It's A BEE-U-TEE-FUL Day In Paradise!

The rain has passed through and things are looking up on the water front here in Northern California. It's not back by any stretch of the imagination, but the lake shown below (Lake Folsom up near Sacramento) has risen by 28.5 feet this winter:

www.dailymail.co.uk

That helps a lot, but there's still water table depletion that has to be restored. Smaller lakes and ponds are still leaking out into the aquifers so they still look dry despite the rain we've been getting. If we can get more and more and more through April we'll be in pretty good shape for the summer. Then we'll need at least another winter like this one if we're going to recover much at all.

This morning coming toward work I looked up and it looked as if Mt. St. Helena had a dusting of snow on it. I was far enough away that I thought it might be clouds, but they just stayed there and I wondered. Coming across the hills I hit the ridge above the northern Napa Valley, a perfect view of the mountain and, sure enough! There was snow - a dusting that's probably gone by now, the time I'm writing this hours later, but it was there and it was pretty.

We are looking at more rain over the next few days - into next week if the weather gurus have it right, so more chances of snow and filling up of dried out things.

Aside from that, looking inside the four walls, my billings are caught up for the moment and I've been able to turn attention to other things. Not quite at The Stack, but close. Perhaps by this afternoon, after I get my Gantt chart project done? Hmm.

I do have a lot of quickie things in The Desktop Stack that I can probably get done in a matter of hours. Then I have The Box No. One Stack. That's a box of stuff I inherited a couple of months ago that I haven't done more than glance through. I'll combine it with The Box No. Two Stack that arrived just before Christmas. That Stack is small and has interesting looking keys intermixed. And they're real keys - as in they fit in locks - but they're more interesting than your garden-variety keys and I'm curious as to what they might go with. Uh oh. I hope it's not the equipment we recently auctioned off. Hmm. That is worth a phone call.

From there I can swing into The Box Nos. Three and Four Stacks. Those are things I received almost a year-and-a-half ago. I pretty well know what's in those, I just have to organize it and make sure stuff isn't inter-mixed with other stuff. All part of the job and part of the interest since I do occasionally find interesting things. Like those intriguing keys I have to call about.

We got the carpet laid yesterday and it is gorgeous! I was worried about the color. It's predominately red and gray - kind of like marbled meat if I'm honest - and I was concerned that once it was laid I was going to have a serious case of buyer's remorse. After all, I didn't want the room to look like a crime scene bathed in blood.

The carpet guys talked to me and I talked to them and we agreed on how to lay it out to minimize the bloodbath appearance and it came out beautifully.

See, I worry about this stuff now after my experience thirty years ago. Then I was office manager for a company that occupied the entire floor of a downtown San Francisco office building. Our landlord's representative came in one day because she was updating the elevator lobbies in the building and wanted to change things up from floor to floor to make it more interesting. She showed me a little swatch and I said "that's nice" and she showed me the carpet samples and I said "that's nice". What I did not do was visualize the end result. Two weeks later I got to the building, got onto the elevator. A few floors later the doors opened and... I swear to god it looked like a whorehouse! It was horrible.

The "soft pink" that she had showed me on the little paint swatch? Glaring! The royal purple carpet had a band of pink running through it as a border. In the context of someone's private home (providing it's a brothel) it might work. In the context of a professional office building? NO! A resounding NO.

I immediately got on the phone to her (as soon as I got into the office and to my desk since this was the days before cell phones) and said NO! She came and took a look and agreed. A week went by and I refused, flat-out, to get off the elevator on that floor. Instead, I would go to a different floor and take the stairs because I didn't want to be associated in any way, shape or form with that mess. Finally, the weekend after I nearly had heart failure, they came in and repainted the walls plain white. The pink was so glaring it still showed through, offering a soft, shell-like pink glow, but it was at least tolerable. Not the full fix since the carpet was still there, but at least I didn't want to die of mortification every time I got off the elevator.

After that I know to visualize BIG. Get the big paint swatch or, better still, get a sample you can put on an unobtrusive spot on the wall so you can get a sense of what the finished product will look like.

This time around, when we were selecting the tile, I got squares - full-on two-foot x two-foot squares in a couple of different colors and styles. Then I had my roomies weigh in and we all agreed on the color. Then it was the execution and, as I say, I did not want the executed room to look as if an execution had taken place. And it doesn't. It's very nice and goes well with the floor in the rest of the space which is brick reddish concrete - a bit redder and darker than the terracotta of a Spanish tile floor.

Other than that, things are quiet and happy and calm. I don't know how long it will last, but I'm reveling in the situation now.

Here's wishing you a happy, quiet and calm day, too.

Best~
Philippa

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