We’ve been on a bit of a neon kick lately. Neon friendship bracelets, neon Easter eggs… I have a new banner with my logo dipped in neon pixels. I may have finally reached full-saturation on the out-of-gamut color spectrum. I might even say neon is the new pink or something like that. Well, at least for us anyway. I know the rest of you are probably ready for it to be over.

Anyway it’s been fun to play with and to photograph.

Even clean-up is pretty.

Some of it not so much…

But whatever you say, you can’t say it’s boring.

You guys all know my neighbor, Boo, right? She’s popped up a time or two on this blog. She’s a super cute girl who lives across the street from us. I love her. Anyway, she turned ten and her mom (my friend Wendy) threw her this fabulous circus-themed birthday party. It was awesome.

I may be a tiny bit biased because there was FACE PAINTING!!!

Done by ME!! I know. You’re rolling your eyes because I have to brag about every little thing but seriously, I have wanted to be a face painter since forever. I have gone to carnival after carnival and paid the five dollars or one dollar to watch some mediocre painter paint some kind of blob on my daughter’s face and call it a butterfly. I have been holding myself back from grabbing the paintbrush right out of their hands and taking over on the spot. You don’t know the willpower that requires! It was painful!

Bethany bought me this kit (I added my own paintbrushes) probably a year ago but I haven’t had the chance to break out until now. I didn’t even get a chance to practice. But guess what? I didn’t need to! It was totally easy and kids are such great sports about things. They were thrilled with everything and if a bit ran or looked funny, mistakes wipe right off with a baby wipe. It was the most pleasant experience ever. I’m going to hire myself out starting tomorrow. Need a face-painter? Call me up. I’m serious. How much do face-painters charge these days anyway?

So right. This party was about Boo, not me face painting. I hope she loved her party because it was super sweet.

Her mom (that’s Wendy on the right) is the best game-inventer ever. I might need to tap into her talent and start a company or something. Too bad we both have plans to move out of town next year.

There was hot potato.

Musical chairs.

Freeze Dance.

You might wonder why Bug is dressed up as a lion. She was part of the show. She was the ferocious lion that Wendy (the lion tamer) led out on a (necklace) chain. You should have seen Wendy play-acting that the lion was growling and giving her a terrible fight in the bathroom before she brought her out. Then this little pip squeak in a tutu came out and everyone rolled on the floor laughing. Bug ate up all that attention of course.

There were a ton of other games too, all carnival style but due to privacy issues and some funky bright lighting, I didn’t get any photos of those. She had tic-tac-toe toss games and a spider toss game that Boo made up herself. It was so cute. You had to throw a spider onto a giant web and if you got it in the middle you won. And of course there were prizes.

Fun photo ops.

Cupcakes with circus-animal cookies!

And random break-dancing.

And of course a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday complete with whistles.

It’s great to turn ten. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOO!

Sometimes when a craft works out really well, you just gotta do it again and again. In fact, I think I’m going to make this a tradition for us.

It’s just fun and CHEAP! All you need are some cardboard boxes (which I have plenty thanks to a super fun backyard Angry Birds game—hope you didn’t want that guitar box back Carrien), paint, maybe a box-cutter and some box-cutting skillz.

Cut them out, paint them, let them dry and you are set for Halloween.

Put them in your window and let the creepiness take over.

This one really gets me. I keep thinking it’s a real cat out of the corner of my eye. That’s Bug’s handiwork. I guess she knows how to draw cats pretty well.

The cool thing is: as it gets darker and darker they just get cooler and cooler.

And creepier and creepier…wooooooOOOOOOoooooooooh……

What do you do when you are buried with work, deadlines are falling all around you like giant redwoods in a timber harvest, you have guests coming in from out of town and you decided to have a great big fiesta on Saturday with lots and lots of friends? Do you knuckle down and get your work done so you’ll have plenty of time to clean your house and get ready for the party before your guests arrive OR do you walk around your house and dream up some impossible last-minute DIY home-improvement projects? The latter of course!

Because you wouldn’t want your guests to see the bathroom floor looking like this:

The horror! Actually, it looked much worse than that. The paint had come up in spots and it was soooo dirty. Muddy kid bathing, running-over sinks (that’s another story) and dogs with hair and claws do not do well on painted pressed wood (not to be confused with plywood, that would be a step up). It was the floor that could not be mopped. Oh, I tried to mop it. Believe me. But scrubbing seemed to just make it worse. You know you have a problem when you moisten the wood and it just comes up in crumbs in your hand. It was icky.

