KoolAid, Bagels, And Knitting. Oh, And Paint.

I don't even know where to begin. The weekend at the beach with knitter friends was lovely, although it would have been even lovelier if I had been missing the Boy Scouts mulch extravaganza at the same time. As it is, I'm still looking for an escape at the end of April. Ideas welcome!

The beach was beautiful. COLD, but beautiful. The bagel shop was open, so I was able to enjoy decent bagels (and bring some home, natch - the kids wouldn't have let me into the house without them). And all of us spent Saturday afternoon experimenting with dyeing yarn using KoolAid mix.

Someone brought tulips, and they were perfect.

There were so many attendees that the party host rented a second house for some of us to sleep in. Now, understand that this was essentially a weekend-long slumber party. We were all up past midnight Friday and then some of us stumbled over to our beds in the other house to sleep. My roommate (who apparently is of an alien species which needs no sleep) woke up at 6:30 and managed to drop her IPad on the floor, waking me up.

Oh, well, who needs sleep, anyway? This just left me more time to knit, right? So we all had a fun day knitting and messing with KoolAid dyes and AGAIN stumbled back to our beds after midnight. "Don't make noise in the morning," I ordered my early-rising roomie. "I'm sleeping in." Still, light sleeper that I am, I heard her wake up a mere 5 hours later and (very quietly) pick up her IPad to scroll through in bed. That's okay, I thought. I'll just roll over and grab an extra hour of sleep.

My bed (which was a trundle) had other ideas. As I flipped over, in the quiet house full of (mostly) sleeping knitters, it crashed to the floor beneath me. I mean, CRASHED. My roommate couldn't stop laughing. "Don't drop your IPad, you said! YOU DROPPED YOUR BED!"

So, yeah, not a heck of a lot of sleep. Still, I did a ton of knitting on my Boxy sweater, which I then had to rip out, because I hadn't read the directions properly. We ate a ton of fun food, including ice cream sundaes. We laughed ourselves almost sick. An excellent weekend, all in all.

And then? I came back to reality. We have a bathroom renovation happening right now, which I have mostly been taking in stride. So much in stride, in fact, that I FORGOT that the guy working on our bathroom would be showing up bright and early Monday morning. Larry was away with Brian, checking out the college he got into, and there I was at 7:30 AM, spinning across my bedroom like the Tasmanian devil, trying to throw on some decent clothes so I could stumble down the stairs and unlock the front door for our puzzled bathroom guy.

That's 3 rude awakenings, 3 days in a row, for those of you keeping count.

Anyway, we all know what a renovation means around here, right? It means the dreaded trip to the paint store. Susie and I went armed with the shower curtain we've already picked out, confident (for once) in our ability to select the right color. After all, Susie is the one who performed the Miracle of the Cayman Blue Paint Swatch, a few years ago. Remember, when we moved her into her very own room and she picked out the color she wanted on the very first try?

Oh, man, those were the days.

We came home, optimistically bearing sample pints of minty green and barely teal and Susie painted them on our sample paint boards and we held them up next to the shower curtain and the tile and decided the colors were both too dark. We needed a white, we decided, a white with just a hint of blue or green in the paint recipe. I mean, formula - paint formula.

So we marched optimistically back to the paint store, where the guy looked at me as though I was crazy when I described what we needed and said, way too bluntly, "Ma'am, it doesn't work that way." So Susie and I stared at the 140 cards of white colors and picked one out that seemed to have a bluish tinge and took a sample pint home, somewhat less optimistically, and painted it on another sample board.

It just looks white.

So, yeah, we've got one more day to figure this out. We're gonna need another paint miracle at this point, is what I'm thinking. Pray for us.