Worse before better

Mercy!  This is what you get when you start poking and prodding a 45-year-old house.  Turns out we essentially had painted mulch for window sashes.  Our house is full of so many holes right now it would go well with pastrami on rye.  But we'll get there!

The upside is that is been in the 60s and 70s all day, and with all the windows opened and getting prepped for painting it smells like fall in the house.  I've got to remember how much I love having the windows open on pretty days.

Let me help you get that image of rot out of your brain with a few more pretty pics from the beach:

Owen acted like his Uncle Drew's shadow for most of the trip.  They were pretty cute hanging out together, and I've got about 50 photos to prove it.

Owen also officially learned to swim in the pool at our rental house!  Now if he will just save that knowledge all the way until it's time to bring it out again next summer...

It's still Tuesday, right?

Whew!  Just made my self-imposed deadline.  Lots going on around the house this week so I'll be back soon with a few more beach things and some progress shots of the work going on around here.

See you Tuesday!

They're being Jay from LEGO Ninjago (who, coincidentally, has never been known to fire a golf umbrella from the back of his Mommy's SUV).

We're heading out to enjoy the last of summer at the beach, so see you in four or five days!

A conversation I had with Owen last night after we got home from t-ball practice, where one of the kids goes by the nickname 'Porkchop' (hold on... that will seem relevant in a second):

Me:  Hey O-Bear.  Come brush your teeth and get ready for bed, please.

O:  It's just 'Owen'.

Me:  Oh... you mean you don't want me to call you O-Bear anymore?

O:  Well... it's just... cute (wrinkles his nose)

Guess I need to find something meatier sounding.  Sniff, sniff.

Play Ball!

 (l) Meeting his teammates and trying Big League Chew for the first time.  He sucked on it like spaghetti.  (I swear the smell of that gum took me right back to my Little League days!)  

(r) Getting instruction from Coach Andy, who has to be the best t-ball coach ever.

Owen has had two practices now.  He was pretty overwhelmed and acted like Eeyore all through the first one, but he was still itching to get back out there and had a much better time last night.  And I'm doing my best to figure out how to dress him more like an athlete.  The too small t-shirt and white bobby socks with black cleats up there just isn't cutting it.

Big things about to happen for our house's curb appeal!  The work starts next Monday, so I'll keep you posted.

First Day: 4K

I can't get Owen to crack at all about what went on during his first day of 4K.  The thumbs up his teacher Mrs. Hertz gave me during carpool is all I have to go on.  Maybe if I build a LEGO mock-up of his classroom and create Minifigures of his friends I could get him to act out the day's events?

I definitely missed having him around today.  When I asked him what he thought I should do while he was at school, he said, "Go to the grocery store.  I need more [cereal] bars and plus anyway I don't like going to those places with you."  I took his advice and I exercised for the first time in ages (unless yoga counts).  Probably serves me right that I had to plop down in three different neighbors' driveways so I wouldn't have what my doctor likes to call a syncopal episode.  If any of you locals see me sitting in the street over the next few weeks, be sure to honk and wave!

And speaking of going for walks, how about a stroll down memory lane?  That's first day in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Where's Owen?

We celebrated Kindergarten Eve for three of Owen's friends yesterday by going out to Pelham to watch trains and eat doughnuts.  When the crossing arms started down and the bell began to ding, Owen dove for the car.  He loves trains but can't stand all the racket they make.

Incidentally, he feels the same way about auto-flush toilets.

I guess I was so excited about my own doughnut that this is one of the few photos I managed to get.

Thanks friends!  Hope your little guys are having a great first day.

Conversations with O

O:  Mommy?  Do you like my fish bowl picture?

Me:  Yeah, O, I love it.  I think it's cute that the fish are kissing.

O:  Yeah...

O:  ...they're so busy they don't even notice the shark eating their baby.

Last night on the cul-de-sac.  Shouldn't it be impossible to scowl with a butterfly on your head?  

