A quick summary of things I haven’t posted on in a while. It’s been a very busy summer, and promises to remain busy for a long, long time. Still, busy is better than idle, and I’ve had plenty of both at various points.
Painting Project
The living room / kitchen / dining room area (open floor plan) is mostly done. The ceiling was repainted with a flat “brilliant white” Valspar ceiling paint to hide the peachish-orangish-yellowish tint that the painter had given it. Seriously. With the odd color on the walls, he put in a little tint into the ceiling to soften the corners. Boy, are we ever glad to have painted the ceiling. (Side note: we initially decided to paint it to make it more washable because of the kitchen. We didn’t realize the tinting in the ceiling because the walls were so hideous.)
The walls are well on their way to their new colors. Most of it will be Dark Green 2 (LA 1108). Below the chair rail in the dining room, the wall is be Dark Green 4 (LA 1110) for contrast. Additionally the bar between the kitchen and living room is Dark Green 4. The contrast really sparkles, and the darker green makes the hue in the wood flooring come alive. The trim is a rather pure white, which works very well against the particular tones of green that we have.
The stairwell and upper hallway will also be Dark Green 2. Repainting that ceiling and the walls in the stairwell are going to be the most difficult task in the house, and I am not looking forward to it. Still, I’ll only do it once. In the upstairs hallway, there is a beautiful little reading nook. We have already matched the bench pad to the greens of the house, and will paint the lower paneling of the nook Dark Green 4 to tie in the theme from the first floor.
The bathrooms are going to be Lavender Pebble (LA 1415). It’s a very grayish-bluish purple, and plays very nicely with the greens. Since a lot of our decorations are seashells we collected in Charleston, the bathrooms will take on a unique character. As a consequence, we will eventually have to replace one or two bathroom sinks – they are cream colored and don’t play nicely with the white trim. *sigh*
The bedrooms are undecided at this point. We’re looking very strongly at taupe colors. The neutrality works well for bedroom space and for office space. Right now, our favorite is Ironwood (LA 115). It’s rather dark, and the bedrooms don’t have huge amounts of natural light to work with. We may go with the next lighter shade – Winter Oak (LA 114). It’s significantly lighter, but wouldn’t depress the room too much. It’s all a matter of whether it feels too light. And if we can move beyond the Ironwood.
And for anybody who happens to consider painting, Auditions are the best. In the greens alone, we went through 6 colors for about $20. It narrowed us down to the right colors and helped us avoided turning the place into a glorified funhouse. Once the green was up, it only took two auditions to get the purple, and will probably only take two for the taupe. Lowes has a great audition service – they mix it onsite in most locations and verify the color match before handing it over. Home Depot is more difficult – most of their auditions can only be ordered online. Their Ralph Lauren series comes in little baggies that are much smaller than the Lowes samples for a higher cost. Not that I’m endorsing, but customer service literally made the difference in where we went for paint.
Politics
I’m still not following the Prez elections closely. I can catch myself up completely in a week’s time sometime around the turn of the year, and save myself a lot of wasted time now. However, the only “viable” candidate at the moment I have any interest in is Fred Thompson. I need to learn more about him, but at least he doesn’t repulse me yet. The rest are worthless.
However, the Prez race is probably not as critical as Congress, oddly enough. After Bush II, the Presidency will not have a lot of political clout in the early months. Congress will probably still have all of its incumbents, and that’s a huge problem. At this point, most of them are only good for earmarking and funneling money around through backroom politics. If we could agree to vote out the 10 longest-serving Senators on each side of the aisle (about 3 per cycle per side over the next 6 years), and the 50 longest-serving Congressmen on each side, we’d get rid of a lot of dead weight at the cost of a very small number of quality members. (I’d be willing to wager that only about 10 of that 120 would be missed.) If we could bump them in the primaries, then their parties could still run reasonable candidates in the general elections. Like that’ll ever happen, though.
Supreme Court
The ruling just came out today (5-4, guess who voted which way) that school districts cannot fill public schools according to race. In a case with haunting similarities to the era of segregation, the liberal judges all voted to let race be a determining factor in public school selection. I haven’t read the specifics yet, but the issue itself is well-known. On one hand, we have a group of people who claim that race should never be a discriminating factor. On the other hand, we have a group of people who play on emotions for political gain by insisting on entitlement programs. Oddly enough, those two groups are the same people. Race is a heavy political card because we are visual creatures. We see race in people and we categorize people in our minds according to race. (Remember that when the OJ Simpson verdict was reached, the news stations showed shots of black college girls celebrating and white college girls in dismay. Even though neither group really knew the evidence of the case, both had made up their minds based on their associations to the parties involved. Race even trumped gender for them.) The original point about the use of the race card in politics would take longer than I want here, so I’ll truncate the topic. However, it’s a card that has almost never been used for the benefit of people (not including politicians). A quick quiz: which party (or political ideology) was responsible for the Civil Rights Act, and which one fought it every step of the way? Which one claims to be responsible for it now? Which party / ideology is pushing for racial discrimination in public schools? (BTW, look up the word “discrimination” and use it properly in this context.)
Statistics
Only about three weeks into my statistics class this summer, and I’m really wishing that I had taken stats earlier. It’s absolutely fascinating. If you have the time, get some stats training. It’s useful for everybody anymore. If you don’t believe me, look up “prosecutor’s fallacy” and imagine what a stat-trained defense lawyer could do with statistics in a courtroom. Or, knowing that gas stations statistically raise their prices after Wednesday and lower them after Sunday, would you consider adapting your refueling habits? Or is that merely a numbers game that doesn’t affect the week that you fill up next?
