my sisters are awesome

I hate cooking. Like, detest it. When the Mister and I first got married, we ate a lot of takeout and cereal. Sadly, a large portion of my day now involves the feeding of the three kids, so I cook way more than I care to.

Fridays around these here parts is Pizza Night.  This is sacrosanct.  I never cook on Fridays. Ever.

Unfortunately, this week the stomach plague has struck this family hard, and while the kids seem to be on the mend, I'm sure not feeding them pizza for dinner.

I was moaning and complaining to my sisters about this--what am I going to do for dinner on Friday?? I can't feed them pizza!  I will have to COOK!

A few minutes ago this showed up at my door:

My sisters colluded among themselves to order us a meal from Fresh Direct.  And they stuck to the BRAT diet--we have a rotisserie chicken, coconut rice, bananas, apples, bread, some veggies for the adults, and cookies and scones for me.  All I have to do is heat it up. How sweet are my super-awesome sisters?

I may have already cracked open the cookies. 

terrible, horrible, no good, very bad paint

I have been itching to paint something a nice glossy black, and I decided on the sideboard for my intended victim.  I got my MIL to watch my barfy kids for an hour and I went to my friendly neighborhood Benjamin Moore Store.  As usual, my friends who run the store denied my request for the paint I wanted and interrogated me as to what nefarious plan I had for the paint.

Honest to Pete I hate this damn store.  And now, Grandma, you should avert your eyes and possibly not read further because I plan to USE MANY CURSEWORDS.

Those DOUCHENOZZLES refused to make a high gloss black paint, because they claim it is IMPOSSIBLE to make a high gloss black paint.  Even if they COULD, they would only make it in an oil-based paint, but they wouldn't  want to sell me THAT.

Breathing deeply, I agreed, I did not WANT to buy an oil-based paint because I planned on painting the sideboard in my dining room, and thus why would they not sell me a latex-based high gloss paint?  Mumble mumble oil no latex mumble mumble why you want it anyways mumble mumble NO.

We compromised by them giving me this:

THIS IS SHIT, by the way.

Shit is not the look I was going for.

I used a tinted primer and two coats of this crap on my sideboard, and it looks terrible.  Sort of a thin, watery, grayish, crappy, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad PIECE OF SHIT.  

But don't worry! I have plenty of time to do stuff like paint!  I don't have to wait till barfing children go to bed! No, I have lots of free time to do FORTY SEVEN coats of watery gray crap without interference.  NO PROBLEM.

Why do I keep going back to these jerks?

*shakes fist in rage at the sky*

Wednesday list: stomach virus, picture frames, David Sedaris and the Oscar Meyer weiner

1) Chez Trapped is the scene of a particularly virulent (and long-lived) stomach virus.  It started with Peter last weekend (he still has it), and it looked for a while like there might be no other casualties.  After six days of hypervigilance, today I turned my back for two seconds and Princess got Peter's sippycup.  ARG.  Greg and the Mister appear to be the next victims.  I am handwashing and cloroxing like a fiend.

2)  I am in a springy, freshen things up sort of mood and am itching to paint a piece of furniture.  Sadly, my Florence Nightingale duties have taken precedence.   Florence Nightingale does a lot of really gross laundry.

3) I was perusing Jonathan Adler's website today, and came across these pretty enamel picture frames:

As we all know, I am addicted to picture frames, and oh my heavens those frames are BEAUTIFUL.

They are also $68 apiece.

Just think of the beautiful gallery wall you could make with 10 of these frames.  OR YOU COULD BUY A SOFA.

4) This one is for my dad. I am a big David Sedaris fan, and I ran across this video on YouTube of David Sedaris singing the Oscar Meyer theme song as if he were Billie Holiday.

If you aren't familiar with David Sedaris's work, his book of essays Me Talk Pretty One Day is one of the funniest things I've ever read.  Listening to him read the audio version is ten times funnier.  You can listen to an excerpt of his essay Six to Eight Black Men (discussing the Santa Claus beliefs of other countries) here, or you can read it here. (If you search on YouTube you can find a 3 part audio that has the entire essay; its pretty long.) 

