Woulda Coulda Shoulda

First of all, thank you for all of the color suggestions and stories and cautions in the last post. I posted that all, “Yellow?” and what your feedback told me was that I needed to put down the crack pipe, as the odds of me selecting a suitable yellow were somewhere between slim and none. Alert (and pretty) commenter Elizabeth said something about full-spectrum paints and I immediately emailed her all “WHAT IS THIS PAINT YOU SPEAK OF?” and with her help I then fell into the deep, expensive rabbit hole of Ellen Kennon paints. Eventually I emerged, bleary-eyed, with a passel of samples on order. We’ll see how it works out.

[For the curious: At the moment I am enchanted by a color called Oasis, which is described on the site as: "... a darker version of Gustavian Grey (Ethereal Mists Color) which crosses that fine line between blue and green. Therefore, it is both healing and soothing, yet rejuvenating." We'll see if I like the sample as much as I liked it in the virtual room-painter thingie on the screen. Also the bathroom off my office is painted dark burgundy and now I'm all I GUESS I NEED TO PAINT THE BATHROOM, TOO and hello, they also make a paint called RAINBOW FOG, which: obviously. Is "full spectrum" just marketing hype? Probably. But I spend most of my life in this room and I want LIIIIIIIIGHT. Hello, my name is Sucker.]

Anyway. That’s the paint. But yesterday, there was cooking! And plumbing! And the intersection of the two, kind of. (more…)

In New England, March was always a month to bitch and moan about how spring was clearly NEVER going to arrive. Or there would be a couple of freak 70-something-degree days in amongst the snow storms. I still remember the year we got two feet of snow on April Fool’s Day, and with Chickie’s birthday being in the middle of April, every year it was a waiting game to see if we could have a party outside or not. One year the day of her party dawned warm and sunny, but I still had to go out into the yard with a shovel and break up an iceberg that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about the weather.

In Georgia, March is a mix of warm and cold, though “cold” is relative, of course. We’ll have a bunch of perfect, temperate days where everyone flocks to the outdoors, because by May it’ll be too hot, and April is the Month Of Pollen. For most of April, everything will be covered in a yellow-green powder that turns to thick sludge each time it rains. We are not yet in the “hey, the air is chewy” stage, but it’s time to break out the daily allergy meds and it’s only a matter of time.

Naturally, this means it’s time to Do Stuff and Clean Things because my allergy meds make me hyper AND because I lose the will to live once we start drowning in pollen. (more…)

Is there anything better than a Saturday? We can sleep in! We have the whole day to do… whatever! But if you are Otto, the only thing that’s better than a random Saturday is the Saturday when the Camper and RV show is in town. Woooooo!

Um. What? You don’t get all excited for the Camper and RV show? It’s EXCITING!

[Full disclosure: It is not terribly (read: at all) exciting to me. But it is VERY exciting to Otto, and generally the kids enjoy it as well. Fancy campers have a variety of interesting things inside of them, and that's in addition to the number of small spaces where one determined Monkey-child might wedge himself and then holler "I BET YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM!" Also, it's an entire expo thing, which means there's food. And one of the booths there sells CAKE! A slice is as big as a child's head. I know some children who really enjoy cake. Me, I really enjoy Otto. I don't think I'd ever, say, head to the Camper and RV show all on my own, but I am happy to go to make Otto happy, and also because he is adorable when he sees something he finds intriguing.]

So! We got up! We ate breakfast! We made ourselves presentable and then we got in the car and headed Atlantaward. “How long will it take to get there?” asked Monkey.

“About an hour,” answered Otto, and that’s when the ominous, foreshadowing music would’ve started up, if only we hadn’t been busy listening to “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” (more…)

It’s a funny thing about putting one foot in front of the other; it works just fine until you get to a point where you realize you can only keep doing it if you shut out everything else. Then you put one foot in front of the other with your fingers in your ears and your eyes closed and people look at you funny.

So that’s what I’ve been doing since last Friday. I’m still doing it, to some extent. My parents are here, which is fantastic, but there is now some question of whether Chickadee is coming home for Christmas, as she has managed to come down with a mighty case of The Crud at precisely the wrong time. I maybe didn’t realize how badly I need to see her until it became possible that I wouldn’t, and that on top of everything else… well, it’s just been a long week (hello, understatement).

So mostly I’ve been vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing. Also, I’m over at Feel More Better, talking about not talking about it. I’m still feeling a little unsteady, but my house is really clean.

I spent half of yesterday prepping/cooking and then got up at 6:00 to start throwing everything into crock pots. What? You don’t do that? It’s awesome, because then instead of musical ovens your guests come and say, “What can we do to help?” and you just wave an arm at your counter full of crock pots and say, “Nothing. It’s all done.” And then they back away slowly. Yay!

This year I’m thankful for lots of things, like that I didn’t break any other bones while cooking stuff, and that my family and friends are awesome, and my readers (that’s you) are lovely and supportive, and that this year is almost over. (CAN I GET AN AMEN?)

Of course I am missing having Chickie here—she won’t be home to visit until next month—but in the spirit of my new the-glass-is-half-full-dammit outlook, I compensated for her absence by putting meat in every single damn dish. (Sorry, honey. I’ll make whatever you want when you’re home for Christmas, sans “chicken juice,” I promise.)

Otto is blasting “Alice’s Restaurant” while hard at work on the turkey and I’m about to go make some rolls, but I have some crappy iPhone pictures to share with you because I’m taking a break and I’m a giver like that. (more…)

Yesterday Monkey and I went to the supermarket to start buying all of the things I’ll require for our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, which meant that my cart was full of unfamiliar items (to him, though to be honest I am trying some new recipes and some of it was unfamiliar to me as well) amongst the regular milk and spinach and whatnot. [Note that I said it was the START of shopping for Thanksgiving; Otto will no doubt be sent out to the store at least twice more as I start prepping and discovering what all I've overlooked.]

Anyway. We shopped, we came home, Otto was arriving home from the office at the same time, and we all commenced unloading the groceries. We were almost done when I came across a large bottle of mayonnaise in the bottom of one of my bags. Except… I didn’t buy mayonnaise.

Otto and I discussed this matter in depth, even quizzing a deeply affronted Monkey (“I don’t even LIKE mayonnaise!”) as to whether he’d tossed it in the cart. He had not. I had not. I’d never seen it before. We concluded it must’ve been a “oh nevermind” item from someone ahead of me in line that ended up in my bag. But then Otto combed through my 3-foot-long receipt and discovered that I had, indeed, paid for it. (Full price! IT WASN’T EVEN ON SALE!!)

Where did it come from? How did I end up buying it? Can I return it? (“Excuse me, I appear to have inadvertently purchased this mayonnaise.”) Is it a SIGN that I should put deviled eggs back on the menu? I am SO confused.