Category: At home

Martini hour

July 7th, 2016

Martini with garden

3 parts Aviation gin

1 part dry vermouth

Stirred with ice and strained into chilled martini glass

Garnished with 3 green olives on a toothpick

Enjoyed on the front steps in the evening with the garden
Summer evening (with kitties)

July 6th, 2016

It’s evening, after swim practice, and our daughter reads on the couch, smelling of swimming pool, while my husband grills chicken and blends fresh pesto. An Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong record plays on the turntable.

Our cat, Tubbles, loves chlorine, kid feet, laying on outstretched legs, and our daughter. She’s got all of those tonight. She has made our whole family happy by loving on our daughter’s feet. We giggled and snapped photos with our devices.

I had a productive day at work. Our house is clean. We ate at twilight on the porch. Our kitty made me laugh.

It’s been a perfect summer evening.
Summer with Windows open

July 2nd, 2016

It’s Saturday morning, 7:30. Early for a weekend day. I’ve already been to the grocery store and started laundry. My husband and daughter are en route to a swim meet, our near-teenaged son is still sleeping, and the kitties are lying in sunbeams, shedding fur in clumps now that summer is here.

I’m sitting in the lounge chair by our front windows, green smoothie on the sill, my bare feet up on the chaise cushion. Birds trill, insects buzz, and Bob Marley croons softly from the record my husband left spinning for me.

The early summer air is cool and fresh. It smells like green leaves, hay, and sunshine. Sunlight stretches across the garden. The butterfly plants — red, orange, white, and purple coneflowers — are already in full sun; the herb garden is in the shade of our neighbor’s dogwood. The morning shadows are long, but they’ll soon shorten.

In the time it took me to type the previous paragraph, the sun rose enough to drench the basil in light. Happily, our basil is thriving. We’ve already made two batches of homemade pesto this summer, and I bought pine nuts today so we can make more. We started in with the basil gin smashes last night as well, and I use the basil in a basic chick pea salad that’s been my staple lunch this week (chicks peas, lemon juice, olive oil, basil, salt). We will still have basil to spare, though. If you have favorite basil uses, please send them my way.

Summer Saturday mornings are lovely. Especially when enjoyed sitting by an open window with a soundtrack of reggae and birdsong. The day stretches before me. It will probably be filled cutting grass, pulling weeds, work I need to catch up on, laundry, heat and strong sun. Maybe a trip to the nursery to find some annuals to fill gaps in the garden.

But for now, it’s soft and cool, nothing but leisure time for me to practice writing blog posts on my phone.*

*More to come.
Paint chips

April 11th, 2016

Image courtesy of HomeSpot HQ.

I lay in bed this morning looking at our bedroom’s freshly painted walls. I studied the color, trying to find accurate words to describe it in my mind.

Cream.

That’s not accurate. Cream — dairy cream in real life — is more white. This is closer to vanilla ice cream, but still darker. Richer. It’s the color of French vanilla ice cream. It’s a rich cream.

And then I realized that’s the name on the paint chip: Rich Cream.

I have great admiration for the vocabulary of whoever names paint colors. Think of the scope of words you’d need to know. Most colors are named for something concrete: an object, a noun. For example, my office color is Lime Mousse. Our son’s room, a terra cotta color, is Oxide. Like rust.

I often want to paint a room a certain color simply because I like the feeling the name evokes. Our original pick for our room was Kansas Grain, which I loved the thought of sleeping in. Warm, light, golden. But the color wasn’t right for the space. It was too peachy. Now we sleep in Rich Cream, a bowl of silky vanilla ice cream, which isn’t a bad evocation either.

I suppose that’s another element of naming colors, which makes me appreciate the skill even more: the names evoke pleasant feelings. Our daughter’s room is Jamaica Aqua; our front door is Florida Aqua. Two colors, two names, that take me to warm, islandy, happy places.

I’m not the best at home improvement projects. I scowl and snap when I paint or try to execute upgrades at home. But I do love browsing paint chips. Frosted Emerald; Waterfall; Roman column; Wood Violet.

I love the sensory experience of seeing all those colors and exploring temperatures, tastes, textures, and smells the names evoke. I’d be terrible at naming — too many options! so much specificity! — but I delight in the work that paint-namers do.

For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
We didn’t play it safe

March 7th, 2016

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were contemplating painting our living room an unusual color. We stressed — do we go safe or do we go bold?

We decided to go bold. We painted the room a dark dark grey — almost a charcoal. A few nights later, the pizza delivery guy squinted into the room and asked, “Are your walls black?”

“No, they’re grey,” I said. I looked inside. I love our walls.

His eyes got wide and he smiled. “Cool,” he said.

Yeah, I think so too 🙂

https://me.sh/x3huv49/3l5-q7g
We might not play it safe

February 12th, 2016

We’re thinking of doing something bold. It’s been a long time since we’ve owned a house that we can do whatever we want with. A couple weeks ago, I painted the kids’ trim to finally check their rooms off the Finished list. Last weekend, my husband painted our living room ceiling.

Now, we get to paint the walls.

We originally thought we would go with a sand color, to evoke the feeling we get from the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean. We have seaglass colored lamps and are playing with textures and shapes in our furnishings: a rich cream shag rug, a curved white chair, a blocky sofa and chaise lounge with square edges and linen textured fabric. We wanted the walls to add another layer of depth, but when we painted patches of the sample, we thought, Blah. Boring.

The color blended with the furniture, and it did not show off the beautiful floors that are our favorite part of the house. Nothing popped.

So we pulled out the paint chips again, this time holding them against the warm oak floor; wondering which would best punch up the shapes and textures of furniture; thinking about the deep yellow, green, and blue of the painting we bought a couple years ago; and most importantly, asking what will be interesting?

My husband pointed to a dark grey paint chip. “I like that one,” he said.

This color is not a cloudy sky grey, or a silver grey. This is an almost-black grey.

“That’s really dark,” I said.

I looked at it again on the floor. “It would look amazing against this wood,” I said.

“I don’t know, maybe this one’s a little safer.” I pointed at a lighter grey — more of a pewter. I held it up to the walls, the furniture, the floors. It was definitely safe.

It was definitely boring.

Today I’m taking a flex day. I work tomorrow (Saturday), so I’m taking today off to write, read with a kitty on my lap, have lunch with my husband, and go to the paint store. I’m going to get a sample of the dark dark grey. It’s a bold move. Kind of scary. Definitely not safe.

It is the one option that I’m excited about. I can’t wait to see how it looks.

Category: At home

Martini hour

Summer evening (with kitties)

Summer with Windows open

Paint chips

We didn’t play it safe

We might not play it safe