Everything is Harder for Me

Or at least, that feels like a recurrent theme. I realize that other people have it harder, but it often feels that things are unnecessarily difficult for me. For example, laundry woes. Everybody does laundry, with varying degrees of success. But there has to be drama involved if it's my laundry.
Last night, I was relaxing in my comfy recliner, knitting lazily on my CeCe cardigan (almost finished), watching the Tudors on DVD, and sipping away on a Big Gulp. I look down to discover a mysterious round stain right over my left ta-ta. Apparently, I'd set my sweaty drink down on something inky (a People magazine? A yarn catalog? Who knows.), which lovingly transferred to my shirt. I proceeded to panic. Normally, this would be a minor disaster at best. It's not as though I was wearing the Shroud of Turin. The shirt in question, a yellow t-shirt with floral and butterfly design, doesn't even look that great with my coloring. It was, however, my grandmother's, so it was upsetting to me to get an obvious stain on it.
Apparently, there are a lot of different things you can use to try to remove ink. This is what I tried: detergent. I put a ridiculous amount on to spot clean it, which didn't do anything except make a humorous amount of bubbles in the machine. Not I Love Lucy bad, but way more than normal. Next, I tried rubbing alcohol, reasoning that the alcohol is what makes hairspray work in these circumstances. Fun fumes, but no luck. Third: a paste made of baking soda and water. I found that on the internet. This might work if the ink is freshly wet, but just made me feel like I was making a failing science experiment. At this point, I decided to raid my secret stash of product for hairspray. I don't use hairspray that often, but I've got a ton of fancy product from Aveda. It smelled fancy. And it sort of worked. The ink definitely faded, but it still looks like I put down a glass of something on my chest. And I didn't, I swear. I had a couple of samples of Volumizing Tonic and Brilliant Hold, that had apparently been kicking around for a while. I can't remember the last time I used them, but a semi-solid substance that looked like cum issued forth. How absurd.
So, the shirt is soaking now, so that the stain isn't totally set in. I am determined to get it out. My google-fu tells me that Oxiclean is good at getting ink out (?). I have friends who swear by the stuff, and at this point I am desperate enough to overcome my natural distrust of anything with its own infomercial.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

I'm having a hard time at the moment. There are some stressful, serious things happening now that I don't really want to blog about. If you'd like to know more, please email me and I'll try to respond.
If anything, I'd like to think about anything but what's going on. Please send jokes, newsy emails, snarky ecards, whatever. In that vein, I give you some fan art that I found online. Guess I'm not the only one dying to see the new Harry Potter film!

Last night, I spent the evening with the delightful Miss B. I may have had too much Jim Beam to drink. It sneaks up on me. Actually, most alcohol sneaks up on me, because I am an amateur drinker.

Besides discovering how delightful JB is in punch, I also discovered that B and I have something in common: a love of Are You Being Served? You might think that it's a hoary old English comedy, but it's actually quite brilliant. Sadly, it was a topic of conversation because Mollie Sugden, the excellent Mrs. Slocombe, died this week. Oh Mrs. Slocombe, with the frilly collars that have inexplicably come back into fashion, the technicolor hair, and constant double entendres involving your cat, you provided me many a laugh on Sunday evenings and during PBS pledge weeks. What a dame. I wish I had the balls to wear my hair like that.

There was a furor a few years ago in some of the more *conservative* states about Mrs. Slocombe's pussy jokes. Apparently, PBS should only show Lawrence Welk. Sure, it's not the most sophisticated humor, but still damned funny. It amazes me that people can still get upset about jokes that were written in the early 70s. Here's a compilation. Raise a glass and have a laugh.

I'm sorry that I've been neglecting my little corner of the internet lately. I've been busy. I've been rundown. I've been tilting at windmills, and it hasn't left me feeling very creative.

Since we last met, some small amount of progress has been made on the sweeping house project. There is a resolution to the long sad tale of the sink. I fell in love with a sink in the IKEA catalog. We met in the stylish display at the local IKEA, where I realized the sink was deep enough for handwashing of small knitted items. I am not impressed by the trend towards shallow sink basins. The sink was out of stock, with no projected arrival date or raincheck offered. Sadness and phone calls ensued. There are two IKEAS in the states that do phone orders, so I left a message with IKEA Houston, feeling assured a sink would soon be on its way to me. The next day, I received an apologetic phone call, explaining that my sink could not be shipped, due to 100% breakage rates. Yikes. I checked the inventory of the two local IKEAs until one day, miraculously, the sink arrived.

