Friday Cocktail

As I've mentioned, my good friend, Amber, at Blue Mango has been hosting Friday cocktails that feature videos of great singers and musicians. I love that idea. To kick off the new year, she's created a button and is spreading the word around blogland.

This week's Friday cocktail at Canyon Wren Cottage is showcasing two of my favorite singers. I first learned about Marc Broussard when I saw his "Home" video in the middle of the night as Hurricane Katrina was slamming the Gulf Coast. It was a moving video, especially considering Broussard is from a small town not too far from New Orleans.

I've had the opportunity to see him in person, first on the Rock Boat, and then in Austin this past year. He puts on an energetic and entertaining show.

As I was looking through his Youtube videos, I saw that he has a few duets with Sara Bareilles. No doubt you've heard her popular song, "Love Song," but if you haven't heard her entire CD, you've been missing out.

This week's Friday cocktail is called "Many the Miles." Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2009, friends! Thank you for your support and friendship this past year. I started Canyon Wren Cottage late last spring, but I didn't get really serious about blogging till July or so. Since then, I've met so many wonderful bloggers and made lots of new friends. Your comments warm my heart, and I've enjoyed getting to know you all.

This new year will feature even more open houses of gorgeous hill country real estate. In fact, I'm meeting with a realtor next week, who's listed a multi-million dollar home in the area. She wants to know if I will help her get the word out about the home, as well as raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Um... Yeah!

This new year will also feature more projects around my own home. It will be the year we finish the media room redo, because once the entertainment center cabs are finished, we still need to address the laundry area, purchase seating and do something about the floor.

We will also be addressing our storage issues. It's a little frustrating to have lived in our home a year and not feel completely settled, but I realize that sometimes you have to live in a space to figure out how best to make it work for you.

Finally, a couple of dear blogger friends are featuring giveaways on their own blogs. Linda, at Lime in the Coconut, is featuring a fun giveaway in which the winner gets to choose the prize.

Penny, from The Comforts of Home, has a great giveaway, too. If you love shabby chic style, you will not want to miss her fabulous prizes.

Have a great New Year's Day!

Please Pass the Popcorn

After living in a fairly small home for so long, I really learned what it took to maximize a room's functions. For instance, our former study also served as a sitting room and music room, in addition to hosting a separate dining space when we entertained many people.

Few of us are fortunate enough, however, to have space designated solely as a home theater. Still, I thought it'd be fun to post a few inspiration pics.





That first photo is from the Elk Springs Lodge and Resort in Gatlinburg, TN. Isn't it fun?

All of the rooms above are much more elaborate than our media room will be. That's partly due to our limited budget and also to the multitude of uses our room must perform. I mean, seriously. As pretty as a coffered ceiling would be, I can't see it working for us with that exposed laundry area.

Before, During, And...

I've blogged about our media room, but it's been awhile. First a bit of history. We moved into our house, built in the mid-80's, exactly a year ago. The house has about 2600 square feet and sits on a lot slightly larger than half an acre. We really do feel like we have a little slice of the Texas hill country.

We were drawn to the house for several reasons. We loved the spacious living room and kitchen and the flow between the two rooms. Also, the house had been completely redone by the former owner, so it was nice to move in and not feel like we had to start redoing anything right away. We didn't love everything about the house, though.

One of the things that almost deterred us from buying the home was the garage conversion. On the outside, the conversion is seamless. Pulling up to the side of the house, no one would ever know where a garage door once existed.

Inside, the former garage housed the washer and dryer, and when the garage was converted into a room, the washer and dryer hook-ups stayed. The little concrete lip that all garages have was also left as it was. Those two features made the room very awkward and not completely functional as a media room, which is what we had decided to do with the space. This photo shows the east wall with the washer/dryer area. The hot water heater is in the little closet on the adjacent wall on the far right of the photo, and the door just to the left of that leads to our kitchen.

The previous owner installed new carpeting in the room, and while the carpet was new and pretty, it was not practical in a room with so much water. In fact, we had washer problems and flooding shortly after moving into the home.

