Coming Soon . . .
Working on a fairly long and complex (HTML-wise) post: Required Listening for Hillbilly Holiday, 2005.
So chill.
And have some ‘possum. (Netnanny alert! One instance of minor vulgarity!)
The Sundry Perils of Bunk Bedding: Conclusion
The bunk bed project is complete:
For the pictures only, from start to finish, go here:
For the entire project in all of its heroic detail, go here.
I’ve survived.
What’s next?
The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding: Update II
Having escaped death and serious bodily injury during the construction phase, and having avoided measurable brain damage (or having suffered such significant brain damage that I am blissfully unaware of it) during the priming phase, we now tackle Stage III: Painting.
Now you would think that painting is a relatively safe activity, but in actuality it presents significant opportunity for permanent psychological impairment. Allow me to illustrate:
Since Angela and I both like the Abbyville’s standard paint job as shown on the playhousedesigns.com website, we start with the yellow base coat:
So far, so good. Just trying to mimic a picture.
But then we start thinking, which is often a mistake in our house.
Angela asks, “What color should we paint the walls?” And by asking, she of course is judging my devotion to her by my ability to guess her preferences and pretend that they’re mine.
And let me digress for a second. At the time, this really seemed like a simple question. I mean, really, how many colors are there? Seven, right? ROY G BIV. Red, orange (Go Big Orange!), yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Seven colors. And I am pretty familiar with these colors, with the exception of indigo, which I believe is the name of a chain of convenient stores in Southern Asia.
Hold on. Slappy’s asking me to assist her with a band aid because she has a dot on her thumb.
Okay, crisis averted. Now where was I? Oh, how hard can it be to just pick one of seven colors and paint? And yes, I realize that colors come in different shades. But light, dark, and in-the-middle is about as complicated as I get.
So, professing a sincere desire to assist my wife in the finer details of color selection, I power up Punch! Master Landscape to help us make the best choice. Of course, I really just want to mess around with the computer, but the program does provide some assistance.
We narrow the color choice down to either blue:
or pink, which confuses me because it isn’t one of the seven ROY G BIV colors:
After only a few short hours of examining the two pictures above, we decide to go with blue.
So blue it is. Easy enough, right? I immediately start thinking (and remember the usual consequence of such behavior in my household), “I get a gallon of blue at Home Depot, slap it on with a brush (or a roller, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious), and then nap while it dries. When I wake, I got me some fine blue walls, and we’re done with the whole project.”
Angela has other ideas. Lots of them. The wife of my youth embarks on what turns out to be a fortnight-long process of self-torment, contemplating in excruciating detail each and every conceivable combination of color, shade, sheen, and technique.
I’ll spare you most of the details, but here’s just a brief glimpse of the agony: The Behr website (which, I feel compelled to point out, is only one of many companies specializing in paint) color-browser has 7 basic blues: Pageant Song, Anenome, Bayou, Costa Rica Blue, Azurean, Water Flow, and Jamaican Sea. I feel warm just typing the names. Each of these starter blues can be “fine-tuned” by making it lighter, darker, “more muted,” or “less muted.” (I sometimes wish our children had a “more muted” option.) Anyway, there are typically several degrees by which a starter blue can be fine-tuned. For example, Costa Rica Blue can be made “more muted” by six degrees. It can be “lightened” by three degrees and “darkened” by three degrees. I tried to determine just how many variations of Costa Rica Blue there are, but quite frankly, I got lost chasing down the color-browser’s varied paths of mutation and hue and couldn’t find my way back to basic (basic?!) Costa Rica Blue. Oh, and it involved thinking, and you know how I feel about that.
So, let’s just say that there are 50 variations of Costa Rica Blue. And from this point on, all estimates will be conservative. And let’s say that each of the other starter blues — Pageant Song, Anemone, Bayou, Azurean, Water Flow, and Jamaican Sea (ooh, I suddenly feel an inexplicable desire for a tropical holiday) — also has 50 variations. So we have 350 shades to choose from.
