Status as home-improvement guru soon to be reinstated!

So we had the guy who previously built us new walls after we got air conditioning installed come over to look at the somewhat-destroyed-bathroom-walls situation. He said he'd come over and TEACH us how to fix it ourselves. He told us that he taught a guy (the son of Sen. Pryor of Arkansas, he said) to plaster his walls and he went on to become a professional plasterer. Mr. T&A would prefer that he just do it himself, but I am very psyched about learning how to do it, and perhaps becoming a professional plasterer myself. Yahh!

Plaster repair despair

Several weeks ago Mr. T&A and I embarked on the project of painting our bathroom. We were fresh off a smashing success in painting our office ("Plantain," a very nice yellowish green), and the bathroom is teensy, so it seemed like it should be relatively painless.

Ahh, the folly. We've spent eons chipping off layers of wallpaper and paint (the bastards who painted over a wallpaper border should be condemned to an eternity of trying to remove it). This has resulted in a disaster zone of cracked, holey plaster with random patches of paint. Tonight I attempted to patch some of it with spackle, but it was like trying to smooth out a 90-year-old's face with frosting.

To add to the problem, the other day, weeks after we started, we realized that our house is old so some of the paint we're chipping off probably contains lead. And we're having a baby shower here next weekend. (For somebody else, not me!) Pregnant ladies are not supposed to inhale lead dust. So now we need to clean the house using an EPA-approved method involving a HEPA vacuum cleaner and 3 separate buckets, and even so I feel like the worst baby shower hostess ever. (Plus maybe we've already lead-poisoned ourselves.)

Anyway, I have now officially hit bottom on the bathroom, and have acquiesced to Mr. T&A's plan to hire somebody else to do it. I now realize that I had been harboring visions of myself as a budding home-improvement guru, but now those dreams are dashed. Maybe I'll try gardening instead.

Help me pick a pillow!

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I'm trying to pick a throw pillow for my couch. Which one do you like? Imagine it on a velvet-ish reddish couch (technically "paprika"-colored) in a room with various blue colors, some orange, some yellow, and a bunch of other colors. As the artist formerly known as P. Diddy would (inaccurately and probably inappropriately) say, Vote or Die!