Living with your folks, the beginning of the end.

I wake up these mornings and think, "I still live in the basement." Nine times i have done this. My optimistic side says, I am nine days closer to humility.
It's not just a matter of pride. At the top of the list, it's a matter of spiders. After that, mice, then millipedes. Then there's a myriad of emotional implications and social considerations. I hate it all. I just want to wear the truth on my forehead so we can all understand, despite how his pride would be affected. My husband screwed up, and this is what it takes to get him on a better path. I'm doing the best i can to help him without destroying myself.
It's a matter of mental illness. Of that i am not ashamed. Perhaps because most of my closest acquaintances have some sort of neurosis. I expect most readers will empathize with our state.

Painting the Hood over the Range

Last summer i painted our kitchen cabinets. The floor still looked disgusting. Last week we got new flooring in our kitchen/dining room. That made the walls look ugly. I painted the walls. That made the window/doorway trim look ugly. I painted the whiny needy trims. THANK GOODNESS the ceiling fits in, clean and white. The only other unmodified surfaces left in the kitchen were the counter top, the built-in corner cabinet, and the hood over the stove. I haven't decided what to do with the built-in yet, and the counter tops aren't hideous. I tackled the hood yesterday.












It used to be a dirty off-white. I introduced it to a bottle of 'chrome' Rustoleum. The bottle reminded me how bad i am at spray painting. I blamed the bottle for having a leak. There's now an area of our new floor, next to the stove, that is shinier than the rest.
The result doesn't exactly look professional, but i think it's an obvious improvement. And it's shiny. How can you go wrong with shiny?
Don't answer that.

Wannabe

I recently went through an addiction to Apartment Therapy's Re-Nest blog. Now i find myself wanting to fashion my blog (and the interior of my house) after theirs. The main problem with that is the word 'fashion'--i've never held much respect for fashion, except as a suggested guideline. However, i must admit that i have not escaped its influence. You won't catch me wearing tapered leg jeans on a good day.
BUT i regress.
So i've started posting pictures of my projects on here. Maybe it's an improvement over my thought-full ramblings. Don't get your hopes up, i'm not going to stop rambling anytime soon. Now that i've found how easy it is to add pictures, maybe i'll add some thoughtful pictures.
Enough of this disgusting self-blog-reference. I'm going to post a project now.

Artsy shelf

I painted a shelf, and gave it to my sister for Christmas. My husband suggested i put pictures of it on the internet.
I didn't just paint, i let my creativity flow freely through a brush onto the facets of the shelf. The resulting shapes were surprising.

It felt so good to use this part of my brain recreationally for a while. Most of the time, the creative part of my brain is working full tilt at predicting ways my children are going to get themselves killed in their current surroundings.

Speaking of my kids, they helped paint. A did the side facing you in the picture above, except for the footprints. I used S for those. I was very impressed with D's work, the purpleness you see below:What magnificent shading. I painted most of what you see on the inside of the shelf. My sister seems to like it. I was going to give her a wallhanging, but it turned out badly so i gave it to my sister-in-law in Utah, so i wouldn't have to see it again for a long time. Should i post a picture of that, too?

Adventures in Crazy Homemaking

There was a time when I was a child when we couldn't afford a clothes dryer. When winter approached, my parents hung rope back and forth through the basement. I remember my brother and his friends playing Axis and Allies at a card table in between the dangling clothes. I'm not sure I'd want to hang clothes in my basement now. It's pretty small, and is inhabited by feral cats. My dryer works fine, but I can't afford much electricity.
An idea popped in my head one morning. Later that morning, my husband came home from an appointment to find a sign on the door that leads upstairs.
"Beware of low-flying laundry."

We keep the stairs door closed to keep the heat on the main floor. The furnace can't seem to pump much air to the top floor, so we don't use it much. What better place to put laundry to dry, than in the stairwell where warm air leaks upwards from the main floor? I can fit about a load and a half in this space. It takes about 36 hours to dry a load of jeans, but it's FREE!


The chicken wire is a different story. It was one of our first adventures in home ownership. The rails above the stairs are wide enough apart for even a large child to slip through, much less a chicken. I think it's going to become fashionable, as I've seen it in a friend's house as well, used in the same way.

New Favorites at the left

I added a new favorite podcast and comic. Radio Lab has intriguing and enlightening stories, undiminished by the mind-bending/ear-grating mixes and clips of 'sound'. Jad has a degree in modern music, and it shows. I love listening to the stories he finds, but sometimes I have to mute the interludes.
XKCD is written by a very smart guy, who seems to have a similar brain as me. Many of his comics find me yelling, 'I said that exact same thing in high school!' Unfortunately, some of his comics offend moral (or, at times, intestinal) fortitude.

It has come to my attention that there are a lot of 'Mom Blogs' out there. Blogs where young moms relate their child-rearing tales with whit and clever humor or ranting rage, sprinkled with tear-jerking expressions of adoration for those blessed little toes. It's really great literature, don't get me wrong.

But this isn't one of those blogs.

This is me escaping from all that mush to make sure that there really is a person in me, not just a dispenser of household needs. Yes, I'm tooting my own horn, curling up in a self-centered ball, but it's okay because I don't do this very often and this is the internet, so I can do whatever I want.

So, what is it I want?
A huge garden, some goats, a hypoallergenic dog, and lots of visitors. That's what I want this week, anyway. It's subject to change without notice.
I'm really having garden withdrawals. Being stuck inside the house is not healthy for me. There are a few things I could work on outside, but it's cold out there. Even if I bundle up and brace myself for the chill, my little S girly girl will only last minutes before her lips turn purple and she squeals like a piglet. I don't dare leave her inside alone for more than five minutes, for fear she'll find something to rip apart in retaliation. So I'm trapped inside, dreaming of planting amidst the piggy squeals.