Barn

A House Guest

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

Biscotti for the creme brulee.

Tomorrow I am expecting a house guest I’ve never met. I’ve been in rather a panic getting the house into some sort of order to receive visitors. To some extent, I’ve said screw it. But still. . .there’s a need for basic cleanliness and order.

I’m very excited. I didn’t have a lot of advance notice which is probably good. I’d have driven myself and everyone else mad.

Chef Boy ‘R Mine has arrived as well. He’s been cooking up a feast and helping to clean. The barn is pert near always two steps forward, one step back – improvement is made in tiny increments with each project uncovering a larger project. This has been no different, but since I’ve grown to expect such things, it doesn’t produce any extra stress. OK, not much extra stress.

[The mess in the plumbing closet was stressful, but I’m Scarlett O’Hara-ing it for the moment. You know – the old I’ll think about it tomorrow.]

Good food, but what a mess.

My house guest has never seen snow. If she’s never seen snow, it’s a given she’s never experienced this kind of cold. Florida born and bred, Guest O’Mine is in for a rude awakening. We’ve borrowed a 4×4 for the airport pickup to avoid her having to trek the hill (in the snow) dragging her suitcases behind her. We’re thoughtful people, we are.

The food, if not the surroundings, will be stellar. The kitchen, however, has been one step forward, two steps back. When I went to bed last night, it was OK, this is adequate. Hah!

Taking a break.

The kitchen is a mess.

The boy has sliced and diced, stirred and whirled, baked, sautéed, chopped, poured, splashed, dashed and whipped.

The food will be fabulous.

At present, we’re both taking a break. Mind you, there’s not any time for breaks. There is still much to do. Much. Much just to get to the minimum. He’s chatting away on his laptop, puppies happily nearby, and I’m blogging on my laptop. I think we both have a problem with priorities. Or maybe we don’t. Making connections with people is more important than ones with Mr. Clean.  Right?  Right.

[insert musical interlude here]

[I swear on my honor, that I wrote all of the above before the following event occurred. Scout’s honor. Honest. Absolutely. With no exaggeration or storyteller’s license involved at all.]

I’m now officially amused. I sent Child O’Mine up to the bathroom to help me switch out the toilet seat. There was a bolt I couldn’t get to budge. The bolt is held on by a plastic wingnut. We did this and then we did that. And there were a lot of exclamations of WTF! So we did some more of this and we did some more of that – all of it involving wrenches, needle-nosed pliers, flathead screwdrivers, and much cursing. Nothing. And it wasn’t that the bolt wouldn’t move – it moved all over the place. The top of the bolt could be turned in the opposite direction of the bottom part of the bolt. WTF?

[Things like this routinely happen in the barn. I’ll eventually get around to the thermostat story.]

We pondered things for a bit. Chef Boy ‘R Mine said, “Wait. I’ve got an idea.”

Now he’s been cooking up a storm. When he comes here, he brings the tools of his trade with him. Since he’s planning crème brulee, he had a kitchen torch – a twinkie torch by anyone’s standards – used to brown meringue and that sort of thing..

Creme brulee carmelizer or plumbing tool? It's both.

We melted that wingnut off. OK, he did. After I was sure the toilet wasn’t going to explode, I guffawed and told him he was genius.

 [He takes after me. I once solved a pesky countertop installation problem with a bread knife.]

A $20 Williams & Sonoma cooking torch as a plumbing tool – who’d have thunk it? Me and Chef Boy ‘R Mine, that’s who.

I can’t wait to tell the girlfriend, OOPS, I mean, houseguest this story.  (Damn, let the cat out of the bag.)

Now, I’ve got the giggles, but I’ve got to go finish that bathroom now.

[Giggle. Giggle. Guffaw.]

Crème brulee, anyone?

The Undisputed Champion of Procrastination

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

I mean, really, how long could it take?

From my earliest memories, I have been a procrastinator.

