"New"

I made a big commitment today.

I cut the tags off my washcloths.

Yes, this is stupid, but somehow I didn't consider the washcloths I bought, that I use to wash my face, to be mine.  Mine enough to have the right to cut off the tags, at least.  But today as I was folding the laundry, the little tags sticking out of every single washcloth in the pile seemed to taunt me.  I have scissors.  I have power.  So I cut them off.

All of them.

This might be a symptom of a larger issue I have of sensing the age of soft goods.  I've had these washcloths for months, ever since I started doing the oil cleansing method and found it disturbing to scrub my face with Pixar characters (Wall-E, get deeper into my pores!).  And recently I've realized that clothes I consider "new" are three to four years old.  I looked at my Facebook photos and saw that I'm wearing the same three jackets in all of them. 

Part of my problem with clothes is that I've been following the advice to periodically go through your clothes and get rid of everything you haven't worn in a year - but I haven't been shopping to make up for it.  So I have one drawer of public-eligible shirts ("top drawer" shirts) and one drawer of jeans, a foot of closet space of work shirts, around a foot and a half of skirts I can't wear to work because I'd splash chemicals on my legs, and those three jackets. Three other drawers are yardwork and gym t-shirts ("lower drawer" shirts), pajamas, underwear, and socks.  The rest of my minimal closet space is slacks I only wear at conferences and sweatshirts.

I've tried.  In the past few weeks I've gone to my normal stores (Target, JC Penney, Sears, Kohls) both here and in the East Bay, and I've found a few things.  An embellished t-shirt (for the top drawer), a sweatshirt jacket (simply because it was fuzzy).  Ah dang it, is that it? Didn't I buy anything else?  No no, I bought two blouses at Target.  But I did figure out I purchase around 3% of what I try on.  Or, I have to try on around 33 items to find one I want to buy.  And that doesn't even account for everything I look at in the store before even selecting those 33 things to go into the dressing room with.

I made that one clerk at Target really sad.

I should get a button that says "I'm sorry I'm doing this but it wouldn't be necessary if your store used consistent sizing."

Unromantic

The older I get, the less I believe romantic movies.

That isn't that much of a revelation.  Romantic movies tend to be pretty ridiculous. He travels through time for her!  They had been married the whole time and didn't know it!  Jennifer Lopez is Italian!  I've read articles warning women against romances because they set "unrealistic expectations".  But we're not idiots.  We're not stupid enough to expect any of the normal romance movie tropes:

• Secret millionaire!  If he appears down on his luck, chances are he's really rich but is just hiding that to make sure a woman loves him "for him".  Or he's outwardly rich, and needs to be brought down to earth.  Sub-category, she's the rich one!  Her riches may or may not be secret.  Played to great effect in Overboard.
• Love overcomes death AND the space-time-continuum!  Played with less effect in Lake House, among others.
• Romance is extravagant gifts, whirlwind trips, and rose petals everywhere!

It's not the obvious ridiculousness like that that's bothering me more as time goes on.  It's other, subtler aspects of the movies that's getting to me.

One is that sex is the ultimate expression of love.  In many movies, it seems like the end of the story doesn't matter as long as the main couple got to have sex.  Case in point, Cold Mountain.  I hate that movie.  Jude Law spends the whole time going through horrible, horrible things to get back to Nicole Kidman who I think is supposed to be portraying a young, innocent preacher's daughter which makes the whole thing less believable from the start (she's nice but she's not 18 even with soft focus).  After meeting several colorful future Academy Award nominees on his way back, he finally finds Nicole Kidman, they have sex, and then he gets killed.  I'm serious.  That's a romantic movie?  We're supposed to be impressed they finally had sex?  What if it was different.  What if Jude Law was the same grizzled Civil War deserter, went through all the same difficulties, then finally, finally found a prostitute who would take Confederacy money and he gets his jollies with her before continuing on his way?  Would that be romantic?  Or is it just because Nicole Kidman's character is clean as the wind-driven snow that it's romantic?  Also, Titanic.  How do we know Kate and Jack loved each other?  Because they had sex.  Otherwise it would have just been two people who enjoyed each other's company and one happened to die when the ship sank.  Sad, but not romantic.  It's romantic because they had sex before they croaked?  Awesome.

Another is that it's romantic when men persist in pursuing a woman long past when she has turned him down.  The woman will turn him down, turn him down, turn him down, change her mind, and him coming back the fourth time is what's romantic?  What would be romantic would be if he got some self-esteem and found someone that was less of an indecisive witch.  This cliche is perhaps more worrying because it encourages men to keep going after unattainable women in the hope they'll cave eventually.  It's not romantic.  It's stalking.

I think the real appeal of romantic movies to women is much simpler.  What I like in romantic movies is a very simple formula.

