I am having the sort of day where I’m going from place to place, crossing things off my to do list that have been there for a very long time, so I’m enjoying the satisfaction of completing tasks but also experiencing the bewilderment of wondering why I put them off for so long. One of those tasks was to go to Home Depot and get paint chips. We want to paint the playroom, as well as our bathroom, and Ellie is going to be staying with my parents for the long weekend in May and that provides the perfect opportunity to paint the playroom. (As an aside, my parents find it strange that we even HAVE a playroom. Maybe because we never had one when my siblings and I were kids? Anyway, I think it can’t be THAT strange. Or is it? Our basement isn’t finished, so it is cold and ugly and has a cement floor, so we bought a cheap couch and a cheap TV and turned one of our currently-empty bedrooms into a room for Ellie to play, until such a time as the basement gets finished. She also gets free-range time on the main floor of the house, but the upstairs room is where most of her toys are kept and also where we watch Sesame Street every morning. Well, it’s where SHE watches Sesame Street while I drink coffee and wish I was a morning person and also wish they would feature more Cookie Monster, because I feel like my life philosophy lines up rather nicely with his. If it is weird, you can tell me — I can take it! — but if it is not weird, I would also like to hear that too, because it is always bolstering to have someone agree with you, even over something so minor. You can also tell me my hair looks shiny, if you’d like. That would be nice to hear too.) Anyway. Paint colours. There is nothing on this planet I can dither over like I can over paint colours. Mike has empowered me to choose the colour for the playroom, which SOUNDS like a good thing, except I am paralyzed with indecision and we are on a clock here, people. The only furniture in there is a brown corduroy couch. I am thinking kind of a tangerine orange. Or a grass green. Or purple. Or something else entirely. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME CHOOSE. 

Speaking of things we didn’t have in my house growing up, we Andersons are not Slipper People. The Butlers (Mike’s family) ARE Slipper People, and some of them are also Australian, which means I have spent the last almost-nine years of marriage staring at my husband’s feet and wondering why he insists on wearing something so ugly as his beloved sheepskin slippers, which he has had a pair of for the entire time I have known him, replaced every few years whenever someone made the trek back to Oz to visit the fam. I replaced his sheepskin slippers this year at Christmas with something a little more aesthetically pleasing, and somehow it came to pass that Mike convinced me I needed to buy my own pair and just try them. I ordered a clearance pair from Old Navy, and it is like the clouds opened and the sun shone down and all around me was beauty and light and also coziness like I had never felt before. I immediately ordered another pair, and then eventually made the mistake of washing both of them, at which point the lining got all weird and now they are terrible. Old Navy doesn’t have any of these ones left, and I looked yesterday at Walmart and their selection was not very inspiring, and now I am bereft of slipper and quite heartbroken about it. I managed to live 30 years without owning or wearing a single pair of slippers, and now after a week I am wondering how I can be expected to go on.