Last week, I repainted the dining room.

Here’s a before:

Repainting wasn’t high on our priority list (we actually don’t mind the yellow that the previous owners had it), until we painted the kitchen blue, and then every time I looked from one room into the other, the contrast of the sunny yellow with the aqua blue felt like some kind of old-timey french circus tent. It was a pretty contrast, but seriously jarring. We’re looking for a softer, light-filled, relaxing look in our house.  Circusy is definitely not what I want to come home to.

I had wanted to repaint all the yellow – but that’s a large area, running from the front door through the entry hall, the living room, computer nook, and dining room. So I tried to talk myself into just painting the archway between the two rooms. But as time wore on and I got more fed up with the yellow, it soon turned to, “I know we have higher priority things than a new paint colour, but I swear to god if I get these things done this weekend THEN I GET TO SPEND THE WEEK PAINTING THE DINING ROOM. DEAL?!”

My mellow spouse knows better than (or doesn’t care enough) to contradict Imperial ALL-CAPS DEALS, so that’s what happened. I tackled doing our taxes on Saturday night with great fervour, organized our papers and receipts and then I woke up early on Sunday morning, feeling like a kid on Christmas and I jumped up, brewed some coffee, cleared out the dining room and started edging.

There’s the ‘after’. It looks white, but it’s technically a very pale grey. The colour is “Full Moon”. Ooooooooh.

I’m very happy with it. I feel like the wood in the room pops better now. Before it was just one big mess of warm tones against the yellow, but now it’s a nice contrast.

There’s so much more light in the room now.

Which is much better for photographing my food.

(Okay and also my children.)

And my stuff.

Alas, with incremental home improvement, every triumph is tempered with the sad list of things you wish were also done. We wanted to re-do the mouldings around the window while we had everything off the walls. We also wanted to put up different crown and paint it a glossier white so it would pop a little more against the grey, install taller baseboard, put a rosette on the ceiling over the chandelier and put some decorative mouldings and corbels in the archways. Oh yes, and those windows that are leaning against the walls, we’d like to hang them up – now that the room is so crisp and bright, it needs a little patina on the walls (which I suppose the kids’ dirty fingers will add soon enough).

For sure all those other things are coming eventually. Right now, though, I’m working on enjoying the present triumph.

Hello lovely peeps. It’s been a while, I know.

I gotta level with you; some shit went down last month and there was a period of time where I wasn’t coping so well with it. So rather than blogging, I did a lot of paper-journal-writing. Ian found me a sulfite free wine at my local liquor store and I did a lot of drinking, a lot of popcorn therapy  and a lot of mental and moral grappling with things. After a couple of weeks, I was more or less coping, just that situations were taking up a lot of my time, still, and blogging, having slipped already, wasn’t a priority to me. And then this week I realized that more than a month had passed.

So I’m trying to get back into the blogging groove. But I’m just going to post some pics off my phone, show you what I’ve been up to and ramble a bit, yes? (Aside: with regard to vagueness, which I realize can worry people, and also with regard to my own coping, I am actually fine. The stuff that went down was mostly someone else’s events and issues – I just take these things really hard and had a lot to process and was trying to figure out what I could do to help and subsequently have needed to rearrange a number of things in order to be there for people who need people right now.)

Anyhow, I have, otherwise, been pretty productive on some various projects. So let’s talk about that.

Last Sunday, at the end of a weekend fraught with social functions and maintenance work, I was suddenly, as I am habitually on sunday nights, seized with panic that the weekend had done nothing to advance our tasks and goals. And so I grabbed three projects and managed to make some good progress on all of them. I fetched some corbels we had been working on and put a couple of coats of varathane on them.

We need corbels for so many things, so I recently decided we should try making them. These ones will probably go toward holding up a bar-height shelf in our dining room, but we also need a number of them to go in archways throughout the house. There are two untrimmed archways in our livingroom/dining room space and eventually we want to add another one. There’s also an awkward space at the back of our upstairs hallway where the hallway opens onto a landing. The hallway can’t afford to be narrowed into a doorway because it’s already too narrow. But some corbels and a little arch at the top would delineate the spaces nicely.

Future corbels may also be more ornate – you know, with some additional details on the sides, etc. We shall see if I can expand my corbeling skills.

Anyhow, I also began taking apart a thrift store picture frame and painting it to turn it into a dining room chalkboard.

It still needs a couple of coats before it gets hung on the wall.

And I put together a fixture for this three-chain vintage light shade.

I had picked up the shade at a thrift shop a couple of years back, and it’s been sitting in my basement ever since. Unfortunately it didn’t have any part of any light fixture to go with the shade, and the shade had three holes, and 3 chain fixtures are not really the most common. So the shade sat around for years while my subconscious noodled the problem. When a neighbourhood friend of mine redid her bathroom recently, I told her I would totally take her fixture off her hands. It was just a brassy, seventies-style thing with a horrible totally retro frilly frosted shade, but I figured I could toss the shade, paint the fixture and do something with it. and then, on inspection, I saw three holes in the top fitting and concluded that I had found the fixture that could work for this vintage shade I had sitting around.

