Only Horses Sweat...

A wise English woman I know (Mummy...) once told me, "Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow." Believe it or not, I actually had the opportunity to repeat this quote to someone yesterday, when they remarked about my not-sweating in the midst of a blistering 98 degree afternoon. I felt quite witty for pulling this quote out of a hat, though I think my charm may have been lost on the person, as he was distracted by the river of sweat running down his face and into his eyes.



I'm not sure if you've heard, but we're having a heat wave in New York City...

Because of the unbearable heat and my ever-growing gigantic belly, I thought it would be best to begin painting our bedroom as soon as I had a spare moment. I readied my supplies (Benjamin Moore's Healing Aloe for the walls, BM's Decorator's White for the ceilings and trim), brought along the radio, and entered the desert wasteland that was once our lovely bedroom. For reasons not fully understood, our bedroom is currently about 15 degrees hotter than the rest of the apartment, which added an extra-special twist to this particular project. The dog walked in there, panted three times, and then headed back for the cool comfort of our living room.


(It should be noted that we don't actually have an air conditioner installed right now. I don't know why-- it's sitting down in the basement of our building-- but the heat hasn't really disturbed us much.)

Until I started painting that room today. I literally soaked through the t-shirt I was wearing... My legs were "glowing" so much that I could have used a slip-n-slide without a hose... Call me a horse! I was sweating buckets! The good news, aside from sweating out every last drop of pregnancy water retention, is that the bedroom is now fully painted (above), and we can move onto the next horrible task at hand: priming, painting, and sealing the floors! Just because I love a good, late-night panic attack, let's review what is left to be completed on the apartment renovation list:

• Prime and paint bedroom floors
• Prime and paint checkerboard pattern on hallway floor
• Touch up checkerboard pattern in living room and dining room
• Seal painted floors w/ water based polyurethane to prolong the life of my arduous checkerboard patterned paint job
• Paint living room and dining room walls
• Install Sputnik chandelier ( I can't wait for it to arrive!)
• Furnish nursery
• Reassemble our bedroom
• Organize /reorganize our closets now that the IKEA cabinets are installed
• The minutia list almost makes me more anxious than the rest of the list combined...! Buy self-adhesive frosted glass paper to make it so you can't see into the baby's closet (to be explained), buy magnets and hardware for all of the doors, put up window hardware in the baby's room, do the kitchen touch-ups, paint the baby's closet, build a rolling clothes hamper for the bathroom to free up space in the laundry closet for the stroller... (And let's not even talk about cleaning! Our apartment is dustier than The South during the depression, and I think I've cultivated a special Claritin-resistant strain of allergies from sleeping here every night.)
• Also to-do: Possibly flee the city, leaving our apartment in shambles and our bed in the dining room, and changing my name to something anonymous, like Jane Smith.

So, yeah... There's a lot left to do before we can call this project "completed". However, we're gratefully on the hook to attend a wedding in far-upstate-western New York this weekend, so we're going to blow this sweaty, dusty popsicle stand in favor of cooler climates with all the comforts of The Holiday Inn, including a pool and aggressive AC accessibility. William the dog CANNOT wait. Another day of these temperatures wearing that fur coat, and he might well have worn out his ability to tongue-pant-sweat.

Check back tomorrow and I will post the whole story behind our 
new IKEA closets, why I'm not a sell-out or an idiot for buying them,

and why Fernando is the best contractor in NYC...