You didn't need that piece of paper did you??

You know what is really satisfying? Shredding paper!

The little confetti is fun.  

First year in my apartment!

I closed on my apartment a year ago (which was also one year after going into contract)

What an adventure it was to move everything myself (from across the street) when my movers never showed up!

I had a lot of time to imagine colors and furniture arrangements

It certainly is a pleasure coming home every day!

The light at sunset is amazing.  What an exciting year it has been

It is like a troop of tone-deaf gnomes are doing bad karaoke in my furnace

When I lived at Smith, our house (Gardiner!) was heated by an old steam system pretty common to older building.  Under the house, in a maze of basements that connected our house to 2 other houses in the Quad, was a huge boiler room.  One year I lived in the first-floor study (sigh... it was my own little library with built-in bookshelves), and when they turned the heaters on, you could hear the clanking of the pipes traveling all the way down the long hallway.  

Naturally, I imagined that there were little men who lived and worked inside the venting system, and those freaky noises were the men hammering and chiseling away on the metal pipes, so that the whole house would be heated.  

Well, here I am in New York City, and my little men are back inside my furnace.  Except instead of clanging, they are all drunk, and singing miserably.  And no one knows the words, so they all just hum.  Loudly.  Except for pauses to get a new pint of beer or something.   And then back to it.  Truly, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

Talk about a multi-purpose kitchen

Believe it or not, this is my refrigerator.  On the right is a series of "humorous" postcards from the CFA institute that are supposed to help keep a light perspective about the amount of time you must commit to studying.

A New York City map (House Number and Transit Guide) of Manhattan circa 1942.

My house is covered in post-it labels.  At the bottom are the days of the week.

For those wondering, we are in the "kitchen" and now I know how to count to 10.

Yummy.

That'll wake you up

I had enough "sprit points" a few years to get a Senseo coffee maker.  It is super easy to use and clean, makes a cup of coffee in about 90 seconds and makes both coffee and expresso.  Plus, perfect for a single gal like me, my Senseo makes individual cups of coffee.

The single drawback is that it requires pods.  Good news is that I found cases online.  I ordered both the medium roast and the dark roast, which works out to 216 cups of coffee for just under $0.26 a cup.  

That is 216 mornings of alertness for less change than lives under my couch cushions.

Books are nice to look at... and read too

One of my apartment fantasies is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a rolling ladder.  Clearly, I would open my door, piroette-into-an-arabesque and leap onto the ladder and then burst into song as I'd glide across the floor.  

But in the meantime, I got a new bookshelf.  I love it.  And books.  And reading books.