Meredith Shayne

Imprinting

I’m gradually settling into the new house, although a week is hardly any time to live somewhere when you lived in your last place for 5 years. I own this house though, which of course makes it different; when I see things that annoy me (which I have, it’s amazing what you don’t notice when you’re just looking at a place during an open home) the thought that follows on from that is that when I have the money I can just get whatever it is changed. It’s a good feeling. I spilt tea on my brand new sofa today, which means it’s christened. Last week I also dropped a dining table on my bare foot and bled all over the carpet (seriously, blood was positively gushing out of my big toe. Toes bleed A LOT, FYI), so I guess that means that me and the house now have some sort of mystical blood bond or something.

Anyway.

The thing I’m most looking forward to is putting pictures up. In the years I’ve been renting I’ve actually not lived in a place with existing picture hooks, and it always seemed like too much trouble to ask to put things up, but ever since I’ve been planning to buy a house, I’ve been thinking about finally putting up some of the things I’ve collected over the years. I’ve travelled a lot over the last 10 years or so, and I have a lot of photos from those trips. Over the past 5 years or so I’ve also been collecting art, either prints, sketches, or paintings of the places I’ve been. I have quite a few of those now, so I’m going to put those up, mixed in with my own photos. I’m really looking forward to doing it too, although going through all my photos will be a mission.

I was thinking of doing this before, and wondering what photos I’d choose. The travel photos from before 2005 are all printed and in photo albums (so totally old school, I know), and the albums are lurking somewhere in a box I haven’t unpacked yet, so I was restricted to the ones I have on my hard drive. The earliest ones are from a trip to Italy I took in January of 2005, and I was just idly picking through them and decided to fish some out and post them here; they’re not necessarily the ones I’ll choose to get framed, but they’re ones I like all the same. I love Italy, it’s a beautiful, quirky country positively bursting with personality, but in the end I had to stop going there, mainly because if you can walk around Rome without a map then you’ve been there too many times, and it was time to remind myself that there was all of the rest of the world to explore as well.

Italy – Tuscany, Rome, Venice, Pompeii