A Functional Adult Tackles Spackle – Bathroom Painting Part 1

I am now returned from my secret mission.  I was told not to mention it on my blog, but when you’re the kind of person who gets sent on secret missions (as I am), what are they really going to do about it?  Fire me and try to replace my irreplaceable skills?  Send me back to CENSORED to fight the CENSORED AGAIN which would actually be really awkward given how I ended things with CENSORED?  Hack my IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS MESSAGES I AM A STUPID POOPYPANTS WHO CANNOT FOLLLOW BASIC INSTRUCTIONS.

So since I’m back now, I figured it was high time I stopped played video games and finally began my grand home improvement project.  Okay, high time I stopped ONLY playing video games.  The project is to repaint the guest bathroom in our house, which is the bigger bathroom (having a bathtub! Oooh!) and is kind of crappy looking.

Good peoples of the Internet, see all my sunscreens.

Most notably, the bathroom has not been painted since The Incident.

The short description of The Incident is as follows:  the toilet fell through the floor.  The explanatory description that makes sense is as follows:  Our roof used to leak a lot and let in a ton of water into the walls.  (Said roof has since been replaced as the landlord realized we would no longer pay him rent if all our checks were soggy because we were living in an aquarium.)  The wooden beams underneath the floor got water damaged and started to disintegrate, which mean the floor was slowly caving in.  We first started to notice the toilet listing toward the bathtub a little bit. 

Then the bathtub seemed to be settling.  It started settling more aggressively.  Husband went out of town one night and I woke up freaking out because I heard footsteps in the house.  I called my dad in the middle of the night (not that he would be any particular help, insofar as he lives a two-hour plane flight away) and told him someone was in the house coming to murder me and I couldn’t remember if the pepper spray in my nightstand was still operational and I didn’t think I could effectively ward off a murderer with just a swiss army knife (also in my nightstand). 

Dad (RATHER CALLOUSLY) told me that I should go look for the murderer and he would call 911 for me if he heard me start getting murdered.  Muttering under my breath that he would be sorry upon the grisly death of his only daughter, I went and looked and found that it was just the bathtub sinking even more and somehow making a noise that sounded exactly like footsteps.  Even as I was standing there staring at it, it still sounded like footsteps.

I remained unmurdered and eventually the toilet and the bathtub became so determined to consummate their longtime love affair that they both sank even further and tipped dramatically towards each other to such an extent that the toilet, now at a solid 45 degree angle, no longer operated.  This was The Incident and was poorly timed as we were having a party that night.  However, The Incident at last induced our landlord to pay someone to fix the floor, put in a new toilet, and, while he was at it, the handyman patched the hole in the wall across from the toilet.  I’m not sure how the hole got there.

So while the hole was patched, it was never painted and didn’t look so hot.  

Also, our bathroom has loads of other cracks and disintegrations that I’m sure don’t at all mean serious problems for the house. 

And the previous paint job was pretty crappy and I can tell cheap paint when I see it (a rare skill).  So new paint is in order.  But if success is 90% perspiration, interior painting is 90% preparation and 10% flakes of paint in your hair.  Today was Prep Day 1:  Scraping off the bumps from the last crappy paint job and spackling various holes, cracks, etc.  I purchased a new paint scraper and some spackle especially for this task.

Scraping the paint was pretty fun, especially since I didn’t feel the need to be desperately thorough and just went for the most egregious bumps.  Also, when scraped, the current paint left an interesting distressed pattern that almost looked like I was doing it on purpose as if on some HGTV show!  Too bad it’s temporary.

I then got to spackling the holes in the wall.  I’ve never spackled anything before, but I figured it can’t be that hard once you know the basic concept:  fill up the holes.  And the spackle I bought turned out to be extra fun because it goes on pink before it dries white.

