It's unorthodox but it works

We wanted to reroute more gutters to the rain garden but I didn't want to do anything permanent until we'd really tested whether it could handle so much more water. My first thought was a racquetball over the downspout hole (I don't know) but Greg didn't have one, despite the fact that he owns every piece of sporting equipment ever.

But a measuring cup worked. Don't laugh.

Believe it or not, this is effectively blocking that downspout and the water is now dumping into the rain garden (which is now filling a lot faster). I can watch it during heavy rain and see if it's in danger of overflowing. If the extra rain overflows or overwhelms the rain garden, I can just yank the measuring cup out of the gutter and take the pressure off.

And if it continues to work we can have that downspout removed professionally. And I own three measuring cup sets so I should survive without this one. Everyone wins! Now stop laughing.

One last obnoxious reminder

Our Portlandia episode airs tonight! If you get IFC you can watch Fred Armisen play video games in our basement. Since I have never been married, I have no children, and Ed McMahon has never showed up on my doorstep brandishing an enormous cardboard check, this is verrrrry exciting.

And then I will shut up about it. We're going over to my friend's house (whose dining room will be in the episode too!) to watch, but we'll have it on our Tivo. If anyone is in Portland and doesn't have the fancy cable, shoot me a message if you want to come over and watch and you can hear me say, "That's our yard. That's our basement! That's our yard. That's our bedroom! That's our yard."

It sounds fun, right?

Bloom Day February 2012

Here in 8b we've had a very mild winter and yet this is the only bloom I have in my yard at the moment. Good thing it's showy.

Helleborus x ballardiae 'HGC Cinnamon Snow'

We have lots of bulbs starting to poke up, my daphne is *this close* to blooming, and I'm hoping that by next month my flowering currants may be putting on a show. Note to self: plant crocuses and snowdrops for next winter so you have as many blooms as some of the others on the garden bloggers' virtual tour.

I think we have a color

House colors: I was leaning toward Peppercorn. Greg was too.

And then he told me that he thought it was too dark but he would go for it if I loved it. I want both of us to love it (and if it looks terrible I need someone to be complicit with me) so I thought about it a while. I mixed some white with the Peppercorn, since he liked the tonality of the color, just not the darkness of it, and put that up on the house. And he liked it! The resulting color actually looks like the picture above.

I swear the difference is more dramatic in person

Of course I didn't measure anything, just glugged some of the Summer White into the Peppercorn and threw it up on the house. I took it into Sherwin Williams and explained what I did. The dude scanned it into his computer and said, "Okay you're all set."

"What do you mean?"
"I scanned it in and we'll give the information to your contractor."
"No, I need you to mix up the paint. The computer is never right."
"Really?"
"Yes. Go mix it."

An hour and half later and 12 iterations and remixes and we had something close enough. I am so glad I am a pain in the ass because that scanned in color wasn't even close to correct. While one of the batches was mixing the two guys at the store started bad mouthing other paint stores and their computers and the fact that they are often too busy/too lazy to have a human look at the colors.

I very tactfully didn't point out that just 45 minutes prior they were going to send me on my way without ever even looking at the computer's color choice. I would like a medal for that.

So the final color choices are Peppercorn-light on the body of the house, Saucy Gold on the door, and Creamy for the trim. Thank you to everyone who chimed in with their opinions--this decision is a huge one and crowd sourcing it made me feel a lot more secure about it.

SWOON.

And soon I'm going to buy all the plants! All of them.

He's flying over our heads in a million pieces!

Because we're painting the house, Greg felt like it was time to finally fix this nonsense that Comcast foisted on us.

Cables across the front of our house.

Cables across our threshold.

Cables across our chimney and across the side of the house . . .

. . . which came in the ceiling of our basement and ran across the length of the room because Comcast doesn't care what your house or rooms or cables look like when they are charging you $85 an hour to give you overpriced cable and Internet service.

So Greg donned this suit, crawled into our scary crawlspace, and ran the cables the right way.

He cheerfully informed me every time he found another spider egg sac, ensuring that I will never ever get in there to help him.

But sometimes your dude is in the crawl space and you're in the office, trying to fish a cable out of the wall and you're trying to figure out where the fuck he is, and you keep tap-tap-tapping on the floor, as if that will help, and he's like, "Heather, that's not helping. I'm underneath the bathtub pipes and I can't hear anything," and sometimes you drill too many holes in the wall trying to figure it out.

But that's okay because I am good at patching holes. Or I am willing. And that's a good thing because we made a LOT of holes in the basement.

I don't even want to explain what happened here, but it involved an unexpected horizontal beam that necessitated a six-inch hole in the middle of the wall, the purchase of a 45-degree drill attachment, and more patching. But we now have a hard-wired ethernet connection to the basement and the office and Greg has plans to install network drops in every room of the house, but probably through the attic next time.

Oddly, my sewing kit came in handy with all of this work. We used the forceps my mother gave me (super handy for sewing AND retrieving cables from the wall), safety pins for attaching the Cat 6 cable to the fish tape, and a seam ripper for undoing all of our safeguards with string.

We're so tired but we have almost no visible cables on the outside of our house and Greg can copy files quickly between his XBOX and his computer and I didn't care about any of this, but it was great to be the helper instead of the instigator, for once. And now I don't have to feel bad when I inform Greg that we're spending next weekend removing sod, right?

(Hat tip to Jess for the Willy Wonka reference in the post title.)

It has to get worse before it gets better

Our house looks like a crack den right now.

And we still don't have colors picked out.

Paint swatches!

Get your judging pants on. Our house painter put up some swatches yesterday..

Scene 1:

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

I think it reads a little grayer on the swatch. For the record I hate the trim color. This is the painter's favorite.

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

Scene 2:

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Scene 3:

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Scene 4:

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

This last one definitely reads kind of purple. It's very pretty (I think it's my favorite) but I worry we'll be "that purple house." And of course, all the this is conjecture because everyone's monitor will render the colors differently. But tell me what you think anyway. Or if you know where I live come by and look underneath the kitchen window. But not IN it! I hate it when you do that, it's so creepy.

I'm hoping the sun will come out soon so we can see how it looks under something other than clouds. And we have the samples here so I'll paint bigger swatches once Greg and I actually talk to each other (we're like ships in the night this week) and see if he hates all of them. It's possible.