I dare you!

Peter and I were sitting around the other day talking about food.  I do not know why, but we were.  We might have been hungry.  We talk about food a lot when we're famished.  Our conversation went something like this:

P:  Have you ever made tortellini?
S:  From scratch?  No. 
P:  No, I meant from a package purchased at the store.  No one makes it from scratch.

Of course I took that as a personal challenge.  He might as well have said:  "Bet you can't do it.  I dare you to try!"

Naturally, I tried.

The recipe I found included beautiful pictures of the steps I should take.  The picture of the dough the recipe provided showed a beautiful glossy ball.  It was smooth and round and perfect.  My dough looked nothing like the picture. There was nothing glossy, smooth or round about it.

Very discouraged, I pondered tossing it out and starting over.  I had used duck eggs instead of chicken eggs and wondered if that were the problem.  If it was - I was stuck because that's all we have in the house.  I decided to press on.  Miraculously, after a lot more kneading, a lot of rolling and  a bit of work, I ended up with these things that look remarkably like they are supposed to:

They were filled with three kinds of cheese.  The sauce was a reduction of sauteed mushrooms, garlic, leeks, butter and wine.

It was good.  I proved I could do it.  It wasn't really that hard.  I just hope Peter doesn't catch on that daring me to do something or telling me it can't be done is a challenge I can't resist.

Wild Hare

I was planning on taking a break after the guest room remodel.  I set up my loom and spent some very luxurious time weaving a table runner out of purple and turquoise with a hint of sparkle  (I love sparkle!).  I also created a set of matching coasters that turned out quite terrible.  I'm not sure I can salvage them or if they must be tossed in a fire when no one is looking - their entire existence denied.  Coasters?  What coasters?

 

I've also started knitting a sweater.  It is a new challenge, knitting something so large and created in pieces. It's slow going but I am making progress.  It'll probably be done mid-summer - when it will be too hot to wear it.  I shall wear it anyway.  Harumph.

Despite having plenty of spinning, knitting and weaving to keep myself occupied I got a wild hare the other day.  I was sitting on the sofa and looked into my kitchen.  My very beige kitchen.  Very beige.  The ceiling and the walls were beige.  "Enough of the beige!"  I exclaimed to myself.  I snatched up my Sherwin Williams color strips  (they give them away for free you know!)  and thumbed through all the possibilities. 

After pondering oranges and lilacs and whites and blues I eventually picked out the strip, #129 - Yellow.  Peter narrowed down the choices to two of them.  I made the final selection:  Lemon Twist.  For those of you who remember my beloved yellow truck it is almost exactly the same color.

Just to mess with myself, when I got the paint home I smeared some on the wall.  My habit is to dislike it intensely when I do that - only to fall in love with it once I have it on the walls.  I should have suspected a problem - I loved my yellow smear immediately.  It was bright and cheerful and it made me smile.

I did not take a before picture of my kitchen.  Silly me.  But I did grab a photo of it before I had ALL the beige covered.  The ceiling was in the process of going white in this photo.

This is what it looks like now:

I'm not sure I like it.  It's way bright.  A little overwhelmingly yellow.  Okay,  a LOT overwhelmingly yellow.  Perhaps it will get better with time. Peter just keeps shaking his head bemusedly saying, "it's different..."  

I have decided I don't like painting.  This paint job was extremely painful. I dripped paint on the floor, on the counters and on me.  I dropped the roller and painted one cabinet yellow.  There was so much trim work and the yellow was very unforgiving.  The paint ran and dripped.  One coat wasn't enough and I spent today applying coat number two.  I was miserable through the whole thing and poor Peter had to listen to me whine and complain.

The laundry room still needs painting, as does the bathrooms and the hallway and the two back bedrooms but I think I shall wait awhile before tackling those.  Although - when thumbing through my color strips, I did fall in love with this color called "waterfall" for my bathroom.

I . Am . A . GENIUS!

