The living room, however, is no longer the hideous dark army green that it used to be - ceiling and walls both, and has been transformed into a much brighter room with cream beige walls and white ceiling and trim. All in all very tasteful, if a little, well, beige for my tastes. As those of you who've been reading this journal for a long time will remember from the pictures posted during my time at Chateau PamerSchulz, the wall colors at the old homestead were decidedly not plain.
The walls in the new homestead are also not plain, at least color-wise. More often than not, I think they're just plain ugly. Dark army green, dark gray walls in the office, crazy industrial mint green on the walls in the hallway. All in all, just really fucking ugly! So the cream beige, though it wouldn't have been my first choice, is light years beyond what was there, and will probably grow on me.
Now that we're a year on, and have settled in and made the place ours, that room is vastly different. It's actually pretty plain by comparison. We've brightened up the walls, but we've removed all the dead plants (none of us are good at keeping plants alive) and removed the "wall of shutters" that are over my left shoulder in the picture. I really liked that wall of shutters, but when we tried to move them to paint the wall, we discovered just how nasty and rotted they were, so there was no way they were going back up.
So now the walls are bare, and I'm realizing that we have the opportunity to really make the place ours. Maybe put some art we like on the walls, put up some framed photographs pertaining to our lives. I've lived out of suitcases for so long that I forget what this sort of thing feels like.
Being home during the run of the Rennaissance Festival, and seeing all my stuff in storage at my sisiter's house really made me aware of just how much I miss having my stuff around me. I hope I can get my act together and get it up here to New York soon. I miss my bed. I miss my chairs and end tables and lamps. I miss my 27" TV (which is a little ridiculous, since there's a perfectly good 27" TV sitting in my living room right now). I miss my books and my CDs and my DVDs and just the feeling that my stuff is in my home.
So wish me luck in getting my act together that way. Anyone wanna volunteer for a moving road trip? Kidding. A little.
I knew people (mainly, I assumed, family and friends) read my online journal, but I really had no sense of how many of you out there were actually reading it. I got about thirty e-mails telling me that I was spot-on in my reaction to the WTC e-mail, and only about four of them was from someone who's actually a friend. The rest have been either from complete strangers, or people I don't know particularly well, but do know (Pam, from the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival, for insance - thanks Pam!). It's encouraging, and sorta makes the money I fork over each month to keep this site going worthwhile. Especially now that I'm not using it mainly to promote my acting career. Just about everyone (in fact, everyone) agreed that the idea behind the e-mail wasn't bad (though I still have issues with using a forward piece of crap to "keep in touch"), but the execution (e.g., the tacky photo) was pure, unadulterated tasteless.
So there ya have it. Thanks for the support, everyone. It makes me feel a lot better about having been so hard-nosed about it. Just as an update: I have received any more forwarded crap from the party in question. He appears to be following through on his "threat" to cut me out of his life. Woe is me.
So plans are moving apace for Jay O'Berski and I to have Road Trip '03®. During Aristocrats he'd been bemoaning the fact that he'd not had a road trip in some time, and I was bemoaning the fact that I've not had a real vacation since leaving SmithKline Beecham in 1996. Thus was hatched his idea for Road Trip '03®. The plan is that I come down to see his kids do The Shape of Things at the end of January, and after he teaches his Monday morning class the following day, we hit the road for a six-day swing through the Deep South. Sounds like fun to me! Maybe by then the Pennsylvania and New York Departments of Transportation will have allowed me to be a licensed driver again!
The amazing thing to me is that, by the time I leave on this trip, I'll have eleven vacation days accrued. I'm not entirely sure, but I think, when I was with SmithKline, it took a couple of years to earn that many vacation days. One thing about working for a reasearched-based non-profit that mostly works overseas: They're as generous as many foreign companies are with vacation leave. We Americans, being decended of Puritans and believing that rest and playtime is evil, have got it all wrong wherein vacations are concerned.
Just my opinion.
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