Life lessons

Poison Ivy sucks - it ate up my arms! I'm on the mend, but was quite freaked out a week ago. It was like a voracious skin-eating monster. And it itched! Badly. I still itch, but I'm slathering myself in moisturizer (I have bottles and tubes all over the house) whenever I can. Murray says it's a rite of passage here. Yuck. I don't do rites. I didn't do it in college and I sure don't want to do it now that I'm 37, mother of 2 and trying to move into a home. But everyone seems to get/have gotten it - and has sympathy and good advice for me. Which is nice.

As an additional mood booster, I finished painting the dining room today. The previous owners had it painted a rather aggressive, intense yellow. I wanted to tone it down but Murray wanted to keep it yellow. So I first painted it a "breakfast nook yellow" but that did not work for us. Now it's a "warm oatmeal" (these are my own descriptors - the paint names are so nonsensical) which we both like quite a bit. My new hero is the paint guy at the local paint store. He's a freaking genius. I will bake him cookies.

The dining room was my side in the (unofficial) "Jen versus the professional painter" throw down. Vito, the Italian painter, didn't come today and our bedroom and hall are still uninhabitable so I think I win. However, it wasn't a true contest because I assigned him the wallpapered bit which I had no intention of tackling and he's obviously doing the right things to it. By "obviously" I mean the wall paper is off, and the walls are ready to paint. Vito is great, and I'm sure he's very good at what he does, but I can't understand what he's saying. So I just smile and nod. And it's all good.

The house is s-l-o-w-l-y coming along. I closed the doors to the formal living room to give myself some peace of mind. That room doesn't exist for me until I get the rest of the house more livable. Well, it exists on my graph paper. Due to my total inability to visualize scale or how things will look in a room, I've drawn all my rooms out on graph paper so I can sketch out whatever I'm contemplating and see how it fits. It seems obsessive, but it's really just common sense - I'm compensating for a weakness. Those of you who can visualize scale and designs in your heads, lucky you.

Now I'm going to bed, to dream of lighting issues and color schemes.