Ship's Blog: August, 2007

Even before we saw the house that we ended up buying (back in 2005) we knew it was going to be a fixer-upper. The description portion of the MLS listing included a count of the rooms with the simple addition of, "Freshly painted. View lot. Potential plus."

Yeah, "potential plus." For those who don't know, that's Realtor code for, "you're going to be fixing up this house for a long, long time."  Read more »

A year and a day ago I wrote, "Cancer Made Me a Cold-Blooded Killer," exploring my most bizarre chemo side effect: losing my life-long bug phobia and becoming a shrewd-eyed bug killer. Overnight. Probably not a chemo side effect, sure, but that's the only thing I could attribute it to, given my sudden transformation from holding my skirt up while I shrieked from atop a chair to pummeling a wasp to death with a light-weight fly swatter.  Read more »

The other day, while I was painting my art studio at 2:00 am (as you do), I was thinking about how I wished I were one of those "master edger" types of people. You know, the kind who doesn't need a lick of blue tape to do a clean and pristine paint job; they just delicately drag their paint brush near the woodwork and voila! Perfect edges. No tape.

I kind of hate them.  Read more »

You may already know that when you're done painting for the day, you can drop your paint-covered roller or brush into a zip-style plastic bag, pop it in the fridge, and then use it again the next day. I do that with paints and varnishes all the time -- it saves me from putting paint down the drain until I absolutely have to.  Read more »

The other day we had a problem with our cable reception, with various channels coming in scrambled. I immediately called Comcast to try to sort it out. Kathy had already tested one TV upstairs and I had tested the TV in the studio, so I reported that we had the same problem in both locations. The call center guy, however, needed me to check the TV in the living room, too. So, with him still on the phone, I trotted upstairs and turned the other TV on, flipping to the scrambled channels.

While we waited to see the results, he made small talk. Kathy, who was in the living room doing something else, overheard only my end of the conversation:  Read more »

I am in such intense nesting mode right now that perhaps I should consider getting a pregnancy test. Well, okay, maybe not; I think we can assume that the laws of procreation have not been superseded of late.

That leaves the Studio Makeover project to blame. If I hadn't innocently begun "putting my art studio in order," things would not have spiraled out of control. I wouldn't have had the cabinets taken down or had this huge room repainted or re-organized the entire garage. We might have had some peace around here.  Read more »

Kathy's company likes to give out corporate swag after big meetings. You know, weird toys, plaques, t-shirts, and electronic devices with the company logo on 'em.

Yesterday, she said she just received one that I absolutely had to see - not for the item itself, but the instructions inside. She came home with a hard mousepad that lit up around the edges when you plugged it into a USB port. The instructions, no doubt translated into English with the aid of a dictionary or computer program, were priceless (and all spelling is correct):

   Read more »

Imagine this: You're shopping at the dollar store when you see these glasses in the home improvement section:

Let's see...they are clear glasses with no correction or magnification on the lens. They are oversized. The logo in the upper left corner says, "Tool Bench." What do you think they are?

If you said, "Safety glasses," then I say, "Ha!"  Read more »

When we won our plasma TV last December, I had to ditch my big, 1980s entertainment center to make room for this one. Mounting the new TV to the wall made for a much cleaner look, but I still had to put the components and the DVDs someplace, and I didn't have a solution handy. As a stop-gap measure, I moved a narrow table in from the bedroom, put the components on top of that, and shoved two banker's boxes (containing the DVDs) underneath.  Read more »

The studio paint color drama continues.

Kathy took a look at the studio this morning. Oh, yes, it looks very pretty when you look at the painting over the white loveseat. Very nice. But once you sit down on that loveseat and look in the other directions...it is different.

"It looks institutional over there. I feel like I'm in a doctor's office. But it looks pretty over there. Hmmm."

I paraded the big painted pieces of foam core around the room, including the new Bahaman Sea Blue. The verdict? My first choice, Gem Turquoise (aka "bold and daring") was the winner. GO FIGURE.  Read more »

After eight hours of labor on the part of two very good painters, my studio has been transformed. The walls are now a lovely shade of aqua. The color virtually sings around the walls of the room, significantly brightening a large space that has always suffered a dearth of natural light. It's downright happy now.

It is also absolutely the wrong shade of aqua for me.  Read more »

As I hinted at in, The Handyman is Coming! The Handyman is Coming!, none of my dark imaginings about handyman disaster came into being. After a mere four hours of work, Gustavo:  Read more »

When you hire a handyperson to come over and do some work on your house, what kind of build-up is involved in getting ready? Do you just shove a few things to the side, let her or him in, point at the work to be done, and go along your merry way? Yes?

Sigh. I wish I were like you, then. For me, the experience is far, far more...complicated.

I start with the act of making a simple, happy list, and soon it all spirals out of control. Out of control in a specific, structured manner, that is. Let me explain how it works.

Step 1: Making the List

Before I call my handyman, I gotta make the List. You know, the list of everything that I want him to do.  Read more »

I once asked my mother if she missed her own mother, who died two months after I was born. "Every day," she said. "Not one day goes by without me thinking of her and wishing I could just pick up the phone and call her."

Her sorrow over the loss of her mother was evident in her voice, even twenty years after my nana's death. I thought this level of grief was exclusive to the special relationship she had with her mother - they seemed more alike and thus, closer, than I was to her. I didn't know that one day I would feel the same way.  Read more »

When you imagine a good professional organizer, what skill or attribute seems to be the most valuable? The way an insightful professional can convince you to let go of the junk that once seemed so important, but now just gets in the way? The way she or he can visualize how a space will work best for your needs, exceeding even your own vision? Or maybe his or her encyclopedic knowledge of storage solutions, showing you how to store 50 things in a place where previously you could only fit 15?

Ha! All of that is mere child's play. To me, the most amazing thing an organizer can do is simply make my stuff go away. Instantly. That makes them worth their weight in gold.  Read more »