I miss my husband

There. I said it. I miss my husband. No, he's not away on some weeks-long business trip or stuck in Manhattan due to any apocalypse-esque hurricane. Nope, he's only about 20 miles away and for some reason that 20 miles feels like 200.

I guess I should preface this with the good news: J got a new job! Mostly thanks to me, since I'm the one that forwarded him the listing online when I saw it (and was slightly obsessed with him moving up the ladder to a higher paying, more prestigious position). Okay, I suppose it also helped that he went to an ivy league school and gained great experience at the law firm he was currently with, but I like to think that my emailing him the posting kicked off all this good news (however delusional that may be). After an initial call to come interview and another month or so of interviews later, J was offered the job, which he promptly accepted. Score!

In a nutshell this job is everything we wished for while he was in law school. Tony street address in one of the best buildings in the city's financial district. Marble lobby with gilded sculptures leering down at all who enter. An office on one of the top floors. A view of Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid from J's window. Big clients and complex legal work. More money than I ever dreamed of having at age 30. After years of uncertainty thanks to the effects of a terrible economy on the legal profession, we -- or I should say he -- had finally joined the big leagues.

For those who've followed my blog over the last few years, you'd think this is all I ever wanted. Frankly, it was. But as is the case with my rose-colored lenses, I tend to only look at "how cool" a situation can be without measuring the negatives as well. Stuck in the path of a historical hurricane? Color me jealous. Lost in the wilderness for three days? At least you lived to tell about it. You were there when Lincoln was shot? Not only would I envy you, I'd also quietly sign up for more theater ticket reminders just in case.

So of course when J got the formal job offer, I was beyond thrilled. We celebrated with cigars and a bottle of Blue Label and stayed up all night talking about how different our lives were going to be now that he had this job. What I didn't consider was that every positive difference also comes with a negative one. I was blind to the the yin and yang until he started work last Monday.

It's only been over a week and I already feel like he's had this job for ages. How could I have thought this was all I ever wanted? Stupid, stupid me. I'm lucky now if he gets home before 8pm, and even when he does it doesn't matter because he's so exhausted from waking up early that all he wants to do is eat dinner and go to bed. He loves his new job so much that he often loses track of time in the office and only notices it's late when I call him and remind him that the sun is coming up in a couple hours (okay, it hasn't gotten to that point yet, but you get the point).

Only having dinner together once in the last seven business days is not all I ever wanted. Watching Anderson Cooper 360 every evening with Ava as my conversational companion is not quite the tradeoff I'd envisioned once J had a Big Law job. Handing Ava over to J when he gets home so I can do some things for myself like, oh I don't know, take a shower, tends to quell any quality time we can spend together throughout the week. I just want my husband back, but I guess this is the tradeoff. If I really want the lifestyle I've always dreamed of, then I've got to give something up...no matter how much it sucks.

So what's more worth it: time or money? I miss our time together but I can't complain about the money, so I don't argue about his long work hours because I know he's simply providing for his family. How else will we be able to do all the things we want to do, like eventually buy a bigger home, travel the world, make real estate investments, (hopefully) retire early, etc. etc.? Does that mean my silence has been bought? Slightly disturbing when thought about this way.

Of course J knows how I feel, but at the same time we're both realistic and know that it's better to work harder younger and enjoy money later than it is to work harder older and not have the time (or mobility) to enjoy it in your geriatric years. Over waffles on Sunday, I told J that I completely understand why he has to work so hard right now. I really do. I am, after all, the person who sparked all this off by emailing him that job posting. I wanted it so bad I could taste it. And as much as I miss him, I'm inspired by his work ethic and commitment to his craft. But at the same time I know myself and I know I can't do this forever. Thankfully he understood, and visions of me in my 70s waiting for him to retire while I lounge lakeside and alone on the banks of Como quickly dissipated.

For now I'll just have to take it day to day and hope it gets easier. At least he changed jobs at a time when caring for Ava on my own isn't as harrowing as it initially was (the thought of him making this transition when we first had her would have been mortifying, to say the least). And because he's in the city now, it gives me more of an excuse to head in and have lunch or dinner with him when I can.

But still, even after five years of marriage, I have this sense of urgency with him and our relationship. It's that butterflies-in-your-tummy, I-can't-get-enough-of-you urgency that makes you do crazy things when you're dating a boy you love, like stay up late talking all night on the phone, make out like teenagers in the rain, or drive for hours just to see him for a quick visit. It's a drug, that urgency, and for some reason I still feel it with J, which makes him working like this all the more harder for me to stomach. But paper covers rock and dollars cover wife, so again I shouldn't complain.

Regardless, I still (and always will) miss him.

Antiquing a French Provincial table on a budget

I've been on a Francophile kick lately for the baby girl's nursery theme: French Garden.

