I’m slightly tipsy and have some catching up to do – bullets!

Photos: I’ve been putting stuff up on my photo blog again lately. I’m having so much fun with my camera, and I’m really learning a lot. This is one of my favorites lately. But then I really like this one too. This one reminds me of Tonka toys. And this one was just plain fun. I have big plans to do more with my photos, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I’ll still be posting them here and there. And everywhere.

It’s a Girl Thing: If you follow me on Twitter you know I’ve been working on building a Girl Cave. It’s done and it’s AWESOME. What is a girl cave? Well mainly it’s a space all my own for the first time in a really long time. Something as awesome as a Girl Cave deserves it’s own post, so I’ll just give you a sneak peak:

Chair of Awesome

Is that not THE most rad girly chair ever? I love that chair.

Grandson: Most everyone knows by now that I have a grandson. If you didn’t, hey guess what? I have a grandson! He is…well, he’s the kind of awesome that is beyond words, which is why I haven’t written about his arrival. I find that I’m still not ready to write about it, and I don’t really know why, but it probably has to do with the same reasons I didn’t tell very many people about it beforehand. It’s personal. It’s private. It seems like something I want to keep very close to my heart for right now. I know there were hurt feelings because I didn’t share with, well, hardly anyone, and I’m sorry for that. The hurt feelings part, I mean, because that’s never my intent. The not sharing part was my choice, though. Sometime soon I’ll be ready to share and everyone will be all shut up already!

TeeVee: We canceled cable over six months ago in a fit of “this shit is too expensive” and honestly, I don’t miss it all that much. I can get my fix on Netflix and Hulu. My husband, however, does miss it. He gave it a good six months, but he’s over it. Since we live in the back of beyond, not to mention in a bowl surrounded by mountains, we don’t get much in the way of “antenna” service on the digital tuner. We took advantage of Memorial Day sales last weekend and bought the World’s Comfiest Couch, so it kind of seems like a moral obligation to have cable TV at that point. After DirecTV made me insane with their bait and switch, stick me on permahold and tell me to “trust them” bullshit I decided to go with Dish Network because it worked ok for us before. Monday morning between 8:00 and noon I will be back among the monthly cable bill paying peoples of the world, still with mixed feelings about the whole thing.

Have a great weekend everyone! Mine is going to include a LOT of margaritas, a metric fuckton of homemade (for the first time in my house) hummus, and artichokes as big as my head. Oh and there will be baby head sniffing. Oh yes, there will.

I have a new best friend. He doesn’t have a name yet, but he’s definitely awesome. I took him out for a test drive and these are a few of my favorite shots so far.

I’m looking forward to a long and beautiful friendship!

It’s not really a fair “before” picture because the cabinet doors and the fridge had already been removed, which makes it look even worse, but I think it would win an Ugliest Kitchen contest hands down. Notice the different linoleum in the laundry? Klassy. The one thing this kitchen had going for it was that it was bright despite being painted in early American dingy. You can’t really tell, but those countertops are gen-u-ine faux wood grain Formica, circa 1973.

What you can’t see are the ceiling and floor patches in the laundry room. When we moved in we replaced the furnace and water heater that lived in there with new models, both of which now live in the attic freeing up a lot of space. The furnace left huge holes in the floor and ceiling, which we just patched temporarily because we knew we’d be remodeling the kitchen. We just didn’t plan on it taking six years.

There’s always something better to do than tear your kitchen apart until suddenly you can’t look at it one more day and next thing you know you find yourself looking at this:

What started off as a quick facelift (paint the cabinets and walls, new countertop and linoleum) turned into a full remodel with new cabinets, countertops, and sink, a dishwasher that the house never had before, and a beautiful tile floor. The difference is amazing. I keep walking in just to look at it.

It took me forever to find cabinet knobs I liked but I finally did, I just have to order them. All 28 of them!

It’s the world’s smallest kitchen, but having these extra cabinets and countertop really makes it feel bigger.

I can’t even begin to tell you how happy this kitchen makeover has made me. It’s still a pretty small kitchen, but I don’t need a big kitchen. I can get some big things done in a pretty small space. But having a beautiful kitchen that I enjoy spending time in? That has made all the difference.

Best. Birthday Gift. Ever.

And someday? The statute of limitations on stories that can get you divorced will run out and I’ll tell you how we almost died because that is some funny shit.

Four badass chicks from the Moulin Rouge…Or Savannah. Whatever.*

It’s not often in a lifetime that you meet people that just get you. It’s even rarer that you meet three of them. Even better? The four of you have the kind of ease together that you can be in a car for five hours straight without anyone thinking about turning on the radio. Twice.

I couldn’t have asked for a better gift than to spend my birthday with these three women, and even though it was firmly established that none of us would be going gay for each other there’s a kind of bond that you only find with your girlfriends. There is no better way to recharge your batteries than to laugh for days. I love you girls, more than my luggage.