1. Man pursues woman.
2. They fall in love.
3. They get married.
4.  They live happily ever after.

And I'll sit through time traveling, extravagant gift-giving, and Jennifer Lopez to get it.

The Transformation

The kitchen transformation is complete!

Before:

After:

I put up shelves as well:

It's so much better than before. What the pictures don't adequately convey is how gross the cabinets were before.  The yellow paint was thick, soft, and chipped, and all the cabinets were coated in sticky grease.  Parts of the interior weren't painted, even though they had to be original to the house, which is 65 years old.

Next project: the overly dolphin-ed bathroom.

Nutrition

I was standing in Trader Joe's, frozen in indecision in front of the breakfast breads, when I realized that I have an ever-increasingly complicated approach to nutrition.

The debate at hand was whether to buy bagels.  I love bagels.  Bagels led me to relax my stringent distaste for white condiments and to actually try cream cheese.  I just requested (and received) a bagel-enabled toaster for my birthday.

But in my nutrition scale, bagels have no point.

Literally, no points.  To me, bagels have no nutritional value.  No whole grains, no protein, nothing but deliciousness.  So I ended up getting the Trader Joe's "Force Primeval Bars" which have whole grains, apples, raisins, and walnuts.  They achieved a similar goal as the bagels (I wanted to try out my new toaster), but without the attendant guilt of eating something "pointless."

Over time I'm realizing I have some useful and some very odd ideas underpinning my ideas of nutrition.  They include:

• Whole grains, super-fruits, and fish are very good for you
• Sugar, butter, spices, onions, tomatoes, and salt are flavorings, not food
• Chicken is better for you than red meat
• Cheese and cream are bad for you
• If I like it, I get less "points" for eating it.
• If I don't like it, I get more "points" for eating it

Based on that, some foods get lots of positive points for getting very good press, and because I hate them.

+ +
Whole wheat
Brown rice
Fish
Leafy greens like spinach and kale

And some foods get lots of points because they're legitimately healthy.

+ +
Cranberries, pomegranates, blueberries
Beans

Some I view as only kind of good for you because they might be legitimately healthy but I like them, which downgrades their "worth".

+
Whole grain oats
Green beans
Cabbage
Broccoli
Strawberries

And some I think are only kind of good for you because they're not known for being super-foods but they're not bad for you either.

+
Chicken breasts
Apples, grapes, oranges
Eggs (for protein, since I don't have a cholesterol problem)
Skim or 1% milk
All other vegetables

Then some stuff is bad for you, mostly for having high fat.

-
Butter as a main ingredient
Soft or melting cheeses, like Cheddar and Jack
Cream
Sour cream
Deep frying
Coffee creamer and CoolWhip (for being made of plastic)
Bacon


Things that don't fall in any of those categories don't have positive or negative points.  Some have no points because I'm not sure whether they're good for you or not.

0
Red meat (conflicting positive value on protein, negative values on fat and cholesterol)
White flour (empty calories)
White rice (empty calories)
Olive oil (conflicting good press and fat)
Coffee (conflicting caffeine and antioxidants)

And some don't have any points because, for reasons my conscious mind can't discern, I count them as flavorings, not food.

0
Butter for a saute
Parmesan, Romano, and Grano Padano cheeses
Onions (probably legitimately healthy, but it doesn't count)
Tomatoes (ditto)
Cream of mushroom soup
Sugar

With that basis, my mind, mostly unconsciously, computes the total value of a meal.  Tonight, I had two hard-boiled eggs, whole wheat spaghetti with pesto, and corn on the cob.  Lots of points.  All positive.  No negative.  Mental pat on the back.  But what about the Cincinnati chili I like?  That's a ground beef chili (0) over white spaghetti (0) with beans (+), onions (0), and Cheddar (-).  Not healthy.  But the pasta primavera I make?  That also uses white pasta (0), plus cream (-), but has mushrooms (+), green beans (+), zucchini (+), and peas (+).  Definitely healthy. 

 Dessert doesn't have a system.  Dessert is supposed to be delicious.

That is its only point.

Kitchen Colors

After seven weeks I finished the cabinets.

My friend Cindy came over for dinner and helped me hang the last of the doors - specifically the ones that were too heavy for me to hold in place and screw in at the same time.

After that I thought I would take a break before deciding on a color for the walls.

Yeah, that lasted two days.  I ended up getting samples from Lowe's and Home Depot, depending which I was nearest at the time.  One fun discovery was that both stores can look up and give you colors from other places.  I had brought in a paint chip from Sherwin Williams, after I found out Sherwin Williams paint runs $70 a gallon and yeah, that's not gonna happen.  I handed it to the girl at the Lowe's paint counter and asked her to color match it, assuming she would hold it up to the little color scanner like they do with stuffed toys in the commercials or with a chip of paint from the outside of my house when I had to do some touchups on the front.