I’ve read some stuff about the disorder (fear of failure, etc., etc.) and I’ve concluded that I simply have a procrastination gene. My evidence? My father is a procrastinator.

I will put off the stupidest shit – like putting a new roll of toilet paper on the holder. Really, how long can that take? Or putting the bag of dog food in the laundry room. If I can’t bring myself to do that, you might be able to imagine what a larger project is like.

It’s a sickness, I tell ya.

I even put off stuff that I’m going to enjoy. Right now I should be at Toys ‘R Us buying bouncy balls (separate post later unless I procrastinate to the point where the time to do what I’m planning to do has passed).

Periodically, I will let the house get into the state it is in now (Super Fund Site). I know from past experience that I can restore enough order to really feel good about myself in less than a couple of hours.

Well, the contrast between the cabinetry and the packaging is kind of interesting.

If I have something important, but unpleasant to do like taxes, I will fret myself into a frenzy. I will get up a head of steam and do EVERYTHING but taxes. I guarantee you that if today was April 13th, the toilet paper would be on the roll, the dog food would be in the laundry room, my kitchen would be clean enough to perform brain surgery on the table and I’d be at the Lowe’s buying paint for the family room with a side trip to purchase bouncy balls. I would organize my spices alphabetically, iron the towels, vacuum the car, and give myself a pedicure.

It’s a sickness, I tell ya.

I’ve had a new-to-me computer sitting in my study since August. It’s going to be a pain to set up and so there it sits. This computer will make other areas of my life so much simpler and yet. . .

Did I pick up the hanger after photographing it? No.

The car needs an oil change. The puppies need grooming. There’s a basket of clean laundry that has been sitting on the kitchen table for a week that will take less than 2 minutes to put away. There’s a hanger on my bedroom floor that I trip over twice a day. There’s nothing in the house to eat (I really hate grocery shopping). I’ve had a pair of shoes sitting in the backseat of my car for nearly a year.

It’s a sickness, I tell ya.

Even this blog post is a procrastination aid. But if I had nothing to do, but post to the blog, I would be outside in the freezing cold “weeding” the garden.

Progress! I'm on a roll now! (Hee hee.)

Now in my defense, I am a busy person. I have a killer work schedule and I’ve had some social obligations that sucked what free time I have. But even if I was unemployed, a childless orphan, and friendless, I don’t think things would be much different. Maybe they would, if I was unemployed the immediate task at hand would be the mailing of resumes, so I would probably be doing everything but.

With any luck, I have now embarrassed myself to the point that I’ll get moving.

Cows (and barns)

/ wvfurandroot / 1 Comment

So much work still to do.

Today, I hope, to make some progress in the cow bathroom.  Excess is a whole lot harder to do than one would think.  Everytime I added a new image (or frame), I had to move everything around.  Finally, I decided to hang all the frames (empty) and go from there.  I then had to patch all the nail holes that were then exposed.  So, today I sand and paint and fill frames. 

There’s still the daunting task of wall-papering the ceiling and I have no idea when I’ll get tile on the floor.  Things take a long time in the barn – I never seem to have money and time at the same time.  Still don’t.

Cow Udder Pink

/ wvfurandroot / 14 Comments

toilet paperIf I were going to channel the writers of Sex in the City, I might begin this post with “Can a toilet paper holder make a woman happy?”

I finally got around to painting the guest bathroom. Trust me, it needed paint like my 401K needs funding. Whilst buying the paint, I picked up the toilet paper holder of my dreams – black wrought iron and cleverly designed so that toilet paper can be installed without disassembling the holder.

I am challenged when it comes to inserting toilet paper in the standard type of holder. I become all fumble-fingers and end up hopping around the bathroom with my jeans around my ankles trying to pick up the middle rod. It’s always an Abbot & Costello moment not that I think those boys ever changed the toilet paper roll.

[I’m generally opposed to jokes that bash gender, race or ethnicity, but I absolutely love this one: How many men does it take to change a toilet paper roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been done. OK. Got that out of my system.]

