Professional Attire At All Times

The part I love most about wearing a skirt to the office is that I don't have to worry all day long about making sure my fly is zipped. This is more of a chronic problem for me than it really should be for anyone over the age of, oh, I dunno, three. Although fortunately, I have long since dispensed with another habit I had when I was three, which was taking off all my clothes every time I went to the bathroom. Socks included. Hairbow optional.

I'm sure my coworkers are more than thrilled by this development.

Casa Del Grace, For Your Enjoyment

Alright, so true to my usual form of making a promise and then beating around the bush fulfilling it for longer than it takes a first-grader to sound out "antidisestablishmentarianism," I am here two weeks after I originally promised pictures of my refinished bedroom furniture, to provide pictures of my refinished bedroom furniure. And to rant, natch. What, you were here for sunshine and kittens?

Okay, fine. Kittens!

Well, singular kitten. Singular kitten totally digging his Santa outfit, whereby "totally digging his Santa outfit," I mean, "shit dude, I'm stoked he didn't kill me!"

Lawyer Boy and I discovered recently that our upstairs bathroom is an unholy disaster of Biblical proportions, and that renovating a bathroom is, coincidentally, a financial disaster of Biblical proportions. We have spent the last year of our lives slaving away on this house that we bought for approximately four dollars and a salami sandwich, which was formerly a disgusting mildew-ridden cricket cave, and which now is...not. I recognize that I've set the bar fairly low here: All I've said is that our house is no longer disgusting, mildew-ridden, or infested with cave crickets, who look to the uninitiated like craggy prostitutes with their ankles behind their heads. * It has been more work than herding a litter of kittens to get this house into shape, but finally, it's really coming together, and our house is no longer a big bucket of suck. We think the progress on the house is moving along well enough, in fact, that in order to get the bathroom done, we applied for a refinance. Yesterday.

This morning, like before-most-college-students-had-gotten-to-bed early this morning, the bank called LB (apparently they know who speaks their language around here). In order to figure out how generously they would like to reward our blood, sweat, and unspeakable profanity of the last year, they want to do a walk-through appraisal of our house on Wednesday morning. Tomorrow. TO-EFFING-MORROW, AMIGOS!!!

Commence extreme panic, frenzied cleaning, and fervent lighting of prayers candles in the Thoreau household. We had been hoping to avoid a walk-through appraisal, the real-life version of "My House Is Worth What?" with less of the profoundly obnoxious Kendra Todd, and more of the tangible real-life consequences. A walk-through appraisal with less than twenty-four hours' notice was, to say the least, as unwelcome as a Jehovah's Witness knocking on the door of a Sig Ep Kamoniwannaleia** tropical mixer. In preparation for the real estate apocalypse that is upon us, one of us finally had to wrangle our wardrobe back into the closet, dresser, nightstand, bookshelf, and everywhere else we use to contain the fabric of our lives when it's not smeared across our entire second floor.

So, my panic-stricken cleaning fest is your gain, and thus I finally bring you, at long last and with much fanfare***, photos of our freshly refinished bedroom furniture. In case you had forgotten, which is possible since I began this topic when Tara Reid had never enjoyed surgical enhancement, LB and I had some truly hideous oak bedroom furniture that I decided we should sand, repaint, and refinish to look "weathered," to fit in with our bedroom theme of "French country romantic."

Now, bear in mind that we're not there yet. The furniture is done but we haven't hung pictures or accessorized or figured out the most flattering pose for the cat to strike while lying on the bed. But, in its infant stages, here is our bedroom:

The view from the doorway. Yes, my bedtime reading is "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Some of us just think about food all the time. Some of us are going to be a threat to the world food supply when we're pregnant.

From the same end of the room, but really just to emphasize the fact that I have two chandeliers in my bedroom. This room used to be two bedrooms, one of which was roughly the size of a Lean Cuisine, so we have two light fixtures. They are both chandeliers because my husband is awesomesticks.****

In case you're wondering which fabric we picked out at Fondiqua's, this is it. We had to cover the cardboard back of the no-longer-oak bookshelf. Stage left showcases a picture that I haven't found a home for yet. Don't worry, we tuck it in each night and assure it of its personal worth.

Girlfriend just likes to be in her own pictures. Also, Grace-Based Trivia: I'm wearing the same shirt in this picture, that I'm wearing in the picture on the dresser. Play within a play, what what!

The aforementioned dresser, without the aforementioned assbaggery, tomfoolery, and cockamamery. Still with pictures of me, though, so my ego is assuaged. And thank God!

