Apartment: Before and After Pics! (Part One)

Finally! Here are a few "before and after" pics of my apartment:

Living room, before (ack!) :


Living room, after (and from many different angles, because I love the wallpaper so much...) :


I think the new wallcovering (lovely blue floral print courtesy of grahambrown.com, installation courtesy of my dad -- thanks, dad!) made a huge difference. I'm so pleased with the way it turned out.

More pics of other improvements in the apartment soon, I promise.

Le Weekend

Another weekend is upon us. It looks like I'll have just a little work to catch up on this weekend, which means that I'll be able to cross some things off my "fun" to-do list:

1. Pick up a few new, fresh Apica notebooks at Kinokuniya.

2. Drool over what I hope is an impressive selection of beads at Beads of Paradise.

3. Venture to The Strand for vintage fashion and art books for my new "bookshelf."

4. Watch Confessions of a Shopaholic, my highly anticipated Saturday Netflix delivery.

5. Read last 40 pages of Confessions of a Shopaholic before watching it on DVD.

6. Stock my fridge with yummy treats from Whole Foods.

7. Grab drinks with friends.

8. Post pictures of my new apartment improvements on blog!

I'm Back!

It's been over two weeks since I last posted! No time to dwell on that fact; let's just correct it:

Last week, my parents made a much-anticipated trip to NYC and I spent the whole week with them. It was wonderful. They were kind enough to indulge my DIY obsession, and my apartment has never looked better. Thanks to them, I now have an accent wall in my living room and another in my bedroom (each of these walls has been totally transformed with wallpaper, courtesy of my dad), my wall art is now on the walls instead of in the "project" corner of my apartment, and my favorite wine glasses are suspended from a rack underneath my kitchen cabinets instead of tucked away in the cabinets. I promise to post pictures soon.

In other news, while this blog remains, for the most part, a politics-free zone, I just finished watching President Obama's press conference on health care reform. At some point over the past few days, it dawned on me that the health care debate is one that I should pay attention to -- I finally decided to do a little digging after hearing the term "single-payer health care" for the umpteenth time and being frustrated -- for the umpteenth time -- that I didn't really know what it meant. Now, I am more informed, but also confused. There's no question that as-is, the American health care system is underperforming. And that's unacceptable. I'm anxious to see how the debate plays out.