On Friday at work, they let us leave at 3:00, a delightful habit they’ve gotten into before any holiday weekends. I suppose it’s for normal people with families who want to get on the road to the beach, or whatever normal people do.
What do the normal folk do? …I think craft. Seems like they craft a lot. They also seem to traipse to restaurants in big groups, if Facebook is any indication.
Having never been normal for even 14 seconds, I eschewed the creative team’s early happy hour and went home to do my freelance work. Technically, it’s due today, but I’d been moving along on it and thought, “Well, I’ll just see how far I get Friday.”
And I finished it.
I finished it!
“Well, NOW what do I do?” I thought. It was too late to go to the happy hour. So I streamed Goodbye Christopher Robin, which I thought would maybe be a delightful film re Pooh and so forth, but really was incredibly dark and I kind of liked it better for it.

Saturday dawned and I continued to have nothing to do, and I assumed I had no money to do it with. Payday is tomorrow night, and they picked a fine time to have a holiday weekend.


I took Lily to the vet for her rabies shot, and now the only thing she’s rabid about is food. Speaking of which…
“Do you want to go to Lexington and get barbecue?” Ned asked me on Saturday afternoon, and yes. Hell, yes, I did. We will not pick this moment to talk about what an effing heifer I am, because Lexington is a town famous for its barbecue, and for good reason. And here it was being presented to me by my rich ex.
So we got in the car.

I’m starving to death reviewing these images anew. Mother of god, that was delish.
Say, June, can you store my equipment in those saddlebags?
Anyway, on the way back, I was telling Ned I was considering painting my spare bedroom. Bitchy Resting Face Alex and I had painted it back in 2015, when I moved back after my unfortunate year abroad with Ned, and we’d painted it white and it never really looked fully covered. It was half nude.
“I just don’t think I have enough for paint,” I kvetched, checking my account.
Turns out, I had a few hundred dollars! Because Amazon!
So basically this next part is all you guys’s fault.
I’d toyed with some colors prior, but when I got to the paint store (and does anyone remember the hot man of color who sold me my Labor Day paint last year? I went there about 40 times that weekend, sort of because I’ma bad planner and sort of because he is so hot. “Could you have more obviously had a crush on that man?” asked Ned after we left the paint store, but WHO CAN BLAME ME.)…
…what the hell was I talking about? Oh, paint. Right.
So somehow I convinced self that
PINK
would be the right color. I wonder what inspired me.

I did not elicit Ned’s help in this scenario, as I have found when we do projects together I mostly want to snap his neck. There’s a whole lot of “Why aren’t you doing it my way” and “Why are you doing this” and “You know what I’D do…” and snap. Neck. Look at the bent neck on Ned.
Pretty much the rest of the weekend was me moving furniture and taping trim and pulling out nails and spreading drop cloths and OH MY GOD CAN WE PAINT YET?
Someone we all know, someone in the asshole family, was deeeeeeLIGHTed that shit was being moved around and things were differented up. I thought cats were supposed to be made nervous by change. Not this one. He was pretty much in there every second I was painting, and likely has brain damage from the fumes, but that’s just the kind of mother I am.

Finally, after three days, I’d scraped and moved and sanded and trimmed and painted, finally, and then I stepped back to admire my work and was all,
I hate it.
But now I’m stuck with it.
My rule is I have to wait a year before I can paint again.
This might be a nice time to gently remind that I hate advice.
Anyway, then I had to move everything BACK in there, to the room, and I texted my mother to get her advice on where I should put things.
“I don’t like this arrangement,” my mother announced, and who made HER…oh. I guess me, cause I asked. Also, I see I let one damn doorknob stay brassy, and gets what’s next on my agenda.
“I don’t like it either,” I agreed. “It looks like a ship is tilting and everything went to one side.”

“This looks like Abraham Lincoln slept here and he had to share the bed with another boarder,” said my mother, who has an active imagination.
“Why does Steely Dan have to get in every picture?” she asked. “He’s like you.”
In the end, this was the arrangement I went with, and I ordered an area rug…
…that’ll really tie the room together, harrr.
I also at some point decided I should shop for, oh, lamps and comforters that maybe would butch the room up a bit. Maybe charcoal accents, or black or caramel.
Then everywhere I looked, I was all, Oooooo, look at the pale pink ostrich-feather ottoman! Look at the sparkly chandelier! Oh my god, magenta fluffy carpet!
So. Butching it up did not go well. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me, but I’m not good at being butch.
So that’s the news on my cervix guest room. Guest womb. Maybe I’ll invite P!nk over to stay.

Tune in tomorrow, when I will have done something else absurd.
Rosily,
Rosalie