YELLOW!

There was something that fell just short of an epic battle between my mother and I at Home Depot while choosing paint colors the other day. Because I'm a writer and therefore entitled to skew anything I want in my favor (and also because I like to entertain you all), let us assume the conversation went like this:

MOM: So what color are you thinking for the great room?
ME: Orange. Orange, and maybe dark orange.
MOM: You're ridiculous and you have no taste, I will not allow anything like that to happen.
ME: (whimpering, tearful) But...but....
MOM: Shut up! Stop talking now before I get angry!
(she then grew a second head and used the giant teeth contained in it to eat my face off before moving on to more important things, like the gardening section.)

OK, she was really more just apprehensive about the house looking like Skittles and she never called me names or said it wouldn't happen, but who wants to read boring stuff like that? Mom was actually semi-supportive of the color scheme and after some debate, agreed to trust my judgment (which scared me more than anything because I really have no idea what's going on half the time). I called the painter and read him the colors I picked, and spent the rest of the day praying that it wouldn't completely blow up in my face.

My mom's first words about the orange were, "I don't hate it," which was good enough for me.

 

I'm not sure whether or not I don't hate it, but I think once I get the furniture moved in and some things on the walls it will make the yellow accent wall a little less seizure-inducing than it currently is. Moving along....

So now that it's been established that mom and I didn't actually fight over Skittlepaint, we moved seamlessly from the paint department to the outdoor area. The green exterior is fairly drab as far as houses in the neighborhood go and she's quite good at finding green stuff to make it look pretty, so we played around outside in the garden section for a while.

She picked out lots of fun, colorful things but, having actually killed a catcus in high school, I let her point me toward only the flowers that are hard to kill (marigolds, palm trees and chrysanthemums). Plants turned into pots and pots to dirt and everything we couldn't cram into our two cars during our first trip, so at the end of Trip 2, the post-checkout situation looked kind of like this four-cart disaster:

The next day (Sunday) marked mom and dad's last in town and we celebrated by working outside. I potted my new plants, mom trimmed the bushes out front and dad nearly gave us all heart attacks by climbing on the roof to clean out the back gutters. Then we all went on the back patio and powerwashed as much as we could of the pool cage before I went to work (oh! and dad hung blinds on the back of the cage so the neighbors can't look in...which will hold nicely until the privacy fence is installed in two weeks).

So the folks headed back north, and while I spent Monday cleaning at both Rosewood and Amnesty (and hosting an impromptu, no-furniture birthday get-together for Jasmine on Monday night), I was a little busy and under-the-weather to go back Tuesday. Let's hope the place didn't burn down.

Next update: Clear pool! And furniture! (maybe...)