After two years of looking at splotchy blue walls and finding freaky faces that weren't really supposed to be there (because that room was nothing if not a psych experiment gone very, very wrong), I got up the gumption to paint our bedroom last weekend.


Tell me what you see...

Yeah, that's so not condusive to a good night's sleep.

So, it took two gallons of primer and two gallons of paint, and two full days of work (and two disks of Scrubs season one), but it's been rehabbed into a peacefull oasis.







But here's the problem: in almost six years of cohabitation, we've yet to purchase a dresser. It's utterly bizarre. Neither one of us brought a dresser into the union. We've both coped by storing our unmentionables in our bedside tables and hanging everything else, and really, it's a decent system, but we're both pushing 30 now, and it's time to grow up.

Which isn't to say we haven't gone dresser shopping in the past. Au contraire, we totally have. There was one moment in late 2001 where we were thisclose to being certified chest-of-drawers owners before things suddenly went south, and then another moment in 2003 when I was introduced to IKEA in Seattle.

Yeah, IKEA. I found the perfect dresser there: pine, eight drawers and cheap. If I'd had $300 and had we not been en route to the airport, I don't even think I'd be making this post, because we'd have a dresser this very minute. As it was, no dresser, not availible on the website and it has been two years of absolute longing.

However, during the bedroom redo, I mentioned my platonic ideal of dresser to a co-worker and made a passing reference to flying to Phoenix on a cheap Soutwest fare, renting a U-Haul and driving back with my IKEA booty.

He laughed.

Gwyneth, on the other hand, said, "let's do it."

See, this is why she's a bold-faced name.

So I've gone onto the website and found Albuquerque to Phoenix is only $34 one way, which, SCORE! but then add in the cost of the rental, gas and, oh, the dresser, it sort of moves out of the happy realm of the fesible and into the drug-infested neighborhood of reality.

But one never can tell. I've done crazier things.

Woo! Gwyneth came over to help with an art project (I'm painting the bedroom while Adam's out of town) and I popped a bottle of Gruet demi sec to celebrate. Man, that's a good wine, and now I'm a little loopy and a lot headachey, but no worries.

Gruet's one of those New Mexican success stories: as the legend goes, a French family with a small vineyard in the Champagne region came to the U.S. looking to expand. They discovered that New Mexico was home to the oldest vineyards in the New World and boom! We have this fabulous local winery.

Actually, one of the things we did when we were in Hawaii was look for Gruet whenever we stumbled into a wine shop (which was quite often, considering). Finding a bottle of the brut NV sparkling wine in Kona was a triumph. The guy who ran the shop containing said bottle was befuddled by our enthusiasm, but man. Cheap, great bubbly! You can't beat it. Go find it, drink it and become a believer!

Did I mention I'm totally looped? Because, man.

Adam's in Jacksonville this weekend and I'm pretty much drunk, and I'm watching "Love, Actually" on HBO, which, man. I'm all tearfully happy. It never fails. Colin Firth, Whassername Knightly, Hugh Grant, Emma Thomson sans Kenneth "I do Shakespeare, respect me" Branaugh, the guy who gets laid in Wisconsin, that guy from "Hitchhiker's Guide" and Alan Rickman and I'm completely worthless until it's over, and all I do is think about how sappily happy I am to be married to, well, that guy I'm married to.

Who's in Jacksonville. Sigh.

For now, I've got the cat to keep me company. Oh, did I tell you? She's got a new nemesis in the neighborhood. Another black cat, this one barely post-kittenhood who's hopped the fence and likes to taunt Cat with it's freedom. There's been much growling and tail puffing on Cat's part, but I had to play the heavy and scare off the interloper and now she's not speaking to me (but is reading over my shoulder, because she's as much as a love whore as I am). Silly kitty.

AND DID ANYONE SEE THAT F1 RACE?!

I should sign this off before it becomes completely incomprehensible. This is how I am when I've had far too much to drink. Bubbly to the extreme and talkative to excess. It's very sad. I'll go now. G'dnight.

OH! One last thing! I've added a banner link to the ONE Campaign to end poverty. Click a link, hit the Live 8 concert, sign a letter to President Bush, wear a white rubber bracelet, whatever. Do your part!

From the New York Times Magazine:

That means changing hearts. How difficult that will be was illustrated by a single vignette. When I met Polyak, she told me how, when she first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ''doing this'' to the woman's children and grandchildren. Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray's Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ''Then I hugged her neck,'' she said, ''and I said, 'We love you.' I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of compassion.''

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That's a hard gap to bridge.

I read through the whole article and it again raised the questions I have about this fear of gay marriage. How does gay marriage affect mine? The anti-gay marriage activists say marriage should be about the procreation of children, but then does this mean infertile heterosexual couples or couples who wish to remain childless should be denied the right to wed? How is this happiness hurting? I just don't get it.

I suppose this is what I get for being schooled in the "love thy neighbor" school of Christian thought.

I should really be in Indianapolis this weekend for the USGP, but lookies, still in Albuquerque.

The Evian bottle is taunting me.

"dare to be beautiful everyday." it commands. Just like that. dare to be beautiful everyday!

I know it's just a little advertising Oprah-ism meant to sell me more water, but just reading it made me resent the water bottle. It was like the bottle assumed I woke up this morning, looked at my reflection and decided Heidi Klum levels were just too intimidating to pull off. No, no. I didn't show a backbone, I submitted meekly to the ordinary, I didn't dare...oh, you get the point.

It seems awfully presumptious for a brand that spells "naive" backwards.

I'm punishing the bottle by filling it with Albuquerque tap. dare to be ordinary, bottle. Choke on those assumptions and oh, have a little arsenic for your troubles, bottle.

Honestly.

Between Adam's old street (formerly the last street in Albuquerque) getting a stoplight and my pending class reunion, there's been a lot of "Grosse Pointe Blank" quote-dropping around WMD this week.

So, with that, let's welcome the possible new readers from Ruidoso High class of 1996. Hi! I haven't changed a bit! Nope! Not a doctor! Yep! Still a geek! How've you been?

I promise, I've got a big doctor rant brewing, it's just going to have to wait until I'm not a snot faucet.

We're both two little snot-balls over here this weekend. Adam's been shnucking his way through life since Monday and last night the Histamine Brigade took a breather in my sinus cavaties last night. It's all a lot of honking and sneezing and, in A's case, coughing. At times, he's been sounding like an unrestored '64 Impala. Poor guy.

Work flies along on the new project, though I can see into the future and the brakes will be applied in the coming weeks. I've picked up a new writing gig at work, providing content for a new, trial section. "Summer Break" bows on Tuesday, sending the Youth Express page on hiatus through the summer. SB will be aimed at my target demograpic: the hip 20-34 year-olds retro enough to read the paper.

So I expect every one of my Albuquerque readers to pick up extra copies of the Journal on Tuesdays this summer (because you're all subscribers, right?) and push our circ numbers up. If the uppers see an improvement, this could be a permanent thing for me, y'know?

My first story rolls out two weeks from Tuesday.

Ta!