Angels Don't Lie

The weather I hate is back. I guess it's back all over the country. Tomorrow (Friday) and most of the weekend it's supposed to get to 100 F. At least it isn't humid, and at least we can cool the house down to 60 F or so at night. I wish it would rain. Don't get me wrong, I like the sun and the light, it's just the heat I could do without.

The other day I was walking Arthur around our new neighborhood on a shopping trip and he started imitating the crows. It took him a few tries before I realized what he was doing. He's also learned the sign for bird, and I think today he wanted us to whistle, so he made the sign for bird followed by music.

The house move is going slowly. I think it really hasn't quite sunk in that we are home owners. We're also having to rethink our decorating style. Six years or so we agreed that we wanted a fairy tale cottage style. It was that or else sixties retro (which I think is a little sterile) or Elizabethan Palace (which Mark thinks is too exhausting).

Mark, who has more style than I do, noticed it first. Fairy tale cottage style doesn't work with the new house -- the ceilings, while high, are not vaulted, and there's no exposed rafters or wood banisters or ladders going up to lofts. It's a 1950's house that sort of but not quite uses golden rectangles in the floor layout.

Just to move something into the house I took the two gilt angels out of my writing loft and put them on the fireplace mantle in the new house. They don't go at all... OK, they go even less in the new house than they did in our current home (but they're gold and over the top, which is why I love them).

We'll have to negotiate a new style we both like. I think we might be able to go with an Arts And Crafts style or a Mission style. Art Deco is out. Mark has already vetoed hanging wattle fences as a border along the top of the walls as a way to add some texture to the house. He's also vetoed painting the walls as if the house were the Temple of Dendur, and he's vetoed placing a Japanese spirit gate outside the dinning area window to continue the line of portals that start with the front door and continue out through said window. I've taken down the offensive light fixtures in the bedrooms, but we haven't found something to replace them with.

I still think we should build a bunch of shoe-box-sized boxes, sink LEDs into them, paint the walls white, and then change the LED colors to whatever mood strikes us. We could even cycle through Christmas colors and bring out the gilt angels.

I don't know what we're going to do with our dog-sized Sphinx.