Pat will make a few television and radio appearances while there

Did the headline catch your eye? There's this fun little game you can play with Google You enter your name as the search term, along with the verb of your choice. Put it in quotes so Google doesn't ignore the verb. For example: "Marla is" or "Marla thinks". The results can be quite amusing. The title above is my first result.

The past few weeks we've been having the top half of our house painted, and doing the bottom half ourselves. I'm not sure we'll get it all done before cold weather sets in permanently, but it's really starting to look nice! Tomorrow I might have a picture that will give you a decent idea of what the finished product will look like. For today, I'll post the "before" picture.

Choosing the colors was quite an ordeal. Those orangey bricks are devilishly hard to work with, especially since I was wanting to lighten up the colors and use a very light trim. I found a really nice little utility at the Benjamin Moore website that you can download for a small fee. It allows you to work with a scanned picture, delineating the various areas pretty easily, and then cycling through a variety of color choices. My absolute favorite was the tropical scheme: salmon, light turquoise, bright turquoise. Or, as BM would say, Creamy Orange, Marina Bay, Harborside Blue. But Todd was concerned it would hurt resale value. "We're not planning to sell it!" I protested. Hmmm. Mayhaps that wasn't his real reason.



A good friend who is an artist and an art teacher and whose home redecorating projects always look good to me came over and looked at swatches with me, to get us started. Then I tried color after color after color ... ad nauseum. I actually tinkered with the tropical colors just because I was getting kind of punchy. Poor Todd ... I think he'd have accepted just about any color scheme after I showed him that one! An unanticipated side effect. (Really! If he'd let me, I'd actually have painted these colors! You think I'm weird now, just wait till I get really old!) Fortunately, I think we're both very pleased with how it's coming out.

Once we started painting, it was several trips to the paint store till we got the colors we ended up using. I'll be dogged if I can ever just pick out a color by looking at swatches. Even the little visualizer program wasn't foolproof, mostly because we were buying Sherwin Williams' Woodscapes product, which was universally recommended by every building professional we spoke to. It has this amazing 8-year warranty on it, and after painting with it, I can see why. Going from a dark color to a light color, the coverage was so good we really could have stopped with one coat. But we did (and are still doing!) two coats anyway. The wood had been basically unprotected for quite a while, so it seemed prudent to assume some of the first coat was being absorbed into the wood and the second coat would be the one that really protects it.

So, are you dying to see it? Sorry, you'll have to waaaaitttt!