7:09 p.m. - 2003-05-26
Home Decorating and Bunny Chewing
Last night I made the mistake of sitting in the studio with my feet on the floor instead of tucked up underneath me as I usually do.
Why was this a mistake? Because Miss Bunny doesn't just chew cardboard boxes and baby keys. She also chews my feet.
She does it when she wants a banana treat. It starts out, harmlessly enough, as grooming. Some massaging little bunny tongue actually feels nice on the ol' feet, and it's her way of saying, "Hey, my dearest caretaker, I love you! Could I just maybe get the smallest little piece of that banana you have on the table?"
If I don't respond to this, she gets a little more forceful. The licking turns into little nips that I suppose could be characterised as love bites. This translates to: "I am ever so slightly annoyed with how you are ignoring me! I would really like that banana now!"
After a few minutes it dawns on her that I have no intention of forking over the banana. This is when it gets nasty, and the full force of Miss Bunny's razor sharp teeth sink into the top of my foot. It's her way of saying: "Give. Me. The. DAMN! FREAKIN'! BANANA! WENCH!"
I now have a dime sized blood blister on my foot. Needless to say, she got the banana.
Sigh. So darn spoiled.
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Bruce and I are in major house fixing up overdrive. We spent the morning pulling feral honeysuckle bushes away from the quince bush and planting our two little huckleberry bushes. I discovered to my delight that mixed in with all the hideous vine-y stuff on our chain link fence is some green passionflower, which is my favorite wildflower of all. I just love it. The leaves are a deep green and strangely shaped, and the flowers are tiny little space alien flowers that are the colour of lemon-lime soda. So I was very careful to save those vines when I was pulling out everything else.
And while we were pulling out evil viney things and sweating like pigs, a car pulled up. It was a woman named Sarah who works with a feral cat rescue group that I have donated a little money to. She just wanted to meet me and say hi. Such a friendly person!
It turns out her mother's house is just down the street. Her mother is in assisted living and so they have turned the house into a cat shelter - there are now 25 cats living there, all semi-feral. She promised to come back when we weren't all sweaty and nasty and give me her assessment of Burma. And I promised her I would call her about doing some volunteer work - possibly even designing a greeting card for them.
You know, it's always when I feel the most rotten about humanity that someone like this comes along and makes me feel like maybe the good guys will finally win after all....
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And then we went to Home Depot, Lowe's, and a little local flooring store with really aggressive sales people to look at ceramic tile.
We can't afford to have all of the first floor tiled right now, but the front hallway is driving Bruce crazy and a friend of ours has a boyfriend, Matt, visiting from England for a few weeks who is bored stiff and used to lay tile for a living. He's looking for something to do and will give us a good deal. So now seems to be the time to have at least the front hall done.
I was hoping for some really WOW! tile, but, you know, it all pretty much looks the same. We finally sort of agreed on a couple of very basic, stone-like tiles in an off-white and a yellow ochre.
I was also hoping that we could get some groovy accent tiles to put here and there, but they were all tacky looking. It dawned on me, though, that I could put little spirals of beach pebbles in, or even the small fossils that Bruce and I sometimes find here. If Matt did the basic floor and would show me how to do it, I could even do these details later on. Just thinking that I wasn't limited to what the stores were offering made me feel better about it.
And I also made the most amazing discovery!! Do you all know that Armstrong makes vinyl tile in THE MOST FREAKY, AMAZING, UNBELIEVABLE, colours you've ever seen?? Yeah, I know, vinyl tile - yuck!! But you haven't seen this vinyl tile!!
Homw Depot had a whole display of it - there must have been 30 colours, and all of them were gorgeous! I wouldn't want this stuff throughout my whole house, but Bruce and I agreed that in the two downstairs rooms that need flooring this stuff would actually work.
We just painted one of those rooms, the library, a light turquoise blue with darker turquoise for the built in bookcase and desk. My idea was to make the whole room blue - blue pillows, blue bench cover, blue chair. Well, this tile come in about six shades of blue, and two of them would be fabulous for this room! We could do a freaky checkerboard of light and dark turquoise! Or we could do light turquoise with a dark border!!
And the best thing? It's cheap! 59 cents a square foot!!
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