fauve fauve fauve.

when selecting projects to do with my students, i have been avoiding painting. why? because the reality of painting with large groups of young children and limited time is daunting. but a few weeks ago, i braved the craziness and took out the watercolors. love. the kids behaved. love. the cleanup was easy. love. the pictures turned out awesome. love.

we made fauve portraits. [fauve: characterized by the use of bright colors and simplified forms.]

seriously people, i love my job.

the joy of the flush.

the mister and i live in a cozy one bedroom apartment. well, technically it is a condominium, but using that term makes me feel like i should dye my hair purple, sit in the sun until i am crisp like bacon, and develop an i-used-to-live-in-new-york accent. i am not yet that florida. maybe someday. 

back to our munchkin house. despite its wee size, our home actually has two bathrooms. the master bath and the half bath. as a child i was always suspicious of those half bathrooms, assuming that they only had a half of a toilet. okay, so that childhood assumption was a bit off, but our wee water closet does sometimes feel so teeny that one has to wonder if it was designed to only fit half a person.

seems silly to get all worked up about a little bathroom, but then the toilet started leaking. for three days every five or six weeks. whaaat?! what is this nonsense? either we have a leak or we do not. this is pure craziness, but cross my heart, our toilet only leaked at its discretion. great. kind of hard to diagnose a leak that is not always present. grrrrr. to make matters worse, the stupid porcelain contraption stopped working. is it a coincidence that the mister lost a nail brush around the same time? nope. ummm...super. so now our finicky toilet is choking on a nail brush. i gave up. we turned off the water, closed the lid, attached a sign that said "me no worky" and turned the bathroom into a storage closet. problem solved. and then visitors arrived. suddenly our bathroom turned into the only bathroom. egads. this is so uncool.

clearly we needed a solution fast! so we waited two years. actually, we would still be waiting except that mommy rolled into town. mommy is the world's greatest handywoman, so she can do random plumbing in her sleep. lucky us. she informed me that we were going to remove the toilet and hopefully find the nail brush, solve the problem, and fix the leak all in one fell swoop. uhhh...oooookay? i guess. how do you remove a toilet? you need a toilet ring? what's a toilet ring? uh huh. sure. sure. yup. right-o. we're good. needless to say i was sort of baffled when we were in home depot looking for toilet rings and i found out they are made of WAX, but i am trying to roll with it.

 for those of you who are not in the know...this is a toilet ring.

when we got home we removed the toilet. oh. my. god. the used wax is positively disgusting. gross. yellow beeswax everywhere. gag. glug. yuck. i could not bear to take a picture of the filth that was under our toilet, so instead i am sharing this picture. it does not do justice to the horror we discovered, but at least it gives you an idea of the goo factor.

we found the nail brush. yay. and mommy discovered that our previous ring was not properly installed. we got everything cleaned up and put it all back together. yay yay yay. and it worked. even more yay.

you know that's not the end, right? i mean that would seriously be way to easy. obviously. so naturally when the mums goes to check on the toilet there is water everywhere. arrrrrrrrg. now i am typically an upbeat person, but i was instantly catapulted into a dark and dreary depression. mommy told me all would be well, but i was not to be convinced. the next day i replaced half of the moving parts in a last-ditch effort to make the sun once again shine in my world. shockingly, amazingly, and wondrously, it worked. and it is still working. yes folks...our half bathroom is once again functional and i use it every chance i get.

now that i am constantly visiting our little bathroom, i have officially concluded that it needs to be revamped. i have always known that the lavender is sadly lacking in saturation. i mean seriously, it is practically white, which is the color of the toilet. and the sink. and the cabinet. and the hardware. and the frame of the mirror. blah blah blah. but not to worry....my current plan is to reinvent my grandma's hot pink powder room.

a$$-kicking hot pink.

of course painting the entire bathroom hot pink might be a little much for the mister. do not fret. the lovely miss K wrote about fancy pants stenciling, so before she has a chance to boss me into stenciling the bathroom, i am going to choose to stencil the bathroom. clearly this will be a small nightmare with lots of misery, but i am sure there will be plenty of joyful cursing.

 a dizzying design that might just be perfect.

anyhow, i am thinking i will paint the walls hot pink and then stencil a design in either silver, dark gray, or black all over. or maybe i will paint the walls white and stencil hot pink over them. that might look better with the bah humbug white accessories. obviously now that the toilet is working the bathroom project has entered a new phase, which means a new saga. just what i needed, because you know, i don't already have enough projects planned. obviously this will not be the last you hear of these 7.2 square feet of our home.

the agony of projects.

