Perhaps this charming image will keep your hearts molten and oozing sweetness while we're off for a wee bit.
We have to visit a certain grandma this weekend, because SOMEBODY's second birthday is on the twenty-fifth and it's time to cash in. You know - when all of the relatives and friends with children for whom my mother has purchased gifts over the years have to cough up stuff we neither need nor want so that the very Earth itself doesn't spin off its axis with the imbalance from how generous my mother was all of those years ago.
But I shouldn't be mean. Really, I am going straight to hell for that one, because I am also going down there to collect some of the funds being cheerfully and generously donated in order to pay Jim and Jimmy, the two Greek guy painters, who are coming on Monday to change my living/dining room from "Palm Green My Ass" to "Japanese Paper" (aka "A Beige That Flatters My Skin Tone"). The hallway, which was the bigger part of this these-rooms-need-painting-because-they-make-me-queasy-after-three-years-of-these-hideous-colours deal, is going from "Who Wants a Textured Ceiling To Look Like The Inside Of A Terra Cotta Flowerpot" and "This Dark Green Is Usually Reserved For Farm Machinery, Not Walls" is going to become - you guessed it! "Japanese Paper". And the woodwork will all be a crisp decorator white (aka "I'll Have To Dust My Baseboards More Often". It will feel good to live in a house that doesn't give everyone a bilious tinge during cocktail parties.
Choosing colours when you're pregnant and hormonal and then leaving your husband and friends to paint without being there to nitpick, second-guess and micro-manage is never a good idea. Living with the remains of a colour scheme chosen by a depressed fifty-something year old single woman with a penchant for geese in bonnets and stencils is not a good idea for one year, let alone almost four. The combination of the two is very very much not a good thing.
However, living with crappy paint colours for years until they ruin your eyesight and scare your friends, then getting a quote for $3000 not including paint to change them, then getting another quote for $1600 including paint with the promise to do it in TWO DAYS, and your mom winning some money on the ponies - well, that is just how fate tells you that it's now a good idea to make that move. Even if it means pimping your daughter at a luncheon full of people averaging thirty-five times her age - well, that's a small thing compared to the fact that I genuinely believe I will be a much nicer person and better mommy to Josie if our house doesn't look like the paint was chosen by colourblind people, and applied with trowels. I'm saying it will be nice to to have to quickly let visitors know that we are aware of just how wrong the colours are. It's tantalizing to think of all of the other things I might be able to talk about, what with that gaping hole that will be left by not pausing to occasionally dis the existing colour scheme. Oh well, there's still the kitchen.
And so, we will be busy for the next while. Boo Boo's little surgery has been neatly timed so that he won't be around to get his little black hairs all over the nice new paint job, or attempt to kill Jim and Jimmy while they paint above the stairs thus causing us to be sued for millions of dollars we don't have. I thank everyone who actually felt the need to email me privately regarding the status of my cat's gonads, and hope this update is sufficient. I shall inquire whether or not they can be preserved much like some keep their children's dried umbilical stumps, and if so, I shall offer them to the person who best composes a poem, limerick, sonnet or haiku that captures the sentiment surrounding their loss. Please leave your "Ode to Boo Boo's Castration" in the comments. The winner will be decided by the number of potentially offensive Google hits it contains. That should keep y'all busy until it's time to post again.