This provided the perfect excuse to visit the new IKEA in Bolingbrook. It's on a more manageable scale than their Schaumburg location. My mother and I even avoided our traditional IKEA argument, possibly because we weren't worn out from walking around a store the size of the international terminal at O'Hare. A clock, some batteries, three boxes of lightbulbs, a bathmat, and faucet also followed me home.

I've also found the tile for the bathroom. I remeasured the bathroom after my initial tile bargain at ReStore and discovered that I didn't have enough tile (and no source for more). How interior design is like theatrical design! Already, I have to let go of beloved ideas in order to complete a project. After looking at a lot of interesting designer tile, uninteresting trend stuff, and many warehouses with terrible neck crick inducing displays, I found a plain old glazed ceramic tile. More precisely, my mother found it while we were looking at tile in one of those big home renovation warehouse stores. The store had exactly three of those tiles and a less than helpful salesman. Maybe it wasn't his department, but I left with a single tile, determined to find another source for the tile. Within two hours, I had located it cheaper about ten miles from the house.

Yes, blue. I looked for something more neutral, but wasn't happy with anything I saw. In person, it is a lovely, watery blue with the slightest green tint. The color manages to be modern and Mid-Century at the same time, which pleases me greatly. If it looks dated later, it will look as though it dates from the 1950s instead of early 21st Century. For the floor, a white gloss finish penny round. Now, I just have to put together the tile order. Lewis has encouraged me to draw elevations to determine what type of trim and how much I need, but that doesn't appeal to me. Apparently, he doesn't know that most drafting for sound is done on cocktail napkins. Most of the original tile is still on the wall, so that can answer most of the technical questions.

I am very lucky to have Lewis on this project. Lucky because he is my friend and good at all of these things that I am not, but also because he is another designer. We speak the same language, which cuts down on the amount of time spent explaining things. A recent conversation:

Me: So, this is the color that I want to paint the living room (showing him a chip of medium saturation, clean green).
Lewis: That will look great with the new curtains you just hung.
Me: That is no accident. I already had that green in my head when I bought the curtains. I just had to find it in paint.
Lewis nods and sips his beer.
Me: You know how Mormons believe that things are created in the spiritual world before they're created on Earth? That is how I found this green.
Lewis: Yes.

We must sound crazy to other people. Our both being designers also makes for hour long conversations about doors. Interior, non-decorative doors. It can be hard to make any sort of throw away decision, because the details make the whole.

I put my Netflix account on vacation to save a bit of cash and quickly realized how truly awful television is. I am reacquainting myself with the interlibrary loan system. As long as I return the DVDs on time, it's free, but they're not delivered to my door. And they can't linger on the coffee table the way that my Netflix DVDs often did. This resulted in a marathon of The War, by Ken Burns. I watched a seven disc documentary about World War II in a week. Two hours on Japanese attrocities and the Bataan Death March certainly helped me gain a bit of perspective on my own problems. I might go AWOL again soon, because I have the Leonard Bernstein's Yound People's Concerts coming (swoon! ) and To Serve Them All My Days. I printed off my Netflix queue and hope to cross off a number of titles before restarting my account.

Specs! Toilets! Tile!

I've been busy, readers: too busy to stare obsessively at my computer screen for hours on end. I realized about two weeks ago that my sleep cycle was totally ruined. I was getting an average of nine hours sleep, but still felt tired. Also, I had the sleep cycle of a koala, frequently sleeping until 2 pm. Sure, I'm not a morning person, but waking at two or three in the afternoon is a real obstacle to getting anything done. If that trend continued, I would soon have become completely nocturnal, which I have no desire to be.

Around the same time, the condition of the plumbing in my house caused me to snap. My toilet had died a slow death. The tank filled so slowly that it would only flush under its own power once a day, forcing me to add water every time I wanted to flush. This is why I have indoor plumbing? Finally, it reduced me to tears. Change was needed. I called one of my good friends, bemoaning the state of my WC and he pledged his help. I called my mom, who agreed that some improvements were in order. The scales have fallen from my eyes.

So, I'm renovating the house. It's a project that I can be excited about, use some of my design skills, and shop for bargains. Did you know that Habitat for Humanity runs stores full of construction/renovation materials? I bought enough tile to do my bathroom floor for $15, beautiful ceramic tile that looks like stone. Enough tile for the quite large kitchen backsplash? A cool $100 for incredible, California casual rough finish subway tile to replace the frankly dated 70s renovation a previous owner did in the kitchen.