i am in pain. physical pain. my fingers hurt. my hands hurt. my arms hurt. my legs hurt. my bum hurts. my back hurts. my neck hurts. and my brain hurts. i feel like i have been run over by a mack truck. i am in agony in the name of painting boxes. twelve boxes. painstakingly (literally) painted inside and out. a luxurious display of torment. adding to my anguish is the nature of the paint. it is everywhere. it has obliterated the deliciously turquoise manicure i gave myself last week. it is in my hair. it is all over me. it is all over my painting clothes. it is all over the floor. and yikes!! i just remembered, the painting implements are all soaking in the bathtub. must finish cleaning up. must eat. must sleep. for two months my husband has tried to figure out how to restrain me from staying up all night. little did we know that painting a boatload of boxes would do the trick.

coffee and cardboard.

i arose to the scent of a coffee-free house. what a nightmare. it all started yesterday when my motivation to visit home depot erased all of my survival needs, including drinking coffee and eating breakfast. you see, every morning my husband makes himself coffee and leaves a half a pot for me. when i decide to rouse my sleepy self there is a half pot of cold coffee waiting to be transformed into an icy coffee delight. however yesterday, in my haste to visit home depot, i neglected to drink the cold coffee. now in my coffee-snob world, when the coffee doesn't make it down the gullet, it goes down the drain. drinking day-old coffee is a sign of sheer desperation.

this morning i was left in a coffee-free zone, when rather than make a fresh pot of coffee, my husband drank the day-old coffee. aaaaaack!

knowing that my husband isn't desperate, i can only conclude that he's apparently not a coffee connoisseur. i guess i should have figured this out when his recent visit to starbucks was a shambles. he doesn't generally visit this froofery coffee house without me, and i always perform the tongue-twister orders. poor guy couldn't remember the name of his favorite drink, so he went with what sounded properly confusing, and ordered a cappuccino. he wanted a frappuccino. umm...so close in name, but sooooo different in reality. needless to say he whined about it later.

speaking of whining...my fingers hurt. i spent the day doing a little bit of classwork and a whole lot of storage bin construction. six hours of slicing, scoring, folding, and gluing boxes. one blister and three cardboard cuts later, we have twelve boxes ready for decoration. my brain is happy, but my fingers hurt. but you know what they say...no pain, no gain.

here pretty pretty.

i love home depot. this love is not of the same caliber as the love i feel for my husband, but it is a deep love. why? they have paint chips. for free. lots and lots of paint chips. and the paint chips are pretty colors. lots and lots of pretty colors. and they can turn a gallon of paint into any color i want. i bought a gallon of "water mark" colored paint. it is a lovely shade of pale aqua blue. cynical folks would probably call it blah white, but i won't let them see it. i am going to slather this delectable hue all over the yet-to-be-constructed storage bins.

yes, the storage bin project. i am thrilled with how things are progressing. i came up with the official template today. i am starting to think the outcome might be even more splendid than i originally imagined. i have my fingers crossed that if i keep him well fed, the hubby won't go crazy when i make a big mess.

cardboard conundrum.

this is the last week of my summer courses for graduate school, so what better time to dilly dally? the fun factor of procrastination significantly increases as time runs out. since i have to read charlotte's web in its entirety tonight, i thought i might as well put down the book for two hours to ensure that i will have to stay up all night. i know what you're thinking...charlotte's web is for kids. yes, that's right. it is. i am working on a masters in children's literature, so i spend my time reading kids books. the difference between myself and the kids (yes there is occasionally a difference) is that after i finish reading the book i have to analyze it, research critiques of it, and then write a two-thousand word paper detailing the represented theories.

as i am sure is totally obvious by now, tonight it was important for me to endlessly dawdle to maximize the sheer terror i will experience in six days when the paper is due. i figured i might as well drag my husband around some stores looking for the perfect cardboard boxes for my storage bin project. i have to say, the mister is a total trooper. he traipsed through four different stores looking at cardboard boxes. he even stepped out of character and encouraged me to buy some lovely canvas covered metal baskets, which are about as close to exactly what i want as possible, because he figured it would save me time. i had to explain to him that the thrill is in making a giant mess of the house while eliminating the cluttered chaos on the shelves. not sure that he fully appreciates my need to be constantly submerged in a thousand craft projects, but we've only been married for two years. maybe in another few years this part of my existence will start to make more sense to him. probably not, but one can always hope.

our search ended in home depot where we finally found what i declared the perfect boxes, for the perfect price. sadly, the forklifts took over the paint aisle, so i will have to go back to buy the paint, but i did bring home some samples of "off-white." it's always a bit surprising to see how many different versions of "white" you can find in a paint store. i am leaning towards a creamy pale pale pale yellow. i think it will look lovely with the fabric i already purchased. tomorrow i will start putting together the boxes. after all, doing research for my paper is on tomorrow's schedule, so what better idea than to start a major project.