Him: "Are you sure the kitchen walls are Egg White? We also have Egg Shell."
Me: "I'm positive. Absolutely positive."
Him: "I don't know. This doesn't look right."
Me: "I painted both sides of the wall the wrong paint color before. Do you need me to go pull up my archives for you?"
Him: "Okay, then. Egg White."
And then I stomped back to the foyer to paint the space next to the baseboards the WRONG COLOR OF WHITE.
Make it stop. Just make the painting thing stop. Guess what I'm doing tonight?
When we moved to Chateau Travolta in 2008, the housing market was on the verge of tanking. Then it tanked, and the For Sale signs started popping up like dandelions. Some of those houses took years to sell, which made me realize just how stupid it was to take on two mortgages at once when we sold This Old House to move here.
This week there are ladders all over my neighborhood, as the houses built in 1978 have begun to show their age. Shingles pushed well beyond their limits topple from roofs. The boards on the sides of houses are torn away and replaced. The aluminium ladders sparkle in the May sunshine.
As I jogged past a pile of boards pocked with bent nails, I started thinking about the kitchen remodel I've not blogged about. It's not that I'm not proud of it -- I am -- it's so pretty -- but I really only feel comfortable blogging home improvements we did with our own little hands, and though the demolition was difficult and Beloved has been moonlighting as a drywall installer, a plumber and an electrician for the past two months while I just took a crowbar and pried off floor tiles and anything else that pissed me off, for some reason, I just didn't want to blog about it because there were so many parts we paid someone else to do, and then for some reason that feels braggy in a way "look at the pocket door Beloved installed" doesn't. This may be justified only in my head. Or worrying about bragging in a Pinterest world may be ridiculous. Or I may be a huge hypocrite because I brag about my writing here (or at least that's what the About Me page feels like, but dude, I'm a professional writer, not a professional kitchen person). I'm conflicted, clearly.
Anyway, I was thinking about all that stuff while jogging by these piles of wood in my neighborhood and feeling so happy my neighbors were fixing up their houses instead of selling them. And feeling happy they had both the money and the desire to maintain their houses so they don't fall apart. And feeling happy and proud that we are taking care of Chateau Travolta and will leave it a better place than we found it. I wrote on BlogHer earlier this week about not toppling your blocks, and ever since then I've been really focused on how important it is to pay attention to your mind and body and environment and address problems right away, before they metastasize into something more.
Maybe it came from growing up in a house my father built perched on the edge of land my family farmed. I like taking root, propping up and staying on. I'm glad my neighbors do, too. There is beauty in that.
So for the past two weeks I have had the my-diamond-shoes-are-pinching-my-feet problem of a kitchen remodel. We've been in Chateau Travolta for five years, and this baby has been a long time coming. For the past two weekends, Beloved and I have ripped out soffits, torn out cabinets and nearly severed our hot water pipe (on accident, that last one). We've also had much use of the world's most fun tool, the fubar.
Now that we've found the linoleum under our linoleum and chiseled away the offensive tile in the foyer, the rebuild began this morning when the cabinet guys arrived. And listen, I can handle the barely veiled disdain and the insinuation that I might be more concerned with the color of screws than weight distribution, but the belching. One of these guys has belched 17 times in the past five hours, and he was gone for a while for lunch. None of the other guys has said a word.
Are they so accustomed to his extra air that they don't notice it anymore?
Or is this part of the trade-off? No office politics, you can belch whenever you want, but you might end up arthritic early from the manual labor? I'm thinking of Office Space, clearly, but is it real?
I know plenty of people who work with their hands, and I can't imagine them walking into someone's house while they are there and belching every four seconds. Please tell me it's just this guy.
I'm on deadline today, so all I have to share is a giveaway for free tickets to the 2013 Kansas City Home Show and Flower, Lawn & Garden Show on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.
Took Buttonsworth to the vet today and we upped his insulin again. More later.
My aunts always had real Christmas trees with ornaments that matched perfectly and ribbons tied to the boughs, at least they did in my memory. I remember going over to friends' houses and seeing trees with all white ornaments or themes that changed a bit every year. My parents indulged my desires with regard to the tree on certain things, but we never did have a real tree. I can't remember why. Probably because they're flammable and expensive and kind of a pain in the ass.
