Welcome to NOVEMBER! Unbelievable that the year is so close to being over... Did you know that November is National Blogging Month? Yeah, me neither - I just read about it on my niece's blog - she had a link to a website for it and everything. Obviously, I'm not motivated enough to add it here for you - it's NaBloMo or something like that if you want to Google it. (Fascinating that "Google" is now a verb, eh?)
Anyway, I've been absent for a bit, and thought I'd better post something! Today I just have some random Same Subject musings, and just general tidbits, I guess... An alternate title for this post would be "I Really Should Be Working", but I've hit total burnout on my "job" and can't seem to motivate or care about doing it (the downside of working for yourself - no one looking over your shoulder to see if you're actually working...or is that an upside...?) I started dismantling a cushion cover to use as a pattern for the new ones, and that's as far as I got.
Have you seen the "Makeover Realities" show where people are remodeling their house and things go horribly wrong? We're living that on a not-quite-horrible scale over here... I've been completely offline for three days because the room where the computer lives looks like this right now:
That is the backside of the bathroom wall (note the medicine cabinet in its stark whiteness). We're building a new wall in this room - technically a bedroom - it will be our office/guest room when we're done. The bathroom is claustrophobically small (I have to stand in the hallway to dry my hair because there's no room in the bathroom for me to bend over to flip my hair down to dry it, for example), so we planned to bump one wall back 18" into the adjoining bedroom, and I had a painting fiasco, which bumped the priority for this project to VERY VERY HIGH!
Here's the scoop: We were having guests for dinner last Saturday evening, and I thought it would be a good idea to paint the bathroom so it would be all pretty instead of all patchy from installing a new toilet and patching holes in the wall. I went off to Home Depot to get paint and chose what I thought would be a deep sage green to match the shower curtain (poppies and leaves), and got the new paint-and-primer-in-one on the recommendation of the paint counter guy. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME! The paint literally slid off the wall, didn't cover well AT ALL, and was a horrible smashed-peas-baby-food green. I told Sherry about it and she said "It can't be as bad as you say", so I sent her pics, to which she responded, "Oh, dear God! Ok, ok - you win!" Here is the evidence:
That second picture is after Greg tried to cover the horribleness with sheetrock mud - it just pulled more paint off the wall - perfect! Yeah - on to Plan B, which is to texture the walls with new plaster, then paint a considerably more neutral color. We decided that now would be a good time to bump the wall back, so we didn't have to texture the old wall, then do it again with the new one later on. Since demolition makes considerable amounts of dust and mess, I moved the computer out of harm's way into our bedroom until the dust settled - literally!
Here's where the Same Subject theme comes in... I've known for quite some time that I need to make a career change and I see warning signs of moving back into depression because I haven't done it yet (refer to the burnout comment earlier). As I was going about the busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which is a whole different thing) of this morning, I kept seeing that partially framed wall and thought it a fitting metaphor for my life - it's Under Construction. Just as this house will always have something else requiring time and attention and re-working, so will I. Every time I think I'm at an Ending Point, I will realize that it's just the Beginning of the next thing. That concept is even in a song: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..." (Closing Time, Semisonic)
Another tidbit on the Domino Effect: I've been working in really poor lighting because a ceiling fan and its little bulbs don't really throw enough light across a wide enough area to do the job very well. It's fine for ambience, but not for sewing and stamping and all. I bought a couple of flourescent lights (yes, the ugly shop kind) to install so I could see what I was doing (not to worry - I do have a plan for camouflaging them into something pretty), but thought that I should paint the ceiling before I did that. Then I realized that when I cut in the ceiling I would most likely get paint on the un-stripped wallpaper, thereby gluing it permanently to the wall. Yup - I spent eight hours Saturday stripping the rest of the wallpaper, and two hours Sunday morning scrubbing off the glue residue. The good news: now I can start making that room pretty instead of just workable!
Just for fun, I'm sharing a couple of Halloween tidbits, too. I was really short on time, but wanted to do something for the folks I work with/for, so I made witch hat treats that I saw somewhere out there on the Internet:
Bad pic, I know, but that's the best I could do before I had to run... This is all you need to make them:
You just squeeze a little blob of icing onto the center of the cookie, then smoosh an unwrapped Hershey kiss into the icing. The hardest part is unwrapping all of the kisses! One package of cookies makes 40 hats, and I had kisses and icing left over... I took them to the office of the parent company, Decor, and also to The Fabric Mill, where the girls were all dressed up for the occasion:
They were havin' a yabba-dabba-doo time, I'm tellin' ya! Jackie was Betty, Della was Barney, Kim was Wilma, Keli was The Grand Poobah, and Cindy was Pebbles (isn't she the cutest?) Here's the shot before this shot:
That's Holly disguised as Dino sniffin' around in the foreground. She lives at Della's house, along with three other rescued chihuahuas (Holly is a mix and I don't remember where she was rescued from, Josie and Lola were puppy mill mommies, and Alfie is a neglected pup rescue). Della refers to them collectively as "the Mexicans", and is goofy about them - totally attached and smitten and all...
Well, I guess I've wasted as much time as I can on this blogging project, so I'd better actually go cut out the cushion covers or paint the ceiling or something... I'm going to try to post every day this month for NaBloMo! We'll see how that goes... 'Bye for now, and thanks for stopping by!
OMG, this is why NOTHING gets done in my house. I start with one idea, then 72 projects (and 3 years) later, I actually get to it. :-)
Posted by: leslie | November 03, 2009 at 08:07 AM
Wow you have your hands full! If it's any consolation I've had paint fiascoes myself over the years. Have you considered getting your paint from Sherwin Williams? Good paint and they have never steered me wrong. All of my afore mention fiascoes were prior to finding Sherwin Williams. LOL What are you considering for a career change? I'm sure whatever it is, you'll do just fabulously. You are one talented woman. :) I can't wait to see your room when it is all pretty.
Posted by: Jenn Embry | November 03, 2009 at 08:19 AM