Your Days are Numbered

I keep saying this to my kitchen. I say, "Your ugly days are numbered, Kitchen." The space has beautiful bones, and it's wonderfully roomy, but, like most of this new-to-us house, it's painted in what I've come to call communist cream. It's not a bright, dazzling white, and it's certainly not warm and earthy. It's drab, drab, drab, and the color I imagine they use for the insides of hospitals and other public facilities in communist countries. It's state-issue cream. The kind of color I can only imagine painting my walls if forced to. Then there are the cabinets, which are painted a very drab celery and cranberry. How these colors relate to one another I do not know, and can only fathom that at some point a very heavy, very colonial window treatment tied the whole lot together. In the absence of said window treatment, however, this color scheme appears little more than "touched", and by that I mean crazy.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My point here is that I've decided my kitchen's ugly days are numbered, and that in this new year my kitchen will undergo a great transformation. I'm not talking new appliances or countertops, all of that is fine. Just the paint. While I haven't yet informed my husband (though he can probably see the ruthless glint in my eye as I stare down the ugly communist cream each day), the plan has been set in action. Paint chips are lining themselves up in my mind, vying for attention. Spring I think. My kitchen gets to slump around in its ugly clothes and slobby slippers until spring.

I have my eye on other things as well, this blog being one. "What I am going to do with you, Blog?" I say. "Have you become just one more thing I can't get around to? Forgotten and needy like so many of my plants? Crumpled and forlorn like my drycleaning?" Though I haven't been actively using it, I have been thinking about the future of this little blog. First thought is cut your losses. After writing all day, I don't generally have the stamina to develop anything of note, plus I don't like to have it bleed into my personal time--my valuable time with my family, my precious hour or so a day with a cup of tea and a good book in bed. I love that that time is gloriously laptop-free. Plus, this blog is also a wonderful diversion, a perfect proscration tool. Since procrastination is strictly off limits in 2010, this is another strike against poor blog.

But on second thought, it occurs to me that perhaps what I need is a clear blogging purpose. I have plenty of time to discuss the comings and goings of my days with others, and I run these little things over and over in my mind during workouts. Frankly, I get a little sick of my own thoughts on the day-to-day. My cooking lately is no subject worthy of documentation. I've been questioning myself, what would I want to track, what could I use an outlet for? The home renovations? Those could take awhile. Then my reading occurred to me. It's the one thing I do completely alone, and, while my husband keeps track of what I'm into and my father and I often trade books back and forth, I think I miss writing about literature. I think back to all my letters to authors over the past couple years. Yeah, I could probably use another outlet. I think it will also be a great way to remember what I want to read, because I often forget. Maybe I'll even tell some people about it. Maybe I'll even get some good recommendations.

So, the blog gets a second chance. It will need a new name, a face lift of it's own for sure. And there will be accountability tracking, blog! Better look sharp.

My reading list for 2010 (so far and in no particular order):

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (in progress)
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
The Big Necessity: Adventures in Human Waste, Rose George
A Good Fall, Ha Jin
Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith
Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
The Painted Drum, Louise Erdich
The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat
Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Say You're One of Them, Uwen Akpan
The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos


Happy 2010!