September 2006 Archives

My latest home project is to paint the Cutlet's new room. Because I've been so focused on it the past few weekends, I think the whole Internet should also be interested.

The colors are bright red, medium blue, sunny yellow and black. We're not afraid in the least of color, and have other rooms with greens, blues, reds, yellows, lavender, orange.

I've got a little more detail work to do on the walls, and then the carpet is coming out. I'll put down wood-looking laminate, which is already in our entry, hallway, the nursery and the master bedroom.

The Cutlet is really excited, and likes to go in his new room to check my progress. He told me the other day that there's some paint missing on the walls. Yes, yes. I know. But I'm working on it. It's a "theme" room, but we're making it personal. There may be similar ideas out there, but nothing taken to this kind of extreme, I bet. If I had some sort of prize I would award it to the first person to guess the theme of his room.

What are you up to?

It's the time of year again, when fashion mullets emerge from the upper shelves of our closets into the American mainstream.

You know the mullet as a hairstyle, right? Short-cropped in the front and on the sides, with a long mane flowing down the back. The description, I believe, is often "business up front, party in the back." I'm sure there are practical reasons for doing something like that to one's head, perhaps wanting to keep the sun off the back of one's neck but wanting to refrain from getting stray follicles into one's food. It is usually associated with undereducated Middle America, but lest we forget, we should not judge books solely on their covers.

As a fashion statement, the mullet is wearing a long-sleeve shirt over shorts. It appears in Texas this time of year, when the morning lows in the 50s are later replaced with highs in the mid-80s during the day. Not solely the look of the Lone Star State, however, the fashion mullet can be found on many a college campus and in stray L.L. Bean catalogs across the nation. There are practical reasons for this ensemble as well ... warming the upper torso can make the bare legs easier to bear while the freedom of shorts (and refusal to let go of summer) cannot be faulted.

I have sported the look while running or biking in cool weather, whereupon my legs are doing the most work and thus warm faster than the rest of me. Some mornings, such as this one, I also walked the dog this way. I find it's a nice way to ease back into my autumn wardrobe because I, too, refuse to let go of summer entirely. Lucky for me, the climate where I live rewards such an attitude with bursts of 90-degree heat in December. For balance, there have also been times of snow and ice in April.

In the end, it means our entire wardrobe gets a workout in those months not associated with summer. Because invariably summer means heat. This summer was really hot, other summers just sort of hot.

Whatever! Wear your mullets proudly, whether they be on your head or on your body. Don't let the fashion police get you down.

It started to sprinkle here a bit this morning, but that didn't stop me when I was ready to get out and exercise a little. The raindrops were happy, fluffy ones, and there was no lightning in sight or thunder in earshot. So I decided to hop on my bicycle.

I've been using a helmet for only about a year, despite having biked most of my life. I was reluctant to do it, but now my noggin feels nekkid without one. If I'm riding on a paved city trail I might still forgo it, but gimme streets and I'm strapping on the brain bucket. First time I've ridden in the rain with it, and the tap-tap-tap was soothing. Water that got through the air vents trickled and tickled, but it was all good.

For those of you with dialup Internet, you may want to stop now. Everyone else, you are welcome to tag along on my brief journey ...

I think I saw Chaka Khan at Kroger the other day. It was kind of hard to tell, though, because I was blinded by the woman's glittering mumu and the shopping cart blocked part of her. I'm kind of doubting she moved to Texas, but you never know. We've got lots of famous people around here. If it was her, let me say delicately, she's let herself go.

I work in a small office with most of the time there being eight or nine of us. We have two restrooms, each being "one-holers." One is unofficially designated for Men and the other for Women, but in a pinch we can use whichever one is vacant if the normal one is occupado.

On occasion, for some unknown Cosmic Reason, me and one of the other guys will somehow get on the same Pee Schedule. Whenever I have to go, he's either already in there or stands up to go about the time my bladder says "Now." Other times I will get there first and will be locking the door about the time nature gives him a call. We work at opposite ends of the office, but there's a window where I can see him in his corner, but even planning didn't overcome the woe that was us. The last time this happened was a few weeks back.

We have other differences (he drinks coffee, I don't) that would make you think it's a never-happen or once-in-a-lifetime quirk in the Galactic Pee Schedule. But it's happened more than once and I bet it will happen again. It got so annoying last time that I even had to use the typically Women's restroom. Ack! I even tried to drink less water, then more water, to throw a monkey in this wrenching delimma. If life had handed me lemonade, I would have downed the whole pitcher in an effort to get back into my own time zone, Solo Pissing Time (SPT).

While it's easy to laugh off now, espeically because I'm at home living in WhenverIWannaPee Land, it's no laughing matter when it's going on. What if it happens again, but some women are also on the same Pee Schedule? I'll be relegated to hoping real hard that my bladder won't explode, I'll be sprinting to the loo or I'll be moistening the Dumpster in the alley.

