Barking Mad

Sunday Surfing Will Be Back Next Week!

A couple of things have all conspired to make me nearly lose my mind lately. 

Remember the power outage from our wicked storm a few days back?  Well, I was in the middle of working on the Word doc where I store all the links for Sunday Surfing when the power went out.  It caused horrible problems with the computer, one of those being the auto-recovery feature with Word was wiped out.  Fun times.  So I lost the entire document which pisses me off to no end.  Thankfully I have a lot of the sites bookmarked, but unfortunately I don't have specific posts bookmarked nor is my running commentary saved in the bookmarks.  Uhg!  So I am slowly but surely rebuilding my cache of great blogs I've been storing up to feature.  Again, if you have any blogs you think are worthy of a mention, and in particular, posts, then by all means, shoot me an email and let me know about them.

The other thing that's driving me absolutely apeshit is this freaking kitchen remodel.  OMG it's gone from merely being a thorn in my side to a full blown pain in my ass! 

We ended up having to buy a power sander to get that God-awful wall border off and whilst it's the most brilliant power tool ever (well OK, so my experience with power tools is limited to the kind you cook with, so who am I to really judge?), it creates the biggest mess.  There is wall border/glue/sealant/yuck dust EVERYWHERE!  And I mean EVERYWHERE!   I have been taking pictures of everything and when I post again a bit later in the day I'll show off some of why this is so frustrating - THE MESS!

Anyhow, it's going to put ALL of the painting at least a week behind.  Grrrrrr.  Now we have to re-wash the walls and cabinets to get that dust off.  There isn't anything in the kitchen/eating area and then the formal living room that isn't covered with that dust.  One of the cats got up on the coffee table and we have kitty cat paw prints all over it, and then on the rug underneath.  It would almost be funny if it weren't so damned irritating.

The final straw that's broken the camel's back this morning?  I am itching everywhere!  There isn't a space on my body that does not itch.  We're pretty sure it's the dust from sanding, but I am literally at the point where I'm going to drown myself in Benedryl and have the hubby take the power sander to my entire body (OMG what a chore that would be!  -- Sorry for the horrible mental image that left anyone with!) in order to get rid of the hellacious itching.  Showering has not helped.  The minute I leave the confines of the study (where the dust hasn't managed to settle) I'm in fits of itching and scratching and rolling around on the floor trying to itch my back.  If it weren't so damned cold outside I'd go run outside topless and rub myself all over the trees like a bear in the woods.  Woops!  Sorry for yet another scary mental image.

Here's something to help replace it!

It's Not Like We Know What We're Doing

There is a reason that the hubby and I refer to ourselves as DDIY'ers.  DON'T Do It Yourself'ers!

Neither one of us is mechanically inclined, or enjoys huge home repair and remodel projects.  Sure, I love to sand and stain and restore simple pieces of furniture but that's about as far as I go.   Lately though I've noticed how everyone (or OK, maybe it just seems like everyone) in the blogosphere is repainting their kitchens or bedrooms, or hell, their entire homes!  And everyone has made is seem like it's easy peasy, nothin' to it!  So how hard could it be?

We knew when we bought the house that the kitchen needed updating badly!  We have started this "update" bit by bit when purchasing the new stainless steel fridge, and then decided, after I pointed out to the hubby how easy it seemed, to repaint the kitchen ourselves, including the cabinets. Plus, we're on a tight budget and why spend thousands to have someone else do what you can probably do yourself?  And even though last fall the very nice gentleman at Lowes told us we could even do the wood flooring ourselves with pieces that just snapped into place, when he mentioned to the hubby that we'd need some sort of inexpensive electric saw, I saw the hubby turn a horrid shade of gray and that's when we knew that whilst we could handle the painting part of it, the flooring [and eventual new granite countertops too] was going to be handled by PROFESSIONALS!  

Our kitchen is fairly large and pretty ugly (this shot was taken after the Puppy Chow Incident!), everything about it shouts 1989!!, the year our home was built.  Everything has a yellow tinge to it, the floor being the worst.  I cringe just looking at this photo.

Anyhow, we'd decided on a green colour for the walls, a green flecked darker granite for the countertops and to paint all the cabinets white.  We're going with a light bamboo flooring as well.

So, having gone back and forth on exactly what shade of green for the kitchen, we finally decided on a shade called Celery Bunch.  Let me just say right now, on the record, that I pretty much hate pastels and any colour in the Pepto Bismal chalky pastel spectrum.  Blech!  At the time, Celery Bunch seemed like a good choice.  It wasn't too light and it wasn't too dark.

