It's Not The Paint Fumes

The Monkey cooked up a batch of banana-peel hooch last night. Puppen are entirely unused to bananas: we often experience a little giddiness with the tropical fruits. (My Great-Aunt Acacia was the real cause of Australia's Christmas Day Disaster in 1974 after eating a whole avocado.)

 I was knowing that this might  happen eventually when The Missus brought the still home for the boys, even though most of the time Puppen only experience these kinds of effects with a really fine vintage ink.

I shall have to ask The Missus to make sure that all the banana peels go straight out to the compost next time.

Gunilla, it's such a shame - The Monkey knows Mischa can't even smell banana-peel gin without falling down. Mischa also seems to be wearing my carpet slippers, for some reason. ( At least they didn't drunk-dial Crown Princess Victoria Ingrid Alice Desiree again; fortunately the Swedish Secret Service has had a lot of  experience explaining tomten-related incidents to the press. )

Renovating The Big House

It has been being over a year now since Mr bought The Big House for the Missus on their anniversary. Everyone moved in in a rush, except, of course for Mischa and Beech. (The Monkey was arriving a few months after the Big House, as I recall.)

The Big House on Vic's Deli side. You can see, Gunilla, all the scrapings of the balsa-wood window trims  on the floor. The Missus keeps muttering to herself about the gouges in the balsa, and where on earth her miter box has gone, and so forth.

Now The Missus has decided, after none of us could make up our mind about which colors we liked, to renovate The House. Most of us were sleeping through the summer anyway, she said, so we are all moving into a large, comfortable box for two weeks of invernation while she sands, paints and repairs.

The bedroom attic side. We are not poor in pots, pans or paintings, Gunilla! One is always having something to drink the good coffee out of, and eat a little bit of toast while contemplating the artist's hand.

The Missus went to the paint shop and was tormented by the wild variety of colors possible.

For Victorine, she thought, perhaps some wonderful buttery yellows and deep shades of tomato red.

For Clovis's guest room, maybe a soupcon of blue-green and turquoise with shades of smoke-purple, puce, and a splash of cream and Chinese cinnabar?

 For the deFleury cousins in the coffee room, probably some muted 1930s florals - hydrangea, heliotrope, deep rose, cactus green, and so forth.

A few of the deFleury cousins. They do love to read the morning papers in the Marigold Room.

It was, Gunilla, an impossible task.

When The Missus is seeing the shelf of mistake paints, she is seizing the whole idea of using other people's cast-offs to paint The Big House, since so much of what we are about is coming straight from junk drawers and sidewalks and the corners of boxes. Other people's unwanted treasures, is what we do best, really.

So, with the paints chosen (almost indescribable colors, but cheap, Gunilla, and, I think, quite pretty as well as serviceable) The Missus begins...



Reading in the nursery before The Missus moves everyone out for painting and cleaning.