t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


i woke up this morning watching saturday broadcast television (i don't yet have cable in my bedroom) in bed. i saw ultimate muscle: the kinnikuman legacy on fox kids, kind of like animated wrestling except it even more outrageous and it's imported from japan. i watched two episodes, surprisingly good, with kind of subversive humor (are our kids safe from japanese brand comedy? we don't have panty vending machines like they do there). with characters like "kid muscle" (resembled a deformed muscular male sex doll from the mad max universe), "terry kenyon" (reminds me of southern style alex jones), and "checkmate" (he doesn't feel pain because as a child he was severely abused, plus he has three interchangeable heads with gives him different chess piece derived powers), you can't lose! i'll make a note of it for next weekend, i can relive my childhood with a bowl of cereal watching cartoons in the morning. i remember the first time i saw saturday morning cartoons 22 years ago, i was like a kid's dream, one day a week they'd be wall-to-wall cartoons. unfortunately, those days are gone, but hopefully networks will reinvest money back in saturday morning programming for kids. children might not have money but their parents do and those little people are voracious consumers as well.

i got out of bed when my mother called asking if i was up yet and that she wanted to bring over my grandmother to see the newly painted kitchen before she left for the airport. groan. so my grandmother and mother came, along with my sister (who hadn't seen the new color yet), plus my aunt lili and uncle matthew who just happened to be at the cafe and tagged along for the tour as well (their first and last visit was last month). my grandmother didn't think the color was all that bad, and my mother agreed with her. mu sister on the other hand, i thought she was going to have a seizure, comparing the color of the wall to the bright orange tank top she was wearing. actually, in the morning, with the natural sunlight (despite the fact that this morning was terribly overcasted with rain), the kitchen walls do indeed look red and actually not so bad compared to what it looked like last night. i decided to give it some thought, but no work would be done in the kitchen today.

when all my relatives left, manny stopped by completely unannounced to see the place. his last visit i hadn't painted the colors yet on the walls, so it was his first time seeing the rooms come to life. he had some reservations about the red in the kitchen, after i've sort of made my peace with the color. manny also gives me some tips on how to paint the ceiling edges with a sponge brush and an edger, versus doing it by hand which was what i was doing last night. after he left, mark hickey and his wife deb came by to see the place as well. apparently my house is a popular stop on rainy weekends! mark hadn't been here since back in july when there was still general contracting work done in the house. deb had never seen the place at all (at least not in person). both of them liked the red color, deb saying it was "unique." by then i was strongly in favor of repainting the walls again. the red is just too dramatic, i don't want people to be assaulted by the color when they go into the kitchen.

after mark and deb left (not before eating some of my peanuts, it's hard to resist, and making a joke about my new door knobs), my sister came back to pick up some home depot stuff to return/exchange, at the same time convincing me to repaint the kitchen. with her help i picked italiano rose as a potential new color. italiano rose is a more neutral red with violet/red undertones, unlike salsa which has an orange undertone and much brighter. she pushed for me to get a small quart of paint right away and first paint a section of the wall to see, but i wanted to wait and get a few other opinions first.

i prepped the bathroom for painting by first removing the water tank from the toilet, so i could paint the small section of wall behind it. without the water tank, flushing was achieved by pouring in a pot of water in the toilet bowl, old school style. next, i taped all the edges of the walls/tiles that need to be protected from the paint. following that i covered the floor with rosen paper, taping it securely down. by the time i was ready to paint, my parents came by. i showed up the new color i'd picked, italiano rose. my mother could go either way, but my father wanted to see a lighter color, in order to make the kitchen look bigger than it already is. he was thinking of a pink color, but pink is definitely a color that would drive me insane as well if i had to look at it everyday. so in the end i decided on autumn red, which sounds like a deep color, but it's actually in between pink and red, sort of a dark pink or a light red. i've decided to get a quart and do a test paint first before buying a gallon. autumn red is actually similar to the original kitchen color which i believe was carnation, but autumn red is slightly lighter.

i started priming the bathroom, and that's when pan susu (childhood friend of my father) and his son theodore dropped by. while my father was giving them the tour, my mother helped me prime the edges. when she was done, she started to climb off the barstool she was balancing on in order to paint the higher spots, but fell off instead. fortunately it wasn't a bad fall and she didn't suffer any injuries other than maybe a bruise and a slight cut on her back. she didn't do anymore painting after that. i took over her edging duty (i'd already finished with the roller) and did the ceiling edges (easy, because it's still in the priming stage). when i finished priming the bathroom, my parents left with pan susu and theodore. i made dinner which consisted of two hot dogs and a glass of egg nog (for lunch, i had some leftover fried rice my parents had brought over from yesterday). i ate it in the living room (i always eat in the living room, that's where the tv's at), watched a pbs documentary about islam. just when it got really interesting, started to talk about the ottoman empire, my friend gary called me up and for the next 2 hours i was on the phone being his sound board as he griped about some personal problems.

a little bit after 1am, while going to the bathroom, i suddenly decided to paint the first coat of white semi-gloss on the ceiling and all the trims. that last well into 3am, but because of the end of daylight savings time, i was done at the new time of 2am. after it was all over, i wanted to wash up before going to bed, but since i was afraid of splattering water on the new paint (not yet completely dry), i decided to take a bath instead, getting a nice hot soak while reading one of my favorite magazines (hint: it's got rebecca romijn-stamos on the cover).