Pink and green and mauve, oh my....

I've been buried in paint colors..... those little cards of paint colors that are on display at Home Depot and Lowe's....... are there that many colors in the rainbow? And who makes up the names for those colors, anyway? I can see a whole room of people looking at paint cards, trying to come up with names other than Light Pink, Medium Pink, and Dark Pink. Personally, I think they should give numbers instead of names to all of the paint colors. I had my mind set on one particular color but then I looked at the name on the card and it was "Tangerine something-or-other." I don't much care for tangerine anything, so I put that card back on the rack.

We've picked out a color for the main bathroom on the second floor.... the top half is wall-papered with a pretty Victorian print, but the bottom half of the walls are just white. Plain old white-bread white. Hard. Color-less. Character-less. And we all know I've been on a war against white walls.... so I thought a very pale green would be perfect for in there. I found a color called "Whitened Sage." I nearly put that color card back just because of the "Whitened" in the name of it... but I got a sample of the paint and it looks very nice in there. When I first painted a small part of a wall with that color, I thought it was too white, but it dried into a silvery-jade pale green. Perfect, because that's the exact color of the leaves in the floral wallpaper in there. They should have named that color "Silver Sage."

The living room walls have been a trial..... I now have three colors on a wall down there... all samples that we thought we would try. The light green one is too minty, the darker green is too circus-y, the green that was there to begin with is too depressing, but the mauve-rose color that we picked seems to be just perfect. The name on that card is "Rhubarb," and I almost didn't want to try that color because, like tangerine, I don't really like rhubarb. But it seemed like the perfect color... vibrant and rich, which is what that room needs. We're hoping that when the sun goes down and we turn on the lights in the living room, the "Rhubarb" will remain deep and rich, rather than maroon and muddy.

I spent part of the day yesterday taking down the Valentine decorations.... and then I debated whether or not to put out the St. Patty's Day things. All my little glass shamrocks and porcelain leprechauns..... they're packed away in the boxes and ready to come out and play for the month of March. I'm also thinking of doing a "March Cookie Madness" party for the ladies around here... a cookie exchange, like you would do at Christmas time, but somehow no matter how much of a head-start you get before the holidays, there just is never enough time for cookie-baking. So just because December is over doesn't mean that no one wants to be making cookies, does it?

Tonight is the first episode of this season's "The Amazing Race." And pretty soon, the new season of "Dancing With the Stars" will begin. Two shows that I just enjoy watching.... and my husband is into The Amazing Race also, so we watch that one together every week.... he records it and then we watch it later so he can zip thru the commercials. Which I may start doing with "Dancing With the Stars." Those two-hour shows are chock-full of commercials, and I know that by zipping thru all of the ads, it would take up so much less of my time. I'll see...... I think it's the lure of watching it live as it's happening is what's stopping me from recording it.

We're thinking that we're out of the winter-weather season here. Aside from just one or two cold snaps that brought just-freezing temperatures, our 'winter' has been very mild and Texas-like. Next week starts Mardi Gras in Galveston.... or was that this weekend when it began? I've lost touch with the goings-on in Galveston since we moved up here to the Hill Country. We used to like going to the afternoon Mardi Gras parades on The Island when we lived in Clear Lake... but we haven't been to Galveston since we came up here.

Maybe I should be planning a Mardi Gras party........