Clickable thumbnails, as usual.

.. started earlier this summer, I spent my holiday weekend once again painting, this time in the bedroom.

Before painting (all pictures are clickable thumbnails):

You may or may not have noticed that the walls in the room were actually two colors - not in an accent wall kind of way, but in a two walls are pale aqua and two walls are yellowish white kind of way. The ceiling is, of course, different from both former wall colors (the second picture shows all three the best), but fortunately it’s white so I opted not to paint it. I did, however, decide that it needed to be primed:

I loved that they tinted the primer to match the paint - it really made it a lot easier, especially because you could tell that a single coat of the paint wouldn’t have covered the lighter paint underneath - as you can see if you look closely at the primed walls. I still ended up doing two coats of paint because I must not have mixed as thoroughly as I should have at some point and the brushwork was noticeably different from the stuff done with the roller. In the end, though, it looks pretty good:

I still need to go back and do some touch up in spots where the tape pulled a little bit of the paint away, as well as some spots on the ceiling that I didn’t notice got smudged, but that is pretty quick work once I get around to it.

The reason for painting *right now* arrived today:

Awhile back I was lamenting Saturday morning cartoons. A few weeks ago, I finally added Shakesville to my daily blogroll and they do a daily 2-minute nostalgia break (that’s usually less than 2-minutes); today’s featured the Monchhichis!

* I’m apparently somewhat stream of conscious when among friends and family, especially when unwinding at the end of a day. One day on the way home (I think it might have been a Friday even) in the midst of a discussion about something else (quite literally in the middle of it) and completely out of the blue I remembered that we were out of eggs and said so. It’s become short hand for when I non-sequitor now (or at least sometimes, if I remember to warn those that I’m talking to).

From this..

(Clickable thumbnails, as always.)

..to this:

..to this:

And finally.. this:

Apologies for how blurry this one is..

I couldn’t match the original stain - partially because it’s a color that appears to no longer be made, but also because the original trim is no longer uniform, as you can see by looking at the right trim board. At some point, I will likely strip the original trim down to bare wood and stain it to match the top piece and doors - both of which are new wood - but for now, it’s at least no more mismatched than much of the rest of the house. *shrug*

Sometime tonight or tomorrow, I’ll patch the couple small chunks of wall that didn’t get covered (there’s a small one where you can see the grey of the original wall above the original door and another toward the bottom of the right side) with drywall compound so I can sand it and have it ready to paint Saturday. Everything I’ve read about painting walls read tells me that I need to first do a coat of dark primer, followed by at least two coats of paint and that I must wait at least 24 hours between coats. I’m not quite sure I trust that, but if it’s actually what’s needed, I at least have the long weekend in which to get it finished.

One of the reasons I fell in love with my house when we bought it is that it has hardwood floors throughout most of the rooms. Even though the upstairs bedrooms had carpeting pieced in and nailed down, we knew that the original floors were under the carpeting. The carpet in what’s now the master bedroom got ripped out before we even moved in - it didn’t even cover the whole floor and looked yucky, so it went. The carpet in the two smaller bedrooms, though, has stayed.

I was disheartened a few weeks ago to learn that the maroonish carpet in the guest bedroom is covering, at least in one spot in what is now the shelved half of the closet space, a place where someone at some point cut a rectangle of floor out and replaced it with plywood. I’m hoping that’s the only spot in that room where they did it because at some point I want to cut the carpet at the closet and pull it out of the rest of the room.

The discovery of the damage in the guest room made me a little nervous about ripping out the carpet in the den - we’ve found some pretty amazingly messed up “home repair” in this house, so it’s always a bit of a surprise when we uncover something new - but it seems the carpet in the den was just for comfort and not to cover some abomination:

(Clickable thumbnails, as usual.)

Don’t mind the bit of mess on the floor - I’d swept but not yet mopped when I took it; I assure you it’s much cleaner now! There is a bit of damage to the floor boards from what appears to have been a bed that sat in the same spot for quite some time:

But.. all things considered, I’m extraordinarily pleased to find the floor mostly intact - or at least as intact as the flooring in the rest of the upstairs!

Right.. So, I’ve been more or less “collecting” various posts from sundry sources the last month and change all more or less loosely centered on crime and the criminal justice system. I keep thinking I’m going to write some wonderful post tying them all together, but with the academic year officially starting next week, and things already picking up noticeably in my office (U.S. News results will be released to the public tomorrow, which is always the more or less official start to the craziness that is fall term), combined with plans to do some more involved stuff around the house the next few weeks, I have finally admitted that’s not going to happen. So, what follows are the links I’ve been gathering with as many of my thoughts about them that I can remember and have time to put down in text while waiting for data to compile today.

