Our home

I was torn about posting this--we now have three bedrooms for two people and I know that Musing is struggling with two bedrooms for three people. I spent much of junior high and part of senior high sharing one room in someone else's house with my mother. It's so dreadful to be a teenager with no privacy at all.



So we have worked hard to have this luxury of space. I was also going to just post them at Photobucket (I haven't bothered to join Flikr) but I forgot my password and it became complicated. But I did promise pictures when we were more settled--and we have decorated some. It was something I promised myself I would do before our party two weeks ago and having the deadline forced us to unpack, clean and decorate. Our belongings tell who we are and what is important to us--and they need captions, so here we go:

We're on the second floor, so you walk in facing the stairs and see The Adams Family greeting you, with our gargoyle. We actually want to have a third Gothic picture there, but found that with the way we had hung them we couldn't reach to hang a third--we also couldn't agree on the third for now (the blanket helps cut the draft). John Muth's image (based on an old Garbo poster) for an illustrated Dracula and an Amano illustration for Sandman. You have to remember that my husband worked for a couple of years IN a comic store, so many of these things were promotions. We have a copy of the Amano which we are planning to put up on eBay.

Turn left at the top of the stair (so behind me as I'm taking the picture above) and you go into a little room with the coat closet, the door to the little deck and what we have designated as the "general" fiction bookshelf. As you can see, we desperately need a second bookshelf. The chair is an office chair that someone was throwing away. As to general fiction, we run into difficulties--do Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake belong here with P.D. James' Children of Men as both women write more "mainstream" fiction generally, or do they belong with the fantastic fiction... Do I put The Bell Jar and In Cold Blood here or in non-fiction. This is why I never became a librarian.





Turn to the right and you enter the hall to the kitchen. The poster is of St. Paul's Cathedral. The pictures are from our trip to Britain. The photo albums are here too. You can just see the tops of posters that we didn't manage to agree on where to hang. The big blank wall you facing the table is reserved for all of the rest of the comic book art my husband has collected, some signed.

Go straight ahead at the top of the stair and you enter the main room. I hope to get curtains on the windows, and stain the stereo stand in the spring. Art books are on the big bookshelf--coffee table books. Dog toys on the floor.

The Moderns poster I've had since I was in high school--Keith Carradine painted the picture, and our children's books...Eloise and Moomin toys. This seemed a good place for folk lore and legends too--Gilgamesh, Bayowolf, etc. There are also 'comic' strip books (as opposed to comics)--Peanuts, Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, What's Michael (although it's technically Manga).

From the main room to what other people would use as a dining room. One thing I really wanted to do here was put the 'toys' out like a museum as opposed to in front of books--Invader Zim, The Muppets, Nightmare Before Christmas, Sandman, Pinky and the Brain/Warner Bros., Simpsons/Futurama.

Some books--graphic novels (you can see the Batman and Green Lantern toys), the best of Fantastic Contemporary Fiction (it's not finished).

The desk with reference, history and other non-fiction.

Up the stairs--biography and my books on poetry, writing and theater--also need another bookshelf here. Our bedroom is to the left of the frame, my studio is to the right of the bookshelves and the white door you can see leads to the attic.

Bathroom--this is why we have this apt. A really big bathroom. I want to get a curtain on that window too, and hang the cabinet.

And the claw foot tub. I frantically made the curtains the night before the party from old sheets that a friend donated to me for a show. They're not quite even at the bottom...

One of our friends said it was a bathroom we could shoot porn in!

You'll notice there are no pictures of the bedrooms--the master bedroom is not decorated, and the other two are still in chaos--there's even more books in both esp. in my husbands--Japanese books, both novels, history and Manga, horror and golden age sci-fi., plus his drawing table. We also didn't manage to hang pictures in the kitchen.

Well, that's it--there's a piece of me that realizes in much of the world, 4 families would be living in the same amount of space and I'm sad and guilty, but there's part of me that feels like I'm home and I need this--is that selfish?

Hope you've enjoyed the tour. I also don't think that there's anything worth stealing in the pictures except the stereo equipment and computer. Hopefully there's no important info. really small in the corner of something. Happy Daylight Savings.