Corybantic

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Word of the day – corybantic – frenzied; agitated; unrestrained.

My littlest grandson Corey has his agitated unrestrained moments, but underneath that he’s considerate and very loving.  A funny mix.

But the Y in this word is pronounced “uh”, not “ee”, and corybantic rhymes with “romantic”.  So don’t say you didn’t learn anything today.  Or that you wouldn’t love Corey if you met him.

My corybantic days of this long redecorating summer are drawing to an end.  The main floor is done except for a couple of light fixtures and some serious dusting.  There have been times when I would flop myself down, utterly exhausted, wondering why my shoulders ached, then think well you just moved sixteen pieces of furniture, you idiot.  I’m not always polite when I talk to myself.

The wall colour in bedroom one is called Swiss coffee.  It is not yellow, even though that’s how it appears in the photo.  More of a creamy white.  Bedroom two paint colour is called plantation tan and also not as lovely in the photo as in real life.  Since we are not familiar with plantations or what the sun on one might do to ones skin colour, we decided to rename this colour maple walnut ice cream, more in keeping with my edible colour theme.  Not sure if you would want to eat a pelican, but pelican is the name of bedroom three and the ensuite bath colour.  Nothing hung on the walls yet of the bedroom three/art area space because I can’t decide what “splash of colour” goes with pelican and cream.  Maybe blueberry?  Or raspberry?  Or some other fruit?

And that’s it!  No more painting of ceilings and walls!  I even cleaned out and reorganized my junk drawer, sorting things like screws into pointy and non-pointy ends, because nails and not nails wasn’t sufficiently specific.  So now what am I supposed to do with myself??

Happily I remembered I have a blog.  And a brand new art area chock full of misplaced and mixed up supplies, and a project, to do a couple of coffee pictures for my daughter.  And I have cupboard shelves that need cleaning and maybe painting and definitely new lining.  And things that need moving downstairs from up, and upstairs from down  and speaking of stairs, the carpet on them is awful.  And then there’s the basement, but that’s a project for another day.  Or series of months.  And the main bathroom needs renovating, which should have been done first, but too late for that.

So.  It appears I am not really done.  But it does feel like a chapter has ended.  Corybantic no more.  Until the next wave of redecorating mania hits me and sweeps me away I guess.

 

Sharing My World 59

Share Your World – 2016 Week 34

What is your favorite comfort snack food?

Chips.  I will even snack on the ones I don’t like (ketchup, barbecue, salt and vinegar, anything extra spicy) simply for the salty taste.  Well, it’s not sugar, is it?  But still bad for you.  I don’t know why I crave salt.  And I wish I could truthfully say fruit and raw vegetables are my favourite, because they’re great and I love them, just not the way I love sour cream and onion or all dressed or nacho chips.  It’s kind of like being drawn to the Fonz in high school when you know Richie would be the smarter choice.

Is the paper money in your possession right now organized sequentially according to denomination and with the bills right side up and facing the same way?

I had a five dollar bill and a handful of change in my purse but I gave it to my daughter the other day because she had a flat tire in my driveway and had to call AMA to get it changed and then the spare tire needed air and apparently you need change for those air machines.  The AMA guy was nice enough to follow her to the nearest gas station and help her out with that too so that she could drive home.

So the answer to the question is – there is no paper money in my possession right now.  There very rarely is because I use bank cards for everything.  But if there was, YES, it would be that anally organized.  Anyone who has ever worked with cash knows that’s what you have to do with it if you want to sleep at night.

If you were a mouse in your house in the evening, what would you see your family doing?

Snacking on chips.  That would be just me since I’m the only one here at the moment and no one is around to give me disapproving looks about my snack choices.  I need to stop buying those stupid things.  Also if I’m not moving furniture and various messes around I am doing important stuff on my iPad.

Would you rather not be able to read or not be able to speak?

