GUEST POST #3 BY JENN
Our Hovel

According to Google's favourite dictionary a hovel is "a small, wretched and often dirty house." Our studio apartment here in Seattle is small. It is in fact often dirty. I'm not so sure about the wretched part. I suppose you can see for yourself. Here are some pictures from behind our door open there on the ground floor.

Right inside you will find the lady of the house. This is what happens when Darren finds a floor lamp on the street without a shade. You know, one thing leads to another. She freaked me out a lot at first when rounding a corner. Marilyn, we forgot to give that little monkey puppet to Eve. Sorry.

She always has the glow associated with a heart healthy diet (quality quaranteed by Kroger Oats)

Here's Darren in the kitchen with his culinary inspirations (Disney's Pocahontas, Gorbachev in a Louis Vuitton frame of mind and Kenneth Cole's Sikh representative).

There are no casual Fridays in this household.

In this exhibit, we attempt a blend of the ancient and modern, near and far (I've always thought my great grandmother was pretty).

Just around the bend Darren's great grandfather provides our ancestral connection to the land here by sowing his wild oats on a logging team in Washington state. Check out how big that tree stump (residual limb) is beside him.

While we're looking at the pictures anyway, this woman (on the right) pretty much captures how I feel during our frequent excursions to the YMCA.

Sufjan Steven's smiling family greets me first thing every morning. I think the baby is actually normal, it's just the way the paper was folded.

Here's one of our favourites from Found Magazine. I had never thought of Jesus as a forlorn schoolgirl before. Perhaps it's a classic case of constructing God in your own image.

I really love our bathroom. It makes me hungry for Easter eggs every time.

But you might want to watch your step on the way out.

On my way to work this week, I've been listening to an audio book by Alain de Botton who suggests that we decorate our living spaces with whatever our lives are lacking. For example, urban people who obsess about redwoods and whales and midwesterners with comfortable, calm routines who scatter 9/11 memorabilia (urban, chaotic landscapes) all over their houses. I'm not sure what our apartment says about us (I'm not even certain I want to know). But this is what happens when we drive across the country with what we can fit into our car and then try to construct a space out of what we can rip from magazines and scrounge from street corners.