This was just handed to me.

Rattlesnake
By: Ursula S. Curlin

Yelp goes the stray dog! Yip and yelp!
What in the world is making that that dog cry for help?
I hurry to the woods where the dog lay with a shake,
Then all of the sudden I look up from the dog to see a big, evil snake
I feel all poor for that dog who ends up to be in a big ache,
I get mad for a moment when the snake wants to break,
Oh, I hate that poisoning snake!
Wasn’t he smart to notice that dog?
Wasn’t he smart to locate that dog?
Isn’t he lucky he’s not a log?
Now I’ll have to take the dog to the vet,
Now I think that dog should be my pet.
Quickly the rattlesnake slithers away,
For it’s the morning time of day.

So… painting this weekend.

First, a word about colors. Did I say all of this already? I am generally fearless about color. In the past I have had rooms in the following colors: red, raspberry, orange, apple green, teal, aqua, periwinkle, bright blue and purple. Those were all selected without swatching paint – pick a chip, make some paint, be happy. (We also have lavender in U’s room – but I did swatch that.) You’ll notice 2 gaps in that list – neutrals and yellow. Picking a grey for our living room was nervewracking – there are all those undertones and it is SO stressful. I am happy with our color (Behr Pensive Sky), but it threw me for a loop.

Which brings me to this weekend. Our hall color was easy(ish) – I had seen and loved a few deep bluey turquoises and loved them but didn’t want one in our room (which, as I mentioned is more about what I don’t want than what I do want). I first feel in love with Benjamin Moore’s Newburg Green and Martha Stewart’s Plumage, but went with Sherwin-Williams Deep Sea Dive – since I still may do a navy in our room I wanted a bit more differentiation. I love it. Love, love, love, LOVE! I was fearless about the color but a smidge worry about the light – it’s a small hall with a smallish light. It’s not a bright space and I was going dark. But it looks amazing – it used to be a passageway, not it looks like a room with presence. It had been an apple green, one shade darker than our (old) living room (Apple 3 and 4 by Laura Ashley for Lowes – I would link to these but they look totally different online).

But the bathroom. Oh the bathroom… We have ONE bathroom. So anything happening in the bathroom needs to happen fast. It’s not like painting renders the bathroom totally useless, but we do enjoy things like showering, so it needs to be pretty fast. We have high “wainscoting” (read: hideous fake tile paneling that is glued down and not really removable), so there’s not much wall showing. No strip is more than a foot tall or wide. I wanted citron – like an acrid, angry yellow that wasn’t like a highlighter. I have seen lots of things this color – but in paint it’s HARD. I know I can use the magic scanner eye to match anything, but I didn’t have what I wanted on hand. I’d see it on someone’s sweater or purse – and mostly in my imagination.

Ursula and I had heated debates over “our” colors – she was sick last week and we spent one of her “I feel fine but had a fever less than 24 hours ago so I’m home” days paint shopping. I found a swatch at I thought was perfect. So did she. Mine was Allen + Roth Limoncello, hers was Martha Stewart Mimosa. This colors were basically identical, but we were not budging (I will say that she has an *excellent* eye for color and I genuinely seek her input on paint). For various reasons, we didn’t swatch – mostly because we only needed a quart. As soon as I bought the quart I did a square on the wall and I was happy with it.

Happy until I painted it all over the next morning, that is. It wasn’t acrid or angry. It was happy and bright. It wasn’t hideous, but it was completely not interesting. It was like “hey! I’m yellow! Look! Yellow! That’s Me!” It was like the paint equivalent of Doug from Up. I tried to talk myself into it. I tried to talk Dan into it. Dan wasn’t having it, but wouldn’t say “this sucks”. Thankfully, I saw the light before we put up a second coat.

We fished a million chips out of the trash can. Away from the bathroom, we’d select a different color. “Oh look – this is way greener!” and “oooh – it looks great with the hall!” Then we’d hold it up to the Limoncello sample and it would be basically identical. Like I mentioned with Apple 3 and 4, light greens/yellows do NOT look accurate on screen, so we were sort of lost. There was one we liked – Lively Yellow – but a) the name sounded too yellow and b) I still didn’t know if it was different enough. So then we looked at one shade darker, Frolic, which I loved but had initially discarded because it was so bright. I made Dan pick, and now our bathroom is Frolic. It is still not the color I had pictured exactly in my mind, but I am happy. Really happy. Because of the brightness it’s mixed in a deep (clear) base rather than white. This keeps the color very true (and perhaps it’s so hard to find – since lots of brands use white bases), but the combo of clear base but not too dark (so not too much pigment) made the paint crazy thin. Like a watercolor. We had one coat of the horrible Limoncello (white base) plus 2 of Frolic. And honestly, a third coat of Frolic would have been ideal.

Wow – that is WAY more than anyone wants to know about my feelings on citron paint. But maybe this will help the vast number (ha!) of people who want angry yellow walls?

Ursula has always had an email account. Like probably since before she was born (yay for self-hosted email!). She’s had easier access to it since she got her new computer in August. But she hasn’t really used it much. Until she got her Kindle Fire for Christmas. We have it set up so that I get a copy of all messages she receives, but not what she sends. So, I have started getting these randomly titled emails from people I know, which are actually replies to her emails.

Some highlights:

“Thank you for the awesome dry erase board! I hope you like my old easel. The dry erase board is actually a good thing to keep data for my science fair project which has to deal with popcorn.”

“Ms. Molly, can you make a schedule with my mom to go to Mellow Mushroom for lunch on a weekend that you are free?”

“Ms.Molly thank you for going to Mellow Mushroom. I hope you had a great time at Mellow Mushroom and Yoforia.”

“I hope you are having a great week! Has Will had a great birthday? I can’t wait to go to Atlanta and see Anna Claire and Caroline and celabrate Anna Claire’s birthday. But I probably won’t get to go to Sweet Tomatoes because I heard that the Q——s have been to Sweet Tomatoes more than normal so they might need a Sweet Tomatoes break.”

I don’t know why, but I find them to be SO inadvertently hilarious. They are so grown up, yet not.

This one is a reply to an email about our dinner at Ruth’s Chris:

“Instead I actually ate crab cakes but mommy got fillet and it tasted awesome. The crab cakes were good.”

And yes, while I was at Ruth’s Chris with her (and Dan, of course), I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that when I was 8, I never went to dinner anywhere. And now she’s 8 and she’s all matter of fact and acts like she eats $30 entrees on a regular basis. Which she doesn’t. And neither do I. But we have been trying to go to one nice place each time it’s restaurant week.