My first year in Kansas City, I lived alone, and I bought a houseplant and decorated that. When Beloved and I moved in together, we got a real tree once or twice, but I never did go crazy -- even that one year when we had tons of money, God bless the Internet bubble -- and buy all matching ornaments or a bunch of real ribbons to tie on the branches. We're never in Kansas City for Christmas, and it felt like a ton of effort for no real reason. It's not like anyone came over to our house.
Then the little angel was born, and we went back to decorating This Old House with gusto, hanging lighted wreathes above the gorgeous wood trim on the entry way (there were so many things wrong with that house, but the foyer, living and dining room were amazing) and hiding scented pine cones everywhere. We even had this crazy lighted Season's Greetings sign we hung on the Great Retaining Wall of 2004.
Then we realized little kids and breakable Christmas ornaments don't go together and stopped decorating the lower half of the artificial, pre-lit tree for about four years.
I've always taken after my grandmother in terms of my affection for grandeur. She could afford it, I can't, but I still love it most of the time. Or I thought I did. I asked for -- and received -- crystal drinking glasses for my wedding, but I've used them only a handful of times. I just started using the not-china-just-normal-but-reserved-for-special-occasions stoneware pretty white plates we kept in the cupboards for the past eleven years while we chipped up the normal stuff or used plastic plates from Target every night at dinner. I thought I wanted fancy stuff, but then realized I get scared to use it, afraid I'll break it. But why? I'm 38 years old and my daughter is old enough to run with scissors. If I'm not going to use it now, then when will I? When I'm too arthritic to wrap my paw around a wine glass?
I tell myself the reason I don't go whole-hog on a beautifully decorated tree is because nobody comes to our house at Christmastime. We don't have annual Christmas parties like some people do, and we still go to Iowa every year for Christmas Eve and Christmas day.
I think the truth is that I don't care that my ornaments are terribly pedestrian, and you can totally see the gaps in my low-rent artificial tree. The little angel likes the ornaments, and at this point, I care more about what she thinks than anything else. Christmas is about kids, and we decorate the house for her, mostly.
I wonder what will happen when she leaves the house -- will I eventually tie ribbons around the boughs of a real Christmas tree with matching ornaments while sipping champagne from my Waterford crystal wine glass? Will I ever get as fancy as my twelve-year-old self imagined I would be?
When I was a kid, there was a bench in my parents' house that was just long enough for a small child to lie down with her head touching one armrest and her feet touching the other. I loved that bench. I still love it -- my parents gave it to me when I moved out. Sometimes I go upstairs and sit on it and realize how totally uncomfortable it is, but I still love its swoopy wooden details. I don't have the house or the budget for the amount of swoopy wooden details I would buy if I could.
I was moving some things around a few days ago and put a little rectangular pillow on the sturdy, uncomfortable bench in our living room, the one that went so well with the Mission 1902 style of This Old House but not so much with the seventies vibe lingering in Chateau Travolta. I don't think anyone in the family has ever sat on it except to put on or take off shoes, but it holds all of our living room blankets under its seat, so it lives on in the corner of the room.
The day I put the pillow there, my daughter came home from school and saw it and immediately went over to lie down. Her head touched one armrest and her feet touched the other. She looked down, pulled a book out of her backpack and didn't move for the next hour.
Pretty cool.
Speaking of things kids like, you can win a giant cardboard playhouse now through Nov. 1 at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!
The vine kept wrapping itself around my flowers and strangling them, every year for four years. It was impossible to kill, no matter how many times I ripped it out, because its roots are under the deck where I can't reach them.
This spring, as it reached its little tendrils toward my pepper plants, I wrapped it around the deck railing in frustration. I told it I would let it live if it would keep to itself.
It did.
It just bloomed this past week, and now there are at least ten very happy bees belly up at the bar.
In addition to peppers and tomatoes, this year we tried growing cantaloupe. I've never done that before. Initially we had tons of yellow flowers, and we were so excited. Then the heat came, and though we watered and watered, I guess they couldn't stand the weeks of triple-digit temperatures. Because after the temperature fell below 95, we saw little yellow flowers again. And then, miraculously ....
There's even a baby. I never thought of fruit as cute before.
Happy Friday!
So ... if you don't like sponsored posts, which I totally get, come back tomorrow because I have something more normal for me planned then.
Most people who visit Surrender, Dorothy already know that I work for BlogHer. And so, of course, any time my colleagues in the publishing network want to try something new, I always volunteer. I say YES WE SHOULD ALL MAKE MORE MONEY. It's not always a popular opinion in the blogosphere, but I think art + commerce = novels, so why not have art + commerce = Rita's Blog.
