Recently in Family and History Category

We have done so much “invisible” work on the house, it’s nice to finally have something to show off! We used the Behr online color tool and despite a miscommunication with the contractor (our fault) we love the result. The scariest part was wondering if the main house color (we chose “Spanish Galleon,” partly because of the name ;-) would be anything close to what we saw on the computer screen. Happily, it is just the color we wanted.

The Behr tool is really neat—you can upload a picture of your house (or room, if you’re painting an interior) and then apply the colors to various areas. We had this awesome Don Springer watercolor of our happy abode so I scanned it in to see if it would work. Here’s the original:

And here’s what we came up with after some online fiddling:

This really gave us a great idea of what to expect! We tried lots of different colors and settled on these (except for the red—we ended up with something darker, but this is close).

The miscommunication was that we intended all the major trim to be the lightest color, but the printout that we gave the contractor was … unclear. So they did the columns in Vanilla Custard, as intended, and the rest of the trim in River Bank. Oops! After we got over the initial shock, we decided that the mistake might have been for the best. The columns really pop, and the lower contrast between the two greens on the rest of the house is sort of calming. They also did a fantastic job of picking out some extra details—the red around the attic windows and the tips of the chimneys, matching the window sashes and the trim on the columns, was a nice finishing touch.

We’re not quite decided what will be next, but we have plenty of time as we have to rebuild the war chest before we embark on the next Renovation Adventure.

If you’re lucky, there are some people in your life who simply are. They’re people that you love and you know they love you, without question.

I am immeasurably lucky to have had my dad’s best friend, Curtis, to care about me for my whole life thus far. I believe that he still does.

Check out this post at Cute Overload! Okay, here’s a preview:

Baby chicks (redundancy alert) really are cute. When I was a kid we had chickens for a while. (Rabbits, too, but that doesn’t have anything to do with this story. I just tossed it in there because bunnies are cute, too.) I built (well, prob’ly my dad built) an incubator for a sixth-grade science project and hatched a couple of eggs. I got a yellow chick and a brown stripey chick. I named the brown one Parsley (nope, no explanation for that) and I don’t remember what I called the yellow one. Buttercup, maybe? They were very cute but not really exactly fun pets—messy and not very affectionate. Which is just as well because neither chick lived to chickenhood. The yellow one got et by a weasel or some other predator-du-jour and the brown one drowned in a water dish. Not too bright, chickens.

We had our new front door delivered and installed today. What a commotion! We've had such wonderful luck with the Pella window installers, and we got our first window guy, Eli, back for this door install, so I had no doubt that the results would be perfect. The man is a perfectionist, and super-nice besides.

(Lots more pictures on flickr here.)

It was kind of fun to be here for this, because the hole in the front wall of the house between doors was Really Big.

I also got to see first-hand that there really isn't a single tiny bit of insulation beneath our floor.

First thing this morning, a big truck rumbled up and two guys dropped off the door. It had to wait in the flowerbed for a while til Eli got the old door out. (He very nicely saved the original lead-glass panels, which are going to a friend of the MO's who dabbles in stained glass.)

The new door (with sidelights) is almost a foot narrower than the original, so there was some intermediate construction, and then Eli and his helper muscled the new door up the steps and into place.

After a lot of futzing with the apparently not-quite-top-notch hardware we bought, we have a gorgeous new front door. It actually seals when it closes! There are no longer breezes in the living room! I think it would take a bazooka to get through this glass, as opposed to being worried whenever a sofa-arm-resting cat would sneeze. And oh boy is it beauuuuuuuuutiful!

I've finally wrapped up a bit of a genealogy project--scanning and transcribing a set of letters that my great-aunt wrote back to her family from Europe while she was with the Red Cross after WWII. I really enjoyed reading them, and I was kind of surprised at just how "long ago" some of the scenes she described sounded to me. My favorite part of the project came near the end of the stack of letters, though. When she was transferred to Schweinfurt, she wrote:

Guess where I'm living at the moment. In an honest to goodness castle. This beautiful castle which is just like a museum with all the armored suits, swords, carvings, figurines, beautiful paintings, etc., belonged to a Nazi named Wm. Saks who is now on trial for having been a War Criminal. He owned a tremendous ball bearing factory.

I thought that all seemed pretty specific, so I spent a few minutes on google and wikipedia and quickly found out that she was in Mainberg Castle. (In her next letter she got the spelling of Sachs corrected--that helped verify things.)

I also found this site, whose author, Don Enderton, writes:

From August 29 to October 2, 1945 my father, a U. S. Army officer, resided in Mainberg castle, near Schweinfurt, Germany.

(Be sure to go look at the pictures.) The internet makes "small world" happenstances even more likely....

(More about Auntie Marge's letters here.)

I've finished scanning cousin Rocky's scrapbook. Full scoop is here.

Penguin Lust Forever!
Originally uploaded by TXMagpie.
Penguin Lust Forever!

More here.

I finished up a set of pages with the Lakewatch photos and put them on flickr. I get kind of irritated with the uploader tool because it seems to just pick any old random order for sending your pictures up, and I'm really quite Virgo enough to want them up there in the right order, thankyouverymuch. But I am also lazy, so I just let it do its thing and bitch about it after the fact. At least I can reorganize them within the set.

Anyhow, there's a link to the flickr set in the DotNest gallery:

http://darcy.txmagpie.com/gallery/lakewatch.php

Start with the 4th picture ;-)

Originally uploaded by Rob T.
'Nuff said....

More here. 2005 is wrapping up quite nicely, and I'm looking forward to an even better 2006!

If you have to suffer through a cold, you might as well do it in paradise....

The post-nasal drip started last Sunday night and had progressed to full sinus and ear stoppage by the time we got on the plane to Cancun on Wednesday morning. The, er, nasal effluvium, was quite nasty by Thursday, so off to la farmacia on Friday morning for some sulfa pills which at least helped to the point where I didn't have to take four naps a day to keep going. The improvement seems to have plateaued somewhat short of "healthy" but I still have several days to go on the medication so I'm hoping for the best.

At any rate, through the fog of medicine and pile of tissues, I did notice that Cancun is incredibly beautiful, and I will be spoiled forever as far as ocean swimming goes. Almost 70 people flew in for the wedding, so I got to catch up with lots of family and friends. Rob and Cindy were originally expecting about 40, so the party overflowed to an adjacent resort to accommodate us all. The ceremony itself was by turns beautiful and hysterical, and ultimately, they couldn't have scripted it better.

So here's to my cousin and his lovely bride!

See you in Houston for Christmas :-)