since I last posted, at the end of January, I've read several books, gotten a lot of work done, seen two shows, painted my kitchen, hung out a lot with my Mom, kicked off my new side hustle, watched Xena's team win their basketball championship and spent some time with BoopityBoop. I've been as busy as I've ever been and something had to give and what do you know: writing about it all is what gave.
Which is a mistake because half the reason this blog exists is so I can see what I've been up to that I've already forgotten.
February was a good month! At least once, we got to spend a day with Boopity. It's rare to have only one of the twins visit and this opportunity was due entirely to the insane virus control protocols of some of our institutions. After two years of dodging it, Boop finally tested + for Covid*.
This meant that she and her sister had to quarantine for a week. When the week was up and Boop tested -, she got to return to school. Boopity, who never tested +, was required to quarantine another week, due to being Covid adjacent.
That's right, the twin who never had Covid had to quarantine twice as long as the one who had it. I almost wrote "was sick" but like 99.999999% of kids, Boop never had any symptoms. On my best day, I'm more "sick" than Boop was when she tested positive.
This is the sort of wisdom we get when we let "Experts" make our decisions.
To paraphrase Shakespeare (Henry VI): "First thing we do, let's kill all the experts". Sounds good but in context, Shakespeare put that phrase in the mouth of a wannabe tyrant. But if we keep calling incompetent boobs 'experts', the word will come to mean something else.
The upside of this idiocy is that I got to hang with Boopity all day! We had fun; we read books, made cookies, went to the park...by midafternoon, she was missing her sister. It's funny about twins: they were literally smooshed together in the womb, so 'together' is their natural state. Being separated must feel super weird to them. They are very distinct little people however, so I enjoy being able to spend time focused on just one of them at a time. Boop has charisma and a sparkling, quick wit while Boopity has a giant and generous heart.
Oh, great news! Zach and Sara are expecting! Grandchild #6 will join the clan in early October. The heartbeat has been heard and baby has been seen on ultrasound.
Z, S and I went to a show a couple of weeks back. The Open Window theater is currently running a production of 1984. It's not a happy story, especially in the light of current events but current events highlight what an important story it is. They did a great job with it: much better than the movie versions. They made Winston Smith and Julie into real people. The actor who played Winston was wonderful. That's something people who don't live here may not know: The Twin Cities metro area is packed with extremely talented actors. I've seen Broadway shows, I've seen the Great Betty Buckley in
Hello Dolly! Our home grown productions are as good as any, anywhere. And it's true, no matter what art form you talk about: theater, film, visual arts, music. Prince was not an outlier.
Well, okay, Prince was an outlier but my point is that it makes perfect sense that he came from here.
That's a very long way of saying that if you get a chance to see live theater in the Twin Cities metro, you won't be disappointed.
A few weeks back, we had the fronts of some of our kitchen cabinets refreshed. We redid our kitchen back in the 90s. This house is now over 100 years old and you can tell which rooms were added over the years. It's kind of a Frankensteinian structure that began life as a farm house or a summer cottage. I don't think the upstairs was part of the original plan. The family room, back hall and back porch all show signs of being after-thoughts. In the 30 years that we've lived here, we haven't added (or moved) any walls but we have refreshed every room in the house, replaced all the windows and turned a couple of windows into doors.
When we did the kitchen, we pulled down a bunch of cupboards that hung between the kitchen workspace and dining area, turned a peninsula into an island and opened the room up. Over the years we've added a couple of pantry cupboards, a built in spice rack and a built in wine rack. In the original work, we kept the bank of cupboards on the wall with a window facing the back porch (and through that, the back yard) but we painted them all white to match the cupboards we put in. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the kitchen, as it was when we bought the house, was from the 1920s. The cupboards, trim and wainscoting all had that orange varnish look that just screams "old age". We painted everything white when we redid the room in '98 and even though dark cabinets are coming back in, I'm still very partial to a white kitchen. My kitchen looks like Key West. White wood everywhere, aqua walls, green granite and bright colors in the dishes and on the walls. My kitchen walls are covered with art. All my walls exist to hang art upon.
24 years after we redid the kitchen, those original cupboards had ceased to function. The drawers all squeaked and none of the cupboard doors closed anymore. Plus, the last coat of white paint on them was ten years old so we were faced with either repainting them or replacing them. We replaced them. All new drawers, too. Now they all match the sleek, laminate we did in the rest of the kitchen. I knew they would look really good but I had no idea how thrilled I would be with doors and drawers that actually close!
As always with a reno of any size, the new stuff made the old stuff look really shabby.
The summer before the lockdown (so 3 years ago!) we'd had a new floor put in the kitchen which required new quarter round be put down along the perimeter. I never got around to doing more than priming that. Jay complained (he does that sometimes) and I told him that painting the kitchen was a huge, messy job that I preferred to do while he was out of town and he'd never left town long enough for me to tackle it. A two day fishing trip wasn't nearly enough time for me to do what needed to be done.
I told him if he wanted the kitchen painted, he had to leave town for at least a week. Fortunately, his brother Tom was going down to his Florida condo for a week and there was room for Jay to join him. So I sent my husband to Florida and set to work.
In addition to repainting the boxes, wainscoting and trim in the kitchen, I got some of the trim in the back hall painted and I put some tropical frond contact paper on the shelves. We have a lot of shelves. I didn't get to all of them so I guess Jay will just have to take a nice, long fishing trip as soon as the ice melts.
One of my favorite things has always been to be home, all by myself. There's a reason I was such a good coach's wife: I LOVE my alone time.
Anyway, the kitchen looks gorgeous.
Now I really have to get to work. I will try to write about some of the other things I've been taking up all my time with before another 6 weeks go by but I make no guarantees.
At Least I didn't wait til May.
*now that we know that the tests can't distinguish coronaviruses, all we really know is that Boop had a cold.