So I decided to paint the floor! Giant deadlines be damned. (Don’t worry clients, all’s well in the end.) My mom had taken all the girls over to her house for Camp Grandma so I decided to attack the floor with wild blood-shot-eyes of craziness and then get my work done on the side. That’s how we get things done around here.

Oh yeah.

First, I was just going to paint some flowers to distract from the ugliness of the dirty mint green paint. I drew them in with a sharpie and was quite pleased. Then I painted the flowers and leaves and some odd purple paisleys around the toilet area and discovered that the new fresh paint made the old dirty mint green paint look like a hot mess of awfulness. It didn’t detract at all! It pointed instead and screamed, Look! Look! It’s dirty in here! You’re probably going to catch something awful if you walk in here barefoot!

Oh woe is me.

Did I mention that I was using old house paint from a craft project from a long time ago and I didn’t have enough paint to cover the whole floor and definitely not enough for more than one coat? Good thinking, that thar me. But I tried anyway. I tried and tried to skimp out every last scrape of “lemon icing” paint to cover the ugly mint green but there was just NOT enough.

This is about the time I started walking around my house naked doing a one-woman stand-up comedy show all by myself for myself and the dog. I really wish I could have recorded that because I think I am pretty funny. But there was nakedness and blood-shot craziness so no recording was going on.

I did jot down some notes for this post though. I’m such a blogger like that.

Here are my notes:

1. Don’t have a dog, with hair when you are painting your floor. No matter how hard you sweep and wipe up the hair with a wet paper towel, you will miss about 80 thousand of them. That is why they call painting white wash. You are washing the hair with paint. Check your OCD at the back door.

2. Don’t paint with old paint from a past project because you WILL run out and you won’t be able to match it with your home stash of acrylics or the kid poster paint.

3. Do not leave the phone on the counter where you can’t reach it later without stepping in wet paint.

4. Do not forget to paint behind the door. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

5. Do not paint in your favorite nightgown.

That’s all I wrote down but I’m sure there are about 95 more things not to do when painting your floor. In the end I went to Home Depot, shelled out 88 trillion bucks for a gallon (They don’t sell smaller containers. Gah!) of “lemon icing” matched paint and a gallon of epoxy garage floor paint for cement to put over the top and hopefully make the whole mess more mop-able. I really hope it works and doesn’t peel up my masterpiece when I roll it down Friday morning.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention how drying times had to be factored in. You know how I am so great at math. Ha ha. Imagine me with a calculator and smoke coming out of my ears. It turns out I do have enough time to get it all done before the party on Saturday (when my guests will mostly likely need to use the restroom!!) but it was close. So close in fact that I had to step aside and painfully not paint more detail so that I could give it a whole 24 hours to cure before laying down the garage floor epoxy laminate clear coat, or whatever that stuff is called. It was hard stepping aside. I desperately wanted to add more flourishes and scallops and maybe some tapered dotting but I started stepping in paint in places I couldn’t cover up and I knew it was time to cut my losses.

My original plan was just to paint some flowers as a temporary measure until I could put some groovy old 70′s linoleum down but now I’m kinda liking the flowers. They’re bright, they’re crazy. They make the rest of the bathroom look like an old lady running away from a flower child on acid but I kinda dig it. If this clear coat thing works out, they might stick around for a while.

At least so I can tell this story over and over.

Today after I finished up work, I rewarded myself with a trip to the local thrift stores—two of them to be exact. I’ve had it in my head for weeks now that I want a coffee table. Just something little that can sit nice and low between Bugly and Beatrice so we can set our coffee on it. (Imagine that, using a coffee table for what it’s for!) That way we won’t be resorting to setting our coffee cups on our laptops like my Uncle Tim did when he was visiting, crazy Uncle Tim.

Anyway, a long long time ago there was this neat little octagon table, probably about two feet high and maybe a foot and a half wide that would have been perfect. Except I didn’t buy it back then when I first saw it because I didn’t have Beatrice and Bugly yet and I didn’t know I’d be on this 70′s furniture kick. I do remember thinking that it was especially hideous but might look cool spray-painted pink or orange or…both! I get crazy ideas like that.

Well, you know how this story always goes. I went back for the table and it was gone. Duh. I’ve looked for it a few (hundred) times and have determined that nothing else like it will ever exist again. Predictably, I went home table-less again today and just felt sad and tired. Which also might have something to do with my terrible habit of waking up at 1am and working until 5am but whatever. Life is all about the hunt, right? Some days you just don’t find what you want, that’s the fun of it.

