.....beige goes with everything

I have decided to re-do my bathroom. However not the “I’ll need to take a loan.....which bills can I forgo paying this month?.....take my first born” type of renovation. This is me, on a stool with a brush, a roller and a whole lotta mess.

My current décor is early aquarium. Blue walls, framed pictures of fish that look like Nemo, big fish, little fish, blue fish, red fish….kinda like Dr. Seuss. Oh and let’s not forget the fish enhanced shower curtain and the matching fish shaped rug. Classy huh? Hence the renovation.

I gave this serious consideration I might add. I wanted something grown up, yet not stuffy….something coordinated but not matchy matchy….and something that wouldn’t make me look seasick when I looked in the mirror. I heard green has that effect and so I went with…..beige. Ok boring you might think, but there is a method to my madness. I cannot paint a straight line. I therefore cannot paint the ceiling white and expect the beige walls to look straight and even where they meet. I also cannot reach said ceiling/wall junction without perching myself on something precarious and therefore I need to paint the ceiling the same color as the wall. Beige works!

I then needed to replace the blue striped wallpaper on the bottom half of the wall with something that went with….beige. I know, everything goes with beige, but brown seemed the most obvious and the most sophisticated especially for someone like me that admittedly has little to no taste. I went to Home Depot. They don’t sell wallpaper any more. I went to Benjamin Moore…ditto. I found a little wallpaper store locally that was closed all three times I went. I finally took my husband’s advice and went to a store on Coney Island Avenue that sold paint, paint supplies and wallpaper. (which I just found out they now call wallcovering so that they can charge twice as much) After a near knock-down dragged-out brawl over a parking spot with Svetlana the Russian bitch from hell, I went into the wallpaper covering store. (I won by the way…my car’s bigger than your car…nah nah nah nah nah!)

There were shelves and shelves with books of wallpaper. I got the impression I would have to order the paper instead of walking out with my double-roll pre-pasted brown wallcovering. A woman approached me asking if I needed assistance as she proceeded to walk passed me and into a back room. (I kid you not!) She came out, briefly apologized and asked me again if I needed assistance. I told her what I wanted and she asked me how many square feet  I needed to cover. Ok she already started with the trick questions! I had no idea so I pointed to a wall and gestured about how high and how wide the area I needed to cover. She immediately said I would need just one double roll. Man she was good! (Of course she ended up selling me two just in case her instant math was off a tad….and no returns allowed by the way.) She asked what room it was for and if I had a color preference. I told her. She asked me if any part of the room was being painted. I told her. She asked what color. I told her. She looked at me and said, 'beige in a bathroom…that’s novel! Everything goes with beige.' Not the response I was looking for exactly but with that she pulled out six rolls of brown-ish paper. One was floral. Ugh One was metallic. Double Ugh One was paisley and would have been nice if it was 1962. One was, well….not brown at all. That left me with two to chose from. Both were similar, but in my desire to get this over with I chose the one I thought looked most like it would complement the beige paint I had bought. I know, I know everything goes with beige.

I also bought a paint brush and a roller tray liner. I already have the rollers from some other project I thought I might attempt and never did. I came home with my supplies, lugged them up to the fishy bathroom and began the daunting task of removing the wallpaper. I picked at, scratched at and pretty much gnawed at the paper and no matter how hard I tried a thin layer of the paper backing remained firmly in place. Piece by postage stamp sized piece I was barely able to remove a section of paper before I gave up, went on line and googled ‘how to remove old wallpaper’. To think it was there all the time, an elucidation, a solution….warm tap water. In a spray bottle. Yup, that was all it took. Spray, wait, peel. Paper off. My nails and fingertips gnawed to the nub and all I needed to do was spray water. Sometimes life isn’t fair.

I still have a lot to do in the bathroom to get it ready to be painted and papered but at least I have all my supplies. Almost. I don’t have a ladder, and I am not sure at 5’ 1” my step stool is gonna cut it. I don’t have a pole to screw into the roller to paint the ceiling unless I use the one attached to the toilet plunger which is kinda short but better than nothing. I will also need to spackle the holes when I remove the nails that hold the fish pictures unless I find some other pictures to hang in exactly the same places which is highly unlikely. I will need rags, a small bucket, rags, blue tape, some rags, a tape measure and razor and a whole lot of rags.

