Wow, the first month of the new year is behind us, and I can hardly believe it. Those 31 days zoomed by for me, probably because I was house painting for the first three weeks of the month. I fell into bed every night, exhausted.

Now, of course, I’m reveling in my thick carpet and unblemished walls. It was worth it, and we’re thinking of tackling the pantry and my office with paint brushes (and, if I’m very, very good and very, very lucky, crown molding in my office).

There’s no rest for the wicked! February looms, and it’s dotted with special events. Groundhog Day, the Super Bowl (is anyone else psyched about the Honda commercial riffing on “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”?), Valentine’s Day (my Beloved and I are negotiating on how to celebrate), Presidents Day, Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday and an extra-special extra day of the month: Feb. 29. I’m also hoping to celebrate some more 50-degree days like I got in January — that’s special.

With all that’s going on, I looked for a quote online and found this gem, which made me chuckle, it’s so full of doom and gloom.

“February is a suitable month for dying.  Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”

~  Anna Quindlen, One True Thing

Here’s to hoping for more out of February than, well, dying. Here’s to sunshine and light.

The temps hit 50 degrees in northern Illinois today which is unusual. My coat was too heavy and I had to remove my scarf, I was so warm.This is not what one expects in late January.

It was a typical Monday at work with long to-do list and deadlines looming, and then I heard some unhappy news about one of my former employers which affects colleagues I care about. And that’s not all. My adored stepson, who was visiting for the weekend, flew back home to Minnesota today. When he’s around, we’re reminded why we miss him.

When my Beloved and I returned from depositing Caswell at the airport, we retreated to the hot tub. It was still relatively warm at 8 p.m. (for late January anyway), and I sank into the steamy water with my head turned up to the starry sky.

I spend so much time with my head down, shuffling along, getting work done, thinking about the next task; I took the dog for a walk — a special treat on a January evening — and spent the whole time watching her, watching for other dogs, waiting for her to poop, keeping my head down.

In the hot tub, it was so refreshing to look up and gaze at the stars. The back yard was quiet, and we didn’t speak. Only the tub spoke in burps and giggles.

I floated in the water. The lights of a plane crawled across the sky.

For a few moments, there was no bad news. No to-do list. No melancholy. The earth was hurtling through the  starry sky, and I was just along for the ride.

Stillness amidst the chaos.

Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen — that stillness becomes a radiance.

~ Morgan Freeman

Have you seen “Renovation Realities” on DIY network? It’s a half-hour show about real-life remodeling projects, almost always gone wrong. Every episode starts with a demolition project (and usually ends with a mess).

Thank goodness we didn’t have to demolish anything. We just repainted.

As far as a kitchen redecorating project, there’s not a lot to redecorate if you don’t install new countertops, cabinets or appliances. Nope, the worst thing about the kitchen (or the worst thing we could afford to address about the kitchen) was the patches on the ceiling where we removed a hanging pot rack when we moved in four years ago.

Oh, and the closest we came to “remodeling” in this project was remudding a corner in the dinette nook.

Paint covers a multitude of sins.

Here are the before photos:

Dinette nook: Before.

Kitchen desk: Before.

We extended the Whispering Pine from the living room through two walls of the kitchen, and replaced the lampshade lighting fixture with something less country. On the back wall (or possibly front wall, depending on your perspective) of the kitchen, we chose Tin Lizzie — a muted purple — to cover the boring old yellow.

Dinette nook: After

Kitchen desk: After

Now we’re looking for a functional object d’art to mount over the doggie dishes, maybe some shelving. That, or we’re buying an industrial size stainless steel refrigerator topped with a custom cupboard and a marble countertop bar area.

Right. We’ll plan that when “Renovation Realities” calls us back.

Nanni was featured in the Chicago Tribune yesterday for his restaurant design which uses old gymnasium floors, broken pinball machines, thrift store leather jackets and church pews in startling ways (read more about Nanni here).

When the rest of us do such things, it’s called recycling. But in any case, we repurposed an element of our old living room and gave it new life in our redesign. Call it art or call it smart, we saved ourselves some money and got a good-looking final product.

The living room: Before

Before

While shopping for finials (a distinctive ornament at the end of one’s curtain rods), we discovered they are very expensive. Or, at least, we have very expensive taste. We needed to get creative. Our couch — I’d call it our former couch, but we’d be getting ahead of ourselves since the new couch won’t be delivered for a month — had screw-on legs, and my Beloved hit on a brilliant idea: Let’s turn the couch legs into our curtain finials.

It’s brilliant because it not only saved us money but they would reflect the shape of the legs on the purple chairs, which we were keeping.

So we removed the couch and ottoman legs (we needed six finials), added some inexpensive ends to finish them, spray-painted the whole thing with crackle brown paint and stuck them on the end of our curtain rods. Tyler spray-painted the wooden wall sconces, too, which reflect the shape of the same wall sconces in the dining room, and voila! We’ve got drama instead of teeny, tiny boring spheres.

After

We hung 95-inch curtains in the living room, too, and added a bit of wrought iron to draw the eye up. Lined royal purple draperies replaced the tired burlap-like greens ones which, like, the former curtains in the dining room, were hung too close to the window frame. The Whispering Pine wall paint, a minty green replacing pukey pea soup we had, brightens up everything and contrasts with the new Oreo cookie ice cream carpeting.

The living room: After

Plant stand: Before

Paint freshened up another element of the redecorated living room, too.

