Salamander
Fire Walking

Interesting. I first typed that as "a femail dear". I do believe that the synapses are starting to dissolve from all the rain.

I took two days off this week and went to a town about an hour from here to see a Loreena McKennitt concert. It's a smallish town, with a smallish and very stylish performance theater. I stayed at a very nice, very old hotel that's been taken over by a large chain but maintained to keep its old charm. I was therefore able to enjoy the concert without the rushing out of work to get there on time and then dealing with the drag of driving home on unknown roads while tired and in the dark. Dr. Nineteen Cats accompanied me, and we both had a great time. McKennitt is every bit as good as she was when I first saw her in beautiful downtown Philthy back in '91.

I tease my “American Idol” friends rather relentlessly (though good-naturedly, I hope). I think my biggest problem with the show is that the singers I personally idolize would never make first cut on the show. Hell, they'd probably never make it past ten seconds of auditions. McKennitt is a brilliant example of that. She’s a serious singer, talented on a host of unrelated instruments. She’s also a wonderful songwriter, who turns out some of the most unique Celtic related music I know of. She doesn’t restrict her inspiration to Irish and Scottish music; the Celts ended up in some pretty far-flung places in earliest history, and she traces all those roots in her music. I'm glad she came out of retirement, and I'm glad I've had a chance to see her in that particular performance hall.

The weather was great for my two days off, something I can't say about this evening. After a weekend-plus of true spring dazzlement, we've now got true April showers. I'm in the midst of repainting the dining room and living rooms, which is what I should be doing now rather than making this entry. I've managed to convince myself that the paint will not dry in this humidity though. I think I need the day off anyway. I painted Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and I'm not yet even finished with the ceilings yet. My neck has a permanent crick in it, and my right arm twinges every time I try to bring it up over my head.

I've said I'm repainting, but frankly it's more like painting for the first time over primer. Nothing has been done with these rooms since the place was first built in 1989. The ceiling may once have been "ceiling white", but those days were far behind it when we moved in. As for the walls ... ah, the walls. The wallpaper beneath the chair rail, with olive and mauve and beige lines and flowers, intermingled with paisley amoebas oozing their way throughout the foliage. And the border at the ceiling! Yet more paisley amoebas, chasing each other in a carousel of primordial ooze.

The wallpaper came down easily enough. A fingernail at the edge of the strip was usually sufficient to bring the entire sheet tumbling off the wall. But that damned border was another matter entirely. It scoffed at vinegar and water. Dif made no difference. I scored and I soaked and I vented. Then I gave up, hit the internet, and purchased something called Wallwik. The stuff comes from England. Apparently the Brits understand wallpaper with a death-grip on the wall. Anytime they want a testimonial from an American, they can leave me a comment on this page to ask; I’ll gladly give them a glowing one. I completed eight-five feet of border stripping in about ten hours. That's how long it took me to get the first fifteen feet of the stuff down before I discovered Wallwik.

So this has been my life since the last entry. Wallpaper stripping, wall spackling (the previous owner did like her mirrors and pictures and objets d’art on the walls), sanding, and finally, the beginnings of painting. I agonized for weeks over the colors I wanted to paint. It wasn't that I didn't know what I wanted. I just didn't know how to make it work. I'm still not sure it's going to work, but we'll just have to wait and see what the “test wall” ends up looking like.

Some time last year I started collecting some pieces of raku (see Giusti's Gallery for an artist I've become particularly fond of) and I wanted the rooms to have the warm earthen feel that the pottery has. It's not easy to bring together the colors of earth and water and sunset into a room. It took a while but I finally realized that all I wanted to do have the perfect room to display the raku in rather than actually turn the freaking rooms into one big raku pot. With luck I'll have the bulk of the painting done by mid-May, so that some visiting friends will a) not have to see the mess I've made of the downstairs while working on this project and b)they can give me their feedback on whether or not I've made a huge mistake with what I'm doing.

I plan to have the chair rail and lower wall painted a warm grey (nearly brown) that matches the brown of the unglazed portion of the raku. The upper half of the wall will be a pale greenish blue, or perhaps it's more a bluish green. It's one of the few hues that isn't actually in any of the pottery, and I'm hoping that it will serve as a good backdrop for the raku wall hangings that I have. We'll see.

I've just fully realized that I've designed the freaking rooms around a few pieces of ceramics. Does that make me like the yuppie couple in the Kohler commercial who set a faucet in front of a high-powered architect and tell him to "design a house around this"? I hadn't realized quite how sad my mad little plan was until I set it down in writing.

Speaking of sad ... over the weekend I went to visit a web site that I used to be fairly frequent at. A new Tolkien book has arrived, and I wanted to see what some Tolkienphiles whom I respect had to say about it. Upon arrival at the old site, I discovered the message board moved at some time in the last couple of months. I further discovered that I've been banned from the new board. At first I thought this was just some sort of glitch at the new board. After all, this is me we’re talking about here. I don't get banned from places. I may not get invited to all the best parties, but I don't get kicked out once I get my foot in the door. As it turns out, I can get in from IP#'s other than my home computer’s assigned number. It seems that I have indeed become persona non grata.

Once I realized the ban was for real, I was a little hurt. I even planned to write the forum administrator and demand to know what I'd done that was so heinous. That lasted about 24 hours, and segued nearly immediately into humor. The world is a surrealistic and capricious place. And now I get to say that I've gotten kicked out of a classy joint. Not everybody gets to say that with a smile.