The excitement about my new bathroom has all but left now. The beige paint isn’t covering the blue. It will need two coats. The water atomized wallpaper turns into immovable stone if not swept up immediately, which of course I didn’t. The ‘it goes with everything’ beige paint doesn’t really match my tiles, toilet or tub. I can’t get the nails out of the wall since the one time in my life I hung something…..I hit a beam. The plunger stick, though suitable gets me three feet shy of the ceiling.   I miss my fish.

Of Kings and Queens....

My son moved out. He moved to Queens. I am adjusting. I would adjust much better if I didn’t read the paper every morning. The letter Q…as in Queens is an obvious letter no matter what font it is in. So when I skim through the paper every day my eye is drawn to the Q….for Queens….. Queens man killed in drunken brawl, Queens Blvd named worst intersection for pedestrians, 2 shot 1 dead in Queens, Queens man goes missing. Of course none of these caught my eye while he lived at home safely tucked away in his Brooklyn basement apartment. And none of these are anywhere near the Queens area my son moved to. But still.

Half his clothes are still here. The teeny closet he had now looks like a walk in compared to the shared closets of his new apartment. Space wise it helps that his girlfriend is a size zero at best. I pass the closet with half his clothes and no door everyday when I do the laundry. (ok so I don’t do laundry everyday, but you get the picture) I am tempted to smell his shirts the way they do in sad, soap opera-y movies when someone dies. I have to remind myself he is only in Queens. A borough away but when the Belt Parkway is between you and a loved one it can be as far as a cross country trek.

I spoke to him twice since he moved. Once on the phone and once when he stopped by for a nano-second to get some stuff he left behind. He rang the bell and was double parked. This ain’t gonna work. He did come by this past Sunday to get some more of his stuff and to do laundry. God Bless the laundry room, I knew it would come in handy one day.

We cleaned out his fridge so that we could unplug it and save like eight cents a year. (My husband has been going green since before going green was fashionable) There were six outdated yogurts that he forgot to tell me he didn’t like, so I bought more thinking he did. There were frozen beer mugs, shot glasses and airplane size liquor bottles in the tiny freezer. There was also a frozen mouse, dead I presume (it was in aluminum foil), back from the days when he had a snake. I won’t be drinking anything out of those mugs anytime soon. The snake was adopted out when his girlfriend made him choose her or it when they moved. He took the A-1 steak sauce, hot sauce, the Snapples and the chocolate chips for his chocolate fountain. (yes, it was a gift) I got the inch worth of pancake syrup, the quarter stick of butter that was frozen near the mouse and a few dirty dishes that never quite made it back upstairs.

My son told me my dog smells. I mean he always told me that when he lived here, and the dog does stink….but now as a resident of Queens I feel he has forfeited his right to critique my dog’s…..aroma. He told me the wall near my back door was dirty….twice. I found myself explaining how his father always has filthy hands from working on the car and blah blah blah…what the hell….I am not explaining myself to someone (not even my son, my son) who just recently painted his entire apartment. Wanna paint it, be my guest.

I am feeling useless. I don’t get to wait up for him or even know whether or not he made it home in one piece. I don’t get to assume the worst when he is minutes later than expected, and I miss the elation when he walks in the door safe and sound. I can’t make sure he has his breakfast yogurt…even if they are the wrong flavors. I certainly can’t ask his girlfriend to cook when he gets in late so that he doesn’t have to eat reheated food. I can’t look at his face and know exactly how his day has gone. I miss my son. It’s just me and Mr.Wonderful now and he doesn’t eat yogurt, I don’t worry about him coming in late and he will eat anything reheated or not. Yup, just the two of us yelling across the dinner table over the blaring TV about the dirty wall and how much the dog smells.

