Small Pond

First coat on the living room is finished! And the color is best mistake I’ve ever made. Or nonmistake, since it’s the perfect color.

I went to my local paint store after work and ordered 2 gallons of Sherwood Green. On the way home, I got to thinking. Was Sherwood the green I wanted, or did I want Georgian Green? See, I had tried out both colors in Benjamin Moore sample sizes. One was too blue-ish, and I was afraid it would be too overwhelmingly green when I put it on the walls. The other was more of a khaki green.

Sure enough, when I got home, the sample board I still had was labeled Georgian Green. Crap. Grabbed both gallons of paint and headed back to the paint store. Luckily, it’s only 10 minutes away.
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I’ve hit the part of home renovation when everything looks like a complete disaster. I finished painting the hallway and am moving on to the living room walls. To do that, all the furniture has been pushed about 2 to 3 feet from the walls, exposing years of dog hair, lost change and petrified food particles. Gross.

Not to mention that my television now sits about 2 feet from the couch, giving me that IMAX experience in my own living room whether I want it or not.

The dining room furniture and end table are piled with stuff that came out of the hutch. The stuff doesn’t have a new home yet, and the hutch is in the garage waiting for me to put it on craigslist. The amount of misplaced stuff that I have to maneuver around is almost paralyzing.

On a positive note, I did manage to pack away all of the china and assorted leaded glass pieces in handy-dandy protectors. And I stopped in at a local carpet place to arrange for an estimate for new carpeting. I’m hitting two more places on the way home tonight before picking up the living room paint and getting started on that all-nighter.

Have I mentioned how much I miss renting sometimes?

In my regular surfing, I came across Wordle. It creates word clouds from text you give it. For example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in German:

Or an older version of my resume. No, I don’t know why it resembles a fish.

Give it a whirl. You can change fonts, colors, word orientation. It’s a fun time waster.

Here’s another one to whet your appetite.

I love buffalo wings. I like them hot and spicy. I like how the taste of the hot sauce mixes with the blue cheese and pulls your taste buds in different directions.

I also like taking the wing concept to other foods. Buffalo chicken cheesesteaks, for example. My local pizza place makes a decent buffalo chicken pizza that uses blue cheese, hot sauce and chicken with very little tomato sauce and mozzarella. I’ve been known to order one for dinner on Sunday night and happily eat it for lunch over the next couple of days.

So when I met my sister and brother-in-law for dinner last night at the California Pizza Kitchen, I was intrigued by its new buffalo chicken pizza. I ordered it. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It definitely requires some adjustments from the standard version.

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Or at least trading in. In the process of cleaning out the house, I came across bags and boxes of books that I hadn’t read in years. For once, I did the right thing* and decided to just get rid of them all without agonizing over discoveries of books I loved and forgot I owned.

Getting rid of books isn’t easy. You can donate them to the library. Goodwill takes books. There’s always the eBay option. But all of those things take time and a lot of driving around. I found a better option.

Powell’s Books would buy them. Powell’s is the main reason I want to go to Portland, Ore. someday. It’s a used book warehouse that’s open to the public. The main branch takes up a full city block - 1.6 acres of books. Imagine that. I could live there forever and never run out of things to read. Things to eat is another matter.
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