A couple of days after the toilet realization, I was still awake at 5.30 am. I decided to stay awake until a normal bedtime, in order to reset my internal clock. I also decided to go see Lewis, who lives about two and half hours away, to talk about the bathroom. He kept me moving when I was ready to crash, was excited about my ideas, and turned me on to Habitat ReSale. He also woke me up at 9.30 the next day so that I wouldn't fall back into my regular sleep schedule. He's a really great friend.

What happens when two designers sink their teeth into a project like this? A field trip to IKEA, of course. I find it hard to resist the siren song of affordable European design and damn good Swedish meatballs. IKEA even has a line of bathroom fixtures and furniture designed for small bathrooms that isn't horribly ugly. Lewis and I had a wonderful time looking at all of the staged room displays and making up stories about who we thought worked or lived in them. It was a great creative exercise that really started me thinking about the different ways you can tell a story with interior design.

My house was built in 1950 or '51, which led me to think about design in that period. If the original owners were sophisticated design fans who followed the latest crack of fashion, it would have been done in Mid-Century Modern. If you grew up in a post war building boom suburb, you probably saw a lot of Mid-Century Modern without realizing it. The contractors who built the place used the cheapest fixtures, so it wasn't terribly stylish at the time (and definitely not now) and hasn't aged well. A virtual visit to the local house museum also convinced me that I DO NOT WANT an authentic 1950s bathroom. Ugh. Instead, I'm going for a contemporary vision of Mid-Century Modern, which is really difficult to explain to people who aren't design nerds. If you're curious, I'd suggest a visit to the Mid-Century Modernist. There are a lot of drool worthy websites devoted to Mid-Century Modern and California Casual.

This week, Lewis and Ariel came to work on the house. I was very nervous about having people in the house, because I am not used to having other people in my space and it was in a serious state. Fortunately, they didn't care and I was at ease leaving them for a few hours while I went to an appointment. The progress on the yard while I was gone was nothing short of miraculous. Apparently the weeds I had bemoaned were actually wild violets. Think of all of the salads I can eat now that I know that! They also bleached the concrete pad on the patio and moved my mulch pile. After Ariel put out some chic solar lights in the front yard (very similar to the neighbors' lights, adding a nice unifying element to the properties), I felt the house no longer looked like it was inhabited by a crazy person.

Several trips to different hardware stores and almost an entire day were devoted to Lewis's much appreciated resurrection of my toilet. The problem turned out not to be the toilet at all, but the plumbing leading to the tank. He pulled out a section of the pipe to show me. It looked like an illustration for a cholesterol lowering medication. Honestly, I'm amazed that any water got through it. I realize that a working toilet is probably not that exciting to most of you, but I was really tired of the Laura Ingalls Wilder method of flushing.

Perhaps you are not that interested in home renovation. I apologize in advance, as this will probably be a recurring theme in the blog for the next year. The house needs a lot of work, but it feels a lot less overwhelming with Lewis and Ariel's help.

In other news, my glasses arrived today. The mailman actually rang the bell to hand deliver the package, which was greeted with a squeal of excitement. Zenni Optical had sent me an email earlier in the week to let me know they'd arrive soon, but I didn't think they'd come until Monday. I tore into the package and my heart sunk. The cases were tiny, leading me to wonder if I had accidentally ordered reading glasses. The sizes were given in metric, which I do understand but have a harder time visualizing than imperial measure. I thought about the tiny Stonehenge set in Spinal Tap and proceeded with cautious optimism. The lab that made the glasses didn't use those big, standard size cases, which is why they looked so small. The smaller case revealed my naughty librarian frames. They're smaller than my last pair of frames, which may take some adjustment, but I really like them. Definitely worth the $12 I paid for them. The Janeane Garafolo frames that had captured my heart turned out to be a different story. They're too small for my enormous noggin. Sure, they look normal sized in their case, but look like children's frames on. They only cost $25, so I'm not heartbroken. I might even order a larger, similar frame. Overall, I am very pleased with my interactions with Zenni. The Rx in the glasses is correct, which had concerned my mother. Not bad at all, considering what a crapshoot online shopping can be. Once I have taken a shower and done other beautifying things, I might even post a picture of me and the naughty librarian glasses.