back on the blog

Folks, it's been a while. Turns out a renovation takes a whole lot of energy (whodathunk?) and we haven't had a ton left over for other things.

Sorry, what's that? You think you saw us on TV at the US Open the other night? Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, duh... It's pretty obvious that the order goes 1) Tennis; 2) More Tennis; 3) Dear God, more tennis? 4) The place we are supposed to be living right now; 86) Blog. Right? Thank god I've made it through the other 82 priorities (i.e. tennis matches...) and finally have a chance to update you all. (btw, I'm assuming there are, like, thousands of you reading this blog, and have duly disabled the "comments" feature so as to insulate myself from possible disappointment...)

So here's what up: we moved out of our apartment. We moved in to...drum roll...not the new house at all but the far-far-too-kindly-offered front room of sister Maureen's apartment, a.k.a. 984 Metropolitan, a.k.a. my ex-apartment. It is, I have to say, looking quite a bit finer than when I lived there, if a bit empty without a certain 4 foot inflatable platypus on the mantle piece (friends of the platypus [F.O.P.s]: having made it all the way to Scotland and back, the I.P. finally gave up the leaky ghost in a trash heap at the front of 27 Kingsland. R.I.P. big weird buddy... Actually, come to think of it now, Maureen's dog Violet looks kind of like a platypus. And a billy goat. And a cat. And she is definitely almost as indifferent to my presence as if I was inflatable...) Meanwhile, our worldly possessions went into storage exile across the street: a 10 x 10 x 10 cubicle packed more densely than some really dense things I can think of. Maybe Joe Wilson (R of South Carolina)'s head? Okay, not quite that dense...

We are hanging tough, but only because we have to. There is electricity and a functioning toilet (hallelujah!) at the house now, but it is still a dusty nightmare – very much a "work site" and not a "living space". We've got this weekend to change up... We've got some of the upstairs primed. Now we just need to choose a paint color — piece of cake...

Luckily, we started on this project a while ago. I think possibly Mary Beth started it before we even saw the house... Anyway, we spent a few hours in Lowe's and Home Depot and got to a decent place with our mood board color sketch for our lovely Florida, I mean Brookyn, home...

Trouble is, you may notice, the overall color feel is one thing, while the exact shades of the colors is another. Three yellows is probably two too many. Locating just the right green is also befuddling.

Especially when I realized that I was partly trying to recapture the faded memory of the green that was in the bedroom of the house where I grew up. Wonderful and tricky to think that colors are like names and carry the emotional resonance (is that a nice way of saying baggage?) of all our previous encounters with them. Yep — piece of cake...