Dining Room Update

I spent most of Saturday afternoon working on arranging a little gallery wall in the newly painted dining room.  There was one short intermission when I spent 30 minutes on the front porch with a nervously sweet Estonian door-to-door salesgirl.  I politely refused to spend hundreds of dollars on a 'learning system' for Owen, and then she asked if she could at least get a snake before she left.  Thirty confused seconds of dialogue later, I went in and got her a banana for a snack.  

It worked out nicely that this area rug in our foyer is the exact dimensions of the wall space I was trying to fill.  I used white box tops as a stand-in for the white lamp and ran up and down the stairs to get a look at different arrangements until I liked one.  I'm trying to use a lot of green in there.  (Ask Owen, he'll tell you it's my favorite.)  Then I made newspaper templates to help me get the arrangement on the wall and mark the exact spots for nail holes.  Not my own fantastic idea or anything.  I've seen it lots of places, including here and here.

Then I put up the real deals.

A couple of things that will probably change:

• I shouldn't have tried so hard to work around the lamp.  Think I'm going to move the oil landscape up a smidge and bring the pheasant paint-by-number in so that the lamp overlaps it a little.  
• Speaking of the pheasant, he keeps staring at me with one really creepy red eye.  I'm thinking of picking my own colors and re-doing the whole painting.  On a rainy day... when I have nothing better to do...
• I still want to paint the tree rings like I mentioned here.
• And the new cow painting needs some low-glare glass.  Or no glass?  And should the frame be bronze?  Such important decisions...

Rainy Monday

Hanging out in the garage today playing with this (love that it tricks Owen into asking me about letters and numbers) and sanding chairs for the dining room.

Back tomorrow with a dining room update!

Art Story

I finished painting the dining room walls white a few nights ago, so I headed out yesterday to look for colorful art to hang on them and found the above cow painting.  Bugs had crawled inside the frame and even had the nerve to die right there between the glass and the mat in plain sight.  Ew.  But I was curious about the artist, so I did a quick Google search that revealed a promising lead.  So I shot off a quick e-mail and in (literally) 2 minutes got this response:

You are a good sleuth!  Thank you so much for finding me!

That, indeed, is my painting.  It is acrylic on paper. 

How fun this is for me!  I wonder how it got to an antique store in Birmingham.

My name is Louise Bourne.  Here's my website, which is maybe how you found me:  www.louisebourne.com

There, you will find a current resume and work, including recent cow paintings!  

I live in Maine, where your new acquisition was painted.  May you enjoy it.

Best,

Louise Bourne

We exchanged several more e-mails, and I learned this painting was done fairly early in her career.  She even mentioned that she forwarded my photos of her painting to her New York City curator.  She also asked me how much I paid for the painting ("errr... clearly not enough if you're the sort of artist who has a NYC curator") and gave me some solicited advice on how she would reframe it.  When I'm not regretting what a huge time suck the internet can be in my life, I really love how it makes the world smaller and let's us 'meet' interesting people.

Blanket City

It's got a roof deck for viewing the stars (through a pool noodle telescope), a bedroom, a kitchen (with golf clubs for knives), an infirmary (with golf tees for hypodermic needles), multiple closets for storage and an emergency exit (which my size forces me to use as a main entrance and exit).

Photo Dump: from Owen's camera

Celebrating my birthday last night with a strawberry cupcake (thanks Amanda!).  

And thanks to everyone who called, texted, visited.  It's really nice to have a special day!

Other photos I found on Owen's (i.e. our really old) camera when uploading the ones above.  So interesting to see what he thinks is documentable.

Owen told me he wanted to make me a necklace for my birthday, so we shaped and baked polymer clay to make some beads.  I copied a few designs I've seen around lately, and Owen made the 'quarter' that's hanging in the middle.  It's got his fingerprints all mashed into it, and I love it!  And in dining room progress:  the primer is going on the walls and I think I found a rug.