I Like To Be In America

Last night my husband and I went to see West Side Story on Broadway. We navigated Flatbush Avenue, me driving and cursing the dollar vans and him answering questions that I never asked. We ate at Katz’s, our favorite deli with diabetic me only able to eat half a sandwich, no fries and a diet root beer. (Hardly seems worth the money if you don’t walk out vowing to never eat that much again.) We made our way uptown taking 6th Avenue which was probably a mistake but it was an adventure navigating the fifty blocks along-side kamikazee cabbies and bike lane cretins with, I am sure….a death wish. Arriving without killing an environmentalist or being killed by a radical cabbie we found a parking spot with a muni-meter only a block from the theatre. At twenty-five cents for twelve minutes it cost us $9 to park until the show was over and then some….a big difference from the ridiculous parking lot prices. So far our night was a success.

Since we were early we decided to sit in the designated seating Times Square now offers amidst the lights, the tourists, and the lunatics. As we sat killing time, Spiderman came by, so did a half naked guy dressed in camouflage gear and a woman (I think?) singing an accapella version of “We Are The Champions.” I bought a $150 knockoff bag from a street vendor for $35 for which he gladly accepted only $31 which was all the cash my husband and I had on us since we spent $34 at the deli and $9 to park.

The time passed quickly and we headed to the theatre. At my subtle insistance suggestion, my husband got those amplifying headphones for the hearing impaired. They basically were upside down headphones. Instead of going on top of your head, they hang from your ears with the amplification box somewhere around your neck. He looked like he had had a tracheotomy and I half expected his voice to come out of the box distorted and disjointed. I stifled a giggle but never let on that he looked like one of the lunatics we had left outside in Times Square. Our seating thankfully included an aisle as I now had two pocketbooks, a coat and a playbill to stuff into that anorexic seat.

 

I don’t think there is a person alive that doesn’t know the premise of West Side Story.  The Jets, the Sharks, Tony, Maria. But something was amiss. Even with his wife beater t-shirt and tousseled hair, the adorable Tony looked like he would rather have been kissing Marco than Maria and it was hard to conceive that he was ever a gang member. Ever! His Jets looked like a ballet troupe in sneakers (which they probably were) and none except Deisel were believable as anyone who could remotely win a ‘rumble’. The Jets girls looked too skinny and too slutty in their micro mini skirts and tarted up make up. I started rooting for the Sharks. Bernardo had a great purple suit and looked sexy and oddly manly while his Sharks wore roach killer shoes with heels and bright shirts with vests. The women in their colorful ruffled skirts that they twirled as they danced put the Jets girls to shame. And there are just some things that shouldn’t be changed, or updated or re-written. Womb to Tomb, Birth to Earth…is one of them! But they decided that Sperm to Worm was a better choice. Ugh! Too much of a visual there thank you!

The scene with the Shark girls dancing on the roof to ‘I Like To Be In America’ was a show stopper as was the hysterically funny tribute to ‘Officer Krumpke,‘ the only part of then play where the Jets were believable as street kids. Just before intermission the entire cast sang a mosaic of the song ‘Tonight’ with each character singing independently but joining together for the climax….I looked over to find my husband with his tracheotomy headphones….tearing up.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  So I laughed.

During intermission I waited on a line that went down three flights of stairs to go to the ladies room. As I get there the lights start blinking and the attendant informs us that we will not be allowed to go to our seats if the play starts before we are seated. I got off the line, trekked back upstairs and to my seat. My husband was already there reading his Playbill which he always keeps and I throw out when he isn’t looking. The second half of the play was far better than the first half and the urge to pee had all but passed.   The curtain down, our hands still stinging  from applause, we returned the trach-phones and manuevered our way out of the theatre and to the car. 