After perusing doorknobs and shelf brackets because owning a home has made me a boring, stereotypical Saturday morning DIYer as cloyingly portrayed in sunlit HGTV clips, I went back to the paint counter.  The girl was examining the paint dot on the top of the sample.  "This looks like it," she said.  "I found it on the computer." At my puzzled look she said, "Oh, we can look up other company's colors." "Really?" I said.  "I thought I was cheating but apparently it's legit!" 

So I used that to my advantage and got two more expensive brand colors in big box brand paint.

Current frontrunner is Benjamin Moore's Everlasting (1038).  Funny, because it was the first one I picked before getting distracted by Sherwin Williams "Interactive Cream".  Interactive Cream was too dark, and orangey, so I also tested Sherwin Williams Biscuit.  That was too close to flesh tone, and once I realized it reminded me of the color of what's stuck under your fingernail when you scratch a lot it was never going to happen.  I also think the Behr sample was closer to paint chip than the Valspar samples, so maybe Home Depot's color matching works better or Valspar's new oval sample cans don't mix as well.  I could see streaks of white or green unmixed in the Valspar samples, so those colors might not be exactly true.

Now that this is my kitchen wall I'm kind of committed.  Maybe that's something I can do over Labor Day.  Compared to painting the kitchen cabinet it will be ludicrously easy!

Expectations

I remember library card catalogs.  I know that's one of the things the next generation will have no concept of, like payphones or the US having a thriving economy.  I'm definitely not one of those kids who always had the Internet at their fingertips, who never had to figure out the Dewey Decimal System to find the right section in the library to find the right book to find out what koalas eat for their fifth grade report.

And yet, I find myself still expecting to be able to find through Google every single thing possibly worth knowing.  And normally, Google has not let me down.  Though it took a few months, and extensive rephrasing, I did end up finding that painting my college roommate (Karen, actually) described as "dead people on a raft."  Google has obviously refined their algorithm since then because the Wikipedia article for "Raft of the Medusa" is now the first listing.

But what Google is now not able to serve up for my intellectual delectation is pictures of every paint color I might conceivably want to paint a room in my house.  Yesterday I thought I might be interested in Sherwin Williams' "Bagel 6114" for the kitchen walls, but the majority of the photos I found on Google were "a similar  color would be Sherwin Williams' Bagel 6114".  Well, yeah, sure.  Even harder to find where pictures of Benjamin Moore's Mohave Desert, since those photos were of the actual Mohave Desert.

So to perhaps keep others from hitting the same dead ends, I wanted to contribute my small part to the Internet's paint color collection.


The dining room is Tinsel Beam by Valspar, eggshell finish.

The living room is Bay Waves by Valspar, satin finish.  It is a very good honest gray, not too dark or too light.

Visitors often ask if the rooms are blue or gray and I have to explain that one is blue and one is gray.  Here are Tinsel Beam and Bay Waves side by side:

The kitchen cabinets are in Mascarpone by Benjamin Moore, satin finish in the Advance paint.  The pulls are Thomasville Grayson from Home Depot.

The Mascarpone is a creamy, slightly yellow white (like the cheese, I guess).  Here is the Mascarpone up against the whiter white of the trim.  I don't know the color of the trim because it is original to the house.

And against the white fridge:

This bedroom is Aqua Spray by Behr, adjusted to 75%, in satin.  The cabinet is Du Jour by Valspar, in high gloss.

Here is the 75% Aqua Spray in a different light.  I admit it is a bit more fluorescent than I wanted. 

This bedroom is Maple Cream from Valspar, in satin.  The trim here is Du Jour by Valspar as well. 

This bedroom is Desert Seedling by Valspar, in eggshell.

Kitchen Conundrum

After Catherine and Karen left, I impulsively decided to start re-painting my kitchen.  For a refresher as to why:

Yeah.  My kitchen really was those colors.

I thought I could cut my teeth on a few drawers.  But painting a few drawers required a lot of equipment.  A sander.  Sandpaper.  Fancy, high-VOC primer (Zinsser BIN Shellac-Based Primer-Sealer, to be exact).  Wood putty.  So it ended up being less of an introduction and more of a head-first dive.

A long, slow, dive.

All the instructions I've found online say that painting cabinets isn't quick.  "Not a weekend project", they say.  Well, yeah.  As I sit here over three weeks later and am only maybe starting to see the end in sight.

See, the process sounds straightforward.  Clean, sand, prime, sand, paint, sand, paint, done.  Even with a day between each coat that's still just three painting days.

But cabinet doors have two sides.  So expand that to six.  And even after borrowing a portable table from my parents I only have space to lay out four cabinet doors at once.  And I have 16 doors.  So that's four sets of doors, six days each...My mind boggles.

But the product is looking good.  The drawer hardware arrived on Friday and I ran to take pictures of it on the only finished portion of the kitchen - two of those original drawers on the one section of frames I had finished.

I'm pleased!

But there's a long way to go.