Anyway, today I'm talking about Olay and Proctor & Gamble. Proctor & Gamble has an ecommerce initiative I'm trying on for size. It's an online store, and if you buy things there, I get paid a little bit, very much like the mphoria store in my left sidebar. So far, I have not noticed the ability to buy tile for Chateau Travolta's kitchen floor, but that's where all the extra income in my world goes -- toward stimulating the home improvement sector's economy.
Here's my story about Olay. When I was in college, I went to this bar in Iowa City called Joe's. It's still there. It's actually where I met Beloved for the first time, but this time wasn't that time. This time I was there and drunk, I believe, and I ran into a woman who told me she was thirty. THIRTY. And I was all, "Why aren't you wrinkled?" Because I, in my 21-year-old stupor, thought anyone over the age of 25 was wrinkled. Now I realize we all look fabulous forever, right? I mean, I'm 38 and I look amazing. (cough)
So this ancient 30-year-old pointed at me with her beer bottle and said, "START MOISTURIZING NOW." And I was so moved by this statement, that the next day I went to the drugstore and stared at the wall of moisturizers. The only one I'd ever heard of was Oil of Olay, so I bought a bottle. I have put Oil of Olay on my face every day for the past 17 years. It seemed counter-intuitive, because I actually have oily skin, but I realized it was helping even out my skin tone. My guess is that parts of my face were all THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OIL HERE WE MUST MAKE MORE and once I started moisturizing, my oil glands felt comforted and stopped overreacting. Because yes, even my oil glands overreact. #catastrophize
The product I've selected to tell you about in the P&G store is
It says "great value" right there!
I just copied and pasted that because I can't spell "regenerist" on my own. I think they might have made that word up. I haven't used this particular pack, but I have used all of the lower-priced Olay products and they are all great. I also appreciate the price point. You can pay the GNP of a small African country for skin care products, but I'm frugal and don't do stuff like that. And, you can get 10% off your order if you go through my awesome link on that huge type from now through August 31, 2012. There is free shipping on any order over $25. And I'm supposed to tell you P&G is an Olympic sponsor so there is a lot of cool Olympic-themed stuff in there, like this.
For those of you with record-breaking periods. FTW! ha ha ha
Either way, START MOISTURIZING NOW. Especially if you are older than 21. My tip from me to you. And if you need some P&G stuff, by all means, buy it through this link so I can rip up my lineoleum a little sooner. (And tell your mother, who probably moisturizes, too.)
The kitchen is the last room not in the basement that needs to be remodeled in Chateau Travolta. The country rose wallpaper has been scraped off, the dark wood wainscoting pried from the walls, one arch put in, the walls painted, new windows installed. We still need to replace the half-hanging-off cabinets and the counter top and the back splash that is half-missing and covered in clear packing tape above the stove. Oh, and the tile. The linoleum is still missing a chunk from when we installed tile in the half-bath.
And for the past year or so, we haven't had blinds in the bay windows or above the sink. There were blinds there once, aluminum Venetian blinds stained with rust and bent in places. When the man came to replace the windows, he pulled them off, and I just threw them away, thinking we'd buy new blinds soon.
"Soon" turned, as it does, into seasons passing and nights growing shorter and an entire winter of eating dinner in front of windows that became mirrors at six in the evening, of learning to be fully dressed and wearing a hat when I came downstairs for breakfast on weekend mornings, to being on display for the two families living behind us. Not that they are total spies, but how could you not look in at night when the lights are blazing and there we are, living our lives like television characters?
I hated it. So in February, we got the windows measured for shades. I wanted Roman shades, not being aware that Roman shades cost more than a new sidewalk. I readjusted my expectations and picked out some pretty woven roller shades at half the price of the Roman but twice the price of What the Fuck.
And we waited for the money tree to grow.
Then earlier this summer, an unexpected freelance gig came along, and lo and behold, it paid EXACTLY the amount of the shades. Which I totally took to be fate. So we ordered the shades.
A nice man and woman came to Chateau Travolta yesterday and installed them. I gave them cinnamon rolls left over from the cul-de-sac sleepover last Saturday. And then I drew my shades.
I was shocked at how boxed-in I felt. Apparently I'd grown accustomed to having the world see in, because it meant, too, that I could see out.
