Sometimes a curtain is just a curtain.

I'm heading to the new Ikea in Charlotte on Sunday with some pretty stylish family members, and I'm on a mission to get curtains and curtain hardware for at least one window in la casa (hey, it's baby steps here).

So yesterday's lunch conversation began with "What color of curtains should we get for the living room?" and took a nosedive from there. Suddenly we were back to the three-to-five year life plan and how our curtains would fit. See, at some point we'll need to move. But before we move to a real home that we own, we'll probably just move to a slightly bigger place in the same community here. And once we're there, we'll probably do the painting we were both excited about doing here - until we realized that it's not worth painting just to paint over in a year. And when we do paint, we lean toward some pretty rich/dark colors, so I'd want some neutral and light-ish drapes there. But right now we've got the various shades of "apartment white" rockin' all the walls, and neutral drapes won't really be worth buying.

The clouds gathered over the Cary Cafe (sidenote: delicious and huge salads) as we discussed money, internships, school, my continued lack of income, and how moving, children, buying a house, buying another car, not being in debt, and trying to balance all this without winning the lottery would work. There was tension. Sadness. Frustration...

But after we ate and calmed down a bit, we were able to laugh about the whole curtain color debacle. We decided that we'll get whatever curtains we want right now, for this place, with the white walls. Maybe in a few years we'll get new curtains again to go with whatever walls we may or may not paint, and that will be okay.

Another day, another marital dramatic moment successfully navigated.

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