And now for something completely different...

I present for your reading pleasure, the lovely Kate:

With all of his blogging and e-mailing long distance friends, James has been doing a lot of writing lately. So much writing in fact that you would never know I am actually supposed to be the writer in this family. But I think it’s harder for me. I am supposed to be a writer, or at least I have been trained to be a writer and so there’s more pressure to it, a specific need to get at the thing you are getting at in a way that sounds nice. And there have been a lot of hard things to get at lately and so I haven’t been writing at all. Tonight in fact, I’m only typing away because James commissioned me.

So here I go.

As of about three hours ago, we have officially been in this house for a week. To celebrate, James chipped a little more hideous linoleum off the entry way floor and I painted the slightly odd shaped bathroom a color which I fear ought to have been labeled with something like “blaringly severe pinkish orange” instead of the much less appropriate “orchard peach” and ran out of paint at about eye level.

Though we are mostly exhausted as we fall into bed each night covered in some sort of grime and I have yet to appear at work without some appendage smeared in the paint of the previous night’s project, (today, much to my dismay, I had said peach paint in my hair) we are happily becoming familiar with our house’s quirks and many beauties. To name a few of each:

• We have eight foot windows in every room that beam sunlight from floor to ceiling and have that lovely swirly look that old windows have
• Eight foot windows come with ten foot ceilings that make every room seem enormous in that art gallery sort of way that doesn’t actually demand very much floor space.
• Though the wood floors have had an unfortunately intimate relationship with an atrocious plastic parquet and a tar paper adhesive for a very long time, we have unearthed bits of the original wide plank floor and I think, after much chipping and sanding and staining, they will be beautiful.
• Our attic is such a lovely formation of eaves and beams and plank floors that I can only spend a few minutes up there at a time so that I don’t overcome myself with excitement.
• I am hoping that the grayish dust that falls over everything when I pound numerous nail holes in the wall is not asbestos.