It turns out that I’m not that great at spackling.  I didn’t do a great job getting it on smoothly AT ALL.  I plan to just sand it off when I do my sanding once it dries.  Right?  That should work?  Don’t tell me if it won’t.  I’ll figure it out on my own.   In any case, it looks like I attacked the bathroom with raspberry frosting.

But since I was at it, I figured I’d spackle up some of the not-at-all-ominous cracks in the other bathroom. 

There’s also a hole in that wall where there used to be a towel rack.  One of the side-holder-thingies of the towel rack is still in the wall and I use it as a hook.  The other is in a corner with the towel bar in the corner where it has been for at least four years now.  Since the odds of that getting fixed have been demonstrated to be 0%, I figured it was time to spackle the hole. 

The final step was to put up a little of the sample paint I got to see how it looks.  I think it looks good!  I’m excited.

Next step:  sanding down the spackle, maybe doing more spackle if necessary, scraping some more, sanding some more.  Once all that’s done, taping and covering the counters and floors.  Oh, and I might need to get caulk.  There are some random cracks that seem like candidates for caulking.  Once all that’s done, I might actually paint…

A Functional Adult at Leisure

I'm between jobs at the moment - by choice; I wasn't fired or anything dramatic like that.  I was instructed by wise peers that true vacations - where you don't have to lie on the beach while keeping on eye on the ol' Blackberry-and-chain - are hard to come by.  So since I'm switching jobs, I thought I'd take a little time off in between.

Folks warned me I would get bored.  To which I respond and submit:  AS IF.  Boredom is for people who do not have games downloaded to their iPhone.  Not working is pretty fantastic, as it turns out.  Not only have I become the most feared pirate on the Spanish main, I am getting all kinds of projects done.  I have gone to the gym - me!  I know!  And I took my shoes to the shoe repair man at long last and made an art project and did the laundry and went to Home Depot regarding to-be-revealed activities.  I returned something at the mall.  I cooked many dinners.  I drove my shopping cart around the Safeway like a boss.  And I made this icebox cake, from this recipe:

At least the plate is pretty.

... though it turned out too spicy even though I cut the cayenne and chili powder in half.  Oh well.

I am also making solid progress on the stack of magazines I've accumulated over the last three months.  I have a real problem with magazines.  Delta told me that all of my miles were going to expire, so I had to spend them.  I tried buying things in their miles-store, since I didn't have enough for a ticket even down the street, but for some reason my miles weren't the kind that worked in their miles-store!  Aaaand the only thing I could get were magazines.  Which means I now subscribe to US Weekly (shut up), Cooking Light, ESPN: The Magazine, and Vogue (in addition to Husband's National Geographic, which I mostly only like to read for the pictures).  

Seriously.  So many.

Cooking Light is great because their recipes are pretty easy and usually tasty; I just eat twice as much of the food as whatever they say one serving is.  ESPN has beautiful photography, but I don't really care what the Devil Rays are up to.  I only read the football articles.  And Vogue makes me feel poorly-dressed and like I ought to be attending Society Functions. 

Which, by the way, if any of you are having a Society Function, I am free to attend.  In case you were wondering.

In any case, it's way too many magazines for a working human being to read. But I'm too... cheap? to throw them away.  So they pile up on top of the TV.  As it turns out, however, it's the right number of magazines for a non-working person!  So if you'd like to know my thoughts on Calvin Johnson of the Detroit Lions or cap-toed shoes or spice-encrusted tilapia tacos, you may ask.  Because I have acquired said thoughts through the reading of magazines.

So as you can see, I am not bored at all.  And may I mention again?  Gym.  Twice.  IN ONE WEEK.  It's statistically miraculous.  Though I did pull something so hard doing yoga a few days ago that I was convinced I was dying of multiple blood clots in my legs and back.  Apparently all this healthiness isn't agreeing with me - I should stick to being a virtual pirate.  

A Functional Adult Wins at Life

Hello, good peoples of the Internets. It has been far too long since I have reminded you that I am not, in fact, a functional adult. Except I think I might be one step closer, if one of the steps on the road to Grownuptown, USA, is Ultimate Win.