For those of you who are unnecessarily interested in the artistic aspects of this project, this is what the crackle finish looks like up close. It's a chocolate brown base coat with cream crackled over top. Chocolate plus cream. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmmmm....

Speaking of chocolate, I will leave you tonight with a shot of my favorite chunk of chocolate love, Breeze, our 100-lb Labradozer who has recently taken to sleeping on the sofa:

Can you imagine trying to move that so you can sit down?
No, I just can't imagine trying to make that face move. Who is a muffin? Who is a sweet, sweet chocolate muffin?

*A worthy skill, of course.
**Wherever you are, and I include in that an open cubicle or church, please say that out loud.
***Cue the fanfare! I said cue the trumpet fanfare NOW!!
****Thanks to Mr. Apron, who called my sense of humor "awesomesticks," which I can only assume is a compliment.

A Brush With Celebrity

Okay, seriously, pictures of my extremely exciting new bedroom decor, complete with panty window valances and seersucker jacket draperies, are on their way. At least, that's what it's going to look like if I don't ever put on my big-girl pants and address the laundry mayhem that has blanketed the room like San Francisco fog.

I would put my big-girl pants on if I weren't currently using them as window treatments.

Instead of playing the responsible role of Holly Housewife at home tonight, I went to my first-ever book club meeting, starring as Holly Housewife At Large, wherein I showed up with hot spinach dip but neglected to read the assigned book. I'm guessing that the cheesetastic dip was more popular than my comments on the book likely would have been, since they would probably have been in the vein of "I would love this character, except she's a giant asshole."

The exciting part of the book club meeting was that after reading her blog for almost a year and feeling a tad bit e-stalkery, I finally got to meet OMG FAMOUS VALERIE. Val is a friend of my friend Hayley, and Hayley turned me on to Val's blog around the this time last year. Something I may have never mentioned here before, possibly because it makes almost no sense, is that in my head all bloggers are celebrities. Following this logic, I still find it surprising and borderline insulting that the paparazzi aren't stalking my every move, following me at the grocery store to report back to my adoring public which heirloom tomatoes I selected for dinner tonight.

All assbaggery aside, I certainly don't consider myself a celebrity, or even worth taking seriously 99% of the time, but I rather illogically do consider all other bloggers to be rockstars. So when I walked into Hayley's living room tonight and immediately recognized OMG FAMOUS VAL from her blog pictures, I became a bit starstruck. It took me a good forty-five minutes of sweaty palms and mentally rehearsed opening lines before I could figure out a way to talk to her. Am I a frat boy, and is this the Mardi Gras mixer, or what?

Proving that I am smooth like pistachio pudding, I eventually went and knelt down next to her chair, and waited for a pause in the conversation. This gave me a chance to refine my personal introduction from a high-pitched giggle to actual English words. Words like, "SQUEEEEEEEEE HIIIIIIIIIII!!!!! Iknowyoubutyoudon'tknowmedon'tbescaaaaaaaaared!"

I was totally delighted to discover that Val is a really lovely person to talk to, in addition to being a great writer and mother to a super-precious chubby bunny of a baby. I don't know what I would have done if she had been some sort of steely-eyed girl-hating bitch, but I think it would have involved making love to the bowl of hot spinach dip in the corner to comfort myself.

That said, check out her blog and her chubby bunny baby, while I play over here and stall for more time to post pictures of my new bedroom.

Promise + Compromise = Prompromise!

Now really, when I wrote the title for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism you're about to read, I was thinking that my dear seventeen readers would immediately see things as I do,* and would recognize the word as a a head-on collision of the business end of "promise" with the party end of "compromise."

What it actually appears to be is a mashup of the popular springtime high school ritual known as "Prom Promise." I actually prefer my take on it, injecting the spirit of compromise into the oath teenagers take not to Do It On Prom Night just because they suddenly can't resist each other's rented clothing and overzealously applied body glitter. The Prompromise is more in the spirit of, "Sure Mom, I promise not to Do It On Prom Night, so as a compromise, we'll only Sprint To Shortstop in the backseat of his dad's Taurus. But we definitely won't Do It. No worries."

Anyway. I was trying to convey that in the spirit of last night, when I promised I'd be back tonight to share pictures of our bedroom furniture project, I am here to shed words upon you. However, I don't have pictures of the project yet, because I have yet to act anything like the grownup I play on TV and get my wardrobe out of the bedroom floor. So, as a compromise, I figured I'd just write about something else. See? It's a prompromise!

