Week Twenty Eight

Week Twenty Eight

Fig. A. The Tick

	Brittany's Bedroom We're pretty happy with most of the paint in the house. This is the exception. Parents were put on earth for a reason. Sure, some people might think that it's to provide food and shelter and instruction for their children, helping them become mature, responsible adults. Those are all good reasons, but the real reason is to keep kids from making bad paint decisions like this. Kids look at the wildest paint on the color chart and instantly declare that they want it for their room. They don't know how overpowering a color will be if all the walls are painted like this. We should have stopped her, but we didn't. She had paint chips she liked, and this is what we ended up with.
	The pink splotches on the walls are the other color she wanted. I think Kurt Cobain's walls were this color, and look what happened to him!
	Leisa called Frank over the weekend to put a stop to the pink paint job. He asked me to bring Brittany to the house on Monday to pick some new colors. Frank suggested a combination of teal and yellow, but Brittany rejected that. "Yellow attracts bees," she informed us. She doesn't want bees coming into her room. We then had a long discussion about what it's like to be stung by a bee. Helen Keller was a chatterbox compared to Brittany when we got to the house. Frank gave her a collection of paint colors. She sat down on the floor and thumbed through the big paint chip collection. Frank would ask her a question and she would just stare at him. She might nod or shake her head imperceptibly, but it was hard to tell. He got more paint chips for her. Finally, she poked her finger at an orangey color. We asked what she wanted to go with it, but we were met with silence and a quick shrug of her shoulders. She then indicated by pointing that she liked a blue on the third chart, as well as a blue on the first. They looked good together, so that's what we went with.
	Brittany's room, part two As soon as we got out to the car, it was like taking your thumb off the top of a shaken pop bottle. Everything she'd been to shy to say in the past twenty minutes came spraying from her mouth. "I liked that orange color because I thought it would be really cute if you put it with blue, but then I started worrying that it might be too dark in there, so I picked a different color and I think it will be really cool." Whew! By that evening, they had the room repainted. Here are the two blues she chose, and the Cottage White of the ceiling. Much more relaxing.
	While she was looking at paint chips, I was talking with Mark about the inside of her closet. He built these cool shelves.
	The TV Room Tuesday Morning. This is the new crown molding in the TV room. It'll match the crown in the living room, and will serve as a division point between the coved ceiling and walls.
	Tuesday Afternoon. The crown and walls are both painted. I told Frank that since it's a TV room, I'd like it to be kind of dark for watching DVDs. I told him that we wanted a blue, but he suggested brown. "Trust me," he said, "It looks really nice with the white trim." I believe him. Leisa isn't quite sure. Leisa wants shutters for the front window, and some sort of light-blocking shades for the west window.
	The Master Bedroom This whole house is starting to look like a commercial for UPS--"What can Brown do for you?" We have the two browns in the Master Suite. The shade on the right side of the corner is "Baked Potato." I think the other wall is "Oyster," and the ceiling is "Whisper." "Baked Potato" is also featured in the sitting room.
	By Tuesday evening, we have our pull-down attic staircase. I tried to go up it, but my back fat was getting in the way. It's a tight fit. I don't think we'll be storing really big stuff up here.
	While all the other stuff was going on inside, the stucco guys were getting busy on the outside. By Monday evening, they had their scaffolding up.

What a difference a day makes. Here's the house on Monday and here's the house on Tuesday. They still haven't added the pop-outs above the window and back doors, though. Hmmmmm.
And, I got a note from Roberta on Monday. There are now kittens living under the house. Some month ago, this news might have annoyed me. As the months have progressed, though, I have evolved and moved to a new plane. I no longer allow things like this to upset me. Chris told me about the note Monday morning. I shrugged and said "Huh." I think he was waiting for me to go ballistic. Not me. I'm calm Dave now. Roberta told me later that she thinks mama kitty brought them under the house so they could be closer to the food on her front porch. "Mean Dave," back in December, would've thought something like, "Yeah, and closer to my cat trap." But not me, I'm calm Dave. Then Mark called on Tuesday. We have an infestation of ticks, (probably introduced to the area and/or exacerbated by all the cats under the house). All these teeny bugs are crawling around on the dining room floor and walls and on the walls in the storage room and in the TV room and outside. Calm Dave looks forward to giving another exterminator another $600 because the cute little kitties brought ticks with them when they came to live under the house. Of course, we can't do anything about these bugs until the kitties are out from 'neath the house, as we would want them breathing icky toxic vapors so they'd die way in the corner of the crawlspace and lie under the TV room, stinking for months as the summer heat slowly mummifies their unreachable little kitty corpses. So calm Dave will just move back into the house in a few weeks and live with the cute little ticks embedding themselves in his skin, sucking until all his blood is gone, replacing it with some mutant aqueous Lyme Disease virus, until we're sure all of the kitties are happily out from under the house. I like kitties. I'm calm Dave.	Fig. A. Shown life size.
The Justin Report is on hold for a few days. He's on his way to Las Vegas to see his friend Jennifer graduate from high school. That'll probably be as close to a graduation ceremony as he gets until Brittany graduates. And speaking of Brittany, check out her Stanford Nine results. "Post high school" score levels on many of her tests! The Justin Report, Part Two Or not. Justin got stood up, and how! He and his cousin, Ryan, were supposed to ride to Vegas with some of Jennifer's relatives. Justin and Ryan were waiting to be picked up at Ryan's house on Wednesday morning. Justin got a call from Jennifer, who had just received a call from said relatives. They were already halfway to Vegas. They not only decided not to pick up Justin and Ryan, but they also decided not to tell them. How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"