If anyone is ever interested, I can totally post more of a tutorial, or at least a parts list, to explain how the chain is fastened on there.

There are many, many more projects in the works around here.

We recently redid the kitchen ceiling, covering it with reclaimed fence-boards for a paneled look. Now we need to make a new light fixture for the kitchen (also using vintage shades).

I have a spice rack I want to paint and hang on the wall to disguise our thermostat. I want to put up the previously mentioned bar-height shelf in our dining room. I want to clean and organize an office space in the bedroom so that I can occasionally retreat to get some work done away from children and noise. I want to sew many, many slipcovers and paint all my rooms and make new pieces of furniture and cabinets.

I also have to really finish the above projects: put the final coats on the chalkboard and mount it, finish and mount the corbels, and I want to replace the acorn nuts on that light shade with ball nuts because I think it’ll look better.

After all the recent crappy situation went down with my friend, and while I was trying to sort out how to help, I said to Ian, “I’m going to quit working. Programming isn’t important when my life is full of people who might not know how important they are to me. I’m just going to devote all my time to being that person in the neighbourhood who fixes things for you, brings casseroles when things are going badly, watches your kids when you need a break, sets up coffee dates whenever you need to talk, and helps you paint your living room.” (Ian, for the record, was so very understanding about that rant/wish.)

But then also lately I’ve been saying, “I need to quit programming work and just work on all our household projects.”

I need to sort out my priorities. Let’s be honest, while I’m out having coffees with all the people I see more of these days, I’m also thinking, “I just want a couple weeks to buckle down and really program. God I miss deep programming.” I need three of me.

Four, since even if I could be there for all the people that I love, and fix up my house, and really program, I’d also want to be writing full time. Errrr… and dancing full time.

On a different topic, sometimes Ian and I joke about being musical soulmates. I think maybe it started with our mutual appreciation of Primus. And The Tragically Hip. And various other bands that we just agree are gold, and integral to a musically complete life. On the topic of Primus, we used to commiserate about the paucity of fellow Primus-lovers in our lonely teen years.

But the joke really solidified when we found ourselves agreeing on a lukewarm positivity about something like Soundgarden or some such. One of us said, “I love their music, I’m totally happy when I hear it playing anywhere. But it’s not like I ever thought to buy one of their albums or pursue being a fan.” And the other one said, “that’s exactly the space they occupy in my musical tastes.”

There are certainly differences. Ian adds bluesier and jazzier things into his repertoire. I love me some trashy 90s techno in a way that I don’t expect him to ever understand.

The other side of it is that there’s a way that your tastes grow in response to the person that you’re with. One day you’ll find yourselves drawn to the same pieces of furniture and you wouldn’t be able to say which one of you introduced that esthetic to your collective tastes – but it certainly is there because of the relationship, because of some design consensus between the two of you.

“I never used to appreciate old trucks before you. Now I’ve probably surreptitiously photographed a significant percentage of the city’s 60s Fords,” I told him once after coming back from Home Depot with pictures from the parking lot.

“Well, I never used to notice character home trim and mouldings before you,” he countered. But with his being a lover of vintage cars, and someone who appreciated a certain “old-timey” music and vintage aesthetic, Ian has certainly been receptive to my vintage-house love.

A couple of days ago, he arrived home from work and I began trying to explain to him how that afternoon I had been realizing that I wanted a different style of couch. (Eventually. Because our current couch is really perfectly serviceable.)

I fumbled through describing something camel-backed, and with some carved wood trim but not too fussy. 30s or 40s, maybe as late as the 50s, I said. Fabric covered, but not brocade or velvet. Probably something manmade, something reminiscent of fortrelle. With a few curvy lines – like a Queen Anne style, but not straight up last-century Queen Anne style. Probably not tufted. More like if someone in the 30s had bought something that was definitely 30s (modern to them), mostly art deco, but evoking a Queen Anne style.

Once we’d gone through that discussion and looked at a few sofa pictures and he’d agreed with most of my vision, I thought about how long it had taken me to explain that vision, and how at the beginning I had been concerned that he might not grasp what I was trying to describe and would seize on the wrong thing like “fortrelle” or “50s” and would say something scathing about how he didn’t think that sounded like my tastes. But I think we’ve been together long enough that he knows how long my descriptions will take and is fairly confident that he will like it once he’s grasped it, or will get to refine it if he doesn’t.

Today I sent him links to various woodworking projects. “You could make me this map-maker cabinet.” And he replied, “I like that a lot.”

And then, “I found the perfect design base for the shelves I want to build at the bottom of the stairs. It just needs three cupboard sections intead of two.” And he agreed, “I like that too. We just have to figure out how to replicate the finish on that piece.”

“The blog post on it says she stained it walnut and then sanded it down unevenly.”

“Oh!” he said, “maybe we need to sand down the corbels you stained this weekend.”

“I WAS JUST THINKING THAT! We are totally woodworking soulmates!” I told him.

So, add that one more thing to my list of project tasks. But then, maybe, hopefully, I will get them mounted and put a shelf on top of them.