I also got the chance to spend time with one of the smartest women I know and the biggest teddy bear on the Internet. I am truly blessed.

These are a few of my favorite photos from the trip. The whole set is here.

*Photo courtesy Britt Reints.

Definition of POGONIP: a dense winter fog containing frozen particles that is formed in deep mountain valleys of the western United States

Somehow “what do you think about painting the cabinets and walls and maybe putting down some new linoleum?” has turned into this.

It was just going to be a quick, cheap facelift. Emphasis on cheap.

Because really, who has money to spend on a kitchen renovation? Definitely not me.

It turns out that you can look at the world’s ugliest kitchen for six years and tell yourself “as soon as we get such and such paid off we’ll do the kitchen” until suddenly you can’t anymore and you’re willing to light up your Discover card to make it go away.

True story.

This has been quite a week! Mostly it’s work stuff that has gone crazy, but what would my life be without a little crazy? I am in that zone where I have so much to do that I’m spinning around in circles unable to land on one thing to work on so I can get it off my list.

Workout: This week I managed not to jack my back, or anything else, and except for one small food timing miscalculation (aka don’t eat within a BIG time window or you will BARF) I made it through an entire week of P90X.

How do I feel? Old. Very, very old. My knees are pissed, every muscle in my body has been pissed at some point, and I am tired at a cellular level. But I also feel pretty good about myself that I can actually do most of the moves. The yoga, surprisingly, is where I feel the least able to keep up. There are too many moves that, at this point, I can’t do. Some of it is because my knee just doesn’t work the way it used to, sometimes my bulk gets in the way because as much as I’ve lost my weight still starts with a 2, but mostly I’m just the world’s least flexible human. I’m getting better, and there are some things I can do better than I could before, but if you’ve been reading here very long at all you know that better is not good enough and I will not be happy until I master that which defeats me right now.

The week hasn’t been without comedy, of course. This is me we are talking about. Take, for example, the time my husband was trying to teach me to do “real” push-ups. I can only do “girly” push-ups on my knees right now, which of course frustrates me (see above with the yoga), so he was trying to explain how to get the full range of motion. See, I have this fear of landing on my face. Like I will go down to a certain point, lose my hold, and smash my face on the floor thus flushing years of painful orthodontia, which really isn’t my idea of a good time.

So he gets down on the floor in plank position, with his shirt off of course so I can be impressed by his musclitude, and tells me that what I need to do is “charge my lats.”

Him: See if you squeeze your sides and charge your lats, you are using your lats to control the motion. You try it.

So I get on the floor in plank position.

Me: How do I flex my lats?

Him: Squeeze your sides. At your ribcage.

Me: How the hell do you squeeze your ribcage??

Him: Just put your mind there and squeeze.

Me: (flexing with all my might, which really means squeezing my eyes shut and trying not to fart) Maybe girls don’t have lats.

Him: *falls on the floor laughing*

I will do those bastard push-ups if it kills me.

Downsizing: For the first time ever I actually sold something on Craigslist. Since I’m not using it anymore, and I now have a gym membership, I couldn’t justify keeping my elliptical so I listed it on Craigslist and it sold. It took a while, but I actually got what I wanted for it and I’m really happy with the whole thing. My husband is also happy because he has a big chunk of space back in his shop.

There are a lot more items in my house that I should part with, some of which seem pointless to sell. Like my cookbooks. I have a crapload of cookbooks that I don’t use because I got a little crazy about collecting them at one point (I can read a cookbook cover to cover like a novel because I’m weird like that), but I think selling them would be more trouble than it’s worth. If I listed them on here (for free) is there anyone who would be interested in them? I’d like to see them go to people who will use them, and I’ll pay to ship them, I just want to pare down my collection to books I actually use. I have a bunch of cake-specific books too that could go to new homes.

Moving: I have chosen a new domain and will be slowly building a new space and moving this blog. I will let you all know when it happens. It’s just time to move away from the floatingprincess name. It hasn’t fit me for a long time, and I’ve been anxious to try something new. I’ve already changed my Twitter name to ellemmes, so if you were wondering were the p*rncess went that’s what happened. It’s time.

I think it’s time for me to head outside. It’s a beautiful day and we’re supposed to have snow next week (what the what?) so I’m going to soak up the sun while I can and go for a run. Have a great week everyone!

I almost wrote a whiny post  about how my back went out while I was running on the treadmill, but wouldn’t you rather look at this pretty daisy instead? I took Ren’s suggestion and resized it for the internet before uploading it and it worked! The colors stayed true to the original photo. This makes me happy in my ice-pack frozen pants.

This second photo I uploaded the way I normally do – I uploaded the full-sized shot and then resized it within WordPress. The vibrancy of the colors appears reduced. I like the first photo better. Thank you for the suggestion, Ren!