There is a TV show called "My strange obsession."  Boy there are some very weird people on that show!  I haven't watched it, we don't get that channel here, I've just seen interviews with these people on talk shows.  The other day I saw an interview with a woman who slept with her blow dryer. 

That's a problem?  I totally get it.

I don't actually sleep with my blow dryer but it's cold up here in the north country and my sheets are COLD by the time I'm ready to crawl into them at night.  I've taken to warming the sheets with the blow dryer before I crawl into them and then letting the heat blow over me while I wait for Peter to brush his teeth and come to bed.

In truth though I've always been obsessed with hot blowing air.  Forced air heat is my personal weakness.  When I was a child my mom would wake my brother and I for school.  We would race to the dining room heat vent.  It was the best vent in the house.  He is 4 years older than I am and would usually beat met to the vent.  I would have to settle on the second best living room vent.

I used to sit on the heater and let my shirt fill with the hot air.  Sometimes I would pull a blanket over my head creating a tent of hot, blowing comfort.

Late in my pregnancy with my son I couldn't get comfortable in any position.  Finally I discovered I could sit in a bean bag chair next to the heater vent, I grabbed a blanket and found my own personal bliss.  The chair supported the parts of me that needed it and the heat provided a totally different, but equally as necessary, bit of comfort.  Unfortunately I needed assistance getting OUT of the chair.

In recent years I if I couldn't sleep I would turn on the house heater and curl up on the floor.  I would usually be asleep in minutes.  Napping was done on the floor as well.  If I don't feel well, it's the heater vent and floor. 

To me the hot air is like a warm hug.  It provides comfort and envokes memories of safety and peace and childhood and really really good emotions.

The problem I'm running into is that our floors are hard and I'm getting older.  No matter how difficult it becomes to get down to the floor or back up again I can't possibly give it up.  Yes. I'm obsessed.

This is where the genius part comes in..  The other day I took a strip of fabric and sewed it into a tube.  I added some elastic and put it around the heater vent cover.  Then I fed the tube up through the headboard of the bed and between the pillows. 

Now I have a bed warmer AND my forced air heat.  It is a little slice of heaven.  No more floor napping for me!

Ready for guests!

The guest room is ready.

It's been a long couple weeks.  Since the last time I posted I've made two trips to Salem.  The first trip was the "usual" one we take so Peter can attend a class in Portland.  The next trip I went alone.  It was the first time Peter and I have been apart since we got married. The first night I was gone I got a hotel with a big king-size bed thinking it would be so lovely to have all that room.  I slept terribly.  I only used a small portion of the space and kept waking up looking for Peter.  I repeatedly stretched my toes over to his side of the bed and they didn't run into his feet.  He's SUPPOSED to be right next to me.  Peter not being there was just wrong!   The second night I was too tired to notice.

The reason I headed south was to spend some time with my children. 

My daughter got her own little apartment and needed help getting her stuff from her dad's house in Vancouver to Salem and into her new place.  She and I did the whole move ourselves.  We are women, hear us roar!  Her place is a very cute little studio apartment, with a murphy bed even - but it's her space and she doesn't have to share.  She is a happy camper.

The second reason I went south - not that helping Jill was not reason enough - was because my daughter-in-law's mother passed away quite unexpectedly and I just felt like my son and his wife might need THIS mom around.  Unfortunately I didn't get to spend much time with them - but I hope my presence helped just a little.

Despite all this running around - our guest room is done.  I was thinking that I have touched every square inch of surface in that room at least twice. 

I scraped the ceiling, then re-scraped it because I did a lousy job the first time, then sanded, then patched dents and holes and sanded again.  Then I painted it.

I scraped the wallpaper off the walls, sanded, patched, repaired, sanded again. One coat of Kilz (more mold prevention), one coat of primer, one coat of honeydew, then more honeydew to cover up the lousy job I did the first time..

I tore up the carpet, scraped up the glue and foam rubber, sanded what was left, vacuumed and then crawled around on my hands and knees wiping every bit of dust off the floor and the walls.

Now.. Who is going to be the first to come visiting?