Our home improvement projects continued this weekend as we reassembled the guest bedroom for an honest-to-goodness overnight guest! We still need to paint the trim, but it looks pretty good anyway, now that the curtains are hung and the bed is put together. Pictures to come.

Our dining room looks about a bazillion times better, too. One of my oldest friends is a very talented artist who wanted to give us a painting as a wedding present. We took a long time to decide what the subject should be, but when Riece saw my photos from Paris, he zeroed in on this image of the chapel at Les Invalides, and we all agreed it would be perfect:

The painting was delivered Tuesday while we were in the city, but because we rarely seem to be home at the same time as our neighbors (who hold onto our deliveries when we’re away), we only got it yesterday afternoon.

I’d say it was worth the wait.

Now our dining room/living room have a focus beyond our obscenely large television.

The Official MI Husband keeps me rolling in good links. He sent along this one today of a flickr set featuring Swiss graphic design of the 20th century.

From YouWorkForThem:

Title: Le Livre Du Livre: The Book of Imaginary Books

Details: A lovely, odd collection of book cover designs for books that don’t exist. (At least, that’s what we think it is: the text is entirely in Japanese and French, so we’re not 100% positive.) Sort of like Borges, but for designers instead of writers. The descriptive text is in Japanese; the book covers are all in French.

My name is Amy and I’m an opera enthusiast … not a buff or a fan and definitely not a -phile, but I love getting out to The Met a few times a year, trying to pass for someone who doesn’t wear jeans to work everyday. I’m pretty picky about the performances I’ll see, so my experience is usually memorable in a good way; Renée Fleming has brought me to tears and I’ve swooned more than once over Dmitri Hvorostovsky. (Since they’re together this season in my favorite opera—Eugene Onegin—I’ll be treating myself to an orchestra seat for my next birthday.)

That said, these evenings are pretty staid and can be trying, especially when I’m seated in the tubercular section for 3+ hours. Because Gil prefers A Night at the Opera to the uncapped version, I usually go solo or with my “opera husband” on a sanctioned date, the most exciting of which involved a showboating extra in the French army falling into the orchestra pit during a grueling performance of War and Peace. The extended silence after the mishap woke me.

I mean, NO ONE said ANYTHING for probably five minutes. It was weird and annoying and very, very uptight.

So I dream of seeing a performance at La Scala, where you can heckle a tender tenor into voiding his contract.

I’d like to think he looked a little like Peanut at the 1:47 mark here.

(The army extra was SO fired, by the way.)