It's a thin line between love and hate

My life for the past week, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

No, it isn't. It's actually a broad gloppy painty line.

For instance:
I HATE painting trim, and I especially do not enjoy it in rainy humid weather. I have bad knees, and terrible eyesight, and ok most of the time I have a steady hand, but jeezely crap - I had to pick dark grey paint to go against that pale-yellow wall? EVERY mishap shows.

But I am done, and now? I LOVE the dark grey against the yellow. I carried the grey through into the powder room off the kitchen, which has like eggplant walls, and the grey looks great with THAT. It's the same grey I used for the trim in the basement, which is a pretty toothpaste blue, and that grey looks terrific there too. It is the L'Oreal Succulent Rose lipstick of trim colors - looks good on everyone.

Some other things to love and/or hate:



I LOVE where I am sitting right now. Since we made a new playroom/guest room in the basement...



(which is to LOVE), we were able to turn the old playroom/guest room into an office, with a desk for the computer, and a table for kids to do art and homework...



... and lots and lots of bookshelves. All that new shelf space meant that I could finally unpack the 27 boxes of books and comics that were stored in the basement and in the guest room closet (which is now freed up (for - whaaat?! - clothes? CRAZAY.) and consolidate the piles of books that were living all over the house...



... notably on the radiator cover in the living room. Not having piles of crap on this thing significantly enhances my calm when I walk in that room.

I LOVE the random doodads I found while unpacking those books, most of which have been in boxes since we left Brooklyn in 2002.



21-cent stamps (when was postage 21 cents?), photo stickers of me and Bob with no children, 1000 lire, and 260 rupees. Of course, when Bob went through his boxes, he found currency from Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe (the most devalued currency EVER IN THE WORLD. Way to go, Zim!). But then he's been to a lot cooler places than I have.

Of course, emptying all those boxes means that we have A FEW cardboard boxes to get rid of...



... and for some reason Baltimore's every-two-week recycling schedule has skipped a week, so I have to live with this garbage dump on my porch for another week. HATE. Thank god we have a covered porch, else all this shit would be brown paste, in all this rain. Have I mentioned the rain? Kind of hating the rain, too.

But I LOVE the way this turned out:



We replaced a window in the basement during the renovation, and I kind of liked the old, munged-up frame. Plus it's the first window Mao ever broke.

The FIRST WEEK we lived in this house, Mao was NOT YET TWO, and Bob catches him in the driveway throwing gravel at the house. I love that! So when the contractors took the old window out, I got the kids and Bob to peep in at me through the window hole, and I printed up the photo life-sized. Made a shadow box out of the old frame - didn't clean it up too much, and I kept the glass, consolidating the broken pieces with special glass glue. So now I have a permanent record of how they looked when we did this giant project. Sort of like handprints in the cement, you know?

I LOVE that I stopped at Wockenfuss this morning and got some for myself, rather than depending on my men to buy me chocolate for Mother's Day.



As Teri Garr says in Tootsie, "I know I'm responsible for my own orgasm."

I LOVE the new blinds in the dining room.



Boy did they not want to go up. That trim is as old as the house and has never been painted, which is beautiful, but damn is it brittle. We have these cordless honeycomb blinds all over the house, and I really like their clean lines and the diffuse light they let in - hey I can be minimal sometimes, not everything in my house is chartreuse-and-turquoise batik!

On the other hand, I am looking for big fantastic batik fabric for curtains for the sliding door, so if you see any...

I LOVE the unobtrusive light-cutting shade in the kitchen:



But I have to say I HATE the moire pattern it makes with the window screen.

We rented one of those giant storage boxes you can keep in the driveway for the duration of the renovation, and this weekend, My Hero Husband got it all the way emptied out. Significant milestone. But when the truck came to pick it up:



Let's get another picture of that, shall we?



Those ruts are TWO FEET DEEP. Plus there's broken concrete all through there. We're going to be on a home tour the first week of June. WHAT am I going to do? HATE big trucks and mud.

And speaking of rain, rainy springs really seem to bring out the ants.



Hello, ant. I am going to kill you now.



Fantastik? Is some kind of ant neurotoxin - they're dead before they even feel the dart. And when you wipe up the dead ants? You're cleaning the counter!