Reading: Mohawk

Moving: .....?

Watching: keeping my eye on that guacamole

Listening: Crash

31 August 2000: Color Blind

I hereby ally myself with the color blind.

See, I had this whole thing going about complementary colors. The bedroom, my beautiful beautiful lavender bedroom, is the best sort of lavender, with blue tones. Most of the rest of the upstairs is going to be sage green, also with blue tones. The two colors complement one another, I think. No one's ever been able to pin me down to a season, color-wise, any more than anyone's been able to pin me down to a Myers-Briggs type, but the field is narrowing: I am either a winter or a summer because blue undertones, not yellow, are the way to go; and MB-wise, the E is off the charts and the N is freakishly high as well.

We chose paint colors, lavender and sage. I bought three dresses, lavender, sage, and sage-with-lavender. I bought a little picture with lavender flowers and pale green leaves. I bought another beach towel in the Wal-Mart of desolute Windham, CT, with lavender, white, and green stripes. I have entered a new phase of Color Certainty in my life.

Besides curtains, the one thing we need to Pull the Bedroom Together is something or other on the bed. RDC wanted a down comforter, which was fine with me, and which meant we needed a cover. The comforter we have is almost seven years old. Our dear friend Roz gave it to us when RDC's Florida family learned he was going thither for Christmas and bring the hussy he was about to live with along. We, a we that included me whom they had never met, received a lot of very nice houseware, including sheets and a comforter from Roz. She, like almost everyone else in the transplanted New York that is southeastern coastal Florida, has this bizarre fetish for things southwestern. We exchanged the desert pink-and-orange comforter for the only pattern we could agree on, a geometric print of blue and green with some purple and pink that has, over the years, become offensive as we learned just how many undesirable types had the same comforter. (To wit: my friend's reclusive, clinically depressed roommate, who kept the blue-and-black side up in preference to the cheerier, blue-and-green side; and most recently, the son of the freakish seller of the house (whose death metal and otherwise violent paraphrenalia made me hesitant to buy the house, let alone inhabit his previous bedroom as my study).) Furthermore, its quilting is beginning to come apart.

Aside: after seven years of hard use, I accept polyurethane quilting coming out of a cheap comforter. The first such thing I owned was a high school graduation gift from my mother, and all its quilting popped its stitches before the end of first semester freshling year.

So. We have looked at exactly three places for a comforter:

First, Scandia Downs, which makes covers to order. They had no patterns I liked. They had a grape fruit-and-leaf one that RDC liked, and this from a man who said that no man should have to sleep on flowered sheets before he's married. I believe he made that pronouncement as we exchanged the southwestern print comforter, and it made a lot of sense to me, who thinks that no one should sleep on flowered sheets almost ever.

Second, Foley's, which had patterns I downright despised, lots of Ralph Lauren, heavy, chintzy, crowded, oversized peony kind of patterns.

Third, Bloodbath & Beyond. This had one (1) cover that I liked, sage green with a pattern of pale green leaves, by Bay Linens (whoever that is). There were also ponderous rococco patterns and others that turned my stomach, and one (1) that I liked a lot, with scattered lilac blossoms (yes, flowers!), by Laura Ashley, which I liked a lot but which was a comforter and not a cover and thus out of the running. But the green one would complement the rest of the house! Sage and lavender go! Just look at my dress and my towel! Look at my walls!

Cut to Tuesday night. It is my last day home. HAO comes over in the afternoon and stays for dinner and it is all very pleasant, as we have not seen each other since before my vacation. I go to bed at nine, because I am getting up at 6:30 to return to work and want a full night's sleep. RDC goes out to see people at Pub on Pearl, and at 12:30 comes home and whispers in my ear, "We're having a party on Friday."

(This is also the venue in which he decided, and the manner in which he told me, we were having Thanksgiving. This was fine, even though it left us but two evenings to get the house out of paint mode and otherwise scour it.)

Therefore, last night found us at CostCo buying stuff for the party. CostCo has that thing, though, whereby you go in for orange juice and Tums and you buy a microwave too (not that we have yet). This time, the temptation was a down comforter, since in its bizarre way, CostCo had what we wanted. Box quilting, better than tubes but not as good as the other kind whose name I forget, such-and-such thread count, loft, skeins of geese psi, etc. And Wamsutta sheets, which we bought in white.

Now, the pimp comforter is off our bed for the duration, anyway. It's summer and we've been sleeping under a sheet and a blanket (navy blue cotton). Nevertheless, we thought it would be nice to have the bed dressed in time for the party, so we stopped at BB&B on the way home and bought the sage green cover.