About a month ago, a post on trends in imprisonment from (where else) Sociological Images picked up on some of the thoughts I’ve had about the ways in which our CJ system is broken for years. There are lots of ways I think the system is horribly broken, but those really aren’t what I wanted to go into (really.. lots of ways.. ). Instead, I wanted to take a moment to think about Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs and it’s continued impact on our economy. In a nutshell, the War on Drugs made felons of a lot of non-violent people (yes, and quite a few violent ones, but not the majority), clogged the courts and jails with a huge influx of cases and inmates, and effectively removed the vast majority of those people from contributing to the economy. We overcrowded our prisons, requiring increasing tax dollars to be funneled toward them, thereby decreasing the pool of funds available for things like, just to pick on that’s a little near and dear to me, public education. We stamped “felon” on a huge number of people who are now increasingly prohibited from accessing jobs with living wages and opportunities for advancement, simultaneously cutting our own work-force (and ability to compete in an increasingly global market) drastically and reducing the ability of our economy to weather cycles of recession. Don’t they say wars are s’posed to be “good” for the economy..?

More recently, and mostly unrelated to the above, M LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. recently wrote about a new law allowing judges in Illinois to require violators of orders of protection to wear GPS tracking devices so that police could better track them. Like M LeBlanc, I’m conflicted by this law - on the one hand, it seems to be a step in the right direction in protecting victims of potentially violent perpetrators, but on the other hand it does so at the expense of those potentially violent perpetrators’ civil liberties - potential is a key word in all that; these are people who have not been convicted who are now allowed to be under near constant police surveillance. M LeBlanc comes to a conclusion that is both heartening in that it’s not the over-the-top rhetoric that sometimes seems pervasive in our society and at the same time utterly sobering and depressing in the enormity of what it means:

The criminal justice system does nothing but create more criminals. We need it, like we need a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding of human dignity from every woman on the planet, but it can not, and will not, solve our problems. These GPS devices will not stop women from being hurt and killed, and they will be another chink in the wall that we put between citizens and the state. The lock and the key, the bracelet and the computer, will not stop or even slow the violence.

For that, we need a revolution.

I was recently chided by a few friends and acquaintances for getting upset about a spoof Guinness ad that I found demeaning and objectifying of women; they found the ad clever and/or amusing and felt that I was making too much of it - reading too much importance into what was clearly intended to be a joke. I wish I could explain to them why their response was exactly the problem, or that M LeBlanc had written this earlier so I could quote it then:

Our society is sick—it is a patriarchy where men are promised power and dominion over women and they are taught that violence is noble, that using force is masculine. It is a pornocracy where children are sexualized, where women’s dismembered bodies are used to sell soap, blue jeans, and hamburgers. It is a market economy where the right to have a young woman rub her naked body on you can be legally purchased in any town or city, but where those same young women are arrested for accepting money for giving a blowjob. It is a world where all things deemed within the fake construct of masculinity are positive attributes, and all those within the construct of femininity are deprecated. Where women make less money, hold far fewer political offices and judgeships, where motherhood is “the most important job in the world,” a privilege for which mothers are treated like utter shit.

Abusers aren’t just bad apples. They are normal dudes. They are the guys you work with, the guys you went to college with, the guys you see in a bar on a Friday night or the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon.

They bear the blame for what they do. But the rest of us do, too. Every guy who stands by and heh-hehs when sexist jokes are made, who views their co-workers or classmates not as colleagues, but as eye-candy, who refuses to acknowledge the misogyny inherent in pornography, is a part of this sick society. Every woman who tut-tuts her friends or neighbors for trying too hard to look sexy, or not trying hard enough, who criticizes other women for being too assertive, who criticizes other men for not being manly enough or showing too much emotion, is a part of this putrid virus.

It’s the pervasiveness of the power structure that is so utterly terrifying - whether it’s patriarchy, or  institutionalized racisim, or our criminal “justice” system, or any of half a million other things.  It’s when we can see it and choose to ignore it without realizing how that just works to reinforce it, when we write off those who rail against the injustice as zealots who are over-reacting.. when we acquiesce to the status quo, or tell ourselves it’s not our problem to solve, or that there’s nothing we can do, or worse that there’s nothing wrong.. those are the things that frustrate me most. Because in truth, to twist another Reagan-era campaign, ignoring these injustices is part of the problem, not the solution.

Right then.. one more jump.. still on the idea of crime, but this one’s going to have to speak mostly for itself, with the warning that it may be triggery for some folks - a video of a purported “news agency” asking abortion protesters who believe abortion should be illegal what punishment women who have abortions should face. Yeah.. not thinking about the consequences of our laws seems to be “as American as apple pie”..

I don’t normally post things like this here, but I really loved taking this little quiz because most of the pictures are really quite lovely; ironically, I’m really far less attracted to the picture they chose to represent “The Artist”. *shrug*

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test…

NFPC - The Artist

Nature, Foreground, Big Picture, and Color

You perceive the world with particular attention to nature. You focus on what’s in front of you (the foreground) and how that fits into the larger picture. You are also particularly drawn towards the colors around you. Because of the value you place on nature, you tend to find comfort in more subdued settings and find energy in solitude. You like to deal directly with whatever comes your way without dealing with speculating possibilities or outcomes you can’t control. You are in tune with all that is around you and understand your life as part of a larger whole. You are a down-to-earth person who enjoys going with the flow.

