I'm moved in! I now live in Bloomington, Indiana...and it's weird. But surprisingly comfortable.
Since my parents left and I was officially "moved in" (Sunday afternoon), I've been locking myself in my apartment and doing random things to occupy my lonely self. My main activity? PAINTING!
Now, I don't know why I'm painting. This place was freshly painted when I moved in, and I have to prime all the walls I paint when I move back out. I guess I was turned off by the dirty cream walls, and ultimately I was in dire need of something to preoccupy myself while I adjusted to Bloomington ALONE.
So I called Mark and we compiled a detailed plan of how I would transform my walls from drab to fab. We decided on a granny smith apple green for the kitchen, a light gold for the living room, and a complex chair-rail-esque multi colored job in my bedroom. We picked out the colors on SherwinWilliams.com and then I was off to my neighborhood Sherwin Williams!
The employees at my neighborhood Sherwin Williams were not what I expected, having been reared on the television commercials... Their jingle is "ask Sherwin Williams!" (or is it "AT Sherwin Williams? Oh well, the first proves my point) so I expected helpful sales associates to great me with color options when I walked through the door. I walked through the door of my neighborhood Sherwin Williams to find... nobody there. I paced around, called out, made noise, but alas no one came to my aid. I awkwardly made my way to the color station to pick out the swatches of my color choices, hoping that my awkward presence there would send a bat-signal to their breakroom to come and get me. But no one came. People came into the store (when the door opens, there's an electric "bing!"), people left the store ("bing!") but no one came out to help me. Finally, a middle-aged woman with a shitty Mia Farrow Rosemary's Baby haircut came out, blatantly looked at awkward me, and IGNORED me! I hrumphed around for a few more minutes, still ignored, and then walked up to the counter to Rosemary's Baby Bitch Whore. RBBW greeted me with a nonchalant something and asked what she could do to help. I gave her my list of colors and asked if I could get a quart of each. She looked surprised, as if she was unaware that this was her job. And then she said "I don't know if I can do that." Now, I don't work at Sherwin Williams, but I think their entire business is based upon giving people the paint colors they want. And they have a nifty computer that does it all for them. So I don't know why she didn't think she could give me my paint. She grabbed my list from me and shuffled around the back shelves, lined with base paint cans. She looks at all the cans, hundreds of those cans, all the same, and says "Well, I guess we can do it." Well, of COURSE you can do it, I thought. She puts some of the base paint cans at the computer and puts in the proper color ratios to make my paint, and then hands them to some guy (no uniform) to put in a mixer. That didn't seem too hard. I don't know what the crisis was. So I caught her in a moment of pause and said "And, I want a color green, the shade of a granny smith apple." Again, she looks at me, surprised I'm asking her for help (the "Ask Sherwin Williams" jingle pops into my head as a plea), and says "I don't know what you want me to do." There it was. That simple sentence explained it all. I replied "Well, I have this apple in my purse. Can you match the color with your computer?" An immediate "NOPE. The computer doesn't read apples." Immediately my mind flashes back to other Sherwin Williams commercials where little girls bring in purple stuffed animals...THEIR colors were matched by the computer... "Well, I have this washcloth that's close." I hold it up, and she replies the same. "Could you help me find a color?" I asked ("Ask Sherwin Williams!"). She just stares at me blankly. This was a "no" stare. I went back to the color table and picked out a green that might work, and I gave it to her to fill in a can.
That was my Sherwin Williams experience.
I went home and tried to paint my kitchen green. I've never really painted before. I mean, I've painted rooms a few times, but I think I was drunk and made a mess each time, surrounded by friends who actually COULD paint. Here I was, sober, and on my own, armed with a bunch of blue painter's tape. Surely I could make this happen.
I eventually completed my kitchen wall. It looks really good. But this was basically a product me of me spilling paint on my tiled floor about fifty times, and frantically wiping it off with a soapy paper towel (which actually just moved the color around and didn't get rid of it...). The green was great. I'll post a picture of it after I complete my entire apartment.
This morning I painted the living room gold. Again, I was not good with the paint, but again it looks great.
Halfway through the painting, I went to Target to get curtain rods and an electric drill. My first drill! Now I feel like a REAL les! After several frantic phone calls to Mark, I figured out how to attach a drill bit and drill REAL HOLES!
Later today I decided to start the complex paint job in my room. Mark recommended painting a 4-in. strip of brown, followed by a 2-in. strip of light pink below, and then followed by a wash of dark pink. He explained that I should paint the light pink in the middle FIRST. I could approximate where I wanted the stripe, and then I could put painters tape on that for the other stripes, and that would help give the light pink a clean edge. Sounds easy enough, but Lindsey can't paint. So I ended up, an two hours later, with a jagged, poorly painted pink line with pink dripping down the entire wall. As I was painting I had my window open for ventilation. There are a bunch of families in this complex with little kids, and kids kept walking by my window and looking in. Now, I KNOW the kids couldn't really comprehend my painting, or the quality of my painting, but I kept getting this eerie feeling that they were judging me. It's kind of like how no one wants the cat to watch them have sex. I mean, the cat doesn't KNOW you're having sex, but it's creepy to have it there, watching you. These kids watching me paint was the same creepy feeling...
When all this painting is over, I'll have to show you pictures. I will. Because I am an obsessed blogger who is living alone in a new city.
Had a great summer vacation, which consisted of a trip to Portland to see Markie, then a trip to Seattle for Tallis Scholars camp, then back to Portland for more vacation. And now I'm back in Columbia to finish my life here (I move in about a week).