Over the past year, we've been making a few changes to the room. In order to camouflage the concrete "lip," my handy husband installed 15' of unfinished, stock cabinets.



We are in the process of painting the walls, installing the countertop, and building shelving to sit on top of the cabinets. We removed the carpeting and simply painted the concrete floor. We are considering installing self-stick vinyl tile, but there are some concrete repairs to be done first. I'll show you more pics as we make a little more progress. We're hoping to have most of the work done by the end of next weekend. Once the room is finished, we'd like to get a roomy, yet space-saving sectional sofa. What do you think? Are we on the right track?

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I mentioned in my last post that good friend, Amber, has started a new feature on her blog, Blue Mango, called Friday Cocktails, where she posts videos of various singers. I love that idea, so this week I'm posting a Friday cocktail at Canyon Wren Cottage.

Also in my last post, I introduced you to one of my favorite singers, Jane Monheit. I first found her when I was doing some research on singers at Amazon.com. You know how you can look something up, and there's that blurb that suggests you might be interested in similar singers? I think that's how I first found Jane Monheit.

She was just getting started back when I stumbled upon her music. My daughter, Cameron, loves her as much as I do. We had the pleasure of meeting Jane Monheit when she came to Amarillo to perform at a benefit gala for the local theater. She signed one of our CD's for Cameron and was very sweet to discuss the "biz" with our daughter, who aspires to sing professionally.


"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" has been sung for decades by so many singers, but hardly ever will you hear a version that is so heartfelt as Jane performs it. She really just melts into the music. Enjoy!

Merry Christmas to You and Yours

My friend, Amber, over at Blue Mango has a fairly new feature called Friday Cocktails, where she features videos of one or more singers. It's not Friday, but I thought you might enjoy one of my favorite singers, Jane Monheit, singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."



Thank you to all the readers of Canyon Wren Cottage. May you have yourself a Merry Little Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Christmas Memories

This time of year is always a great time to reflect on favorite holiday memories, and I thought it might be fun to share one or two of mine.

I spent the first two years of college at North Texas State University (now know as University of North Texas). I was six hours from home, and when I wasn't in class, I was working at the TG&Y near campus.

It was the end of 1981, and Neil Diamond was coming to Reunion Arena in Dallas. I had a date to the concert, so I figured I'd spend the money I'd have used for tickets on a tree. Before I had a chance to get the tree, my date informed me he had to work the night of the concert and had sold his tickets to recoup his costs. (We were college kids; what do you expect?)

My roommate, Nickita, liked Neil Diamond as much as I did, so we managed to purchase a couple of tickets, but I had to spend my "tree" money to get them. It was worth the trade-off, but as Christmas approached, the desire for a tree grew stronger.

I was due to drive back home on Christmas Eve, but on December 23rd, TG&Y put all their Christmas decorations on clearance. An artificial 6' tree was just $13.88. Even a poor college student could afford that. Unfortunately, there weren't many ornaments available, so I went next door to Rite-Aid to purchase a few boxes of simple Christmas balls. A few strands of silver tinsel and stringy, silver icicles helped fill out the tree.

I've upgraded to bigger and better trees and ornaments, but I have such fond memories of that simple tree, which was erected every Christmas for at least 15 years. And I may still have a box of ornaments with a Rite-Aid sticker on it.

Another favorite Christmas memory was shortly after my husband and I moved to Tulsa. It was 1985, and Christmas fell in the middle of the week. I had the whole week off, but Chris only had a couple of days off -- not enough time to get back to Texas to visit family. The weekend before Christmas, I flew to San Antonio, where my parents had moved while I was in college, and my flight back to Tulsa was late Christmas afternoon.

One of the gifts my parents gave us was a blue Playmate cooler in the box. Now, our family eats Christmas dinner around 1:00 in the afternoon, so after we ate, my mother packaged up leftovers and put them in the cooler, along with one of those frozen thingies to keep the food cold. Then we re-boxed the cooler, taped it up, and I checked it as baggage on the flight home.

That evening, Chris and I had a lovely Christmas dinner, just the two of us, courtesy of my sweet mother and that Playmate cooler.

What are some of your favorite holiday memories?