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

And speaking of lovely pictures, this one of the Olympic torch and the (nearly?) full moon is utterly gorgeous! And the photos of the Cartoon skeletons exhibit are fun, but make me want to go see more and I don’t think I can afford to go to Switzerland anytime soon.

Finally, one personal picture of the (finally, almost - need to find the little bracket that guides the doors and reinstall it) finished guest room closet:

(Clickable thumbnail, as usual).

The color is slightly off in this shot - I took it this morning without flash because the camera batteries were about dead - but it’s pretty close. I really like it and can’t wait to get the bedroom closet doors done and the bedroom painted now!

And just for comparison, here’s a “before” shot from when we moved in:

Much better now!

Things I’ve done since returning from a week’s vacation in Colorado*:

1. Attended my 15-year high school class reunion. Remembered that sometimes just having been in the same place at the same time, even for an extended period of time, doesn’t mean you actually have anything in common with people**.

2. Bought a Select Comfort, aka Sleep Number, bed. Technically, I did this the afternoon before the class reunion, but I figured the reunion was more likely to amuse people. Still, dropping a couple grand on a new bed and bedding still deserves a mention. I don’t have it yet - they’re s’posed to call this week to arrange a time to deliver it and set it up - but I have the bedding, which is good because this afternoon I..

3. Tried to pick out paint colors for the bedroom. Yeah, I’m sort of seriously thinking I need to coordinate the color of the *walls* in my bedroom with my bedding.. *sigh*. The new bedding is a caramel/gold with caramel or olive green sheets (depending on which set is clean at the time). I sort of think this means the wall would not look as good in the blues I’d originally been thinking for the bedroom (I’m worried they’ll be too “cool” - if I’d stayed with the forest green theme I’ve had for years it would have been okay, but not so much with the caramel and olive), and am now sort of surprisingly leaning toward a  pale pale purplish pink (*cringe*) or a pale purplish blue for three of the walls and a dark, deep burgundy for the fourth***.  I have paint samples to bring home tonight to see how they look with the bedding and the bedroom trim, but have hopes of painting *before* the new bed arrives, so a decision is sort of imminent.

4. Repotted the hugely overgrown aloe in my office. It was in serious need of being split so while I was out at Home Despot this afternoon to get paint samples, I picked up a bag of potting soil and split the aloe into six sections, five of which I had pots for. The sixth had grown almost horizontally due to the overcrowding of the original plant, so I pitched it rather than try to repot it.

* Yup, a week. Nope, I didn’t take a single picture. It was beautiful and exactly what I needed, though, just as a vacation should be.

** I s’pose in theory this could be said about family, too. *shrug*

*** Is there any particular “right” way to choose which wall is the accent wall? I’m sort of thinking it should be one of the two closet walls because they’re shorter..

Apparently, the difference between this:

(As usual, clickable thumbnails.) .. and this: (Yeah, yeah.. it’s a bad picture.. but I just wanted to get an idea of the length.)

.. is a couple of inches. At least.. if you’re the stylist at Cost Cutters I saw yesterday. (I’m not wearing the same cami in both pictures.. the one in the bottom picture sits higher on my back than the one in the top picture.)

It’s astonishing that my reaction when she was finished was “It’s so short!” It’s not really - my hair is still quite long - but it’s rather considerably shorter than I expected when I asked her to take off enough to get rid of the split ends which I said “might mean a couple of inches”. Apparently, a couple now means 8. *sigh*

Right then.. this post is mostly for my mother, who wanted to see pictures of the progress on the new closets in the bedrooms.

This is the main bedroom new closet:

(All pictures are clickable thumbnails.)

The doors still need to be stained, but I did the top trim board this morning. The stain is a smidge darker than the original varnish (and the trim board on the right is considerably lighter than the rest for some reason - will eventually have to strip it down and stain it to match), but I think once it’s dry and has a coat of poly on it, it will be close enough. The doors might get done this week, but more likely they’ll wait until later in August when I have another free weekend.

The guest bedroom closet, I have to admit, is sort of my favorite. Maybe because it makes that room really a bedroom now:

*

Not the greatest pictures - it’s a small room and we still need to figure out what to do with the bed and desk that were in there because we gave up some floor space to create the closet - and the trim wasn’t fully finished yet when I took them, but at the moment they’re the only ones I have with the doors on. Previously there was a truly horrid clearly slapped together for the sole purpose of being able to sell the house as a 3-bedroom box that was supposed to be a closet; it’s gone now:

Dad did the work to frame the closet and trim the wall out, but I still need to stain it all. He used reclaimed trim from the house - some from the bathroom (the uprights), which he had to sand down to remove all the nasty, icky, yucky green paint, and some from the other bedroom closet.

He also framed in a wall behind the center support - which we turned into a small bookshelf and is the perfect size for trade paperbacks:

And finally, I started staining the closet doors for this one last night:

I’m working on filling some gouges in the recovered trim, but hope to sand and get that trim stained this weekend so that at least the guest bedroom is finished. Except for the fact that we need to paint now since they apparently painted the room *after* putting in the excuse for a closet.. *sigh*

* Yes, that would be a home for my stash.. Exciting, no?!