I can go for days without speaking, except for the occasional expletive when some redecorating procedure goes wrong.  Then when I do talk on the phone or in person my voice sounds all weird and hoarse until I get it going again.  So as long as there’s texting and emails I guess it would be no great loss for me to give up speaking.  I do say some pretty stupid boring things.  But give up reading?  I hope that never happens.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

Another room is finished!  But just when it looks like the redecorating phase of my summer is nearing completion,  (two bedrooms to go), I decide to rip up the master bedroom carpet.  I hope this helps to explain my latest absence.  I also got the last stipple ceiling scraped off and chucked out.   And I moved three bookcases and a gazillion books into the space that is now no longer my art room.  Because the art room is moving to a new space in the master bedroom now that there’s so much space in there with the books gone and a smaller dresser and no dust collecting monster headboard.  But this latest rearrangement has to wait until the room is all painted and the floor is tiled.  Or something is done to the floor.  At the moment the bare sub floor is looking better than the carpet ever did.

So that’s my jumbled up upside down world to date.  I need some chips.

Kids In the Hall

Yesterday I finished the hallway.  It’s a little weird how happy I am about that.  Only one picture allowed (new hall rules) so it’s my collage picture of some ancestors at various stages in their lives.

Because there is less light here the colour looks more orange and the white really stands out.

Ok, I expect that’s about all the time you would like to spend in my hallway admiring walls and doors. And a surprisingly clean floor.  Let’s go around the corner.

And turn left.  And then back up and turn right.  You know, so you don’t get lost.  New shelf rules too.  Two or less items per.  I just noticed one has three things.  Oh well.

The colour behind the couch is called “tea dance”.  It’s looking a little more pink here than it does in real life.  And notice how different my “melted marshmallow” looks in bright morning light.

I’m not sure what this suspended slab of stone or concrete under the fireplace is called, because don’t mantles go above, not below?  Anyway, it was ugly and I always kept it completely covered in stuff.  It’s a perfect place for candles.  And other assorted junk.  And did I mention ugly?  Well now it’s covered in a grey textured paint which looks and feels like rough stone.  And I no longer feel the need to pile loads of crap on top of it.

My daughter made me take away those little elephants. She is ruthless.

And finally, my art corner.  Sadly neglected for now but not forever.

Because there has to be a mess somewhere.

I should have cut the grass today, but it was just too hot.  These days you have to get out there between thunderstorms. And despite all the rain, the heat manages to keep the grass looking half dead, especially in the front where it kind of matters.  Anyway, I had a nap instead.  Painting wears me right out and it sometimes takes days to recover from all my hard work.  Ha!  No, I don’t really believe that either.

I think we might be half way finished!  This is another picture from the kitchen because I forgot to add it last post.

In case you were worried I might have chucked out the stove.

Back at it tomorrow.  Two bedroom ceilings on the agenda.  Or more naps. Hard choices to be made.

Take It Away

After the back entranceway transformation with all the baskets, the kitchen was up next for an update. The worn floor should be replaced, but frankly, I don’t care.  We replaced it once already years ago.  And the cupboards are old and kind of horrible on the inside, but here’s what I figure. Someone will buy this place and rip out the cupboards and the floor and be all pleased with themselves when it’s done.  So I won’t deprive the future owners of that pleasure and expense.  I just wanted the blue and sand and beachy theme gone and the ceiling white again with no stains and no gawd awful fluorescent light buzzing over my head.  Here’s how the cupboards looked before, going up to the ceiling.
And here’s how they look like they don’t do that anymore.
That bit of white at the top really brightened things up.  There is a different mess on the counter in the second picture and the window frame is also now white.

I thought the backsplash tiles were white but here they are going from half-assed white to blinding white.

The colour we decided on for the walls is called melted marshmallow. It’s sort of peachy.  So yeah, I have gone from beachy to peachy.  This colour is now on the kitchen and living room walls and will soon be down the hallway because I just taped six doorways and all the baseboards there. I never counted how many doors there are in the hallway before but that’s a lot of doors.  They were all wood and now they are all white.  The hallway is no longer gloomy.  This is the linen closet door where I started.  Because I like to start at the end and work my way to the beginning.

