Woad Walk and Cranberry Crunch

Well, we ironed out the paint choices. Ultimately I convinced Dave that maintaining a neutral beige in the living room would be wise. In return, I let him choose a darker shade for the bedroom than I would normally want -- but I think it might wind up looking pretty good. It's a deep blue, somewhere between peacock and teal, with the mysterious name Woad Walk.

Someone asked yesterday, "Don't you like the paint colors you already have?" I actually do, even though we chose neither of them. The bedroom, a sort of deep gray/brown, was painted by the previous tenants -- just as we lived with their couch for more than a decade, we've lived with their bedroom walls. The living room was repainted several years ago, at least partially, but it's time again.

This will leave only the dining room with its original off-white paint job, and honestly, we're not in that room much.

One thing we're not certain about is how much of the trim the painters plan to do. Are they repainting all the baseboards and molding? When we had the halls, kitchen and bathroom painted years ago, we did not do the trim or the doors or windowsills or any of that stuff. So I'm not sure what to expect there.

Oh! And they're painting our front door. We're going from faded, flaky dark green to bright red. Cranberry Crunch, to be specific.

In other news, I made another batch of squash soup with one of the front-porch pumpkins, which have been sitting in the chilly closet under the stairs. (I forgot about them until last week, to be honest.) This soup wasn't as successful as the last. I used the brown pumpkin, which turned out to be sort of pale yellow inside. It was more like a spaghetti squash and when baked and then blended, the texture wasn't as smooth as I would have liked. I stirred in some spices, stock and sour cream, and I ate it for dinner last night. It hasn't killed me.

Now I only have that green one to deal with.

I also finished a book yesterday, "We Contain Multitudes" by Sarah Henstra, a gay coming-of-age/romance novel about two high school boys who are assigned to write letters to each other in English class and have a relationship as a result. The novel is epistolary, told through their letters, and one of them is a Walt Whitman enthusiast, hence the title. I had to set aside some quibbles -- no high-schoolers would write letters like these, recounting events between the sender and recipient that had just occurred -- but it was interesting and it drew me in and held me until the last pages. I could never make heads or tails of Whitman, and I admire anyone who can.

I finished it on the tube last night as I went to see the annual Winter Lights display at Canary Wharf. More on that tomorrow!

(Photos: A healthy-looking teasel in the garden, and our snowdrops about to bloom.)