Yesterday Megawatt and I got started in the kitchen.   I was on some sort of DIY-high...running around the kitchen taking the hardware off the cabinets, unscrewing screws, and covering everything with blue painter's tape!  I totally got my handyman groove on!  I was running around like a madwoman with a screwdriver.   I got so carried away, just me and my little screwdriver, that Megawatt had to stop me before I suffered delusions of grandeur and started fiddling with the plumbing.

I was pumped!  I was excited!  Let's break open the paint cans!  Let's stir it up and slap it on the walls! Then I opened the paint cans.

Hmmm, this Celery Bunch is a lot lighter than I originally thought it was.  Megawatt even thought it was pretty light.  But, being the intrepid women we are, we decided to start painting anyhow, in hopes that it might magically darken a bit once it was on the walls.

We painted and talked and laughed and in between giggles we commented on how light it was.  Then I got the brilliant idea to toss some white paint up on the cabinets just to see if it might make the green "pop" a little bit more.

Here was the section of the kitchen we were working on before we got the initial coat of paint up there...

Megawatt painting...

And now, all I can see when I look at it is Pepto Bismal's newest flavour, "Pathetic Green Mint Chalk."

Even trying to contrast it against the section of cabinet I'd painted white, it's still too friggin light.  I hate it!  And yes, I know we have to take the cabinets off and primer them and all that good stuff.  I just wanted something to gauge the horrible green with.  I DON'T LIKE IT!

So, guess what the hubby is doing today?  He's heading to Lowes and going to get another couple gallons of paint.  And this time, we're leaving the Celery Bunch where it belongs, in my tuna salad! We're going for a deeper shade of green called Garden Room.  If you're so inclined, you can head out to Behr's website colour picker thingy and look it up, as it wouldn't let me cut and paste.  It's Behr number 450D-4 and it's going to be on my walls before I go to bed tonight.

This is going to be a long weekend.

Black Friday ='s Broken Bones, Bruises, Black Eyes, and Bloodied Lips!

Megawatt, the spare Megan, Zack B., and Stev decided that they wanted to brave the masses and hit the midnight sales down in Portland in order to take advantage of the lower prices at the stores in the Maine Mall.   Just thinking about all those people makes me want to vomit, let alone having to keep my eyes open in the middle of the night.  I am just not a die-hard shopper. Never have been, never will be.  Not around the holidays anyhow.  This is my least favourite time to shop.

Imagine my surprise, just as I'm about to drift off into a deep sleep as the 11PM news is blaring in the background, to see Megawatt stroll across the screen! She and the others were standing outside the entrance to the mall, waiting for the doors to open whilst the news crew from the local CBS affiliate (they had the video up on the site, but it's since been updated with another from later in the day.  If I can find it I'll post it.), talked about how hundreds of people were braving the fridgid temps and waiting for all of the early bird specials.  And who would have imagined that less than 45 minutes later, once I'd drifted off into a deep slumber, that the phone would ring and my hysterical daughter would be in fits of sobs and tears on the other end, vowing never to go to the mall again?

From what I could make out during my initial bleery-eyed conversation with her was that once the doors opened it was literally a stampede.  People were pushing and shoving and doing anything they could to make sure they were the first ones to get whatever deals they could.  In the course of all this pushing and shoving, Megawatt got a small table shoved into her hip and is now sporting a bruise from the top of her hip all the way down her thigh, the spare Megan has spent the day in the hospital after her shoulder was dislocated, Stev fell down after being pushed by a mob of teenage boys and then her ankle was stepped on by someone running past and it looks like she might have torn some ligaments, and then Zack ended up being pushed down on top of someone already on the ground whose leg had been crushed (literally)by a couple of people who had steamrolled her.

From what Megawatt told me, when the four kids left only a short while after all of this happened, there were already three ambulances waiting outside.

This is just incredulous to me.  How can people act like such neanderthals and have so little concern for their fellow human beings?  I know times are tough, but if things are so bad that you have to practically kill someone in an over-zealous attempt to save a few dollars, then do you really need to be out spending money in the first place?  I've heard stories in the past of women coming to blows over the last TMX Elmo or whatever hot toy of the season, in an attempt to bag the prize and get it home. Asinine! But this is just insanity!  People being crushed and bruised and bloodied all in the name of holiday sales?

I phoned the local NBC and ABC affiliates to ask if their crews had captured any of this and if so, why wasn't it on the news?  I was told very politely that although they'd heard of an ambulance or two being called to the mall,the big news of the day was going to be how well retailers did and if it was going to be enough to "boost the morale of the local economy."  I was actually shocked into silence and hung up because I couldn't fathom saying anything else in response unless it contained a string of expletives. 

It's deeply upsetting to me that the the almighty dollar is more important than consideration for the people who very well could be the ones signing your paychecks, patronizing your business or even live next door to you.  This is yet another pathetic example of how unfailingly ugly people can be.