Progress!

God Bless America. First there was progress at the Capitol with gay marriage (then not, then again), then progress in the White House with our first black President, and now progress at the Multi-Colored house in West Sac with families uniting for one common purpose: Get Shit Done!

We actually got so much accomplished this weekend that the only place I can think to start is with this:

It may not look like much, but this one picture actually shows six weekend projects that we completed this weekend.

So there is no way I could have done these weekend projects by myself. Not because they were a more-than-one-person job (some of them were), but because some of them were just things I didn't want to do (paint-scraping anyone?) that certain people in my family had the patience for (thanks Mom!). So the whole damn fam was in town to help me try to bring an end to my redecorating madness. While I'm not done yet- actually I'm nowhere near done- we were able to knock out A LOT of projects, all of which I will be showing you in the coming days.

Now you may not like the chairs, the big TV, or just my style in general, but please don't go all Glenn Beck on me and rain on my parade. This is my house, and I'll do as I please. Or do as my family pleases at least.

Eat Me: Dinner Tonight

Mmm mmm mmm. This looks like just what the doctor ordered after a long weekend of eating and drinking with the family. A light and fresh Melon Gazpacho... shouldn't be too hard to make considering my weekly Riverdog Farms produce box contained most of those ingredients! I might even sneak in some crumbled bacon on top for a treat. Mmmmm... bacon....

Welcome to California!

Ok, most of you are already here, but you're not in my California. My California is located in West Sac, in a multi-colored house, up the stairs and to the right.

Welcome to California, the Golden State:

If you look closely, you see that orange thing is in fact, not a nipple (sorry to disappoint), but the silhouette of our state Capitol. It's just one piece of the California puzzle for that room. And that sucker was quite the scientific feat, courtesy of my mother's and my inartistic sides.

I had the idea of making a headboard the shape of the dome back when I was moving into my two bedroom apartment and wanted to have my guest room be a "California" themed room. It was only appropriate considering I lived right across the street from the Capitol. Unfortunately, I have NO artistic ability, and neither did my mom who was helping me out. So we went about it in the best way we knew how: with cocktails. OK, maybe not cocktails. But I'm sure that would have made sense too. We used equations instead.

First I bought the big sheet of plywood. Then I printed out a picture of the Capitol. From there we measured the distance between each vertex and point on the silhouette (we're talking centimeters on the paper) then divided and multiplied our way to the perfect ratio scale and converted it to a measurement we could use on the sheet of plywood. After we had all the main points, it was just a matter of connecting the dots with the right lines. Then Dad stepped in with the saw and cut it for us, and we finished it up with a layer of batting, an orange velvet curtain, some serious staples and Voila! We had a Capitol shaped headboard that can also easily be mistaken for the nipple of a bottle. To-may-to/To-mah-to.

The rest of the room is a work in progress. As I've mentioned before, I'm always on the lookout for all things California. I've got some "Welcome to..." posters to commemorate some of my previous hometowns (Fres-yes) and I'm working on getting them framed. I've already got one framed beauty in there...

It's California related because he plays for California's team, right? It also matches. That Lakers Gold is one of the new colors for that room. Now you know why California is called the Golden State. You learn something new every day. You're welcome.

Eat Me: We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

... to bring you this!

No, that's not dessert. That's a dinner-ish Blueberry & Chipotle Pulled Chicken Sandwich. I'm sure it doesn't intrigue everyone, but that combo sounds uh-maze-ing to me! AND IT'S ON A BISCUIT(!!!). The end.

Otherwise They'd Call it (House)Play

Gah. It's only 9:00AM on a Saturday morning and I've already been up for five hours. I thought weekends were for sleeping in? Apparently not when there's work to be done. Yes work. Housework, and lots of it.

I didn't purposely wake up that early this morning (no one in their right mind would), but just happened to wake from my dinner/cocktail/dessert coma. Usually I can go back to sleep within a couple of minutes, but my mind immediately started wandering to all of the things I had to do today, and I figured I could either shut it all out and try to go back to sleep, or just wake up and get it done. And so I set to work...

First project was my office that I said I was going to tackle last week. Uh yeah, didn't happen. So I got to it this morning and made an awesome discovery: my desk! I'm actually typing it at now, something I haven't been able to do since this whole thing started. I was also able to put things in their rightful place, including on my walls.

I don't know why I thought I just had to have that gigantor calendar, maybe it was to go with my gigantor calculator.

