Freshaire paint - totally worth it!

Well, I'm painting my room, and I was SO HAPPY to find that my local Home Depot finally offers a low-VOC choice!!! It was about 35% more than me getting "normal" paint.


Freshaire paints don't have quite the color selection of, say, Behr or Glidden (it's closer to Ralph Lauren's palatte), but I am blissfully happy with my choices of "Reef Pink" and "Arbor Vine"... and my sinuses are even more happy with the fact that there is barely any smell at all. One of my housemates, when I apologized for any smell he might have noticed, said "Oh! That was paint? It smelled a little funny, but i had no idea you had painted the room!"

I think that is pretty much a perfect endorsement of the product. That and my lack of migraine!

I painted two walls green and two pink, then added some funky striping running around the room.

Bovine Ambition

I want to be exactly like Alexe P. van Beuren.

Check out her latest column in the Oxford Eagle:

Bovine Ambition

Outside my study window lives the only sign of my agricultural ambitions: a fifteen by twenty plot of raised beds, including a pre-existing boxwood, and forty-one heirloom tomato plants.

Thirty-nine, come to think of it. The blight got two that I ripped out yesterday.

I am twenty-five years old and there are days when I want nothing more than to rise at dawn, don overalls, and pad forth from my sleeping family to go deal with chickens, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and yes, a cow. A milk cow, to be exact.

Somehow, the whole town knows of my ambitions. Yesterday at the farmers' market, the husband of an acquaintance asked me how my pursuit of cow-dom was going... (Click to read more)

This chick is soooooooo awesome. If she weren't already married I'd be hightailing it down to Mississippi with a ring in one hand and a cow in the other.

summer time, and the livin' is LAZY

23 days between posts... my, aren't I turning into quite the lazy-butt!

In my defense, things are moving quite fast in all this heat, so fast it's hard to keep up.

I have decided to rent out the Graybar condo. Despite all the remodeling we did (and how darn cute i think it looks!), we were unable to sell it and frankly, folks, I'm just ready to move on. I'll be moving over toward the 12 south district (walking to the frothy monkey and the devi clinic? yes, please!) and two very sweet girls will be moving into Graybar.

Needless to say, moving out is taking up a lot of head space! Mixed in with all of that are money-thoughts. The Prius has been the "biggest" green thing I've done, and it has been cause for lots of thinking about both my place in the big world and my little concerns about money and quality of life.

The past 8 months have been a time of great changes for me in the way i think about my life and my goals about how i want to live it. Living like a hotel guest in the condo while it's been on the market has been at the center of these thoughts... one big thought was "should I sell the Prius?"

Cons:
- I only have to fill up once a month most of the time
- what am I gonna buy to replace it? some old clunker that breaks down all the time? I've been using the Prius to drive to Memphis & Chattanooga for my new job and it really pays off b/c the company reimburses mileage at $0.505 a mile!
- if i get a bike, what the hell am I going to do when it rains? when i have to look nice (i.e. not sweaty?)
- I just bought a new set of tires for it
- I am seriously attached to the cute little thing

Pros: (here's where it gets interesting)
- According to the Kelley Blue Book site, I could actually private-party sell my car for just $1,413 less than the loan i took out on it originally... that's $2,554 more than I currently owe on the loan. What i boils down to is that I could basically sell the prius and it would have only cost me $6K to use it for 17 months.
- If those numbers are correct, I could get a bike and stop using gas pretty much altogether (just renting a car when i need to drive out of town - and if those numbers are correct, I could rent a car 40% of the year.)

So.
I'm really having a hard time with this.
Given that the condo has not sold, while the renters will be covering my mortgage costs, I still have the debt i incurred in remodeling the little beastie. Not having a car payment would mean i could pay those suckers down much faster than I will currently be able to.
But, I whine to myself, I like her so muuuuuuuuch...

Well, a happy Friday to you all. I'm looking forward to a weekend of a little packing (I probably have 2 boxes of stuff in addition to the furniture) and a lot of taking advantage of my last weekend to be blissing out on the back patio. This time next week, chickadees, I'll be out of that condo until at least July 31 2009.