Stuck in 90' somethin'

During a recent visit from Krissy my self image was slightly shaken. It wasn't anything bad or hurtful just surprising. Here's what happened.

While sitting on our family room sofa and watching some silly late night show together, Krissy started teasing about our shockingly outdated TV. It is an old console TV. We do have cable on it but you have to actually get up to turn it on/off and to change the volume. It is huge. Not screen wise, just cabinet wise. Oh, and it is 18 years old.

I'm ashamed to say that the whole family has a lot of fun teasing Grandpa P about this TV. You see, he thinks it's great. Of course he knows it's hopelessly out of date but it still works and being the left brainier that he is he sees no reason to get rid of it.

I respect that. I even love that in him. (After all I'm sort of out of date myself) But it does give the family endless opportunity to tease at his expense. Then Krissy said something that surprised me. She started teasing me that the sofa and love seat we were sitting on were straight out of the 90's and didn't I think it was time to update.

What?

The sofa and love seat that I had bought? That I had planned the room around?

Sure it needed cleaning. No bad problems but a good cleaning. And, yes it was a plaid. I’ll even admit the funny looking pillows that came with it are flat and strange, but I never considered that it made the house look out of date. Hummmmm. What should I do? Here's the thing.

We will be moving to our “forever home” in about 4 years. I'm hoping we will be down south in the land of eternal good weather. Most of what we have in our colonial home in Maryland is not going to make the move with us. It's just too northern. Too colonial. I'm longing for tropical colors and open spaces.

”Ah-HA!” you say, “Perfect. Buy a new set now and buy something you will want to move with you.”

But, I have discovered that I have just enough Grandpa P in me to realize that in our world, that's just plain silly. Without knowing exactly where we are going and what we are going to need, I'm kidding myself by thinking that what I buy now will be what I want when we start "the best years of our lives"

The bottom line is we are not going to buy new furniture again until we are in our forever home. It's just that simple.

However, I don't really want to look out of date. I regularly buy slip covers, wrangle them onto the furniture, decide they look way to tacky, return them and end up living with my old furniture after all. Ugh. So, I have four years of the “same old same.”

Which brings me to my point. (Gottcha! And you thought I didn't have a point!)

Consider:

Variety and change keeps life updated. It has just occurred to me that one of the things that I love about food is that it is a very quick and fulfilling way to make changes. After all, no one has ever made a four year plan for a loaf of bread. Actually, you could make a daily plan for changing your bread and even the most left brain thinker in the world, Grandpa P, would applaud you. What a wonderful way to forget about things in life that are not changing any time soon. I also believe the majority of our lives are made up of those slow changing things. Really, think about it.

So we cook and we buy food from the store and we go to restaurants and we try every one of the items on the McD's dollar menu. And, well, maybe there is a connection there? I don’t know.

Maybe not. All I really know is that I have to learn how to take advantage of the fabulous changeable quality of food because, seriously, it doesn't take long for eggbeaters and toast to start looking like old furniture to me.

The trick is to make sure the changes are healthy ones. For me, that is going to be a big challenge.

What do you think?

In a world in which we have so little power to change things, do you use food because it is a deeply satisfying (not to mention legal) way to bring changes into your life?