That Is Not My Coat (and that's okay)
As of last weekend, the living room is painted. Only a year and a half after I moved in! I'd really stopped seeing the (very, uh, saturated) red/coral it was painted, but I got a nice light blue up on the wall and wow, it was like my shoulders went down two inches. I'm very pleased and do not at all miss the old color, even though Change is traditionally Bad. My parents came to help out - I think at least 50% because they knew if they didn't it would never happen - and we finished the whole thing in about four hours, I think. The only irritating bits were trim-related; there were literally four different colors of creamy and/or yellowy white down in the basement, and not one of them matched it. So now I have a tupperware of custom-mixed cream down there, which presumably will not stay liquid (I mean, maybe, but I don't trust the seal that much) but will at least provide an example for future colormatching.
(A brief entry in Conversations With My Mother: We found a spot that needed spackle and hadn't been done the day before. Mom went off to get the spackle; I passed her in the dining room and saw her heading for the living room with the spackle and my good silicone spatula.
ME: What are you DOING?
MOM: …what?
ME: That's a food implement!
MOM: You can just wash it!
ME: No. Put it back. We have a putty knife!
MOM: Yes, but I don't know where it is.
ME: …you can use a piece of metal silverware if you want.)
Now I need to figure out whether to paint the foyer the same color. I think probably yes; on the one hand, painting it something different would define the space, but on the other hand that will lead to being able to see large chunks of three different wall colors from the couch, which seems like maybe a little much, no matter what suggestions some people may have made about rainbow apartments.
***
Foyer or foy-yay? I've realized that I think of public buildings as having foyers and private as having foy-yays, but I think I'm going to try to Americanize and go to foyer for everything, because I feel faintly silly breaking out the French pronunciation.
***
So I'm doing some work right now that involves going into restricted parts of the city's tunnel and subway systems, and this week we went down searching for a connection between a particular subway station and the Central Artery. This was fine until we turned a corner and were suddenly in a section where all the lights were out, there were a couple of inches of water on the floor, there was random detritus everywhere, and the walls were unfinished slurry instead of concrete. I swear to God it was like something out of a monster movie, where the idiots go into the dark spooky area even though the audience knows they shouldn't. We only had one set of rubber boots, so one guy went ahead to the actual connection point, and I told him that if he wasn't back in fifteen minutes we were leaving him and saving ourselves. One of the other people there said that we'd call 911 first, because he's nicer than I am.
(The other funny part was that this tunnel was an emergency egress from the highway tunnel; it is connected to the subway system, but only through a locked door. Despite that, it has two speakers on the wall that announced, more clearly than in some actual subway stations, the arrival of trains. Apparently the tunnel escapees will be going to Wonderland.)
***
Crocuses blooming! Tulips coming up! Granted it was 23 degrees this morning but you can't have everything. And we didn't get snowed on Wednesday, so that was nice.
***
I went to the MFA last weekend to see their exhibit of Audubon prints, which were worth seeing. The hook for the exhibit was that they'd paired the prints (there was an embarrassed note about having taken apart a book for them back in the 1930s and how curators didn't do that sort of thing anymore) with short passages from Audubon's writing, which were interesting in the way that I always find that kind of close observation from the past interesting. Audubon did love his birds, although sometimes his love involved a significant amount of gunfire. (His description of a couple of birds was clearly a little put out at how difficult they made it to shoot them.) Somewhat ironically, the prints that I was most familiar with were the ones on the wall dedicated to now-extinct birds - because Audubon's images are often used in articles etc. about birds that went extinct before color photography. It's sad - they were that close, you know? Some species were out of luck no matter what, but there are others where you look at them and think, man, if you could've held on just a few more decades in a valley somewhere, you are totally charismatic enough to have made it once we started caring about that kind of thing. Oh well.
It will tell you something about my personality that when I was in the gift shop later, I saw The Obsessive Chef Cutting Board and thought "I WANT IT." Didn't buy it, mind you, since I have two perfectly good cutting boards. But I want it.
(A brief entry in Conversations With My Mother: We found a spot that needed spackle and hadn't been done the day before. Mom went off to get the spackle; I passed her in the dining room and saw her heading for the living room with the spackle and my good silicone spatula.
ME: What are you DOING?
MOM: …what?
ME: That's a food implement!
MOM: You can just wash it!
ME: No. Put it back. We have a putty knife!
MOM: Yes, but I don't know where it is.
ME: …you can use a piece of metal silverware if you want.)
Now I need to figure out whether to paint the foyer the same color. I think probably yes; on the one hand, painting it something different would define the space, but on the other hand that will lead to being able to see large chunks of three different wall colors from the couch, which seems like maybe a little much, no matter what suggestions some people may have made about rainbow apartments.
***
Foyer or foy-yay? I've realized that I think of public buildings as having foyers and private as having foy-yays, but I think I'm going to try to Americanize and go to foyer for everything, because I feel faintly silly breaking out the French pronunciation.
***
So I'm doing some work right now that involves going into restricted parts of the city's tunnel and subway systems, and this week we went down searching for a connection between a particular subway station and the Central Artery. This was fine until we turned a corner and were suddenly in a section where all the lights were out, there were a couple of inches of water on the floor, there was random detritus everywhere, and the walls were unfinished slurry instead of concrete. I swear to God it was like something out of a monster movie, where the idiots go into the dark spooky area even though the audience knows they shouldn't. We only had one set of rubber boots, so one guy went ahead to the actual connection point, and I told him that if he wasn't back in fifteen minutes we were leaving him and saving ourselves. One of the other people there said that we'd call 911 first, because he's nicer than I am.
(The other funny part was that this tunnel was an emergency egress from the highway tunnel; it is connected to the subway system, but only through a locked door. Despite that, it has two speakers on the wall that announced, more clearly than in some actual subway stations, the arrival of trains. Apparently the tunnel escapees will be going to Wonderland.)
***
Crocuses blooming! Tulips coming up! Granted it was 23 degrees this morning but you can't have everything. And we didn't get snowed on Wednesday, so that was nice.
***
I went to the MFA last weekend to see their exhibit of Audubon prints, which were worth seeing. The hook for the exhibit was that they'd paired the prints (there was an embarrassed note about having taken apart a book for them back in the 1930s and how curators didn't do that sort of thing anymore) with short passages from Audubon's writing, which were interesting in the way that I always find that kind of close observation from the past interesting. Audubon did love his birds, although sometimes his love involved a significant amount of gunfire. (His description of a couple of birds was clearly a little put out at how difficult they made it to shoot them.) Somewhat ironically, the prints that I was most familiar with were the ones on the wall dedicated to now-extinct birds - because Audubon's images are often used in articles etc. about birds that went extinct before color photography. It's sad - they were that close, you know? Some species were out of luck no matter what, but there are others where you look at them and think, man, if you could've held on just a few more decades in a valley somewhere, you are totally charismatic enough to have made it once we started caring about that kind of thing. Oh well.
It will tell you something about my personality that when I was in the gift shop later, I saw The Obsessive Chef Cutting Board and thought "I WANT IT." Didn't buy it, mind you, since I have two perfectly good cutting boards. But I want it.