We're having our house painted. It's one of those totally un-fun things you get to buy when you are old. I can hear my sister in law already, telling me to stop whining about the "high class headache" or even better, my friend M saying, "Waaahhh! My p--y itches!" Which totally cracks me up, every single time, even typing it. Anyhow, we are lucky to have a great house to paint, a good painter to paint it and the money to pay for it. I get that. I do. But still, Mexico might have been fun.

There are a lot of good things about having the house painted. I just walked into the living room and noticed that, now that the front porch ceiling is painted light blue, there's a kind of glow coming from the windows. It actually brightens up the whole living room, all the better to showcase the new lamp I plan on getting (totally copying Aunt Ginny, so I need to ask her permission first!) If you have an opinion as to which lamp is cooler, please post it in the comments section (yes, my imaginary friends, you must find a way to respond!) Here are the lamps:


I like them both, but I think the double one would give off more light, because it has two lights. Duh. But that's the one my aunt has. Is it stalkerish to copy someone's furniture? It's not like buying the same outfit. I mean, no one brings a lamp to a party (unless it's a shower and the lamp is a gift, but that's taking it too far, so let's just drop it. The subject, not the lamp.) I think the lamp will look totally awesome with the glow from the porch, but I digress, which is nothing new.

I also got a mini vacation, courtesy of the painters. I was lying on my bed reading while Baby J slept and I could hear two of the painters singing and talking in Spanish just outside my bedroom window. Although I really should take a Spanish class at Tech to remember the Spanish I knew, I haven't done that, so I couldn't understand a word. And I find it very relaxing to hear people talking and have no reason to really listen. That's why I like getting my nails done at the mall, where Lin (not her real name, but the one she gives out to us honkeys), her sister and her husband speak Vietnamese while they work. They actually are Vietnamese, by the way, they didn't learn the language just so they could have private conversations at work. They laugh a lot, so it could be that they're making fun of me, but I suspect they have more interesting stuff to talk about. Anyhow, lying on my bed, half reading, half sleeping and listening to people sing in Spanish made me feel like I was on vacation somewhere awesome.

But then Baby J woke up, the painters started sanding or drilling or something loud and I had to pee. I don't know why I always have to pee when it really isn't a great time. Baby J likes to keep me company when I go to the bathroom. He takes after his father that way. One of the main reasons we moved to this house from our old one is that it has four times as many toilets. I, mistakenly, thought that this meant that I had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the bathroom. Serendipitously, my toilet is really hard to find. You have to travel through my bedroom, through my closet, through a room with a tub and a shower and, if you haven't been distracted by then, you finally reach the toilet, which is housed all by itself in a tiny little room. My room. But, and this shouldn't have come as a surprise, my kids and their friends will come from the farthest reaches of the house, from the deepest depths of Lego coma, from the most elaborate game of dress up ever played...to take a crap in my toilet. And, given the attention span it takes to find my toilet, I 'll never understand why none of them can hold it together long enough to flush (Note: I just read this part to O and he pointed out that he does too flush, but X does not. True, all true.)

So that's what's happening here. Namasté, y'all!