After sitting outside on my park bench and sighing loudly for nobody to hear, I finally hatched a new plan. You could say I had a bee in my bonnet.

I remembered this spool we found in the dumpsters by my aunt’s seamstress shop back when we were looking for empty boxes for my sister-in-law’s move. Don’t worry, it wasn’t dirty dumpster diving. All the trash in this dumpster was clean. It was full of empty boxes and some random things that cable companies use to hook up direct tv or whatever it is they do. We had no idea what the cable could be good for but the spool looked like it might be fun for Bug to play with. So we threw it in the back of my mom’s SUV with all the empty boxes and never thought of it again.

That is, until now. That spool was destined to become pinkified.

Perhaps that shade of fuchsia that is so popular around these parts? I just happen to have some spray paint in that color already. I wonder why?!!

So we pinkified it. Pink, pink, pink.

Then we spray-painted an old broken phone that happened to be within reach. Nothing is safe from THE Pink.

“I got it, I got it!…Hey, Barbie! What’s up girl?”

“Like totally. Hang on, my mom wants me to help her with something in the living room. I’ll just walk and talk.”

“Seriously, it’s like my mom thinks she’s on some kind of interior decorating show or something.”

And that’s the story of the pink spool in my living room. I realize it’s not the best fix. It looks sort of like a cross between something from the set of The Borrrowers and something from a college dorm room but it does get the job done and it’s small enough that we can just wheel it off to Bug’s room if something better comes along.

I think it looks pretty cool, especially with the new (old) dishes my mom just gave me. Aren’t they groovy? My mom bought them when she was pregnant with me. Nineteen-seventy-two, baby. What a good year that was.

* * *

In other news, don’t forget to stop by my review blog and comment on my Slim-Fast post if you haven’t already! Sweepstakes be-a sweepstaking!

Just like he said he would, my dad came home from jury duty and installed a new motion-sensor light in my backyard laundry area. It’s wonderful. When I walk around the corner the lights automatically come on for me and I no longer have to blindly swipe through the cobwebs to find the plug for the existing fluorescent light that plugs into a power strip that connects to an extension cord that runs from inside the house somewhere. I know it sounds Mickey Mouse. It is.

As you may remember, I’m living in my grandpa’s old place and everything has been rigged by him. He was the master inventor and also the original MacGyver. Well, not really but sometimes I wonder. Most of his inventions are very handy but sometimes they leave me scratching my head. Really, Grandpa? You strung a wire from here all the way to there and never worried about fire hazards? But hey, who has Christmas lights in their pantry? I do!

As my dad was futzing around with the wires on the motion-sensor light, he let out a familiar frustrated sigh. When I asked him what was wrong, he didn’t even have to answer. We both chorused the same phrase we always say over any project we do around this house.

“Nothing is as easy as it seems.”

It’s almost a formula for the jobs my dad sets out to do here. He’ll look at something, declare it an easy fix he can do in an afternoon and then head off to the hardware store for parts. Then he comes home and starts working. Right away he finds out the part he bought is the wrong part and back to the hardware store he goes. Half the time the hardware store people give him the wrong advice and the other half of the time it’s just the house’s fault for being old and incompatible with everything new. In the end he always manages to fix everything in the nick of time before he has to go back out on the road but everything always takes longer than he anticipated and he’s always late going back to work. His dispatcher hates me, I’m sure. I should probably bake him some cookies.

Here is the floor my dad painted for me. I was going to take before photos of the water-damaged plywood because it was so awful I thought it might make a good background if I ever needed some stock art for a grunge/punk design job. True, I don’t have very many grunge/punk clients, but you never know. It’s always good to have a big library of background images on hand.

But then my dad surprised me and painted it while I was gone. I had told my mom that painting the floor was on my big important list of things to do. I was actually thinking of painting it something like this but I was procrastinating because the floor was in such bad shape. I knew it was going to take me forever to get it clean enough to paint. So I casually had mentioned to my mom that if my dad wanted to paint the first coat, I wouldn’t mind a bit.

Of course my mom took my casual request as something that must be done right away for their favorite paying renter and had my dad do it the minute he got home. So I’m not going to complain at all about the color or for not giving me a warning first. It’s cleaner and now I can send guests off to the restroom without having to apologize for the floor that might give them leprosy. Eventually I think I’m just going to put some groovy 70′s linoleum in there. The stenciled-floor idea is really fun and I’d love to do that someday but I know I’m not going to get to it. I have do other things, like work so I can keep paying my rent to my favorite landlords. Maybe I’ll let Bug go crazy with some pink paint.

