The room formerly known as the Pink Room

You may recall that we live in a house that has a BRIGHT PINK room. You may also recall hearing me say that I saw the PINK ROOM in the photos of the house way before we bought it, before we had even seen the house, and I said "I can't live in a house with a pink room." We bought the house anyway, and I figured we'd change it immediately. But for numerous reasons, we had not gotten around to doing anything about the pink room. For one thing, it's right in the middle of the house, making it a bit of a hassle to take care of such a project. For another, the room is old horsehair plaster with wallpaper, and then paint over wallpaper, and then a wallpaper border over that. It was going to be a project. A big one. And today, that project began.

Here are a few before shots. I'm not putting a whole lot of them up here, since I think most of our readers are well-acquainted with the pink-ness in question. If you're not, take a gander at some of the older posts (like this one or this one) or at our flickr pages, where you're sure to see shots of the pinkness in action.




If you're wondering about the wallpaper that was under the hot pink you can check out a small patch here:


Last night we emptied the room of all its worldly possessions.


Every other room in our house is now over-stuffed, and things are a bit nuts, but the pink room was empty, and ready for the arrival (at 7 am today) of our plastering team.

We're very happy with the work Brian Daly and his two workers did for us today. He was recommended to us by our good friend Matt, who's quite an expert carpenter and house restoration expert. The coolest part of the job was the fact that two of the guys wore stilts to do the job.

Our ceilings are 10 feet high, so this was kind of necessary. Lucy was fascinated by the stilts. I think she would have preferred to stay home from daycare today to just watch them working.

Here's a mid-project shot:


The drywall (before it was covered with plaster) was this dark blue-gray color, and we actually liked the way it looked. We're thinking of a dark slate blue as a possible color for the room (but we really have no idea what we're going to do color-wise).

The last time we did a drywalling project was for Lucy's room, but back then, we actually demolished the plaster. That was an incredibly dirty and trash-producing job, and we swore then we would never do such a thing again. This time, we sensibly decided to just put the drywall right over the plaster, making it an easier job for us. It did make things a bit tricky though, since the wallboard had to go on top of the bottom molding. We could have removed the molding, but this too would have been quite a project, and quite possibly would have ruined some of the molding. We think it turned out pretty well.

We're especially pleased with the ceiling, which had a lot of cracks in the plaster and is now nice and smooth:

Here you can see some of our nice, sharp corners:


As you can see, there are still some PINK spots, as illustrated here on the medallion. We're hoping to be able to paint over them. The guys did a nice job of trimming the drywall around the medallion, and bringing the edge right up to it. A few pieces broke off, so the guys suggest that we spray paint it, since it's in pretty delicate shape.

The room is filled with dust and smells funny, but we're pleased with the job. We have to wait at least a week, and probably two, for the plaster to completely dry before we can paint it. So we have a pretty much empty room in the middle of the house, which Lucy is really enjoying.

Do you have a color you'd like to suggest for the room formerly known as the pink room? Do you have a new name we can call the pink room, besides "the room formerly known as the pink room"? We look forward to hearing from our devoted readers!

By the way, I wrote most of this post on Tuesday, but didn't have a chance to get it finished. So all the "todays" here refer to Tuesday, June 23rd, for those of you documenting and keeping track of such things.

A Visitor from the Past

This afternoon a stranger knocked on our door. She's the niece of the two ladies who once owned this house -- the Crowley sisters, Veronica and Madeline. We invited her in and she looked around the house, telling us all about what the place used to look like. Apparently the craft room/spare bedroom was once charcoal grey and red! The sliding glass door in the kitchen wasn't there, and there was in fact a door at the top of the basement stairs, and then another, smaller door that went outside to the back porch from the kitchen. The built-in cabinet in the dining room used to have glass doors (oh how I wish it still did!). It was pretty neat.

Garden Update 2009

Here's our little array of plants for this year. We kept it a bit smaller and are trying to focus on stuff that will keep coming back, hence, rhubarb!

Speaking of things that come back, last year, we planted some Jerusalem artichokes. We harvested them at the end of the season. When we dug up some of the garden to put in the patio, we discovered a ton of new Jerusalem artichokes...apparently they send out a lot of "volunteers" and it's likely we'll never be rid of them now. Anyone have any good recipes for Jerusalem Artichokes?

