"Music, Candlelight, Chocolate and Chillax"

Facetiming with a few of the kids tonight, the topic of doom-scrolling and setting boundaries for screen time for both ourselves and their own children. "Remember when people used to just randomly call on the phone and you'd have a conversation about whatever?" Wyatt asked, and then said he was taking a social media break. I really should do that too. I asked the them if they remember me reading books endlessly. The older ones for sure do. I had a difficult time pacing myself on reading. The idea of reading at bedtime to help induce sleepiness is lost on me. "Just one more page.....okay I'm really going to close this book after this one last chapter..." and so on until I'd look at my night-stand clock and to my horror realize it was as late (or early) as 3 AM.

Elisabeth has mentioned several times that I should use A.I. to help me figure out my different decorating or landscaping quandaries. I often get so bogged down in browsing content creators beautiful work that it causes overwhelm. The talent, and often much larger budgets of these people are much more than I; so then I switch to watching cat and bird reels until I finally realize I'd probably be better off just cracking open a novel.

Last night, as I lay in bed, I thought I'd go ahead and see what A.I. could do with the other side of our loft. It has been neglected ever since our furnace caught fire last year causing us to remove all the flooring and much of the drywall. We lived in a hotel for a month all while starting a new business and adding an addition onto our tiny cabin. A second bathroom at that point sounding like a luxury we didn't need to be spending time or resources on. At least we had installed a little toilet room the year before, and that, in an of itself, was enough to make me feel like royalty. Not having to venture down the rather steep (and now carpet-less or as our little grandie Sienna Jill says, "Grandma! your stairs have no fur!") stairs to use the downstairs potty was fabulous. It's the little things in life. Oh yes, the Toto bidet with the heated seat and water is, shall we say, life changing.

As with any project(s), we made mistakes along the way, the biggest being that we worked on both upstairs and downstairs bathrooms at the same time. The day our plumber shut the water off to both bathrooms and told us "I have another project I have to see to, but I'll be back soon.", translated into nearly a month of us being very diligent gym attendees, mostly so we could shower. Thoughts of soaking in a beautiful clawfoot tub, surrounded by candle-light and soft music kept running through my head while I tried to keep the gym shower curtain from blowing open, while I tried to rinse the shampoo from my hair as quickly as possible. "We're having an adventure!", I'd smile at Dave as we'd drive home.

One Saturday morning, over breakfast I told Dave, "I wonder if there are ever any cast iron clawfoot tubs in Facebook marketplace?" Setting down my fork, I grabbed my phone and searched for one within a 50-mile radius. "Oh my gosh! There's one right here in town that was listed like two hours ago! And only ninety-nine bucks! Whaaat??!!" We called and told them we'd be right over to get it. This was much more fun than the two brand-new acrylic tubs we'd purchased and realized I was never going to like the feel of it. I was going for that whole "What Lies Beneath" Michelle Pfeiffer type of tub (minus the scary dead lady in the water thing), and I was pretty certain the tub in that movie was not acrylic, seeing as how it was a whole haunted house situation and I'm pretty certain haunted houses don't have acrylic tubs, just the good ol' cast iron type.

Like this one.

But with new paint. And now because of the addition on this end of the cabin, there is no more window for me to gaze out of while taking a bath with soft music and candlelight. But we're not sad....we're grateful and totally flexible. We're also a bit stumped, because now instead of the "What Lies Beneath" beautiful haunted house white bathroom, chrome fixtures, and white claw-foot tub with lots of natural light pouring in through the sheer white curtains with a slight breeze coming in off the beautiful lake (until the movie takes a darker turn, and the hair-dryer pops a fuse and there is hand-writing in the steam of the mirror and also the dead lady in the bath water that keeps filling up by itself), we are now windowless and therefore moving into a darker/cozier/moodier situation.

Freya jumps onto the bed, so I guess she's done hunting for mice for now. I can't sleep because over the weekend Dave put drywall over the plywood the framers had placed over where the window once was and now my mind is racing to figure out what to do with a vision of what was once more a Nancy Meyers aesthetic and has now gone dark and moody. Not spooky though. Just moody. Candles. Music. But water that fills the tub only when I turn the faucet on and no scary messages on a steamy mirror.

Where we started....

Where I think we might be headed. From Nancy Meyers, to Ralph Lauren.

I kept giving the A.I. prompt more and more requests, "Three candles, not five." "Plaid not floral." "Darker paint." "Lighter paint.", and on and on and on, until it had generated so many images, I think I wore it out (who or whatever "it" is), because eventually it gave me an image of just a huge armoire and then finally it told me it could no longer generate any images at this time but come back tomorrow. I looked at the time on my phone. Oh shoot. It IS tomorrow. I could've been reading a book. But not a scary one. Just a boring one that'll help me sleep. I could read a book about math. That would work for sure.

Something along these colors for that tub wall. It looks a bit like chocolate; and I mean really, music, candlelight, and chocolate? Even a ghost would be happy to hang out and chillax.