Can't You Smell That Smell?

Welcome to our renamed blog! We had been talking about renaming it for a while, but the other day we finally got the proper impetus:

I was making dinner and Randy was washing veggies for me to chop. He grabbed something to toss it in the trashcan, and his wedding ring slipped right off his cold, wet finger and into the trash. Oops. After a few minutes of carefully transferring trash from one bag to the other, he triumphantly held up his ring.

"Ah," I said. "It's the stench of discovery!"

It is, natürlich, a Spongebob reference. There's an episode where he loses his Krusty Krab nametag, and he and Patrick have to dig through a dumpster to find it again. Just before they dive in, Spongebob says, "What is that stench?" And Patrick tells him: the stench of discovery. Of course, it turns out to be the stench of discovering that you've just been wearing your shirt backward and your nametag has been there all along, but still.

In other news, it has been coooooold here. The last few days have been in the 20s, and have actually felt quite pleasantly warm. We've also been getting - well, not a lot of snow, but a little bit of snow repeatedly. Just enough to have to repeatedly shovel the driveway, except for yesterday when we got maybe three inches, but the wind was blowing so hard that we ended up with drifts of six to eight inches that we had to shovel away. I think this is probably a much more typical Chicago winter than last year's - it is definitely colder.

We're also taking a ballroom dancing class. So far we've learned to foxtrot and most of the steps for swing - waltzing and the tango are ahead of us still. Even though I was looking forward to the class, I was nervous about how well it was going to go, since I have a notable lack of coordination. I walk into walls, door frames, and furniture; I trip over my own feet and also the air. But I think it's actually gone quite well - we're maybe not the best dancers in the class, but we are far from the worst. The class has been a lot of fun so far.

And, in house news, we finally figured out how to arrange our living room furniture. The people who lived here before obviously didn't use their living room much, and obviously didn't have any idea of how to best arrange the furniture. It is a little tricky because we have one room for our living room and dining room without any obvious demarcation between the two, and while it's certainly not a small room, it's not huge either. So I had been kind of half-heartedly pushing the sofa and loveseat around without ever being inspired by the way it looked.

But I came home from work last Saturday, and Randy had found the perfect arrangement. Somehow it just works now - we never hung out in the living room before, and I kept thinking it was because we still don't have any accessories (we're looking! it just takes time), but now we do hang out there. All he did was rotate everything 90 degrees to the left of where it was in the living room picture here, but now it feels like a place you want to be. Clearly Randy is some kind of heretofore unrecognized interior decorating genius, because I tried every single other configuration - parallel, diagonal, angled toward each other, angled away, whatever. Anyway, it's nice!