Of blue.
From Behr.
“And what about sheen?” Angela asks. And again I fail to comprehend the true complexity of the question. I mentally flip a coin. “Uh, sheen. Sheen would be good, right?”
But to sheen or not to sheen is not the question. The right answer is apparently one of the following: flat, flat-enamel, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, or high-gloss.
So each of the 350 blues comes in six sheens, and that’s what, 2100 blues? Conservatively.
But wait, there’s more! There’s Inspiration! AKA technique: Sandwashing, Venetian plaster, sponging on, sponging off, ragging on, ragging off, colorwashing, dragging, crackle, Pearlescents, and one other that I can’t list because Netnanny considers it an unsavory term. But anyway, 11 “techniques.” So, let’s see . . . 23,100 blues.
So we’ve got the blues.
And here I’m shifting to past tense, so don’t freak out. We decided on a base coat of satin applied with a ragging off technique. The two color combination we actually used is a closely guarded trade secret, which we will not divulge except under threat of death or torture. (You know, like somebody threatening to make us paint or something.) But here’s a hint.
Here’s the room after the first coat of blue, but because the picture was taken at night, the blue looks much darker than it really is:
And then things got really hectic for about a week, as we engaged in a frenzied flurry of activity to get the bunk beds and the rest of the room done prior to the arrival of out-of-town guests. Slappy complicated matters by regularly touching recently painted surfaces and then trolling all through the house, pausing only to pee on the sofa once in awhile.
In the meantime, we received the custom-made foam mattress. Angela said it was wrapped extensively with packing material resembling Saran Wrap, which I thought was just hilarious. I mean, the mattress itself is basically packing material. (Angela pointed out that they probably didn’t want anything to puncture the mattress, but that’s just not as funny.) Anyway, we put the mattress in the loft and used the cling wrap to fasten Slappy to the kitchen table.
In the chaos, I stopped blogging and taking pictures, so I don’t have a record of the steps taken to this point (those documents have been shredded). But, as you can see, we “antiqued” the bunk beds and put on the shutters, molding, and part of the shingles (actually, they’re cedar shakes).
The jury’s still out on the shakes. We may take them off and just paint the roof. And we still have the hand-painting to do (which will be done by Angela’s sister, Pam Heikkila, who owns and operates a fine art photography studio in Farmington, Minnesota), but at least we got to the point where the kids could sleep in their own room instead of on the air mattress in the basement.
And they were pretty excited:
By the way, Slappy thwarted her parents’ attempt to bind her to the dinnner table with kitchen supplies. And she’s excited about that, too.
For the final installment of The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding, go here.
The Sundry Perils of Bunk Bedding: Update I
I have survived the assembly of the bunk beds. New additions are the shelves and the two corbels (and the semi-made bed):
We devoted today to priming — a relatively hazardless activity, except as it relates to our carpet and my brain cells. Just finished, and I’m feeling quite loopy.
The special order foam mattress for the loft bed is on the way.
Later, the paint.
And the molding.
And the shingles.
And the chemo.
For the next installment of The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding, go here.
The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding
So Slappy is outgrowing her crib. Ready to move to a big-girl’s bed. But the girls’ room isn’t that big, and the other “bedroom” is being used as an office. So we think, aha!, bunk beds!
Angela starts poking around on the web and ends up at playhousedesigns.com, which is a pretty cool site. It features a bunch of themed bunk and loft beds, and we settled on the Abbyville Collection Bed Loft:
The only problem? Cost: $2795 painted; $1595 primed; $1395 unpainted and unprimed; and $850 for a kit, which I guess includes pre-cut boards and assembly instructions. But I wouldn’t know, because we didn’t buy that.