How did I Ultimate Win, you ask?

I HELD A BABY SLED DOG. OH MY GOODNESS was it tiny and cute.

!!!!!

Therefore, I have achieved full awesomeness. Or at least during the three minutes I got to hold a four-day-old puppy.

Back later this week with more regularly-scheduled programming (whatever that means in the context of this blog)...

A Functional Adult Should Not Get This Irrationally Angry

I just had an encounter at the grocery store.  While I was checking out - a pretty large order, as a certain Functional Adult's parents are coming to visit soon - I realized I'd forgotten diet coke, which is imperative insofar as a Functional Adult's Mom needs diet coke to eat pizza, and a Functional Adult needs pizza to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and a Functional Adult's Dad needs to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics and inevitably comment on how it's not as good as the ceremony at Beijing was.  

So I needed diet coke.  The checker was still working on scanning many of my items, so I told him I'd be right back.  I literally dashed through the store to the soda aisle - realizing, as I did, that I nearly bowled over the same accommodating fellow who had made room for me in the egg aisle.  I grabbed the diet coke quickly (since I have the layout of my local Safeway memorized) and dashed back.  Couldn't have taken more than 90 seconds.

This is clutch.

In fact, when I got back, the checker hadn't even finished with the items I'd already put on the conveyer belt.  But some old woman had decided to push my cart with its remaining items aside and start putting her items on the belt!

I was somewhat astonished and pointed out, "That's my stuff."  She gave me an aggressively condescending look and said, "Well, you were gone."  I gave her my best "b*t¢h, you crazy!" look and said, "I was only gone a second!"  And then she gave me an extremely dirty look and said, "I waited at least FIVE minutes." 

At that point, I decided to let it go. I rolled my eyes a little at the checker but said, "Oh well, guess I wasn't as fast as I thought I was," and finished checking out.  Even though she kept shooting me looks.

I feel like when you do the nice thing and take the high road, you should get a pleasant sense of satisfaction at being a mature and kind member of society.  Or at least you should be able to forget about it quickly.  Neither of this happened to me:  as I drove home, I got madder and madder that I'd taken the high road.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAGE

I began to wish I'd used my words to rip that upjumped elderly to shreds.  I spent my entire car ride home coming up with various forms of cutting remarks I could have made to her:

Ad Hominem (making use of shopping cart observation): "So, this is how you get your jollies?  You just stand around at Safeway being snide to people for no apparent reason?  I'm guessing that's because you're sad and old with nothing better to do in your life, and you are going to DIE ALONE DRINKING AN 8-OZ CAN OF SODA."

Imposing the burden of proof / aggressive wagering:  "Really?  I was gone five minutes?  Prove it!  Let's see your stopwatch.  Oh, you didn't time it?  Yeah, I didn't THINK you knew what you were talking about."

Marshaling the evidence:  "FIVE MINUTES, you say?  Even though the checker was still scanning the items I left on the belt?  What if I asked the checker how long I was gone?  What if I asked to see the store security footage?  Do you think that would show I was gone five minutes?  Or would it just show that old hags can be idiots too?"

Logical / Accepting her premise as true:  "I'm sorry, even if I were gone five minutes, what did you think was going to happen?  Did you think I was never coming back?  Or did you think the checker would just unscan the $150 worth of groceries that he had already scanned, scan yours, and then re-scan all of my items?  Or did you maybe not think at all because you don't have enough brain cells?"

Sarcastic:  "Oh, see, when I said I was only gone a little while, I meant in clock time.  But you're probably measuring in ugly old woman time."

With religious overtones:  "You're so old, you shouldn't be lying like this, because you're likely to die soon and you'll have to explain your lying ways in the afterlife."