The calculator actually came in handy after I was done tidying up. For some reason I decided now was a good time to install my kitchen cabinet hardware. All by myself. Trying to do that with help is a freakin' joke, so by myself was hysterical! Right. High-larious. A mathematical nightmare(No, seriously. This really could all be just a bad, bad, dream. It was too early for me to really be doing this, I still had to be in my coma).

When I picked out the hardware at IKEA with my parents, they thought it was so helpful that IKEA also made a template with holes in it to just put up to your cabinets so you don't have to measure 300 times on each cabinet. I thought it was great too. Until I opened it this morning and realized the template was too small for my hardware. Damn Swedes! But I wasn't going to let them leave me handle-less in my kitchen, so I decided I would measure the cabinets 300 times.

I spent a good two hours trying to figure it out, first using cardboard as a dummy cabinet to test on, and then when that didn't work the first 100 times I decided I was ready to try it on the cabinets... genius! Clearly I don't have the patience or the brain for this. One drill hole in the cabinet later in the not-exactly-right-spot, I stopped.

This is what I was left with. I have a feeling this is exactly how things will stay until next weekend when my loving, caring, handy, thank-god-I-have-them, parents come to town to help me with some projects. And so I have to get my complaining out now. All throughout the morning I found myself repeating one of my dad's favorite sayings, "That's why they call it work, otherwise they'd call it play." I hate it when he's right.

You May Say That I'm a Dreamer...

I'm not much for deep thinking (there are lights to hang and hardware to install. I do not have time for that), but as I was hanging up some art recently I realized what I put on my walls said a lot about who I am. Or I guess it's more of who I hope to be.

Save for the animal heads- I'm really not sure what those say about me- the rest of what I've been hanging up lately makes me realize I'm a dreamer. Not a dreamer like I spend all day dreaming about flying (or surviving solely on nacho cheese) although that does happen. More of a dreamer in the sense that I'm an optimist at heart and I tend to always see and hope for things that are better than reality.

I'm drawn to these things in combination with pieces that make me smile when I look at them. Like my laughing Buddha in my office:

Everyone always asks why he's in there. Why not? He seriously makes me smile every time I see him. I want to be like him: permanently smiling and letting out a hearty belly laugh. I might wear a bra though. His boobs kind of scare me.

Then there's the pretty redhead on a wall in my living room:

Now this is truly wishful thinking. I like to look at this one and pretend it's a self-portrait (I did say it was wishful thinking) with her flowing red hair and perfect posture while carelessly riding her bike through a field of flowers.

Or my newest addition, a framed marriage certificate of my great-great grandparents from 1913(!):

This awesome piece is hung by my front door. I see it every time I come in and out, or up and down the stairs. A reminder of where I came from and something for me to strive for.

Halfway up the stairs is my favorite:

This painting combined with blue wall makes me want to dive right in to whatever. To fun, to relaxing, to the weekend, to a new house. Whatever I've got going on good in my life, this painting sums up that feeling.

I didn't make a conscious decision to buy all these pieces because they make me feel a certain way. I was initially drawn to them because they're visually interesting. Then after a while of looking at them they got me thinking and dreaming... And when you come and experience them for yourself, you'll realize I'm not the only one.

A Day of Mourning

A moment of silence please....

I thought losing Chick Hearn once was bad enough, but twice is just unbearable. Chick, an apparent victim of the chaos in my house, will be sorely missed.

Chick and I go way back. He taught me everything I know about professional basketball. For instance, many of you incorrectly think too many steps in the paint is called traveling. Wrong. It's a bunny hop in the pea patch. Or how about someone jumping at a player who did a pump fake? That man just got put in the popcorn machine, and he's got butter and salt over him. Here's some easy ones: air ball, charity stripe, finger roll, brick, ticky-tack, and the description of the game "moving left to right across your dial." Those are all Chickisms-- things he taught me 82+ games a year.

When Chick passed away the first time, I continued my tradition of watching games with him by placing his permanently smiling-microphone-talking face next to my TV during the NBA season. There he sat with my husband Kobe, helping me through the good times and the bad. It's like he was still helping me through the season.

So imagine my shock when I discovered his lifeless body beneath the rubble of my desk this weekend. At first I thought he was the innocent victim of an errant bump or falling book. But wait! Upon closer inspection, I discovered the wound around his neck was too clean and the edgs were smooth... like a knife had been used. He had been murdered. Death by decapitation. And I wasn't the only one reeling from the news:

Don't let his smile fool you. Those tears are real. Kobe doesn't take breaking the law lightly, and he and I are offering a reward to anyone with a tip that leads to an arrest of the responsible party. We won't rest until the murderous (wo)man is in the fridge, with the lights out, eggs cooling, butter getting hard and the jello jiggling.