Georgia on My Mind

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm temporarily hanging out in Atlanta for work. I'm only shooting on certain days, which means I've got a looooot of time on my hands. I don't know many people in this city, and the one friend I had here working on another TV show just left to go home to LA today. The past few days have been filled with a lot of lonely me time, which is always good for the soul. Right? Right.

It's taken me about a week to get used to calling a hotel home. Don't get me wrong. I love room service, and I love housekeeping. I love the pool with food and beverage service, I love the spa, and I love the brand-new gym, stocked with cold towels and green apples and free headphones and water. I feel so absolutely spoiled. I'm ecstatic that I'm here. But maybe it's the germaphobe in me - I can't help but think about how many sticky fingers have touched the remote control! Plus, when it comes down to it, I'm away from home home, which, when you've got a loving husband and two furry kitties there waiting for you, is...well, hard. So I'm trying to refocus my germaphobic energy toward exploring this amazing city, and trying to build a little temporary home space for myself out here, even if it resides only in the mind.

Atlanta is bawse. It contains glimpses of cities I've known and loved and lived in: New York and Chicago, as well as the South, obviously, plus a healthy dash of Portland. The Southern food here has really blown me away, as well as the general friendliness of people. Here are some moments that made me at "home" in my mind.

High Museum of Art

The High Museum currently has a really cool outdoor design installation called "Mi Casa Your House." Basically, it's a bunch of red hammocks on a very green lawn! When I walked up, I just made a beeline straight for a hammock and spent the next half hour, swinging. This reminded me a lot of LACMA's outdoor installations in Los Angeles.

Inside the museum, I saw a Mary Cassatt painting that immediately brought back the feeling for me of my shoes echoing as I walk around The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC - my favorite place to go on days when I was cutting school hanging around in New York City before I ever lived there. I have the best fuzzy memories of high school field trips where somehow we were all left to our own devices to wander the grand galleries of the Met, staring at paintings, sketching our own, and walking around the Upper East Side.

This Hopper painting and the similar one below it gave me a Cape Cod-y, mid-Atlantic vibe -- those marine blues and whites, that coastal breeze -- a nice feeling when you're feeling hot and muggy in the South.

Georgia Aquarium

Exploring the aquarium by myself, surrounded by hundreds of kids, reminded me of my time in Chicago, when I was working with these awesome refugee kids from Uptown. I brought them everywhere I could in the city that was fun and enriching and kid-friendly, and I have great memories of them oohing and aaahing at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

Piedmont Park

Two words: Central Park.

Life Is in the Details

Small details in a house make it a home. I'd much rather have a half-designed home full of little personal objects that have stories and meaning to them than in a "finished" house full of off-the-shelf decor bought at Pottery Barn.

I'm a sucker for fresh flowers.

These are from the Larchmont Farmer's Market, bought for me by Alex. And the jewelry hook thing is a gift from my friend's trip to India. The hanging aortic heart is a thank you gift from my childhood friend.

I love a good bedside table.

The glazed ceramic bowl is a wedding gift from a friend. And the succulent I got at the Rose Bowl, then planted in a vintage Japanese tea cup for our wedding.

I've since changed these curtains that were bugging me so much, but the garden view is what I love. I inherited the purple and white flowers from our previous tenant, and I love that they face the bedroom window.

This is the kind of view I never had in New York City. My apartments usually had prime views of a brick wall or maybe a window where I could see my neighbor going number 2.

The Chanel No. 5, a gift from my dad. I think he learned long ago from my mom that you can never go wrong with giving her a new bottle of No. 5, and he's since passed that wisdom down to me. The pearls, a gift from my mother-in-law, passed down from Alex's grandmother.

The rabbit dish, an engagement gift from my producer and good friend, Angela. It incongruously showed up as a prop in the movie Looper. The watch, an engagement gift from my parents, with a matching one to Alex. And the rings, they were from Pottery Barn, of course.

I kid!

Lastly, this guy makes all the difference in our home. It's like rooming with a miniature friendly lion.

A New Coat of Paint

A new coat of paint can work wonders for even the dingiest of apartments. It didn't help that the last tenant here not only left a crapload of her stuff in our new pad, she also was a HEAVY smoker. Meaning, the walls were covered in a yellowish, stinky film of stains, and the heavy odor of stale smoke greeted you as you walked through the doors.

My fiance has a perpetually stuffy nose, so this didn't bother him much, but I couldn't bear the sight of those gross, old-looking walls and smoke clinging to the insides of this place, so I asked our new landlord for a fresh new coat of paint. Unfortunately, she was going to paint it the same off-white-kinda-yellow paint, which did NOT work for me, nosir, so I begged to get some colors in there.

I was limited to Glidden paints because of the amount of money they wanted to spend (or rather, not spend) on my new color dalliance, but I did the best I could given Glidden's limited selections.

First off, my latest obsession is finding the right shade of grey to paint a living room. LA is rife with these faux fireplaces, which some people find tacky, but I--coming from New York City, where everything's cramped and people live with bathtubs in their kitchen--find them kind of cute, even if non-functional. In particular, white fireplaces against a grey wall--swoon! But there are so many shades of grey out there--some with tan undertones, others with blueish/purpleish undertones. And the paint chip you choose in the store can look tooootally different when it's splashed across your wall and in the sunlight of your living room.

Here's my old place. I used Behr Silver Screen.

Before

After:

It's a little bit blown out here by the sunlight, but you can see the difference.

You can see it better here, if you can pry your eyes away from Mila Kunis's hot bod on the cover of GQ. It turned out way bluer than I expected it to in the sunlight, but was nice and grey in artificial light. For my new place, I decided to go with a tanner undertone, something closer to Behr's Dolphin Fin.

Next post: See how the Glidden worked out!