Help me

What color should we paint our house?

It looks like this right now (minus the green grass and the nicely trimmed shrubbery):

Light gray with white trim.

Here it is in winter:

I know, yawn.  It’s your basic cookie-cutter tract home with the original builder paint.  All light colors.

I was thinking about going totally crazy and maybe painting it darker gray.  Any other suggestions?

My next door neighbor’s house is yellow.  The one on the other side is beige.  We also have a mintish green, a darker gray, a lighter gray (like mine), a tan, and a white house on our block.  Houses around the corner who have repainted have all gone darker and bolder than the original pastelly pallete of the neighborhood.

I’m seriously at a loss.  Help me.

Do goodery be darned!

Last week I volunteered to sew triangle bandages for the young women in our congregation to use to practice their first aid skills at girls camp this week.  I’m not sure what possessed me to do such a thing.  Actually, I’m pretty sure it was pity.  The woman in charge of camp has very little help and when she sent out an e-mail asking for a volunteer, I just couldn’t help myself.  I think I’ve decided pity is not a good reason to do something.

She brought me 11 yards of material that I was to cut and hem.  Kind of tedious work, but not a big deal, right?  Oh, but you should know me so much better than that by now.

I am not a sewer.  I mean, I am a person who can sew a somewhat straightish line when there’s a new moon and Venus is in the fourth house, but beyond that, my skills are limited.  But they’re just triangle bandages, Bythelbs, what could possibly go wrong?  Well, the real problem was not the cutting or even the “sewing”.  The real problem is my sewing machine hates me.  Or at least the bobbin thread loader thingy part hates me.  It took a minimum of six attempts for me to come up with a usable bobbin, and I really have no idea what kind of magical bobbin voodoo I managed to pull off that last time to get it working properly, but thank heavens it did because I was just about a half-messed-up-bobbin away from HULK SMASH!

The task was at last accomplished, and I even managed to do it without cursing.  Unless you consider freaking, frick or crap curse words, in which case I say to you, Pppbbbbbbbbt!

It didn’t help that this weekend included the hottest days of the year and I was slaving over a hot iron to make my hems “straight” and I had four kids interrupting me at regular and irregular intervals and I am generally prone to maniacal outburts of anger and frustration when attempting to help my fellow man.

See, and it’s the last part that has really got me thinking.  Surely the cursing and complaining that almost inevitably accompany any of my real attempts at do goodery cancel out whatever divine or karmic credit I might have received for doing the good in the first place.  Actually, I’m fairly confident that my cursing and complaining actually outweigh the brownie points, so in the end I’m really in the negative.  Perhaps it would be better to hang up my do gooder hat and call it a day.  Or a life.

In an attempt to control her darker half, Bythelbs turns to a life of solitude and apathy.

Ho to the hum

Lately I’ve been feeling…

Yeah, like that.

~

What do you think of this song?

Civil Twilight – Letters From the Sky