What was I thinking?

I was putting away groceries as RDC buttoned the comforter into the cover. I didn't see it until he had remade the bed. He called me in.

It doesn't go, it doesn't coordinate, it doesn't complement, it looks awful.

But wait! I thought. Perhaps it's the sheet color! I bought lavender sheets a long time ago, now well faded, and when the flat sheet ripped (our bedding takes a lot of abuse), RDC replaced it with what he thought was the same Wamsutta (the brand) shade of lavender, but which was actually blue. So we have a faded lavender fitted sheet and a blue flat sheet and two blue pillowcases (those three items match) and one sham (mine) left over from the comforter and, as the last, really pretty touch, one pillow (RDC's) whose case is that white with primary flowers that every schoolchild has, the sheet that was the Irish family's tablecloth in "The Snapper," that one. I whipped all the pillows--in three different colors or patterns--off the bed and looked again.

It doesn't go, it doesn't coordinate, it doesn't complement, it looks awful.

I am considering two choices: sage and lavender don't go and my dress and picture and towel are awful and people passing from the living room through the dining room and hallway into the bedroom will be struck blind, or the comforter has yellow undertones, not blue, and therefore hasn't a hope of coordinating anyway, and we should probably go to Linens & Things or mabye (ack!) try the Great Indoors, or I should learn to love RDC's Scandia grape thing. This green cover's going back to BB&B, is all I know for sure.

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I was sick for a long time. I missed four days of work with a weekend in the middle, six days all told. I did nothing. RDC beavered away priming and spackling and painting the hallway (which will be done for the party, anyway). On Friday we got sport drink down my hatch enough to restore some electrolytes and boost my blood sugar, but I was still so dehydrated that my pee was dark amber. On Saturday I thought I was better and tried to do some yard work, but that was a sorry mistake. Monday the 28th I finally saw a doctor, who figured I had a bacterial infection from tainted food. He attributed it to the sushi I ate Monday night (the 21st), but I don't remember if he concluded that because this sort of thing takes nearly 48 hours to incubate. I believe him that it was food poisoning and bacterial, but I attribute it not to sushi but to the leftover pasta with eggplant I ate Tuesday the 22nd. RDC and I had the exact same order of sushi: we split a tuna roll and a California roll, plus had a piece each of tuna, yellowtail, mackerel, and salmon. We ate neighboring slices of the same fishes, and he was fine. Whereas Tuesday (the night before I got sick) we each finished off a different leftover meal, and I don't remember how old the eggplant was, but close on a week. Tuesday (the last day I convalesced) I stayed home mostly to give my gut one last day to behave before I trusted myself in public, and finally got back to housework. I washed the dining room walls. Also I reread Emma. Now I'm rereading Sense and Sensibility. I still haven't finished Mohawk.

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In the meantime, my sister got email and web access, finally. HAO emailed me plaintively, why don't you looooove me anymore, since I had not emailed her for some inexcusable period, and I said look here Fido, my vey sister finally got email and I haven't written to her yet either, so this is equal opportunity neglect.

HAO reads this, but only those paragraphs that include her initials. So I should explain "Look here, Fido!" Like so many other of my stock quotes, that one is from SEB's little scandal sheet story, and specifically is from a newspaper headline she rebus'd into place.

Of course, my sister assumed the same thing HAO did. Friday while I moaned pathetically in bed, she called and recited her email address to RDC, quickly over the phone from work. Why didn't she email it, since I had given her my address a few days before when she announced she was but hours away from computer-hood? What can I say; she's not going to be an Adept. And I shouldn't laugh up my sleeve because I'd be equally helpless without my in-house Mac support dude. When she had not received any email by Saturday afternoon, she called again, at which point I told her I was so sick that I had called our mother. At this point, she not only understood why I would not be mucking about with computers but became extremely concerned, because neither of us calls our mother in an I-want-my-mommy kind of way unless she is very badly off indeed (fr'instance, the last time I did was when I fell last September).

Her e-address is really cute. She didn't know that when she picked up the machine from Staples that she would be required to provide a username immediately, and so what came out of her mouth, just off the top of her head, was what I called her as a tot, before I could pronounce her name. When RDC got off the phone with her and came to tell me the address, he said, "She said you'd understand, it's -----@domain dot com." That really was off the top of her head, because as far as I knew she's been trying to get away from that baby babble nickname her whole life. Heh.