Apparently I'm also super + lame = superlame, but that's neither here nor there.

Lawyer Boy and I were all set to corral my calamitous clothing and get the rest of the furniture in place tonight, and the only piece of the puzzle we had yet to procure was a little fabric to cover the hideous faux-oak (fauk?) backing on the bookcase. In order to do so, unfortunately, we had to go to a fabric store of the generic variety. You've probably got anywhere between one and forty-two of these retail lint traps in your current locale, and out of a desire to not get sued for Christmas, I'll call it Fondiqua's. LB hates fabric stores because his mom dragged him through each and every one on the Eastern Seaboard frequently and at great length when he was a kid. I hate fabric stores because they involve paying attention to one thing and one thing only, most of which is ugly, and most of which is not shoes, wine, or food, the only topics to which I can devote my undivided attention for more than thirty-two seconds.

So we wandered into Fondiqua's all set to sprint through the store, pick out a piece of fabric in a Michael Phelps amount of time, and sprint back out before Fondiqua's could cover us in applique-ed ducks and corduroy covered in autumn leaves. Or giraffes. Or whatever the hell they were.

We found our fabric. We even figured out how much we needed, which was something of a magical occurrence, since one of us whose name rhymes with Sawyer Joy forgot to measure the fauk panel we were trying to mask. We even unhinged the roll (bolt? cape?) of fabric from the rack without destroying or wearing any of the other capes of fabric, which was really fortunate, since absolutely none of them were my color. Seriously, since when is everyone a Winter? We took our prize and paraded it to the front of the store, where we had to wait in line. Twice.

Have you ever met anyone who likes to wait in line? Have you ever seen an industry that isn't actively trying to get rid of waiting in line? Self check-out. Associate to Aisle 5. "I can take whoever's next!" No one likes waiting in lines, so every store with common sense and a desire to write some black ink this year tries to get you out of them quicker than Kanye West out of any public event whatsoever. Fabric stores, however, do a number two on your desire to cut and run: You have to wait for the gravy-ass Scissor Sister to cut your fabric for you, and thennnnn you have to get in line agaaaaaaaiiiiin to give them dollars in addition to the sanity you've already given them. Look how generous you are! Dollars AND sanity! Bless your heart.

Seriously, did they plant the purchaser of yards and yards of bargain-basement purple polyester in front of me on purpose? Did they steal her ability to speak English just to keep me teetering on my three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels just as long as humanly possible? Did they miss the part where I almost threw my three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels at the polyester procurer just to get her the eff out of Fondiqua's? Because all. of that. HAPPENED. PEOPLE.

By the time LB and I sprang free from the cottony clutches of Fondiqua's, we were both so exhausted, hungry, and in immense pain from a day in three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels that we couldn't bear the thought of finishing the bedroom. I don't think I can touch that fabric for at least another twenty-for hours.

*Which is, frankly, a terrifying thought.

Wherefore Art Thou, Grace?

Well, faithful amigos, I've been around. Recently I've been a really useful combination of busy and lazy, wherein I run around doing all kinds of productive, meaningful things like painting furniture and making my own yogurt,* only to be so butt-ass worn out by the time I sit down in the evening, that finding two words to put together is even more difficult than finding a shadow of a brain cell anywhere between Megan Fox's elaborately pierced ears.

Stop Googling "Megan Fox piercings" right now. This is about me, people!

Anyway, I promise to return triumphant this week. Lawyer Boy and I have been busy trying to prepare our house and our persons for La Grande Douche, or as it would roughly translate from French, "the part where we have to tear apart our entire bathroom, our only full bathroom, to pull a complete do-over from the floor underneath the tile all the way up to the peeling plaster ceiling." We're not embarking on this test of our sanity and marital strength until November, so until then, we're finishing up all the other random projects we had swirling around the giant toilet bowl of our house, in hopes that while the bathroom is a giant pit of suck, the rest of the house can be somewhat less suckiful.

Today we finally finished refinishing all our bedroom furniture. Remember like, six lifetimes ago (okay, back in June) when I said I was going to do that? Yeah, we finally did that! I will have pictures for you tomorrow, once the ratio of my underwear collection to actual furniture in the room has been significantly diminished. Right now the room is much less "French country romantic" than it is "detonated laundry warhead." I've actually come to enjoy the way my tweed work pants double as window treatments.

That said, I'll regale you with all manner of ridiculosity tomorrow. Happy Monday!

I know, right? Ew.

*Total waste of time, this yogurt business. Well played, Yoplait. You win this time.