Since the backyard is a bit of a jungle, we decided that it made some sense to move the grill around to the front. Since it's hard for us to find much time to spend in the garden, we thought we'd give over some of our garden plot space to the grilling area. Jake put in a small patio area using some randomly shaped flagstones. It looks great and it's very convenient to the kitchen for grilling purposes!


We got a few tomato plants -- sunny yellow little ones, something called "Mr. Stripey," and "Sweet 100s"


Here's Carter, checking to make sure we've put everything in the right place. This is the herb patch.


We put in some oregano and some loveage (yup, that's really the name of a plant!). Last year's sage and tyme and chives came back -- they're actually pretty huge. Nice


When we put in this year's plants, we discovered that last year's strawberries had really taken over the plot (along with the mint!). We dug up a bunch of the strawberry plants and put them in this lovely strawberry pot. They are thriving in their new pot. YUM!


We did all this on Mothers' Day weekend. Everything is looking good so far. We're still trying to find a couple of tomatillo plants. We grew some last year and they did great, providing us with green salsa well into October. If you get lead on tomatillo plants in Lowell, let us know!

New Orleans Retrospective

Ahem.

It's been way too long since I've posted, so I thought I'd set about rectifying that situation. A month or so ago, I went to New Orleans to attend a conference. I'm just now getting around to sharing some of my photos from the trip.

I was struck by how completely different the architecture was from anything I've encountered elsewhere. For instance, the house where I stayed, with my kind and lovely friend Shannon, was a BRIGHT cheery yellow:
(yes, it matches her car)

Here's a fairly traditional scene:
Yes. It's really that bright.

I took a lot of photos of things I noticed on the streets. Here are a few:
Many of the downtown streets have these street markers imbedded in the concrete at the intersections.

Instead of filling this tree-root area in the sidewalk with gravel or bark mulch, it's filled with oyster shells.


I thought they looked like ears. Ew.

Here's some art-y graffiti:



And an art-y piece of metal in the sidewalk:


And some disturbing art:



OK, so this isn't a terrific shot, but I was stopped short while waking by this on the street. Look closely:


that is the H. W. Johns-Manville Co.'s building, which, apparently, specialized in ASBESTOS. Sign me up for an apartment in that building!

The crazy display below is made up of tiny filled macaroons of various flavors. This is in the window of a candy-maker and sweets shop called, appropriately, Sucre:


And yes, we did order a few macaroons and they were delicious. I had chocolate and orange, Shannon had chocolate and hazelnut (I think). Yum!

I was also struck by the VERY different flora in this neck of the woods.


I think it looks like that tree has hair and tusks. It might be a wooly mammoth in disguise.


Some lovely purple flowers. Everything was in bloom!

Below is my favorite shot. We saw some weird things in New Orleans. Among them was this man walking down the street in a top hat. Tamara, this one's for you:

{I was trying to be all discreet about taking his picture; we actually saw him close up and he looked a bit hobbit-ish. Strange.}

That's about it for today. New Orleans is very beautiful and quite unlike anyplace else I've ever been.

Lucy Bridge, Master of Deception

For a while now -- like four months -- we've thought that Lucy was on the verge of walking. Generally, she's not all that interested in it, as she can crawl VERY fast to get to whatever she wants. She's taken a few steps here, and actually, right before our St. Pat's party, she took about 8 steps. We were very excited. But Lucy still seemed not all that interested in walking around, even though it seemed that for everyone involved, this would make things like going outside a lot easier. Today, I learned the truth about my daughter: she can walk just fine.

Apparently, all day yesterday at daycare, she was walking, much to the delight of the other girls there. I found this out because another daycare mom came in this morning and said "I hear we have a walker!" I had NOT heard that we had a walker, because our daycare provider (who is great) doesn't want to make moms sad when their kids pass some milestone there instead of at home. Hilarious.

So apparently, the bean has a secret skill set that she hides from us. What else can she do that we don't know about?

Peanut Problem

On Monday, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. About a quarter of it was left on my plate, which was sitting on my desk, when Lucy climbed up into my lap. She pointed and otherwise made clear that she wanted some (she typically wants anything that she thinks we're eating). She's 16 months old, and to date, has had no problems with bad reactions to any foods (other than sometimes throwing them across the room). We have no family history of food allergies on either side. So I figured, well, it seems reasonable to let her have some of my peanut butter sandwich.

You may know what comes next.

