Just to let you folks know, I’ve added support for gravatars and userpics on this web site. A gravatar is a globally accepted user photograph that accompanies you on all websites which support gravatars. To get your global gravator, simply sign up at this web site and upload a photograph of your choice.
If you’d rather not use gravatars, you can use your own userpic here on this web site. You simply register for a commenting account, load the photograph you want, and go.
It’s just some extra bells and whistles to make the comments section more interesting, and I hope you guys make use of it. Let me know what you think of the implementation.
Painting Over
Today we painted the foyer.
That’s not normally big news, especially considering the other things we’re going to be doing to the foyer (bashing down a closet and putting in a door to the garage), but I’m noting this down because I’m feeling a strange bit of sentimentality.
Because the foyer isn’t just being painted, but re-painted. The sunny bright yellow (which, I have to say, looks great in the opening) is going over a muted lilac that had started to get a little scuffed and dirty. A part of me rebelled over doing this, however, because I’d laid down that paint myself. After I’d spent all of that time laying down that colour all over our first floor, why on earth would I cover it over again?
Now, I have re-painted rooms. We’re not professional decorators, and we’ve found some of our colour combinations by trial and error. It took three tries to get our master bedroom look right. And, of course, Vivian’s room went from a nice sweet potato colour to a kid-friendly green, but only after changing from its previous use as a guest room. The front foyer is the first time that I’ve repainted something that I was happy with, whose use hadn’t changed.
But I have to face facts that this lilac was laid down almost nine years ago when we first bought the house. And that’s when it hits me that we’ve had this house for nine years. We bought it in August 2001, and moved in during the week of the 9/11 terror attacks. We bought gallons of this stuff that supposedly Martha Stewart had a hand in making. It was called “first crocus”, and we resolved to paint the entire first floor of the house before the furniture arrived. It meant for some long evenings shuttling between the house and the apartment, but really, that is the best time to paint something. The “first crocus” was our anchor. We highlighted with strips of bright yellow, here and there, and a bright read on one particularly gigantic wall.
This was the most successful colour combination of the house, I think. We tried a truly bland “sea glass green”, also by Martha Stewart (where is she now? Or, rather, where is her paint? I also notice that you can’t get Debbie Travis paint cans anymore; is she going the way of Martha?), which we tried to enliven with a raspberry. Both fell to a much more tasteful blue that my mother-in-law painted all over our master bedroom in the days before Vivian arrived in this world.
And now it’s all going away. The march of time, I suppose. I feel strangely nostalgic, and a little surprised that a house has been in our possession for almost nine years.
But, whatever the case, the yellow in the foyer looks darn good.