No, Angela says, hey, the plans are only $85. We can build it. And by saying “we” she of course means me. And I think, hey, with my vast experience in carpentry (none), my great amounts of discretionary time (close to none), and with my extensive collection of tools (I have one of those plastic toolkits with seventeen kinds of screwdrivers and a crescent wrench in it, and a circular saw, which I actually used . . . once), I think, I can do that. And then I utter the two most famous last words ever spoken: “No problem.”
Well, I had to buy a jigsaw. But first I had to figure out what a jigsaw was. A router saw may have been better, but then again I wouldn’t know because I don’t know what a router saw is. And I had to buy, so the plans told me, 7 sheets of MDF board, but of course I did not know what MDF board was. If pressed, I would have said some kind of wood. I also didn’t know, until later, that I would have to rent Home Depot’s truck to get the MDF home. Here’s a free tip — MDF is heavy.
So in only four short weekends, I had cut 21 pieces of MDF board and decided the “D” stood for dusty. I started out trying to use the jigsaw for straight cuts, but, alas, I was not that straight. I then cut some boards using the circular saw, without a guide, and I ended up with the straightest crooked lines I’ve ever seen. Another free tip — use a guide. Measure it, clamp it down, and make sure there’s nothing underneath the cutting line. Oh, and make sure you are not going to have a deadly (but hilarious!) see-saw type chain reaction when you finish cutting through the board. Hint — if the cut is not supported on both sides (but not directly underneath!), the middle will cave in when the cut is complete, and you will be sandwiched by heavy, dusty MDF boards flying at you from both directions. You’ll be squished like a grape, except that grapes generally do not hold smoking power tools. Not that that happened to me , mind you.
So, take the time to set up the cut. Then, start the video camera, and make the cut. It takes ten minutes to set up a cut and ten seconds to cut it, but it’s the best way. Oh, and don’t breathe while you’re cutting or for fifteen minutes afterwards. Alternatively, you can wear a mask. (We now know why Michael Jackson started wearing masks in the 90’s: he was cutting MDF board in his garage.) Dusty! Dusty! Dusty! Had to invest in a shop vac, and in seeing how well it worked, I considered attaching it directly to my face to suck out all the dust I had inhaled. After all, the instructions did not specifically warn against such use.
So I started putting the thing together. The instructions, while decent, were not exactly precise. I’m used to assembling computer desks and things that are made by companies like Sauder that specialize in consumer kits, but only experts and fools try to make something like this from scratch. And if you haven’t figured it out already, I’m no expert.
So I made mistake after mistake, but things finally started to take shape. Here’s me (notice the dust!) hooking the two sides and middle partition together with the loft bed deck.
The most exciting part was getting the gable up. As the next few pictures show, I let the kids get up there and look around at this stage. Hey, they wanted to, and besides, I figured that it was better (for me) if the thing collapsed with them in it instead of while I was underneath it with a sharp screwdriver.
[replacement pictures forthcoming]
Having avoided death or serious bodily injury to this point, I pushed my luck and attached the roof, and once again placed my eldest daughter in imminent peril to test my work . . .
[replacement picture forthcoming; maybe]
. . . and then attached the roof to the bookcase gable.
And, ladies and gentlemen, that’s where we are today. Actually, I put in the bookcase shelves and attached the corbels (is that a wine?) this afternoon, but I don’t have pictures yet. I’ll update this post shortly.
Right after my lung transplant.
The next installment of The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding here.
Thanks for the Traffic
Just returned from the AHLA Long Term Care and the Law conference. Thanks to Shawn Driscoll and his monkey arms for telling Shawn Anderson, devoted father of adorable twins, about this blog. And thanks to Anderson for his online promotion of the link to The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness. Oh, and to Kris Anderson for leaving the first comment on this blog. Y’all should win a prize or something.
It’s weird to get “home”, early even, at 5:20 and realize that at your real home, your kids are in bed. Or, more probably, in the bedtime routine. Tried to call, but no one answered. Hope Slappy and Freaktoe didn’t kill their mother.
Conference was good; lots of info and all that. First order of business, though, is finding cheap food for the rest of the trip. So, back later.