I’m pretty tickled with the holder. In fact, I’m pretty tickled with the whole bathroom.

I’m two-for-two on recent paint jobs. After the disasters of recent years, this is heady stuff. The lavender office and now the cow bathroom have been freshly painted with the color being right the first time. Right and fabulous.

Um, cow bathroom – yes.

happy cowsBack when black and white cow motifs were all the rage, I made the mistake of saying (out loud) that I thought they were cute. I’m not generally a “cute” person, but I live in a barn. I like black. And I do, now and again, enjoy a touch of whimsy which explains why Miss Piggy lives on my desk in my oh-so-elegant lavender office. It also explains the cow bathroom.

Since I had declared the cuteness of black and white cow stuff out loud in front of God and everybody, my entire extended family gave me such stuff for every gift-giving occasion. It got entirely out of hand. By the time I shrieked, “Enough already, people,” I had cow dishes, posters, photos, cards, plant holders, door stops, stuffed animals, coffee mugs, sweatshirts, socks, salt & pepper shakers, cleverly designed lotion dispensers, Christmas ornaments, soap, stools, canisters, soup tureens, cookie jars, and, I’m not kidding, perfume.

cowsSurreptitiously, I had been getting rid of the nastier stuff as the years rolled by. A few years ago, I got rid of 90% of it. During the cow purge, I discovered that I like cow images. I saved those. I also saved the 4,327,643.5 greeting cards bearing cows that I received along with the cow gifts. I also cut out and saved particularly amusing cow cartoons. (No, really, they do exist – Far Side, for example.)

Over the past ten years or so, I’ve been putting some of these things in frames. I actually hung some of them, but most of them were languishing in a box pending painting.

While recovering from what was probably swine flu, I woke up with a powerful urge to finally paint the bathroom I’ve been trying to paint since 1998. I decided, after ten years of pondering, that cow udder pink would be just peachy – although I wanted a cow udder pink that veered towards orchid rather than peach.

I skipped-to-my-lou’d over to the Lowes and picked out paint in less than 5 minutes which left me plenty of time to snag the black wrought iron toilet paper roll holder. It was a good day. Those of you who know me know how out of character that is. It took me 3 hours in the paint aisle once to choose a white paint. There’s something to be said for buying paint in the wet-noodly-stage of flu recovery.

It was even better when the molding came off without cracking. Spackling went enormously well. Primer was easy-peasy. Paint went on like a dream AND the painter’s tape didn’t pull off the edges of the new paint when I pulled it off the wall. Really, it was like someone else painted the bathroom. (Of course, there’s paint in places there shouldn’t be and I’ll eventually get around to fixing that.)

sinkAfter all that, I painted the vanity and medicine cabinet, spray painted some stuff black and begun the onerous task of hanging stuff on the walls.

One wall has always borne three of Jennifer O’Meara’s “American Barns” prints. I love these things and I could flay myself for not having bought more when they were on the market – they weren’t particularly costly. My goal was to complete that wall with a ton of barn images and cow images and touches of whimsy as well as the other three walls. I have two thick file folders of images suitable for framing (some blatantly stolen from Flickr).

People in bifocals with a significant astigmatism find lining up photographs and prints on a wall to be challenging. I got about half of it done when I ran out of frames (and energy).

barnsMy to-do list now includes the purchase of more frames (from Dollar General and similar fine framing establishments). I also must deal with the ceiling and the floor, but significant progress has been made.

And so? Can a toilet paper roll holder make this woman happy? Well, no, not in and of itself. But I’m tickled cow udder pink with the progress of the bathroom. If memory serves, I think pink is one of those colors that is said to provoke a feeling of happiness. And then there are the simple conveniences like being able to put toilet paper on the holder one-handed that do make me smile. But I’m especially happy that it’s all gone so well.


[And, in other news, I’ve replaced my stolen camera with an exact replica! In fact, for all I know, it could be my stolen camera. I mean do we really know? Is E-Bay just a giant fencing site?]