AUGH.  I am STILL MAD I didn't say ALL OF THOSE THINGS TO HER.  Which is ridiculous, I know, because who cares some old woman shot me dirty looks in the checkout line over some diet coke.  Except I apparently care really deeply and now want to ruin an old woman's self esteem over it with any number of references to her age and impending death.


Aaaaaaaand here you have piece of evidence #284 I am still not a functional adult, because I cannot let crap go.

Item of Evidence #283.  Though, actually, I bought this for my parents.

A Functional Adult Gets Some Style

I love clothes more than I ought. I love reading Vogue and online shopping and staring at people walking on the street who have cool clothes. I got especially excited last night because I hung out with my friend Rev, who I hadn’t seen in awhile and who is Le Stylish all the time. She has a great sense of style because while her outfits always nod towards whatever is trendy at the time, she never looks exactly like anyone else, just herself. So cool. I may have spent too much of our time at a cool bar freaking out about how much I liked her purse. But seriously, you guys, her purse was amazing.

LOOK AT THIS PURSE OKAY

I’m a little jealous, because she has a job that allows her some flexibility in looking cool at work. I wear boring suits every day. There’s only so much you can do to jazz up a charcoal gray pantsuit without looking stupid, and in my job it’s better to err boring than look stupid.

So my attempts at stylishness are usually limited to occasional frantic bursts of online shopping, and drooling over my friends’ clothes.

This weekend was particularly opportune because in addition to getting to drool, when I got home, I remembered that I had engaged in some of said frantic online shopping approximately 10 days earlier and I HAD THREE BOXES IN THE KITCHEN ALL FULL OF SHOPPING JOY.

Huzzah! So after my efficient Saturday morning routine of sprawling all over the bed, drinking orange juice pensively for 30 minutes, a botched workout* attempt, and eating some jelly beans, I opened the boxes and started trying on the clothes. Yay! Style leveling up imminent! I was no longer a boring gray-suited android!

I had ordered the following things, all of which seemed like good ideas at the time:

• Hot pink jeans

• A hot pink blouse with gray trim

• A wetsuit-influenced “scuba” dress, cobalt blue with neon chartreuse side… ovals

• Black flats to wear to work

The jeans didn’t come because they ran out or something, and CANCELLED MY ORDER. WHAT. As a child of the 80s, I was so excited to branch out into the realm of colored denim! Boo.

I tried on the blouse with a khaki skirt that I had recently forgotten I own (whoops, sorry skirt, I didn’t mean to hurt you, baby, but you can’t tie me down to one skirt). And it looked AWESOME. So awesome I got excited, went out to the garage to show husband, where he somewhat less enthusiastically agreed it was great.

Husband: Yeah, it looks really nice!
*pause*
Husband: You didn’t have that blouse before?
Liz: No! No, it’s new!
Husband: Okay. But you did… have the skirt before?
Liz: Yes, duh.

He’s one for two. Excited with my blousey success, I spent several minutes happily imagining all the places I was going to wear it before trying on the Scuba Dress.

Here’s a picture of it. It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds:

Please be clear: I am not this lady.
This is a different lady.
Wearing this dress is her job.

It’s cute, right? And side panels like those, I have read, theoretically make one look thinner. And looking thinner is the ultimate goal of Western society; once we all look sufficiently thin we will blast off into space like the arcologies in Sim City 2000 and conquer all galaxies through how nice we look. Or such is the impression my subscription to Vogue magazine has given me.

I tried it on and really liked it. It was au courant and funky and a good color on me. So I walked around the house, trying it on with different shoes, before I went to show Husband.

Husband: Oh, would you wear that at the lake?
Liz: No, it’s a fancy dress. It’s very chic?
Husband: Is it made of swimsuit material?
Liz: No, it’s just supposed to LOOK like swimsuit material.
Husband: Okay. And you wouldn’t wear it when we are hanging out around the lake.
Liz: No.
Husband: So where do you wear it?
Liz: At a fancy bar!
Husband: A nautical themed bar?
Liz: A BAR-THEMED BAR.

