Going Domestic

I love the scent of latex in the morning

We've been slowly making more progress on the home renovations. Two weeks ago, Chris primed the walls in the hallway on his day off, and I put two coats of Pecan Sandie paint on over it over the next couple of days. Sometimes I wonder if I should be embarrassed to admit that I've painted our living room, dining room, and hallways a derivative of "builder's beige", a term I hear used in scornful tones … but our apartment had beige walls, and I thought they looked great with our sofa, so I continued with a similar shade in the house. It's just more mocha than brown … We've even hung a total of six pictures on the walls now!

The middle bedroom is merely a shell of it's former self - goodbye mint green paint, hello canary yellow! (Well actually, hello Wildflower Honey from Behr). We've nearly finished putting on a second coat of new paint, though to be honest, Chris has done the bulk of the work. The colour is fabulous, though - it's like walking into a sunbeam. No child of ours will suffer from seasonal affective disorder during the winter while they reside in there …

If only we could motivate ourselves to do something about the baseboards and door casings ... *sigh*

I'd Rather Be ...

So, this is my first day back at work after three days off, and to tell the truth, I'd rather be at home right now playing with my brand-new serger! I am really looking forward to a summer full of sewing! I can only hope that none of the loopers on the machine ever unthread (ha!), because between my mom and me, it took about forty minutes yesterday to figure out how to re-thread them! So far, I've only tested out a basic overlock stitch, but it was really nice to sew so much in so little time …

I *heart* strawberries

I just have to show-off the very attractive desserts that Chris made for us the other night:

On a roll ...

I usually pride myself about being diligent about taking good care of my kitchen gadgets and painting supplies, cleaning them meticuously after using them. This past weekend, I put two coats of paint on the walls of our hallway (the same Pecan Sandie colour as our living room). While I don't wash paint rollers because I buy the cheap ones that come in a 3-pack and leave little pieces of fluff on your freshly painted wall if you use them again after washing (I just put the roller, wrapped in plastic, in the fridge if I'm going to be doing the same colour again), I do wash the paint brush that I use for getting into nooks and crannies, and I most certainly take apart my edger and clean all of it's parts. After Sunday's second coat, I was at the kitchen sink, and washed the edger pad, the base, and popped off both of the wheels and scraped off the bits of drying paint. I put everything in our dishrack to dry, but when I went to move them three hours later, one of the edger wheels was missing! I know that I washed two of them … hmm … Chris and I suspect that it might have ended up down the garbage disposal - such a sad end!

I bought a cool replacement edger, though - from Rubber*maid - it's blue and a person can attach a handle to it to help in reaching the high places.

Does anyone have the number for Ty Pennington?

My folks are coming for a visit in a couple of weekends, so Chris and I are once again planning our cleaning tour de force that we hold every time we have houseguests. There's usual stuff to do, like clean the bathrooms, tidy the living room, debate if we should hang up some pictures, but this month we had set an additional home-improvement goal: finish the baseboards in the living room and paint the hallway, as we have two gallons of Pecan Sandie latex sitting in the utility room waiting to be called into service. One of the complicating factors is that we really ought to replace the door casings at the same time - thirty-five years of wear and tear haven't exactly been kind to them, and they're one of the home's shabbiest features.

Door casings really shouldn't be a complex repair, but Chris and I are struggling way too much with it. You see, when we tore out the carpet in the living room, dining room, and hall to have the hardwood underneath refinished, we realized that the gap between where the floor planks end and the wall meets is sometimes as large as half an inch. This meant that we needed to buy thicker baseboards, to hide the gap. So, our nine-sixteenths of an inch thick baseboards stick out at least a quarter of an inch beyond the door casing that they meet up with at doorways. This means that we'll have to shop for thicker door casings so that they fit more flush with the baseboards. Only it seems like it's impossible to find a thick door casing that isn't three inches wide as well! Some of our doorways are tucked less than three inches away from a corner, so we are kind of restricted to skinny casings … Grr … I knew that I should have been a carpenter!!!

Showing Off

Even if I haven't been doing as much cooking and crafting as I used to, at least some of us out here in cyberspace are still at it - I've added three new links to other blogs that I'm going to be peeking at regularly over on the About Me page ...

I never mentioned that my parents gave me a huge self-healing cutting mat and a rotary cutter for my birthday!!! I am excited to start using it, even that probably won't happen before I've written the CFA exam and I'm on mat leave. I'm hoping to buy a serger of my very own in the next couple of weeks, so together I am hoping to produce some knit clothing and some blankets for the little one, as well as a Roman shade in a fun print for it's bedroom. Then I think that I will start sewing tote bag after tote bag ... just because I've seen so many cool designs (like this one over at Craftster) on the 'net lately!

Shrinkage

I first heard about McDonald's voluntarily dropping the term "super-size" from their product selection awhile ago, but I hadn't realized that the trend towards rationalizing portion sizes had been embraced by junk food manufacturers as much as it apparently has - Chris pointed this article from the Globe & Mail out to me over the weekend. I think that the tiny cans of Pepsi are really cute in concept; I remember bring enamoured with the little mini cans of soft drinks used by British Airways when we flew to Scotland to get married. I'm just annoyed to learn that companies aren't lowering their prices by a proportional amount to sell their appropriately-sized products!

Also must say that I'm a little disappointed in Martha. It's St. Patrick's Day, and her website is promoting Easter stuff. Nary a shamrock or green beer in sight ...

Vegetabulous!

One of the things that I love about springtime is the increased availability (and quality) of produce at the grocery store! I was very happy to find young bunches of aparagus at Sunterra Market over the weekend - it had been ages since we'd last had any! I normally just wrap the lower stems in a damp paper towel and store the bunch upright in a big jar in the fridge. I love preparing asparagus, too - my favourite part is snapping the ends off! I usually cut the stems into thirds and simply steam or saute them in my chef's skillet, seasoning with a little black pepper. Of course, this was before I learned that a few cookware companies have designed something special - the aparagus steamer! The more obscure and frivilous the piece of cookware, the more that I covet it …

Be careful what you wish for!

Last fall, I was nothing short of eager to plant my very first tulip bulbs in the new backyard, but I did manage to wait until the fall arrived before stick my trowel in the soil. This winter, I fretted everytime Calgary would go through a warm spell, sure that the tulip bulbs were saying, "Hey, spring's here - let's start germinating!" even though it was only December, and another streak of - 25 degrees Celsius weather was surely around the corner.

It's March now, and yesterday Chris and I saw this this in the yard:

Don't know if they'll make it or not because cold snaps are likely through March - May here, but maybe I can keep my fingers crossed :)

Mary Poppins, you couldn't have known ...

I recently caught a short news documentary on tv that I found quite fascinating - it was all about the hidden sugar in foods that are otherwise pretty unassuming. Like jars of spaghetti sauce (which we have lots of but probably will never use because Chris makes an awesome tomato sauce from scratch, without sugar!). But this news program was quite an eyeopener, putting those scientific-sounding words (and more than I thought!) on the ingredient lists into the context of how many teaspoons of sugar they contain. Let me just say that I'm very glad that I am past the age where poptarts and fruit roll-ups tempt me … Btw, if you follow the link, there's some good resources for identifying all of the sugars on food labels, among other useful things.