Whirlwind = list

It's been a whirlwind of a week around here.  I can't for the life of me figure out how it got to be the end of June already.

And when my mind (and house, and life, as you will see...) is disorganized, I turn to listing.  Do you ever do that?  Just list things in your head--things to do, things to read, things to remember...?

1. M officiated at a friend's wedding last weekend.  Yes, as a third grade teacher and former altar boy, the internets, and, subsequently, the state of Washington, deemed him suitable to unite man and woman in the holiest of unions.  (Side note: It's a funny world we live in, where my husband, wonderful as he is, can spend 25 seconds on a website and be eligible to unite a guy and a girl in a marriage, while this gay couple, who have been together since 1958, can't get married at all.)

2. He did a great job.

3. The wedding, start to finish, lasted less than 10 minutes. Several guests, who were married with full masses, averred that they wish they'd had M as their officiant instead!

4. We came home on Sunday, tired, but ready to tackle a few projects in between trips.  (Because, of course, we are headed off to Olympia on Thursday bright and early for some work on my in-laws' house and his dad's 60th birthday.)

5. And so, I sit typing this at the computer table, currently the only piece of intact furniture in my bedroom, having spent much of the last 24 hours removing wallpaper.

6.  Wallpaper stinks.  The only silver lining is that they only put the paper on the bottom half of the walls, sort of a half-assed chair rail look.

7. I've had to take wallpaper out of all three bedrooms in this house.  I wish I'd realized how much better it would have been to do all of them at once before any furniture was placed in the room.  We were smart and did Miss E's room before we unpacked it--of course, it was our office/guest room then, and it also had the most hideous wallpaper/paint combo: mauve, blue, and metallic silver seashells with the top half of the wall painted a pukey light mauve.  Very 1984.

8. Mr. D's room was less onerous:  blue and white vertical stripes with a blue and white floral border, the top half of the room painted blue.  (Badly.  In all 3 bedrooms, it looks like they tried really hard to make 1 gallon of paint stretch to paint all of the walls and the ceiling, so they were all streaky.)  It actually looked pretty good--but then, when he was about 4 he figured out he could pick at the paper and peel it off, and pretty soon we had to do the whole room.

9. Our room has yellow striped/floral wallpaper with and lemon yellow above.  And if you don't know why an English teacher wouldn't want yellow striped wallpaper (besides the fact it looks like something Laura Ashley puked up after a frat party gone bad), you need to go read this short story.

10. Each room also had sort-of-coordinating valences over the windows.  I say "sort of" because none of them quite match exactly, and often the colors were far different.  For instance, our yellow wallpaper is sort of goldeny sunshine yellow, but the paint above is full on lemon.  I much prefer the streaky adhesivy walls I'm uncovering now, I must say.

11.  So the next step is to prime over where the wallpaper was, and then get to work on painting the room.  We're going to go with a nice neutral in most of the room, with an accent wall, probably deep gold (NOT LEMON YELLOW), behind the bed.

And that is today's list.  I hope to return to knitting soon.  I've made one washcloth in the past week and that's all I have to show.