This conversation with Husband was giving me the uncomfortable realization that… I don’t go to fancy bars, or really even bars, all that often. My trip to a cool bar last night with Rev was an aberration; despite working in a fancy city, I hightail it out after work like the municipal authorities are after me and I need to get outside their jurisdiction ASAP.
 

In this more critical mood, I noticed the bunching. This “Scuba” dress was tight in some places and loose in others, which meant I kept having to yank it down. This is a problem whether you are scuba diving or drinking at a bar.

So, tragically, the “Scuba” dress is going back. Though the quote marks are staying.

Aaaand the boring black flats for work are maybe fine, but not that comfortable. I am leaving them in possible-return limbo.

So my attempt at increasing style is 1 for 4. But the weekend’s not over yet: tomorrow I’m shopping the old fashioned way. No internet, no waiting in the mail, no having to pick things out myself: I’m just going to the mall and buying everything Rev was wearing last night.

---

* My latest attempt to trick myself into exercising is by incentivizing myself using cute workout clothes. I usually find myself “saving” my exercise clothes – for example, never talking my running shoes outside, ever, lest they get dirty. This leads to weird results where my Nikes stay pristine for YEARS and my gladiator stiletto sandals start looking tired after half a season. But today, I figured if I have to run, I might as well like how I look doing it (assuming I like how I look doubled over and wheezing). Though that was distinctly un-fun and ended 7 minutes later, so I don’t want to talk about my workout any more.

A Functional Adult Cooks Vegan

I decided to cook vegan tonight.  Actually, I decided to cook vegetarian, but I accidentally ended up cooking vegan, which is like leveled-up turbo status vegetarian!  INFINITY BONUS POINTS!

But cooking vegan was harder than I thought it would be.  I'm a major meat eater, mostly because meat is delicious.  It's so easy to cheat when cooking meat - if you just cook a sausage, and put it in a crappy Costco hotdog bun, it will be delicious because IT IS A SAUSAGE.  Cf. beef hamburger in a crappy hamburger bun (also delicious); see also that's what she said.

There is no cheating with veganism.  Here is the secret to cooking vegan, as stated by someone who has now cooked at least one vegan meal:  you cook a crapton of vegetables.  

Shocking, yes.  And surprisingly DIRTY - but more on that later.  I decided to make lentils and rice, which is a pretty doable recipe I got from a very inspiring NY Times article about eating sustainably.  It's also easily vegan, though I usually make it with sausage.  This time, though, I decided to mix it up by using beets instead!

I thought at first I'd just chop up the beets and throw them in the pan with the onions and garlic I cook at the beginning. But when I went to my trusty friend Google to inquire "cook beets" (Google is an efficient friend who doesn't need pleasantries or extra words), all the hits strenuously insisted that I had to ROAST the beets in the OVEN or they would be GROSS. Unfortunately for my plan, that vaguely recalled that I had read something in one of my many cookbooks about beets being gross unless roasted. I hadn't actually read how to cook beets, but I'd read that, because I read cookbooks like hermits read travel guides - the pictures and the stories are good enough for me!

So I guessed I had to roast the beets in the oven. The recipe just said to roll them in oil and bang some salt on there (I'm paraphrasing), but I looked at the beets and thought I'd give them a rinse first. Which was when I was reminded that beets grow in the dirt and do not just appear fully formed in the produce aisle of Safeway. Those beets were DIR-TAY. I scrubbed them for what felt like forever to get all the dirt off, and the sink looked like I had spilled a post-apocalyptic ant farm in it.

And then I had the dripping wet leaves to contend with. At first I tried to rinse all of the grit off of them before I set them on a wad of paper towels, but then I didn't have enough room so I set the wet but still dirty ones on top of the ones I'd already cleaned, so I had to start a new wad of paper towels only for clean ones, but the only place to put that was across the kitchen (kind of on the stove) and so I dripped water on the floor after every gritty leaf I washed.