She seems to be in charge of the rest of the decor.

What I really want to get rid of are those hanging-chain light fixtures. But they are not on my big important list of things to do. I’m sure if I fixed them then I’d want to change the counter and put in new faucets too and before you know it I’d be blowing so much money on this place I’d be stuck here forever. For now I am getting along just fine with my mint-green floor and my avocado-green tub.

Mostly because I am still on cloud nine over my oven.

I’ve found that one can put up with a lot of things when one is surrounded by family one loves and an oven that bakes tasty treats. And yes, I did send my Dad off with a great big bag of cookies and homemade dinners that he can eat on the road. He earned them!

My office badly needed art. There was this giant 1-inch hole smack dab in the middle of the wall that looked horrible, it did nothing for the paneling from 1977. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the giant hole was from. A flat screen tv?

No, my mom never had one and before that my grandparents lived here. They certainly wouldn’t be hanging any flat screen tv’s back in 1989. It was probably from some invention my Grandpa tinkered up. He’s got wires and holes all over this place. Christmas lights in the pantry? Check. Indoor/Outdoor thermometer wired up between the two front windows? Check. Handy dandy gadget that ding dongs every time there is mail in the mailbox? Check. My Grandpa was an undiscovered genius.

Anyway, I’ve been desperately wanting to put up something big on this office wall since I moved in. Only one problem: big art usually comes with a BIG price tag. Even just buying a large canvas can set you back a couple of hundred dollars. I did find a giant canvas at a thrift store but it had this horrible peach south-western motif on it in three inch relief. I suppose I could have sanded the crud down but I had another idea.

Why not paint the four canvases I already have on hand! (My mom is the best. Whenever she sees canvasses on sale, she buys them for me.) The end result is not quite as big as I had in mind but it’s certainly better than the old white paneling with it’s ever-mocking 1-inch hole. It was screaming at me. I had to take care of it.

So late one evening after I’d just enjoyed a cup of coffee a little too late and Bug was whining to go to bed two hours too early (Yes, my kid begs to go to bed as soon as it gets dark. She’s insane.) I decided we’d whip up a masterpiece. Nothing too daunting. Just some stripes.

Some really loud and exciting stripes! I do like drab normal colors too but, I don’t know, I just wanted something fun and exciting in my office. Something to offset the miles and miles of sand-gray paneling. Also, this didn’t feel like too big of a commitment. Painting stripes doesn’t take too terribly long and I could always paint over it if I didn’t like it. I love my paintings to have lots of texture and I figured maybe someday I’d paint some funny cartoon characters on top of the stripes and sell them in my shop if I get tired of them.

AND! Stripes are something Bug could help me with. Her stripes are not perfect, of course. She’s only almost five. But I wasn’t going for perfect. Her little touches make it special. Perfect would have taken forever. I would have had to tape each stripe and then waited the hour or two it takes for the paint to dry in between each stripe. I have no patience for that! I wanted this art done now. Besides I love extra texture. Bring on the blobs and drips. That’s what makes it fun.

Wham bam done!

Then as I was washing the paint off our glass plates (that I used as last ditch palettes since I’m fresh out of paper plates) I sort of felt sad for all the perfectly good paint going down the drain. It was so pretty as it swirled in the sink. There must be some way I could save all this beautiful pigment.

I decided to grab the two other canvases that I was going to paint with stripes too and create large dripping swatches of stripes instead. My friend Deb paints with watered down acrylic paint all the time, so why couldn’t I? I have to say I was so pleasantly surprised! A painting this pretty should not be this easy!!! It’s like I cheated. Three or four swooshes and I was done. I mean, I could have hemmed and hawed for a few hours and thought long and hard about what color would drip into what color but why? These crazy sink impromtu pieces look great to me! What do you think?

I could shellac it with a few coats of resin, call it “Desert Sunrise,” hang it in a fancy gallery and charge $5000. OR I could just admit that it took me five minutes and sell it for five bucks. Five cents? Art is so weird. Anyway, it makes me incredibly happy and I’m hanging it on my wall, so that’s all that matters.

Wham bam, thank you ma’am.

I call it: Office Wall DONE.

That is until I get tired of it in about 2.5 weeks. Which is totally fine since I’ll probably be itching to paint again by then anyway.

We lost Green Bear for a whole week and then we found him again. It was terrible. I was having visions of him left at the laundromat and adopted by some other kid who wouldn’t love him as much or worse that he somehow fell out of our car and was in a gutter getting rained on. I didn’t know I cared so much about Bug’s old bear. She’s never been one to have a favorite thing. No lovey or blanket that she carries around exclusively but she has loved this bear more than the other 399 stuffed animals she has.