But back to the kitchen.

Because the walls were blue at the bottom and sandy yellow at the top they begged for this type of work in progress art by my creative daughter.  I’m kind of sorry we painted over it.  And even though the paint included primer, the line where the blue stopped was hell to get rid of.  So there are at least three coats of paint here, and this corner in particular where there is less light is a lovely warm almost orange.  Other places the colour looks much more pale.  So even though this colour is all over the place, it looks like different shades in different lights.

There is a story behind the newly spray painted spoon and fork which I’m sure I have shared elsewhere.  This wall looked a little off balance to me before I added that plate on the left. Then all I could think of was hey diddle diddle the dish ran away with the spoon.  But look at that other wall with just ONE thing hanging there!  I’ve come a long way, baby.

This last one is in the living room by the front door where the colour is beautifully soft.

The best decluttering idea ever, which I’m so happy my daughter shared with me, is to remove absolutely every bit of decor that’s movable from every room in the house.  Then once a room is all fresh and clean and painted, carefully choose only things you love dearly and would be sad about if they were gone to add the finishing touches. Less is more.  And move all that weird shit you bought on impulse out to the garage.

Okay, wake up!  I’m done for now.  I will share my living room/art room journey next.

Or I might tell you about my dermatologist appointment because that’s where I’m headed this afternoon.  The excitement rarely ends around here.

Rabbits In the Rain

Rational me knows that the appearance in my backyard of crows and magpies and jackrabbits and squirrels and cats and ducks (yes, there have been ducks!) is completely random and entirely insignificant.  There is no sane reason for me to be counting these creatures and keeping track of their arrivals and departures.  But I do.

Weird superstitious me believes in omens and portents and prophecies of doom and assigns grave importance to…well….pretty much everything.  Because you never know, right?  If the cosmos is sending me messages I would like to be receptive, not oblivious.

Let me tell you about the crows.  It’s been a crow summer here.  These big black shiny creatures swoop down four and five at a time onto the grass and squawk at each other like mad things. Magpie conversations seem almost polite in comparison.  They are devious and mean looking.  One in particular, perched somewhere in the big pine tree in a neighbors yard,  eventually lost his voice I guess, or moved on.  For weeks he just would not shut up.  But now he has.

So What Does That Mean???  One for sorrow?

Maybe somebody shot the bastard.

Anyway.  There are no crows today.  Today is W’s birthday.  If you’ve been paying attention you will notice my last post was on MY birthday three months ago.  I am fine.  Just finally doing things worth writing about and not having time to write about them because I’m too busy doing things.  I feel like I sat on my derrière for the first year or so of my retirement and now I’m not doing that so much.

My kitchen and living room are cleaned up, painted, decluttered and tastefully decorated. Ha!  Notice there’s no pictures of that so you can’t dispute the tasteful part.  Instead I have shared jackrabbits and white spray paint on our pitted driveway through the kitchen window.  That probably means something too.  Like I should stop gazing out rain streaked windows and get on with the rest of the house.  I’ve taken a few ‘before, during and after’ shots. And then some after-after ones after I changed my mind again.  We had a garage sale the end of July and got rid of a lot of stuff.  The garage has now become home for what remains until my daughter picks it up and it gets donated to some poor unsuspecting charity.

It’s been lovely to have lots of time and no deadline getting the painting done.  The house is old and there are always new challenges and surprises.  I am now an expert at concealing gaps on wooden window and door frames and baseboards, imperfections which showed up when we painted them white, with sealant.  House glue!  Awesome stuff.  Hallway, three bedrooms and main bath to go!  All in various stages of work in progress.

The crows have been worrisome, but now I think maybe they were not trying to give me bad news.  Because after all my doctor visits and tests  and consultations, I finally have a medical diagnosis.  I will save that for another post, and don’t worry, it won’t have to wait for some random relatives birthday.

Unless the crows freak me out again simply by being their normal bird brained annoying selves.  It’s their fault this post wanders around all over the place.   At least I got it done.  Longest break ever.  But I think I’m back.