Painting The Game Room

The time has come to paint the game room, aka Wil's former room. All the holes have been patched for quite some time and the white patched hole marks were glaring against the medium gray walls. We wanted to lighten it up. 

I know the room is a mess now but we pushed everything to the middle in preparation for the painting.

At work they had asked if there was any other department I might want to work in and I said "Paint". So for the past few weeks I've been working in the Paint Department once or twice a week. I really like it.

We finally narrowed our choice of color down from the 40 or so chips I had brought home. I was excited to mix my own paint when I was at work the next day.  

Turns out I was in a bit of a hurry and I mixed the wrong color.  It was one of those three color chips and I had marked the color I wanted, but when I went to mix it the chip was folded up and I made the wrong color! A coworker tried to lighten it up for me and I brought it home anyway.

We painted a few spots on the wall to see if it would be okay.

We thought it would be okay and I started painting.

It wasn't okay.

It was glowing. It was taking over the room. It was overwhelming. 

It was nauseating.

It reminded me of when my sister painted one of her rooms orange and we jokingly referred to it as "CalTrans" orange. Icky.

I had only used one can before we decided it was enough and we could not live with it. Fortunately our store has a very liberal return policy and I was able to return the two unused gallons.

I got the paint chips out again and started over. This time I got the 8 ounce samples and brought them home.

I still wasn't happy with those colors and brought a couple more home to try on the wall (no photos of that). But I finally decided on a color and bought the paint. This time I didn't mess up on the mixing. Here is the new color. 

I got everything but the three access doors done. Maybe on my next days off.

SOOOO much better!!!

The next step will be to paint the three access doors, then clean up. It's going to be a nice room again soon.

In other news I did not get the Paint Department job, but I did get a promotion anyway. I will be moving to the Hardware/Tools Department which is fine too, because I love my power tools! Also I was offered a full time position so I'm no longer part-time. I'll be working a full 40 hours a week and I got a bit of a raise too (about $1.00/hr). That means I can get store health insurance too. It's not a whole lot of savings but it's better than before. 

So, things are looking brighter!

Challah

I believe it wasn't all that long ago I mentioned I was starting to get a bunch of eggs every day. Despite my friend from work's assurances that he would take all the eggs I could give him, when I asked him recently if he was ready for yet another batch he admitted that he couldn't keep up.

This is what we have to date:

In a bowl...

Three 18 packs full...

Leftover from yesterday's gathering after breakfast this morning...

Since it's Easter today and I was fortunate enough to be scheduled off for the day, I decided to bake some sort of sweet egg bread. I started my Google search with "egg bread" and after a bit I found "challah" and decided to go with that.

I'm not going to post the recipe here but if you are interested I used Smitten Kitchen's recipe (click here). It was easy and didn't take all day.

Here are my results.  Two loaves, the first a regular three braid. Kind of boring looking, in my opinion.

The second was a six braid, more interesting but next time I'll make it a bit prettier.

And in case you were wondering it really tastes good, too. If you like Hawaiian bread you'll like this bread.

I will use the bread not only as bread, but for French toast and bread pudding. 

Happy Easter!!

Skin Tags Removed

Clydes's skin tags were successfully removed. He had two spots taken out, the one on his hip (the grub chrysalis) and the one on his underside (the deformed nipple).

Everything went very well.

The doctor said even his blood work was excellent, which is good news since we can't give him the DHLLP vaccination. He's allergic to that and gets a terrible case of hives and paw and facial swelling. His face looks somewhat like a sharpei.

In any case he's doing very well and we can get the stitches removed on Monday!  :-)

No Joke

Clyde has a couple of strange skin tags. He's had them for several years but they were not really that noticeable. Lately, however, one in particular has been bothering him a bit and he bites at it and it swells up. I used to joke that it was another nipple coming out of his hip.

Now it looks like some kind of grub chrysalis.

Gross.

Another of Clyde's skin tags is on his belly area. 

This one looks cancerous to me. It has gotten a little bigger too, but not at the same rate as the chrysalis. Clyde has an appointment on Thursday to get them hacked off. And any others they might find while he's there. (Like maybe that other little black spot in the upper right of the picture.)

Today I did a quick exam of Clyde to see if there were any other skin tags that maybe we missed. 

Yup, there was a lump on his neck under his collar. 

Yet there was something suspiciously familiar about that particular mass. I put my glasses on and got a flashlight and ~YIKES~ it was a TICK!!!

I wasn't going to wait for his doctor appointment and gathered the materials necessary to do the tick removal procedure. Alcohol, tweezers, antibiotic ointment, flashlight, and reading glasses. Alcohol swabbed tweezers on the tick as close as possible to Clyde's skin, then pull firmly straight out. Drop the tick into a tiny container of alcohol to show the doctor, and swab the giant hole left behind with more alcohol and then the ointment. 

The operation was successful. There were no pieces left behind.

YUCK!! 

Who knows how long that thing was on him. We do have ticks around here but mostly just on the deer. We had visited our friends in Roseburg a couple weeks ago. Did he pick it up then? 

In any case, you can see how deeply it had imbedded itself. Those are not wings, that's hair that came along when I pulled the tick out by the head.

So, Thursday Clyde gets his other growths removed. Later this month Ollie will get her annual shave. This is the month of the animals I guess.