Busy

I didn’t go away again, I swear. I have been busy, which is ridiculous when you factor in the fact that I’m a part time bookstore clerk, my kids are “grown up” and, um, some other reason why my being busy is impossible in today’s America. However! It is not true. I have in fact been ridiculously busy because I have a giant Project. I am, in fact, enjoying all the fun and games of moving without actually leaving the house: I’m completely redesigning my house.

To that end, I moved my bedroom to where the computer room used to be and moved the computer room to where my bedroom used to be. This necessitated emptying the computer room, which was alarmingly full for a small room and then painting it and painting it, of course, did not turn out to be the simple, cheap one day job I had in mind. I have only a few things to say about the whole painting experience:

1. Antique white should not be beige. Corollary: OK I should have opened the damn paint before I got home.

2. Making lines of beige and red and black and using a sponge roller to kind of mix them over a strange and heinous blue that’s been there umpteen years does not, in fact, produce a deathless work of art that looks like storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Shocking, I know.

3. Beige will not magically start looking better even if you paint the entire room, including the stormy masterpiece, and use the whole gallon up. And beige over blue turns a kind of disconcerting dirty orange.

4. Light purple, even really light purple that you buy late at night at Lowes when you’re practically in tears, which is probably why you didn’t really grasp this, is still pretty goddamn purple.

And 5. Even though Auds came in and said, “whoa! This is my dream room – when I was 8.” and even though OK, there is a certain terrible Disney Princess feel to the color, I have gotten to the point in the last week where I actually really like it.  I painted all the trim gray – it turns out that if you want the exact gray of a Nantucket barn (if they still have barns on Nantucket; I’m basing this on some dimly remembered 19th century New England painting) you could do worse than to mix a little black with Disney princess purple – and that toned it down a lot. I’m hanging art, bit by bit, that helps too. And I gave the hell in and hung up dark purple curtains because, fuck it, I might be 50 outside but I’m probably 8 inside and my purple room with the purple curtains is pretty purply awesome.

Meanwhile, since I don’t spend enough time organizing books at work, I then had to clean and organize about 1000 books. I threw out a lot. I took a lot in to work to trade for other books (yes, I know. Me working at a bookstore is pretty much like sending the crackhead to work at the crack factory) and yet I still don’t have enough bookshelf space.  This should be impossible but then books and bookshelves do tend to break the space/time continuum a bit – it is known. Hee. Naturally, I have also now gone deep into a cataloging stupor and there are piles of books everywhere, waiting to be somehow reunited with other books by that author that I know are in some other – totally full – bookcase somewhere.

And I am rehanging art and cleaning things – everything, but everything, was covered with five years worth of horrible dog hair and dust and dead stink bugs, bleargh – and moving things around and doing things like opening boxes I haven’t touched for five years. This is how I wasted an entire afternoon reading my great 2nd cousin Louis’ memoirs (“we threw 2 or 3 small Cubans over the bar”) and my father’s age 8 diary (marble composition notebooks are eerily the same as they were in 1934 but not as many things are grand or swell) and my something cousin DeWitt’s booklet Leaves and Shoots of the Atkinson family, which contains four pages on a General who might or might not be related to us but DeWitt didn’t want to waste the research so he put it in. This is all fascinating but meanwhile, I am stumbling around the boxes and piles of books and the box of 750 phone chargers for phones we haven’t owned since the 90s. And this is just Phase One.

Yes, Phase One. There will be a Phase Two. I am eager to get to Phase Two, now, because Phase One has gotten piddly and boring and horrible and I want to get back to big, giant and horrible, but I’m not allowing myself to touch Phase Two until Phase One is completed.

Phase Two involves converting the living room into a dining room, or at least a room with a big table in it and moving the couch to the new computer room and moving the shelves in the kitchen to the other side of the kitchen and then, somehow, some way, making new shelves and countertops in the kitchen, all without spending any money. My entire budget for this remodeling has been spent – I had budgeted, like, $40 but I spent more than that on paint. I am not fazed. I have plastic shelves on the porch that I think might work out okay in the kitchen and I think Phase Two is going to be SWELL! And I might paint the living room!

Probably somebody should stop – or shoot – me now.

Oh and in other news, I have also spent an inordinate amount of time gnashing my teeth and wailing and rending my garments about the complete disaster at Flickr. I am so angry and so basically distraught over the bullshit that Yahoo is pulling over there. I’ll do a whole post on it, maybe – many others have – and meanwhile, the whole thing has disrupted the hell out of Phase One, because I’m moving all 10,000 of my pictures. Probably to 500px but while I like it there so far, it seems a little too intimidating and professional to put, you know, all my pictures there. Although I may yet but still, goddamnit, Flickr was a wonderful thing until Yahoo decided to fuck it all up last week and I will miss it but I no longer trust them as far as I could throw them, so that’s that for me, I’m afraid.