Gallery walls in my house

The Inspired Room is doing a link up for gallery walls (oops, the link is actually here), and since I have (ahem) a gazillion of them, I thought I'd share. (I apologize for all the flash photography, but the interior foyer doesn't get any natural light at all, and even if it did I am doing this post after my kids go to bed and forgot to take pictures during daylight hours, so....right, moving on!.)

There's the picture ledges in my foyer:

The gallery in the hallway:

I had planned to make this a gallery of all the places we've lived in the last ten years, except I only have pictures of two of the ten places we've lived in the last ten years, and those frames have been blank since I put them up, and since I just got adorable pictures of my kids in their Easter finery, I figured I may as well put them up since I have zero plans in the near future to go driving around New Jersey photographing the more far-flung places we've lived. So now there's 3 blank frames instead of 10.

There's the art wall in the dining room:

I have those pictures tacked on all four corners with that blue sticky stuff and they are STILL crooked.

There's the small collections of ceramics--do they count as a gallery?

Right now you're thinking to yourself, woman, you have spent a fortune on picture frames.

  

craigslist mirrors

When buying our craigslist chair this weekend, the seller told us to meet her at her storage unit in a shopping center.  We followed her instructions to pull around the back of the shopping center and parked behind a bowling alley.  There was no storage unit in sight.

The seller turned out to be a young woman, and she led us behind a dumpster into the basement of the building next to the bowling alley.  It had all the makings of a slasher flick, but she was about 80 lbs soaking wet, so I figured the Mister and I could take her.

Half of the basement was crammed full of furniture.  The empty half contained only the blue chair and a bookshelf.  We gave the chair the once-over, a sniff test, and decided to buy it.

I grabbed the cushion, the Mister grabbed the chair, and we started moving it out, when two mirrors caught my eye.  I asked the girl if all of the furniture was hers, and it turned out she split the storage space with a friend who owned a consignment shop.  She agreed to sell me the two mirrors, and I am now the proud owner of a federal mirror and a bullnose-ish mirror, which is super-exciting, because I have been looking for a federal mirror ever since seeing the Matters of Style house tour on Apartment Therapy.

The federal mirror lives above the blue secretary:

I don't yet have a space for the other mirror, but I'll figure out a place for it.

Princess is enjoying our new blue chair:

blue craigslist chair

I've been searching Craigslist for a few months, looking for a wingback or a bergere chair to  recover on the cheap.  This weekend I came across this:

Its not quite a bergere chair, but close, and the color is perfect for our living room.  Its in stellar shape for a vintage chair.

I think I'll be leaving this chair as is.  Its too pretty to recover.  

weekend reading

1)  First a thank you to Elizabeth at Princess Nebraska, who figured out my weird "password required" problem. Go read her blog, its very funny.  Anyone who can work in a diamond-encrusted toilet into a discussion about hardwood floors is worth reading.  (My sister Sarah also diagnosed the problem, but Elizabeth got there first.)

2) I spend a fair amount of time window shopping pretty things.  I run plenty of items past the Mister, whose first reaction is frequently "Don't we already have a mirror/pillow/sofa/rug/dining table?"

Apparently Nicole Richie's husband says  the same thing.  I got a giggle out of Joel Madden making Nicole Richie return $3000 pillows.

3) I recently came across a blog called Peppermint Bliss, and its fantastic. Bailey, author of the blog, is pregnant, and has rounded up a number of design bloggers to create moodboards for her unborn daughter's nursery.  I have bookmarked all of them for the day the Princess gets her own room.  See them here, here, here,  here, and here.

4)  I just came across this amazing poetry slam by Katie Makkai.  If you have daughters, and three and half minutes, this is worth the watch, especially the last thirty seconds. There might be an F word or two.

Have a nice weekend, peeps!