Saw my first lightning bug of the summer

Me too!

(is today the solstice?)!

Indeed it is.

I don't want something to permanently block the light/view.

I miss lightening bugs.

I was watching them tonight as I talked on the phone on my porch. Never had them growing up, always associated them with visiting the grandparents in the midwest. So I think of Rockford and Pipestone and those lazy summers with cousins whenever I see them.

Loki's doing his nightly "I'm gonna die if I don't go outside" routine. He's pining! It's comical. And loud.

Maybe just a sheer white curtain that encompasses all the windows and can be pushed to the edges when wanted? Which is far too much work for me. I've become addicted to my new blinds (faux wooden 2" slats) that with a simple pull open to let the light in, and I can pull them completely out of the way if I want more light. And they look nice (so much classier than the cheap-looking aluminum venetian blinds).

Oh noes, the ants are descending.

Double oh noes, the cats slept all day (the day it wasn't raining) and now I'm ready for bed.

How about like a bamboo shade?

Matchstick blinds are also nice, and then there's those canvas blinds that fold up. I was drooling when I saw some copper (very orange and shiny) blinds that did the tilt/pull-up. I'm doing the white faux wooden blinds for privacy/shade, and sheer orange curtains for accent.

sara, what about a shoji screen that you can move in front of the windows when necessary, then move elsewhere when you don't need them? I think World Market has some nice screens.

Those are gorgeous windows. I have both roman blinds and cellular (cordless) and I love them both. The roman blinds look great, and I like the color fabric nature of them, so they're not hard texture, but they're cleaner lines than curtains. (You know me and my clean sparse lines.)

But for your application I'd say cellular, because you don't need it to be totally room darkening or anything, and cordless cellulars can really disappear. That's what we have in the sunroom. You can barely see them in this photo, but they're there, and ours were even outside mount because cheap(er)! Inside mount, and behind your valances, you'd never see them except when closed.

I had to poke around to find it, but this is what they look like closed.

Furthermore, if you didn't want to go cordless, you could do the top down/bottom up kind that let you adjust exactly what you want to block.

Kitchens are so personal, yeah, I would want design control over it. I mean there are things about its layout that are personal to my workflow. The only problem we had was that the freezer was a little big, so we lost the room for the trash pullout under the long worksurface between the fridge and stove. It's near the sink now, which is good, but those are shorter surfaces. We still tend to cut on the long surface, but then we've got to port all the scraps across the triangle.

Lightning bugs; when we first brought one of our kiddoes to a music festival in the midwest he'd never seen them before. He was so freaked out. "There's a bug. And its butt lights up. Dude, its BUTT LIGHTS UP!" with such a what-is-wrong-with-you-people expression on his face.

Lightning bugs; when we first brought one of our kiddoes to a music festival in the midwest he'd never seen them before. He was so freaked out. "There's a bug. And its butt lights up. Dude, its BUTT LIGHTS UP!" with such a what-is-wrong-with-you-people expression on his face.

That was about my reaction too. It's pretty cool. And then there are female fireflies that mimic the flash pattern of the females of other firefly species to lure the hapless males over and eat them.