The Weekend Log: Take 11

Cozy porch edition: A long-awaited refresh + what to wear and read on your porch this summer.

Hey-ho Midlifers,

Hope you’re having a good week! This may be an unpopular sentiment, but after being pretty on-the-go for the past few weeks, I am so here for a quiet, rainy weekend. I know, the people here in New Jersey want to go to the beach and bask in the sun on their days off. But this Morticia Addams will be happily rotting at home (when she’s not food shopping or doing errands).

Do you know rotting? That’s what the kids do these days. It’s when they take to their beds for hours on end and look at their phones or watch shows on their laptops. It’s good for their mental health, they say.

Of course, my generation is not wired like that. We always feel like we need to be doing something. Being productive. Checking things off our lists.

It’s exhausting.

So this weekend, I’m really going to take a page from my younger friends’ playbooks and try to spend some time rotting instead of running around.

And I have the perfect place to do it.

I had been wanting to upgrade my porch furniture since last summer, when the new cushions I bought from Lowe’s for the metal loveseat and chairs I’d been dragging around to different houses since the Obama administration (first term) turned out to be a bust. You could feel the hard metal underneath every time your butt hit the cushion.

The furniture I brought from my old house and last year's cushion refresh.

Also, I could never stretch out on the loveseat to read. Even for a short(er) person like me, I’d have to drape my legs over one of the arms when lying down with a book (or to nap). How can one rot in such an uncomfortable position?

I’d spent countless hours combing the internet for just the right upgrade, but everything was just so darn expensive. I don’t feel like making a huge investment in porch furniture when I really don’t know how long I’m staying here.

And then plans for Europe and the wedding gobbled up all my mental bandwidth. Instead of Googling Costco’s outdoor furniture selection for the 100th time, I was searching “what to wear in Paris spring.”

We came home from the trip a few weeks ago and I was immediately greeted by porch furnishings covered in a thick layer of pollen and dirt (?) from a long, cold winter.

So, at the start of last week, I turned to my new personal assistant (aka: Chat GPT) to help me upgrade my porch situation. I told her how much I wanted to spend (under $1,000) and that I wanted it to arrive before the weekend so that my daughter, who was visiting, could help assemble.