Slappy’s Third Birthday
Slappy turned 3 on Tuesday, but we had her party today. Princess theme. Taking care not to stress out about something that’s supposed to be fun, Angela and I made the cake, which I think Slappy liked. Mostly, though, she just wanted to stick her fingers in it. It turned out pretty well, I think. And anyone who had a piece can expect to holler New York in three to five days.
It only took me ten minutes to put together her Princess scooter — which Slappy keeps stroking affectionately, saying “I love my bike, my beautiful bike.” — but it took me about a half hour to figure out how to make her helmet fit. Which is really pretty funny, since she never got her scooter up past half-walking speed. If we’re worried about her falling down, shouldn’t we be consistent and make her wear a helmet around the house?
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Slappy! You’re my Princess!
Best Read of the Day — The Bleat and the Perfectionist Mother
James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, but don’t hold that against him. His blog — The Bleat — is excellent, and I don’t read it often enough. Lileks is a stay-at-home dad, and he often writes about his daughter (I think she’s pre-school age), whom he refers to as Gnat.
Today, The Father of Gnat Fisked (a blog term that I’ve gathered from the blogosphere refers to the line-by-line or piece-by-piece destruc, uh, refutation of someone else’s story or statement; I assume it’s derived from someone named Fisk, but I don’t know the whole origin. Ask Instapundit.)
That parenthetical was so long, I’m going to have to start that sentence again:
The Father of Gnat Fisked this story from Newsweek about mothers’ complaints of insanity.
The Newsweek piece is, apparently — I didn’t read it — basically about how working women who have become mothers have stressed themselves out by transferring corporate ambition to the mothering role. One woman was apparently pushed over the edge by her inability to coordinate felt piece textures for a school function. To this, Lileks says:
Raising Gnat is the most important thing I do. But she’s a child, not a project.
I don’t get a bonus if she exceeds quarterly projections.
Gnat’s dad concludes that:
The article makes a point despite itself: the perfect is the enemy of the fun. Maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this, since I am a guy in a rather unique position. But I’ve given up great acres of work time to be here with Gnat, and the amount of free time I used to have – time I spent recharging the daily batteries – has dwindled to zip. But it’s all a trade-off. So it’ll be a couple more years until I can wander downtown again; so it’ll be a while until she’s in school and my day is my own. So what. Nothing beats the time we spend together, the look on her face when she shows me a magic trick, the hug and kiss I get when I leave her at school. Today she beat me at UNO again and I explained how Barbie glitter cards are made and we looked at a website about the solar system and ooohed and ahhed at Saturn. And that matters more than anything because she is mine and I’m her Dad, and qualifying those definitions just seems petty.
I could teach The Father of Gnat a few things regarding UNO. It’s pretty easy to win against a pre-schooler because they tend to spread their cards face-up on the table thereby enabling the adult with larger hands and better coordination to cheat. James, that’s a freebie. You can return the favor by telling me how Barbie glitter cards are made.
Read the whole thing — it even suggests a remedy to the ever-present problem of Polly Pocket creep in households with young daughters.
The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness
So Tennessee is once again on the cutting edge of the new and improved flu season. But at least we’ve learned some interesting and fun new terms for vomit. Check out the link. It’s fun! It’s interesting! It’s fun and interesting! I especially like “holler New York.”
Bedtime is much better at the Hollingsworth household nowadays. But it’s been a crazy week and a half. Middle of the night one day last week, Freaktoe comes into our bedroom to announce that she’s going to get sick. Leave it to her to preface every action with a statement of what is to follow. I usher her to the bathroom where she promptly spews.
Hoping it’s just something she’s eaten, I put her back to bed, but she’s up again ten minutes later heaving into the toilet. We finish the night on the floor in the hall, trying to sneak in some rest in between cack sessions.
A friend of Freaktoe’s had the same thing a few days ago. Swept through their house touching everyone with illness like a Biblical plague. It did not pass over us. More like through.