Jake put her down for a nap. She was rubbing her eyes, and cried a bit, but we figured she was just sleepy. She fell asleep and woke up at about 2:15. When Jake went up to get her, she was crying and grabbing her ears and generally VERY unhappy. The ear thing made him think she had developed yet another ear infection (we've been through many already this year), so he called the doctor. Shortly after getting an appointment, he began to notice a growing redness....indeed, her whole face was becoming covered with hives. Bright red and itchy. Her face was a mess, and her belly and upper arms and legs were covered.

We went to her regular doctor where they determined that she wasn't having any respiratory symptoms, so that meant they didn't need to give her an adrenelin shot. So that was good. They gave her an oral dose of Benadryl and OraPred (a steroid). They warned us that the Benadryl makes most kids sleepy, but sometimes, with very young kids, it makes them hyper. I of course, imagined a hyper-active, steroid-induced kid terror, but thankfully, she became neither hyper nor super-strong. The medicine actually took care of the hives pretty quickly, and in fact, by the time we got home and tried to take pictures (for the future visit to the allergist) we discovered that the worst of the welts were gone.

But now, we think we have the dreaded peanut allergy problem.


We have to go see an allergist to get some more definitive results, but even then, the whole science of allergies seems a bit untested. Although Lucy didn't have a respiratory reaction this time, it's possible that she could have one next time. So we're also the terrified owners of an Epi-Pen, in case she has a future peanut encounter.

There are some nagging questions for us:

1) The reaction seemed a bit delayed for peanut (which is, from what I've read, typically instantaneous). Was her initial crying and eye-rubbing actually the beginning of her reaction? Or did the reaction really take over two hours to start and three hours to really get bad?

2) Is there any chance this reaction was actually to her latest round of shots, which happened last Friday. The three-day window, according to some folks I've talked to, makes this seem likely; however, the two doctors we saw both agreed that this was actually too soon for the reaction to be to the shots. Hm.

3) We found out today that one of the kids at Lucy's daycare is a carrier of strep. Every kid at daycare has had a case, and it's likely that Lucy has had it at some point, but since she was already on antibiotics for her ear infections, the doctor didn't give her a throat culture. Here's the rub: for some kids, in some cases, hives are the first sign of a strep infection.

Issues 2 & 3 leave me wondering if it's at all reasonable to suspect something other than peanuts. Don't get me wrong, we're not planning on exposing her to peanuts again any time soon, but I'm just not entirely sure it's peanut allergy. Occam's razor may apply here: it seems that the line of feeding peanut butter to baby leads most directly to baby breaking out in hives, but I guess I'm holding out hope that Lucy isn't doomed to a life of being terrorized anytime she sees this guy:
So that's the latest news from us.

Notes & Promotions

Notes:

We did our Root-X application over the weekend, so (hopefully) our sewer pipes are root-free. Fingers crossed. Maybe we should get one of those fancy cameras down there and see for ourselves how bad the situation is.

For those of you who have been trying to keep up with Lucy's language development, please note that we have not been updating her "lexicon" lately. She is saying so many things that it's hard to keep up. She now knows the name of her BFF, Ruth, (she says "Oooth!") and repeats just about anything you say. On St. Patrick's day, I mentioned that she looked very "preppy" in her polo-shirt dress and cardigan, and I heard "preppy! preppy!" Nice. Today she said "toaster." She also calls all kids she sees "bay-be!" although we've tried to clarify the difference between babies and kids.

Promotions:

If any of our readers are living in the Lowell area, we'd like to recommend joining our CSA: New Entry Sustainable Farming. We get a huge array of delicious vegetables from them all summer long. Check out their site here: http://nesfp.nutrition.tufts.edu/worldpeas/csa.html Their FAQ is here.

For our fellow home-owners, we'd recommend you check out the new government mortgage program here: http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/ to find out if you're eligible for a refinancing plan. They also have info on how to find out if Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac hold your loan (it turns out Freddie has ours). Looks like the economic stimulus package will be helping 83 Durant. Nice!

We're also fans of the American Antiquarian Society, where Lucy has just Adopted a Book! The book that will be adopted in her name is Little Marian; it's a children's book in the "Nettie Lightfoot" Series. It was written by Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), who was also the author of a significant piece on the Gothic. So Lucy's book adoption is fitting in many ways!
You may recall that Lucy adopted a book last year, too.

That's all for today. A belated Happy St. Patrick's Day to all!