At first she was so mature about it all, telling me that he’d show up eventually and that she was okay without him. She had Valentine Bear and Madeline and then she rambled on a bunch of other names of other stuffed animals that she loved. But then last night it was late and she was tired and when we talked about Green Bear again and went over all the places that he could be, she started tearing up and was inconsolable about him. I started thinking I didn’t care how broke we are right now. I better find another bear exactly like this one on ebay somewhere and hope it’s not a collector’s item.

I lay in the dark fretting about him for a long time. I even prayed. Then about midnight I got up and snuck out of the house in my pajamas to go look in the car one more time. I was cursing myself for all the times I let her take him with us on errands. That bear should stay in the house and never go out. Why am I such a softie about things like this?!!

He wasn’t in the car. I came back in the house, went back to bed and lay in the dark trying to put it out of my mind. Then I looked over at Bug’s dollhouse and there under the table I saw something. I reached under the dollhouse and there was Green Bear. He’d been inches from me all this time. How many nights had I laid down next to Bug and talked to her about Green bear and fretted about him and he was right there next to me?!!!

I don’t know. I know it’s just a stuffed bear and I shouldn’t get all mushy about material things but I hugged that bear with all my might. I felt like I was four again, loving some soft stuffed thing. Maybe I should have prayed about it sooner.

We painted today. It’s been a long time. Painting doesn’t come super easily for me. I still struggle trying to get what I see to come out the same on the paper but the process, even with all the mistakes, is enjoyable. Bug is getting the hang of it too.

We were painting flowers that we picked from our walk around the block. Bug is pretty good at drawing herself and happy faces with hearts. I thought it was time she learn to draw things that she can see. Still lifes. We have a long way to go but I think she did really good for a four year old. Probably better than I did at her age.

I don’t know what this light yellow flower is called. I called it a moonflower but I looked that up and that’s wrong. Does anyone know?

I don’t know what I liked better: painting the flowers or just having them around to take pictures of. I think we’ll have to do this again.

After the Natural History Museum we walked briskly through the sculpture garden, which was pretty neat. There was a giant sugar cube sculpture and a silver tree and some chairs stacked up really high. There were a lot more sculptures too but we were on a schedule so we rushed by.

Of course I had to take a picture by the scale model of the Paris Metro sign that I have been to in real life.

By then we were starving so we stopped by a hot-dog cart for a quick lunch. Except Bug suddenly decided she doesn’t like hot dogs and was given an ice-cream sandwich instead. She’s getting away with all kinds of spoiled behavior during this vacation. But then again, so am I.

We crossed the street to the Lincoln Memorial and took lots of pictures of the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool. The funny thing about the Lincoln Memorial is that it’s really big and impressive. They have a sign up that says to be quiet and respectful. You sort of feel like you’ve entered a church with the cavernous stone walls rising up over your head. It’s cool and quiet and filled with whispering people. So when you yell out for your kid to stop running away from you and pose for a photo, you sort of feel like someone who farted really loud in church and it’s embarrassing.

By then we were running pretty late for our scheduled events for the afternoon but I really really wanted to see the Vietnam Memorial since I remember when it was built. I remember reading long articles about the artist’s reasons and inspiration behind it’s design. It’s just as interesting and impressive in person and I’m really glad we took a moment to walk down and really experience it.

Bug played her favorite game of finding all the H’s. The wall was actually hot to the touch since it sits in the sun so it was a tricky game for her to touch the wall but not “burn” her finger. It wasn’t really hot enough to burn you but you know how kids can be sensitive.

Then it was back to the Actuallys’ for an hour of unpacking and some more putting-together-of-furniture for Troy. Then Bethany and I headed out for a “Ladies’ Night” at her old favorite pottery painting studio. (The kids stayed home with Troy for a fun-filled movie night.) Of course we had to stop on our way there for Starbucks so we would be at our optimum creativity levels.

Also, it’s 7 Days again so we snapped a few self-portraits. If you’ve been following my flickr feed, you’ve probably been wondering why there was a sudden explosion of pictures of my ugly mug. Now you know.

I finished up the ceramic egg I started the other day. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s fired. It looks soft and pink now but if I remember right I think the banding stripes are orange and pink and the pink I mixed with something else so it might turn into this awful mauve. Who knows. That’s the fun of pottery painting, you just never know what you’re going to get in the end.

And that’s that! Much more to come though!