Over the past few months I've collected things here and there to try and make this nursery as calm and dreamlike as possible, but furniture was the one area that proved frustrating. I'd love more than anything to waltz into Pottery Barn and scoop up anything I want from their nursery collection, but money is a little tight with all our home remodels, and spending a grand here and there on nursery art and furniture just doesn't seem like the responsible thing to do. Luckily my parents bought us a beautiful new baby crib as a gift, so that was taken care of but I still needed a sidetable and a rocking chair.

After exhausting all searches on the Internet, I hit up my local consignment store looking for any type of table that I could modify. My only requirement? That it have French Provincial legs. Surprisingly these types of tables are more obscure than I thought, but just as I was about to leave the store empty-handed, I noticed this little hutch on provincial legs hiding under a rolled up rug:

(Ignore that goopy stuff on it. This was taken after we brought the thing home and slathered on some stripper compound to get rid of that awful Grandma patina walnut stain.) Grandma-furniture coloring aside, I saw major potential in this piece, especially with the adorable beveled detailing on the drawer and the steel mesh grids on the doors.

Since I'm conveniently pregnant at the moment, I had J work with all chemicals to antique this thing back to life so it would fit in a little girl's nursery. Like the diligent husband he is, J got to work stripping off the icky veneer. . .

This part took about two hours in 90-degree temps. Ugh.

Stripped and ready for painting. Much better already!

After perusing various design blogs, I decided to have J spray my little table with Rustoleum's "Heirloom White" paint in satin. I'm absolutely obsessed with this color -- it's a slight off-white with no yellow undertones like other off-whites. Two cans of spray paint and a sanding around all beveling and curves later, the final product was magnifique!:

Nice legs.

Love these curves.

The perfect nursery addition.

Materials Breakdown:

French table: $65
Stripper: $5
Mineral Spirits (to clean stripper off): $10
Two cans of spray paint: $8
Sandpaper: $4

Total Cost: $92

At just under a hundred dollars, I would say this project was a success! Especially considering that it was a solid wood piece and a hundred bucks barely gets you a heap of particle board at Target. We're currently at work antiquing a vintage rocker I found at another consignment store -- pics coming soon.

Hello again

Confession: After months (well, years) of being gone from Brunette on a Budget, I've decided that this site is exactly where I belong in my off-time. Now that I'm finished with The Worst Job in the World (officially quit February 2011), I dabbled off and on in my other anonymous blog and it never felt quite right. Partially because I've never liked doing anything anonymously, especially writing. Why should I feel bad about telling it like it is? Why do I need to hide how I really feel? I don't, and it's only taken me about 16 months to figure that out. I'm sorry, sometimes certain people or certain situations just suck. That's reality, no matter how much it hurts to read. Now I'm back, to the inevitable chagrin of some and the (hopefully) happiness of others (hey, if you don't like reading here, you're more than welcome to move on).

SO, with out of the way, the last year or so of my life has been packed with changes. Like the kind of drama in Jennifer Aniston movies where years of changes have been condensed nicely down into two-hour bits. For starters:

We bought a house!:

The house around Christmastime (still hadn't unpacked yet).

The house was a steal, mostly because it needed major remodeling to be "cute," but we spent all November remodeling. And by remodeling, I don't just mean throwing up a coat of paint on the walls, though we did that as well. I'm talking on-our-hands-and-knees-scraping-old-tile-adhesive-off-the-concrete-bathroom-floor-for-six-hours (okay, that was more J than me), ripping out all the older Pergo flooring throughout the house, laying down new, dark hardwood flooring, completely gutting the bathroom and rebuilding the shower, painting the dirty fireplace white, etc. etc. After our remodel, we refinanced the place and it appraised for $50,000 more than we paid for it. Apparently, all that work in November paid off. Now our mortgage on our 3-bedroom home is much less than rent on a 1-bedroom apartment. J calls it one of the best investments of our lives so far; I have to agree.

Now that most of the interior remodeling is done, we're going to start fixing up the outside when it gets warmer. On the docket: Painting the house dark gray with white trim and a dark red front door, and landscaping everything.

We got a second car!:


A few days ago we picked up this beaut, since we really only have one reliable car between the two of us (J's been driving his old '67 Volvo to work, and it hasn't been too happy about that.) Now we both have reliable cars. Movin' on up.

We adopted a new dog!:


This is Gidget, a six-year-old Chihuahua we found at the pound. She's a quiet, shy little four-pound thing that barely ever makes a sound. Since it seems she's cold all the time, I had to buy her this bathrobe to pad around the house in.

Last but not least: We're having a baby!


World: say hello to Peanut (above). We don't know Peanut's sex yet, but I think we find out in March and we're both very, very excited. Well, I'm sure Peanut is excited about this revelation as well, whenever it happens. I still can't believe I'm going to be a mother (Jesus Christ, just the word makes me feel old), but I'm looking forward to the whole thing as I'm sure it will provide reams of good blog fodder, starting with the odd encounter I had recently with my doctor. But that story's for another time.

Those are the big things in my life as of late. I'm sure there were many other things but probably not as important. Ah, it feels good to be back. :)