General improvements

The s.o. and I went to Home Depot tonight. We bought a Ryobi string trimmer and we're very excited about it.*

I also found a nice color to paint the dining room walls. The trim, as you've seen, is a sort of warm khaki color (I believe the pretentious Ralph Lauren paint color is called Raffia). We chose a mushroomy pale brown (inexplicably called Crab Apple) for the walls, which should make things nice and Southern Living-esque.**

---------

* It's not so much the purchase of the string trimmer that has us excited, although we do love our Ryobi power tools. It's the prospect of sending our neighbor completely over the edge that has us champing at the bit. You see, our neighbor Ed is a nutcase. He has a yard-care obsession. He uses some kind of yard machinery, be it his mower, his tiller, or his string trimmer, every single day without fail. This is not an exaggeration; it's absolutely true. And he does bizarre, inexplicable things, too. Once we saw him riding his riding mower while pulling his push-mower behind him. Another time we saw him weed-whacking in his sweet corn patch.

Ed and his wife aren't nice people. They used to let their untrained, hostile dogs run loose on our property, and inevitably one of them came after Silver when I was walking her on leash. I tried to back her out of the situation, and the dog bit me. Ed tried to blame it on me, then lied to my face when I asked whether the dogs were vaccinated against rabies.

For a while, we had trouble with Ed burning brushpiles on our property. His excuse was that we had left piles of brush and someone had to take care of them.

Anyhow, the point is that even if Ed has just mowed his yard to a golf-course-like level of perfection, he feels compelled to mow again immediately if we mow our yard. We toy with him, timing our mows so they fall about three hours after he finishes cutting the last blade of grass. We can't even begin to imagine what mischief we can wreak by strategically deploying our string trimmer. I picture him walking around his yard babbling incoherently, whacking his wife's flowers down to a uniform two-inch height. It'll be fun, I think.

** As a birthday gift, the s.o. gave me a subscription to Southern Living. I just got the new "Idea Houses" issue and was gratified to see pages and pages of ruby-red, yellowy-cream, and light-brown rooms. I thought I had odd tastes (or, even worse, might potentially be horribly design-impaired), but it turns out I'm ahead of the curve. Or not, I dunno. I mean, Southern Living is provincial by definition, right?