As expected, the car was still there and we even had ten minutes left on the muni-meter. I had considered sitting in the car til the meter ran out, just to spite the city and Bloomberg and the D.O.T. but I really did still have to pee and so the faster I got home the better. 

one potatoe, two potatoe

My mother in law is 83.  She will be 84 in April if I don’t kill her in March. She is a sweet, wonderful, generous, totally exasperating, and infuriatingly frustrating woman. And that is on her good days. She is from Illinois. Not quite middle America, not quite East coast. Not quite Bible belt, not quite border region. Not quite normal, not quite certifiable. (yet) Just good old hillbilly hick. (without the twang) She married my father-in-law when she was 16 years old and came to New York a child bride. She raised three sons, each to their own degree of normalcy, one of which obviously, I am married to. Over the years I have come to understand her idiosyncrasies and more often than not ignore her….I mean, them.

My father in law passed away almost two years ago and although she fought with him on a daily basis, she misses him and says she still hears him peeing in the morning. (More info than I needed….) Recently my brother in law who lives with her (god bless his patient soul) had to go into the hospital. He has been sick for many years, but like Ben Gazzara on Run For Your Life….he will probably outlive us all. On one occasion when his health was at a low, she called me up in hysterics.

“Oh God, I think he is dead! I can’t wake him. I don’t think he is breathing!” I calmed her enough to tell her to hang up with me and call 911. “That is what Joy said to do.” she makes known. Joy is her sister who lives in….Illinois. My brother in law doesn’t stand a chance if her first call was to Illinois, the second to me….and all before calling 911! He wasn’t dead and he was breathing and 911 could wait for another day.

Since it is basically like the blind leading the blind there, we got her a medic alert…you know the ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” systems. All she has to do is press the button if she has fallen or is ill and a voice will come on the unit and ask what is wrong. If they do not get a response they call…..you got it…ME! So for the first 48 hours she pressed the button twice by mistake. Second 48 hours she was just testing it a few times. By day 5 I had gotten six emergency calls until finally they offered to send someone to explain to her how and how NOT to use the unit. She refused saying she wasn’t an idiot and knew how to use it. I threatened her to not press the button unless it is an emergency or they will come and take the unit away, which of course wasn’t true, but hick, hillbilly….remember?? One Friday I was shopping for about and hour and had accumulated quite a cart-full. My cell phone rang and it was the emergency response unit. I was tempted momentarily not to answer recalling the boy who cried wolf story. But I did and was told she had pressed the button and although they got no response when they asked her if she was ok they did hear her breathing. I thought to myself, good God this is it, she really is in trouble. I sprung into action….ok maybe not sprung per se, but I did abandon my cart full of carefully hand picked items and was en route to her house within minutes. I kept calling her house phone in the hopes that she was ok and contemplated calling 911 in the interim. After several attempts, she answered.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” she answered sounding annoyed that I had interrupted her soap opera.

“The medic alert called me…you pressed the button?”

“Boy are they snitches….I pressed it by mistake.”

“Why didn’t you answer them when they asked you if you were ok?

“I thought they would get mad and take it away.”

So much for threats!

With one son living the life of a recluse in Queens, my husband the workaholic and my brother in law in the hospital the job of making sure she has milk…and bread…and red potatoes falls on me. She loves red potatoes. Can’t be the ones in the bag, can’t be the ones in the bucket, has to be the loose ones that need to be carefully inspected for potato eyes. (don’t ask) I bought the ones in the bucket dumped them in a produce bag and she was happy. Since she eats breakfast at 4:30 am, lunch at 11 and her dinner somewhere around 3, it makes sense that at 6 she is ready for a snack. Her snack of choice is Celeste frozen pizza. Has to be Original Cheese though, not Pepperoni (heartburn), not Vegetable (gassy) and not even X-tra Cheese (bothers her stomach). So of course they are out of Original Cheese. I buy X-tra Cheese and cross out X-tra neatly with a permanent freezer safe Sharpie. She was happy. I bought the wrong oatmeal. She likes the kind you cook. I bought instant. I returned it. I bought 3 minute Oatmeal. Still wrong. I returned it. I bought the right oatmeal. She decides to tell me she already has three in the cupboard. (yes, she calls it a cupboard) Although there is smoke coming out of my ears, she is happy with her oatmeal, her eye-less red potatoes and her frozen X-tra Original Cheese pizza.

Get well soon dear brother in law…PLEASE!