Gosh, it's late. Gosh, I'm tired.

Friends Rob and Ed and Anne came over today and helped me paint my living room. This was an act of pure-dee charity on their collective part, as my living room is panelled in ancient faux-wood (well, I mean, it's real wood; it's not like salami panelling or very-quiet-peacock panelling) that takes up paint like a sponge, plus it used to be chartreuse and now it's white.

Anyway, the three of them came over and we painted and painted and painted. At one point, late in the day, we all got punchy. Ed started asking plaintively, "Paint ALL the things?" and we kept replying, "Paint ALL the things!"

Which got me thinking about how I found Hyperbole and a Half. I had been unaware of the blog until I got an email from somebody (I don't remember who, and I'm sorry, and you rock) warning me about somebody *else* putting shit up that they were passing off as their own work. As well as my stuff, I saw some of Allie's from H&1/2, and some things Sark wrote years ago for Tomato Nation, and a whole load of things from other very well-known bloggers.

Anyway, that's how I found H&1/2. The person who'd put up our work as her own apparently had been doing it for some time on different blogging platforms; Allie mentions the same situation on a Blogger page (the one I was clued into was on WP). Some people need fucking hobbies, man. Better fucking hobbies.

But it was nice to see HN posts up there among the rarified works of people I really admire. I'll admit to getting quite a charge out of that.

Speaking of hobbies, as I mentioned above, the living room is painted. I had hoped to get the dining room painted too, but then I realized that a) eight hours is about four and a half hours too long to spend painting in one day, and b) there was nowhere to put the stuff in the dining room, as I'd piled all the stuff from the living room in there.

This is a natural consequence of my addiction to dwell blogs. I read them all day long if I'm not careful, and I come up with great ideas on how to make my own bead curtains from waxed paper and embroidery thread, or why decoupaging your refrigerator is a good thing, or which exact shade of white you should use with which decor. (For the record, I used Behr UPW all over the living room. It reflects colors nicely.) I could talk about the difference between midcentury modernism and Brutalism now.

Unfortunately, I have ten thumbs and no natural decorating talent, so my attempts at warm-and-cozy, midcentury cottage style came out looking like somebody's crazy Aunt Bossie had camped out in the living room. And had gotten into the cooking sherry and the paint, in that order.

Hence the change from chartreuse to white.

I'm also getting a new couch delivered sometime (I hope) soon. This will be a real couch, though condo-sized, because it struck me the other day that I have several friends who are on the enormous end of the size scale. They're all guys, and they're all very sizy, rangy, tall people. There's something kind of pathetic about watching poor Rob, who stands about six-five, trying to wedge himself onto my loveseat, with his knees up around his ears, and still make charming conversation. Friend Ed isn't much shorter, and Beloved Dmitri is big enough that he has to keep swatting the small planets that circle him away as though they're mosquitoes.

So, yeah. New walls, new couch. I gave the jute rug to the sweet hippies across the street, rescued a tail-less gecko from Notamus, and scrubbed the floor. Tomorrow I will continue to clean ALL the things.

I will post pictures when everything's a little closer to done. Right now you'd get a lovely tableau of the new shiny gorgeous walls, the empty bookshelves I just moved back into the room, and a floor buffer, vacuum, and all their attendant cords. Oh, and both cats sitting on the back of my grandfather's chair on their hind legs, chirping at something near the ceiling.

Good night.