I've had this phenomenon occur at previous jobs, but most of the offices had not only multiple urinals/toilets in the restroom, most had multiple restrooms. If it happened that my sked matched someone else's, we could avoid embarrassing chats at the urinals by using another restroom.

The only thing that's worse than all this? Remembering the Synchronized Poo Relays of April 2004, during which it really paid to be the fastest one to the can. Trust me on that one.

Thanks for everyone's input on moving the Cutlet into a new room in the house. We left it up to him, asking him at different times in different ways, and he's all about the new room. He wants to decorate it with car stuff, and we've got some ideas on that front. One of our goals is to have decor in our house, including in our boys' rooms, that are unique and full of personality. Considering that most of our home is decorated in "Landlocked Prairie Boathouse Modern/Antique," it's likely nobody has a house quite like ours.

One of the cool benefits I have at work is getting an extra day off during my birthday month, and I'm hoping to take this Friday off. With my normal Thursday off that will make a four-day weekend. But I won't be boozin', cruisin' and snoozin'. No, I've got tons of work to do (nothing new at Casa del T-bone). Here's my list of to-do's for the long weekend:

• Finish redoing our stairs.
I had the brilliant idea, in light of getting new carpet in the living room, that the nasty carpet on our stairs had to go. A year after ripping it all up, I've gotten all new oak stair treads stained/polyurethaned and screwed down. New beadboard risers (the go-up part) are primed, painted and in place. Just have to finish staining the moulding and get it in.

• Unclog the bathroom sink.
Liquid Plumr® ain't cutting it. I'm going to have to take the pipe apart underneath the sink and scrub it. This will be loads of fun.

• Mow the back yard.
This will be a project because recent rain has made it grow. And allergies will make it a real challenge.

• Paint the Cutlet's new room.
We've sort of picked colors (with some input from the little guy) and we have a plan to incorporate the car decor he wants. After I paint (a three-color paint scheme with white trim), it will be time to replace the nasty carpet with wood floor (but that won't be until next weekend).

• Get ready for a yard sale.
We are donating clothes to charity, but the flotsam that's left over will likely sell in a yard sale. I really hate yard sales, but it will be nice to have a less-cluttered house with some extra cabbage to, of course, buy more crap to put in the house. Anybody want a bread maker?

We're at a crossroads in the Great Room Switch of 2006: do we move the Cutlet into the spare bedroom, which is bigger than his existing space, thereby giving our new arrival (coming in December) the smaller room? Or is it more important, considering the upheaval and infant will create in the family, for the Cutlet to keep his old room as a piece of stability? Yeah, we don't know, either. What are your thoughts?

As you ponder that, I'll salivate over the prospects of the new Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Should I wait to get my hands on one of those, or go with the existing version that will no doubt get discounted in the near future? I'll probably wait, considering I'm typing this on my new laptop. Will be hard to justify to the Petite Filet that I need a new camera, when I have free access to the DigiRebel at work. Free 6.3 megapixels is better than $900 worth of 10.1 megapixels. At least for the time being.

As part of the room shuffle in our house, we have moved our desktop computer into our bedroom so that the former home office can become a guest room (and the former guest room will become the baby's room). This situation isn't ideal, but I've long been a proponent of making every room in our house do double if not triple duty. Who needs a big house when you've got a little one that's versatile and thoughtfully put into play?

For example, if we have a lot of people over at one time, we can fill the bathtub full of ice and use it to keep drinks cold. And, you guessed it! The toilet can provide extra seating. I wonder why it's so hard to get party guests over here?

Anyway, the computer's migration means we have to use a smaller desk. This is actually the one my mom used as a kid. The stool to the right (now in use as a rather scary printer stand) is a leather-topped oak barstool my dad found on a curb. Our "desk chair" is a vintage pub seat we bought at an antique store during a weekend trip to east Texas. Our abbreviated workstation is still a work in progress, but it's an example of why sometimes size doesn't matter.

Have you shrunk anything lately?

I woke up with a pounding headache (tell me more, T-bone!), but for some reason, as the day progressed, I just started feeling better. It's not because I was getting a lot done at work (I didn't) or I took a lot of medicine (I didn't). The little beastie germ has just run its course. Bye, beastie!

Normally I'm not someone who likes to lay around and do nothing. I have projects! I enjoy exercise! Playing with the Cutlet is fun! Cars to wash! Garages to clean out! But instead I had lots of time to read and think about stuff. And because if you're here you are bored now, I'll take you on a short journey through my sick mind (er, my mind when I was sick. Yeah!).

Wow, it looks like a bigger number when written out like that. Maybe "33" is better. Yes, two little digits staring blankly at me, with gobs of promise for the year to come. Today is my birthday, and to mark the occasion the Cutlet passed on his stomach virus to me. Yay! At least I've got tomorrow off, too, to give me more recovery time. It really stinks to burn the last summer holiday off on whooziness and downing clear liquids, but sometimes we don't have choices for the way we spend our time.