I don’t think I could ever be a family court judge. there is just too much crap and vitriol to wade through – even in the cases that are more or less rational

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 I have been working very, very hard on some paid client work. as our goal is to pay off all our consumer debt this year, this will, ultimately, be helpful. but right now I’m sleep deprived and missing my evenings drinking tea and watching This Old House with Ian

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a friend of mine is going through resolving her divorce and custody in court. it is obviously more stressful for her than it is for me, but some of our conversations have stirred up some memories of my own that I am having a little trouble dealing with just lately

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I read through some of my old journals recently, and I keep thinking I just want to throw them all out. they never have the information I’m looking for when I go back through them. and if there’s anything in journaling that’s for other people, the stories in them aren’t the ones that I think are important to tell. maybe I could start new retrospective journals that went back and did tell the stories that I think are important

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my little cousin (pseudo-sister) is in London right now and then goes to Paris next week. I’m a hundred kinds of jealous, but also just so, so happy knowing that she’s having this adventure

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I took Hannah for a hair cut yesterday and asked for a pixie cut “like emma watson’s”. it is exactly what Hannah wanted and this morning when some of the other kindergartners said ‘you look like a boy’, she just beamed with pride and said, ‘well I know. that’s what I wanted!’

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one little boy who is a very good friend of hers, said ‘Hannah! Do you think my hair is still a little bit shorter than yours?’ and when I quipped, ‘nope, you’re pretty much twins,’ they stood in the hallway for a solid moment, frozen and beaming at each other until his mother said, ‘you know, they do kind of look alike,’ which seems exceptionally sweet because he is a slender, Indian boy and she is a round-cheeked white girl, but I guess that beaming and that moment of connection – oh and the haircut, of course – transformed them

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in the last few days we have received so much snow and the morning temperatures have been -25C, which seems like a slap in the face when the sun is shining so hard and the birds are singing their hearts out like it’s spring

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I’m so desperate for spring weather and a bit of a break from working, so I’ve been getting through each day saying, ‘soon you will be done these projects and it will be spring’. but today I am playing with the idea that instead of getting through today by looking ahead to better times, I should remind myself that this is part of what I am actively choosing for my life. Soon today will be nothing more than a tiny patch in a tapestry of days and of those days I want the pattern to say, “I chose a life with Saskatchewan winters, three kids and no sleep, I got so excited about new projects I was always spreading myself too thin – and I loved it!’”

Oh boy. I can tell today’s theme is going to be awkward sex talks for various developmental stages. Right now Hannah is unable to stop giggling over the information that grown ups have to get naked together in order to have babies.

We didn’t even get into mechanics. The nakedness info was necessary because when I tried to keep it simple by describing baby-making as “a special kind of cuddle that only adults do”, Hannah looked incredulous and said, “a CUDDLE?! Like how you cuddle a CAT??”

So then I clarified that it was a naked cuddle – and reiterated that only adults do it. And then she raised her eyebrows SO HIGH and I jumped to say, “Yup. It seems really weird. And it’s totally fine that you think it’s weird. ‘Cause it’s just an adult thing and even when you’re an adult, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.” And she started laughing and laughing and said, “well I guess I’m never going to have babies.”

Aaaanyhow. Also my oldest is fourteen. And, like, oh my god, how did that happen? So I’ve ordered a couple of teen sex books from amazon because even though I intend to step up my efforts on the talks, I feel like I’ll easily miss a lot. And I feel like if I do miss something or gloss over something, a book is a nice resource to return to when you need to go over something again. No fourteen year old wants to have to go to his mom saying, “I know you explained about [whatever] – but like, go over that again, okay because I’m still having trouble with the concept.”

So the first of the books arrived today and I thought I’d just give it a quick read to vet it and then pass it along to him. But now that I’m reading it, I’m thinking that actually, I’ll maybe sit down with a pen and scribble a few notes throughout it. Like, “if this ever happens to you, TELL ME RIGHT AWAY. I will help you find the right resources as quickly as possible.” or, “Let’s talk about this passage. I think not pressuring someone is more complicated than this book implies since sometimes we don’t know what will make other people feel pressured.” or, “did you know you can get free condoms or STI testing at the Public Health STI clinic in town?” Or, “When I was fourteen, I had a friend who was having unprotected sex, so I made an appointment for her to see my doctor and get birth control and went with her. If you know someone that you feel you need to do that for, you can call our doctor and make an appointment any time you like, or take them to the Sexual Health Centre.”

Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.

UPDATE: And then Hannah went to watch Big Cat Diaries and it featured lions mating. They didn’t cover anything graphic, but I seized that opportunity to add more dimension to the conversation by pointing out that this was Lion-sex and that’s how lions make babies. And she said thoughtfully, “I thought that you wouldn’t have to take your clothes off and maybe the seed from the boy’s body would come out of his mouth and go into your mouth.” And I said, “Nope, it comes out of the penis.” And her eyebrows shot up to her hairline again and I was like, “Okay, you go back to your show. We’ll talk more later. BYEEEE.”

You know when the experts talk about only giving them as much info as they’re ready for? How do you know how much they’re ready for? Do you ever feel like sex info is a big unappetizing plate of food and you keep offering them tiny spoonfuls watching to see when they gag. Only they gag after every morsel.