I finally got the beets in the oven and the greens clean in a pile. I made the lentils and rice pretty easily; I've made it several times before and then only obstacle was CRISIS THERE IS NO BROWN RICE HUSBAND WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY BROWN RICE oh I guess it's okay the recipe says I can use white.

Beets.  Yup.

So then it was time to deal with the beets.  Internet told me that I could peel the beets just by kind of rubbing it and bam, peeled.  But here's the deal, INTERNET, beets are REALLY HOT when they have just come out of a 400 degree OVEN.  Not to mention SO MESSY.  I tried to do this and mostly ended up hurting my fingers and also looking like I had committed purple murder in the kitchen.

Getting my Lady MacBeth on

My ah-ha moment came when I realized that Husband has a stash of latex gloves for working on his old car, which might provide some insulation against burning beet finger death.  So I popped those on, but the stupid beets still weren't peeling, so I had to bust out a peeler and just sort of push it at them.  It took forever.

This is how the purplocalypse began

I finally got them peeled, and wilted the greens in a pan, and put them on top of the lentil mixture, and check THIS out, fools:

Full five points for presentation, AMIRIGHT?

SUPER PLATED vegan dinner!  Hoo-ah!  That's right, I am a modern lady able to make sustainable vegetable-based dinners for myself and my modern husband.  And it was ACTUALLY TASTY.  The Internets may be on to something in re roasting beets in the oven.

Of course, the kitchen is still full of purple CSI evidence.  

And it's only two hours since I ate dinner and I am somehow starving.  Are Jelly Belly jelly beans vegan?  I think I need a second course.

A Functional Adult Gets Handy

… No, not handsy. I respect most people’s personal space. Mostly.

Handy. Today, people, I did something almost worthy of the really mature bloggers with whom I am mildly obsessed! I helped Husband build some work benches! Mostly. Most of some work benches! I got my hair cut and came home and used a power tool! To drive screws through brackets into lumber!

Okay, I apologize for the excess of exclamation points; I told my mom she was only allowed three per page and I ought to be consistent. But it feels remarkable to have been so productive in the literal sense of the word: we produced (most) of something. 

Impressive, no?

And as you can see, I did not chip my nails in the process because I have discovered the wonders of gel manicures. People, they are amazing; my nails have held up for five days now. (If you are a guy, trust me, this is a long time because manicures are an exercise in futility by which you paint your nails to have the paint IMMEDIATELY begin flaking off. It amazes me that the paint on my car has been fine for 17 years when just now did I discover a process by which nail polish can last longer than 17 minutes.) 

This is what we’ve made so far:  

Yeah, they don't look SO much like tables.

They aren’t connected yet because Husband accidentally had the guy at the store cut the shorter side connecting pieces too long, so now we are going to buy a saw to trim them down ourselves. I voted that we buy the saw (rather than have the store shorten them for us) in the hope that if Husband develops an affinity for woodworking, some day he will make furniture for INSIDE the house and not just for the garage. 

I want him to be able to make furniture because I’m constantly amazed by how expensive furniture is, perhaps from having spent part of my childhood in a very timbrous – wait, no, I mean timber-filled – area of the country. There were trees just EVERYWHERE. On Earth Day, we didn’t go plant trees, we cleared ivy off of the millions of existing trees. So when I look at the price of wood furniture online, I am BAFFLED. It’s just trees and labor! How can a teeny nighstand cost $1000? This is why we bought all our furniture from the very chic store of Craigslist. It’s amazing the deals you can get when people are cleaning out their inlaws’ houses.

Anyway, the plan is to get him to become a master furniture maker in his free time, obviously. But in the meantime, I hope we’ll finish these workbenches soon. I’m somewhat eager to see how much this manicure can really take. Maybe I should go visit my parents and do some ivy-clearing to pick up lumber for the next project.