Last evening we were invited to Eric and Erika's lovely home for dinner, an opportunity to celebrate our lives (hopefully) returning to normal after this year's hectic concert season. Erika is a full-time nurse with an all-consuming hobby that is becoming a business. Nothing seems to excite her quite as much as the challenge of imagining how someone's room could be redesigned in one day on a very limited budget. Although decorating magazines emphasize what can be accomplished with limitless resources, that is hardly the world in which I live. We therefore enjoy visiting their home for the fantastic food and conversation, and we never fail to admire how Erika keeps her decorating skills honed by continually transforming their home, adding collectibles, rearranging furniture, combining objects which did not originally share a common purpose. I particularly liked this month's transformation of the quiet corner in her living room, lit only by the soft light of an overcast sky. Old exterior windows with peeling paint suddenly seemed appropriate in the newly painted room. (You can see how this corner looked before it was recently redesigned for Saturday, but [Monday] I just learned this morning that she found it much too busy and simplified it Sunday. Since I never ever rearrange furniture, this attention to design absolutely amazes me.)
Their front yard is now completely devoted to a relatively new flower garden. The April tulips and spurge were at their prime.
