Happy hanging day

Well that serves me right... decided to blog first thing in the morning as we were all sleepy and happy after a productive, and rare, day off together and I end up sitting here now fresh from one of my more disturbing serial dreams. Usually it is about a kitten I am looking after, although sometimes a baby that morphs into a kitten; always the creature is ridiculously small, like a match-box size, and on its last legs. In this instance, (which incidentally is the first for sooo long that I thought this particular dream genre had left me) I was in a bus heading for a hotel, with the usual very sick, wet two-inch kitten in a damp box. Passed the hotel and had to walk back for miles, in the rain, so kitten now drenched and sticking to the rapidly deteriorating box. In hotel is my mother eating from a wedding style buffet table in the lobby and a few people from my current cash-job, one of whom inadvertantly crushes the wretched kitten when I ask him to hold it. Proving my brain is grounded in the everyday, I miss my hairdressing appointment, which I do have today. After much wandering of corridors and having replaced the box with a baguette bag, also soggy, I abandon what remains of the kitten in a lounge. That's where I always wake up, with the guilt and failure feelings and a sense of anger that no-one saw fit to help me; always a jolly start to the day. Today I am more fascinated at the dream's recurrence; since having actual cats to look after I had reckoned that the small dead kitten dream had been exorcised from my repertoire. Seems not. Never really figured it out either, and not sure if I want to - it is a very bleak patch of unconscious for sure.

The jollier events of the day are luckily fresh in my mind also; remodelling the living room is an occupation that always amuses me; we have always seen the house as very much a work in progress as, especially now, money comes in sporadic bursts and we don't have the budget to 'do things up' all at once. This kind of eclectic growth is exactly what I prefer however; I never saw the point in employing a designer to kind of fake your history by buying in a bunch of ornaments and furniture; far better to amass things on our travels gradually so that everything is tinged with meaning and memory for us. Even the larger 'shop bought' pieces of furniture are memorable merely by the effort involved to save for and buy them; each a little landmark in our personal history. I am feeling a lot happier in the house now I have had the crucial realisation that I don't 'have to' have a cute cottage by the sea to be a painter; I know it sounds dumb but it is easy to set targets that are unrealistic and then torture yourself for failing to meet them. If I am happy and productive here then all the better; I quite like the 'tardis' effect of this house anyhow as it is so much lighter, airier and cooler than the 1940s estate exterior would suggest.

New lights in the living room, previously a very dark place only used in winter, mean that we can expand our collection of other peoples' art, begun on holidays and now added to with Ritchie's baldy man and fish. Putting that up was the catalyst for getting into gear with the other pics, and now we have the brilliant Vietnamese artist's anarchic 'boy on a buffalo' being framed just now. I need to rediscover the artist's name; part of it is Nguyen, but I can't remember if that is first or second. Great painter though; we saw a whole bunch of his work in the main Fine Arts museums in Hanoi and Saigon, going on to buy a couple of prints and this mixed media painting before we flew home.

One of those super-easy decisions at the framers; I had my swither between two really nice mouldings and asked the price of both only to find that one came out at £95, the other at £60. That made the choice a little easier and kept the budget on line; can't wait to see it on the wall. Even just the smaller one I put up yesterday makes such a difference to the room; the huge blank wall has been bugging me for ages and in a ideal world I would have aquired a huge tapestry or rug on our travels last year, but budget concerns and the thought of Twig getting her claws into it held me back. I think this is the better course; nothing like spending our hard won pennies on the process of artifying our house; far more satisfying and I can live on dishes created with mince for a while more... tonight - lamb koftas!