After a few days of staying home from school, laying on the floor sleeping, Freaktoe gets better just in time for Slappy to show her how it’s really done. Now we’re all up at all hours of the day and all hours of the night. And Slappy’s blowing chunks, contaminating everything in the house.
A day later, we think she’s okay, and we all have Chinese.
Mistake.
You know how they always say that every time you eat Chinese you’re hungry an hour later? Not so when you’re picking broccoli out of the blankets. Mmmm.
Where did our lives go, I ask. Gone are the big dreams of changing the world, writing the great American novel. Now we’re de-chunking the crib 24/7.
Meanwhile, Angela and I are keeping a close eye on the weather, so to speak. Frozen by anticipatory fear, like the mass of humanity staring up at the sky in the movie Armageddon, waiting for disaster to strike. So far, the crisis has been averted. But for how long? It certainly seems inevitable. And imminent.
Finally, today, Slappy is the old Slappy. Smiling. Making faces. Happy.
We have tacos for dinner.
Mistake.
A half hour later, Slappy’s not so happy. “I feel sick.” Mmmm hmmm. She’s rushed to the throne room by her mother, where she refries her beans. Freaktoe, who’s taking a shower, starts freaking. “Eeeewwwww! She’s hurling!” She grabs a towel and runs into the hall soaking wet. Her voice echoes down the hall — “Eeewww! Slappy puked on the dog!”
And sure enough, there’s Oreo, our Boston Terrier, sitting at the end of the hall with telltale taco specks adorning her head and bulging eyelids. A circle of spotlessness extends from her mouth as far as her tongue can reach. Mmmmm.
We’re having American food tomorrow night. Oreo wants more tacos.
Mediating: Slappy v. Freaktoe and Veggie Tales v. Psalty
So here it is, more than a month after my test post, and I haven’t done squat. It’s almost 9:00, and I’m still multitasking. Eight-year-old Freaktoe is reading in bed, and she, like the rest of us, are trying to ignore two-year-old Slappy crying and going through her repertoire of tactics she uses to try to keep from having to actually go to sleep. “I’m scared!” “Sissy’s mean!” “Aahhhhh!” “What did I do?” “Turn this off!” (referring to the boom-box softly playing “Safe in Your Daddy’s Arms.”) Nice, Slappy. Thanks much. Burning Veggie Tales for you as we speak.
I have a defense mediation by phone tomorrow. Incredible mess involving our leased nursing home operation, the owner of the property, the management company, two insurance companies, the broker, two other parties in the chain between the broker and the insurance companies, two attorneys for each of the above (only a slight exaggeration), one local counsel here, in-house counsel (that’s me), and the mediator. Oh what fun . . . .
Slappy’s escaping from the crib. I know this because Freaktoe is screaming it at the top of her lungs. Like it’s a new occurrence or something.
Now Freaktoe starts in on her repertoire. “Can I turn up the lamp?” “Can you shut the closet door?” “Can you read by the door?”
The Veggie Tales burn didn’t work because I got those CD-RWs, thinking I could save some money re-using CDs. Didn’t know they took so long to burn. Didn’t know they don’t play on old CD players. Like the one in the Slappy’s room.
“Daddy. Want Veggie Tales.” For some reason, Slappy’s not following the CD-R, CD-RW explanation. Boiling it down to “Veggie Tales doesn’t work. Sorry.” results in a pause and then an “Aaaahhh!!!”
I’m with you, Slappy.
And still, along with all this, I’m thinking about writing. Thinking about a second book. Blogging its creation. Might actually do it.
Slappy’s escaped again. Hold on.
Angela’s on a frantic quest for the original Veggie Tales CD. It’s important. Determined it’s probably in storage in the dungeon under the stairs. Substituting Psalty.
Still trying to figure out how to make Hello work. Need pictures.
Still considering the blogging the creation of a new novel idea. Percolating.
News flash. Slappy doesn’t like substitutes.
