What is UP with me lately

The rain. The rain is what is up with me. I get that rain is good, that I haven't had to water the lawn in over a week and hurrah and, furthermore, it will end as all weather things do and we will go back to all dry all the time and also HOT. (Okay, we are in fact back to HOT). But: the rain messed up my weekend, and I am NOT HAPPY. Specifically, the rain made a perfectly easy and sensible project, painting (some more of) the house, suck all of the non-accounted-for time out of Sat & Sun. To wit: Sunday I woke up and prepared myself for my weekly long run, as is my wont. Except that as I was tying my shoes and otherwise puttering toward Start, I happened to get that itchy, let's-think-about-those-clouds-and-how-they-might-impact-my-plans feeling, and that feeling led to a decision to switch the order of things, from run-then-paint to pain-then-run, which was fine, except that the paint part ended up taking up all of the paint and run time...and I guess maybe what I'm really mad about is the painting.

Augh will I be glad when the painting of the house is fini. It seems like it is neverENDING.

The other reason I felt a little pressed for time on Sunday was that we had to leave after lunch to bring Si up to his first-ever overnight camp. One of his best friends is also attending (they're sharing a bunk bed, in fact), and they've got about a million fun things scheduled, from baseball to archery to rain to canoeing to campout night to rain to horseback riding, and fun counselors that actually seem focused and attentive, like they might remember his name--but I still said, as we drove away, that I was SO VERY GLAD that my own personal days of sleepover camp are over. It just...has that overtone of bleakness. The too-hot, slightly mac-and-cheese-smelling dining hall. The bare-bones cabin with the plastic mattresses. The cabins that used to be snugly nestled in a cool pine forest but now, thanks to pine beetles and blowdown, are scattered across a bare, stump-studded field.

Si was enthusiastic about it, though, or at least a good sport, and by the time we'd gone back to the car and returned with his Harry Potter book he was deep in a game with his friend and barely looked up to say goodbye. So that's all good (but I will be glad to have him home, and to have school back in session and everybody in their place and predictable while I'm at work).

Yellow: Should We Hate It?

Sources Say Yes.

So, I spent all last week painting the kitchen and TV room yellow, and I hate it. Also, I'm so tired from painting in the first place that I'm not sure what the best fix is anymore. Simply repaint it? No way. The yellow will STILL BE THERE. I'm thinking torch the house and start over.

So the deal is, I thought I liked yellow. Since we moved in I've had in mind to repaint the kitchen a pale, summery yellow, something to feel bright and good-morningish as the sun streams through the house and the water heats for coffee. I've even painted a few other rooms in the house yellow--the hall bathroom and the hall. That's where the trouble started. I liked that yellow, but in certain light it seemed a little cold. Not quite enough sunshine, a little too much overcast polar sky. So, I thought, let's still go with yellow. Let's just warm it up a bit.

Unfortunately, I didn't really process the mechanics of "warming up." You warm up a color by adding red, or, since we're dealing with yellow to begin with, you add orange. Technically, it seems, you warm up yellow by adding the cheese powder from boxed mac and cheese.

So the past week I've been painting the walls of my kitchen with the fake-cheddar sauce yellow of mac and cheese.

Grok.

It's gotten to the point where I can't look at any yellow anywhere without feeling slathered in butter. The yellow of the hall and bathroom? Looks like banana taffy. Yellow houses I used to like? Yech. Even Helen's pretty yellow dresses have something unbearably margarine-y about them.