WhimsyLand: The Paris Fund

I suppose that WhimsyLand has been dark long enough. Not that I haven't been busy, but that's actually no excuse. First, there was the tiling of the kitchen, then the slating of the foyer, then moving every damn thing on the first floor somewhere else to accommodate the hardwood floor installers. I'm no longer living in the kitchen, and the fridge and range are back where they should be, but the den looks like a used furniture store. The upside is that Miss Emily seems to like all the changes. Women! Wouldn't you know it?

I'm taking this opportunity to paint, of course. The problem is that my kitchen, foyer, den, living room and whatever you call the rest of it kind of blends together with cathedral ceilings and no real definition. The builder solved the problem by painting everything white, but Sweet Junie assures me that I need accent surfaces and compatible earth tones and what not. So I started by painting the living room some kind of blue that isn't Tahitian Blue (which my front door is) or Serendipity (that Der picked for the bathroom), but Light Lilac or something (I actually can't remember after looking at a zillion paint chips) and I like it. I bought some 8-foot lengths of really wide oak baseboards and stained them and they will look great with everything. 95% of the painting was easy, but then there's where the edges meet. Honestly, I hate taping. First off, it doesn't work worth a damn because I have textured walls. Secondly, I have to balance on a bigass ladder and get the edges straight which I never do. Then, when I paint and pull it off, it's not actually straight and some of the paint has bled through. So, I just bought a tiny brush and a wee brush and a smallish brush and I'm going to use those and dispense with all that damnable blue tape.

My newest business opportunity is this giant job with a giant company that is bidding on a contract with another giant French firm. We submitted our bid and was told that it was WAY short on travel expense. Why, I asked? Because the first 4 weeks, you have to do collaborative requirements analysis with the customer in Paris, they said. Oh, damn. Paris. Damn. "And make sure you budget for business class, you don't want to fly all that way and end up tired", they said. At this point, I was willing to discount the entire job by 15%. Sweet Junie and I actually have a Paris Fund and hope to get there sometime in the next 18 months. I have a few friends there and would love the opportunity to take Junie around. When I lived in Belgium, Cath and I drove to Paris a couple of times, and I've been there on business another couple of times, but there's nothing like visiting a wonderland like Paris with somebody who hasn't been there. It's probably time to drag out my Penton French tapes or Pimsler French CDs or that company that advertises how the farm boy learned Italian to woo the Tuscan supermodel.

Meanwhile, my break in the morning has consisted of drinking coffee while reading the Boulder Camera, which inexplicably arrives at my door every day now. Even living 10-12 miles away, Boulder seems like another world. One article said that home prices in Boulder have risen almost 5% in the first quarter of 2008. You know, while the rest of the nation's home prices can't find a floor. Another story was about the arrest of a man for flinging racial epithets about, for which he indicted for third-degree hate speech or something. A retired fireman in Nederland (just up the hill from Boulder) who died of some odd misfortune is having his ashes launched tonight in one of the fireworks displays. A prominent Boulder County family with a popular restaurant was charged with drug-related activity over the past 20 years, which charges were dropped for some reason but they had to give up the $47,000 they found in their home. A political cartoon shows the provinces of Iraq, labeled ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron. Greyhounds all over Colorado are unemployed due to a combination of strike and season shortening by the race tracks. A Longmont company got the bid to build a whole bunch of new spy satellites. Dilbert brought another anti-matter Dilbert into the world.

I found out that I am one of 34 finalists for a book contest. My first thought was "goodness, was anyone not a finalist?"

The latest Poetry magazine is killerbee. More on that tomorrow.