A couple of beat-up cream-colored ceramic columns sat at each side of the fireplace, holding a couple of potted plants. I used a sample of Thunder Bay, which we rejected as too blue for the dining room, to paint the columns, and here we have a brighter looking pair of fireplace sentinels:

Fireplace: After

Of course, this repurposing poses a little problem, at least in the short-term. Our new couch isn’t here yet, but our old couch has no legs. We tried using it without legs for a while, but between its own lack of cushioning and lack of legs, it was too jalopyesque for two middle-aged people to use (we could sit down, but getting back up was another story).

So, we repurposed a few 2-by-4s.

The couch: After

Tomorrow: A new color in the kitchen.

I was standing there in high heels holding yet another gallon of paint I probably should have purchased the first time I was there. I didn’t know what I was doing, but these two sounded like they spent their days measuring twice and cutting once rather than the other way around.

“Thank God I talked her out of the crown molding,” said one guy who seemed to be referring to his wife.

“Yeah, crown molding is a pain in the butt,” agreed the other guy (only he didn’t say “butt”).

I just shifted my weight from side to side. “Hmm, we’re putting up crown molding,” I thought silently. “Huh. That guy’s wife lost the battle. Too bad.”

It never dawned on my that crown molding isn’t exactly a DIY project anyone can accomplish.

Top of the column after painting but before crown molding.

Over the course of a several more visits to the home improvement store, I learned a lot more about crown molding. It’s a flat board, not a triangular chunk of wood. Installing crown molding requires more than a little geometry. And you tend to need more of it than you think.

But thanks to my dad, I got the crown molding I wanted, and it brings sophistication and class to the plain old columns separating my dining room and living room. Originally, they were painted a reddish purple, but we chose to paint them in Raindrop to match one of the walls in the dining room; the very faint aqua color looks more like marble and the crown molding lends a Greek air to the columns. Here’s the after shot:

The column featuring Dad's crown molding.

Crown molding brings the eye up, and our nine-foot ceilings weren’t emphasized enough in the old decor.

The dining room before.

Why not highlight all that space up there? Besides dressing up the columns, we chose 95-inch curtains instead of the standard 84-inch type, and we hung them outside and above the windows so they frame the windows rather than cover them and cover the outside woodwork. We found fancy finials that echoed the detailing on our dining room table and buffet, and instead of expensive valances, we added a stunning (but much less expensive) wrought iron wall hanging above the rod.

The dining room after.

Check out that Pumpernickel wall color! We dumped the lampshade light fixture for a more suitable, elegant option, too.

While Dad’s muttering while he worked on the crown molding taught me how challenging crown molding can be, it didn’t come close to being as tough as ordering area rugs online and returning them.

Our old rugs on the hardwood were way too red to fit in our new decor. My Beloved orders everything online and though I hesitated, I went along with some rugs described as “tan, ivory and blue.” When they arrived, we discovered they were brown, tan and red, with a smidge of blue. Not at all what I wanted, even when Tyler managed to get the online retailer to offer a discount. After much wrangling (7-by-9-foot area rugs don’t just go back in the box), we returned the wrong-color rugs. We ended up paying $35 in shipping to return them, and we’re still awaiting the arrival of the promised refund in our checking account. Despite all that, we ordered more rugs online — this time from Home Depot, so we could return them there if necessary.

Front entryway conversation area: After.

We’re still waiting on the largest rug for under the dining room table, but the second rug design sets just the right blue tone under the conversation area at the front door.

Makes me want to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea. Ahh.

Tomorrow: A clever repurposing of old things in the living room.

My Beloved husband is better at giving orders than taking them and I got sick of being the order-taker, but in truth, I didn’t know what I was doing half the time and I couldn’t have successfully accomplished what needed to be done the other half of the time, so it’s a good thing someone was in charge.

I wearied of living in a half-assembled space, but total project time was only three and half weeks.

Those irritants were troubling, but nothing — nothing — compares to painting the stairway.

That was terrifying. And I didn’t even paint the stairway.

My Beloved assembled an awkward system involving a ladder, a couple of 2-by-10 planks, a prop and a number of screws in order to be able to reach the top corner of the stairway from the main floor to the second story.

He wanted me to hold the ladder while he high-wired the paint job, one hand holding the paint can and one hand holding the paint brush.

The fact of the matter is that I could not have stopped calamity had it befallen him anyway. The whole mess could have collapsed, paint splashed all over everything and him a broken pile at the bottom of the steps, and I would have been standing there screaming, my voice the only instrument of strength in my entire upper body.

But I did what I was told and held the ladder. I broke out in a nervous sweat. I could barely breathe and closed my eyes. I prayed.

Meanwhile, my ever confident husband painted a straight line of Dusty Trail along the wall meeting the ceiling.

While he was disassembling his homemade apparatus, I took this picture:

The planks and props and screws are gone, but you see the thank-God-it-was-sturdy ladder. And the yellow. The thank-God-it’s-gone yellow.

The carpet layers came today and replaced the worn-out taupe carpeting on the stairway and in the hallway with a sumptuous thick fudge, neat and clean.

Here’s the after shot:

My stairway has never been decorated, but now I’m entertaining the artwork  – or family photos — I can hang along the steps and in that open expanse above the entry to the dining room. My mother says one should hang only meaningful objects on the wall.

Maybe I should be shopping for tightrope art.

Tomorrow: The big reveal on the dining room. Not only was the carpet installed today, our new area rugs were delivered!

It was a settlement for a class action lawsuit in which I was a party. Well, one of the lawsuits in which I’m involved. This lawsuit is the case of Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation & Ross, et al, vs. American Express Co., et al.

At the risk of being sued, here’s the summary: Credit cards in the early 2000s were charging high (reasonable? outrageous? depends on your perspective) conversion fees to Americans who used their cards when traveling outside the country. Somebody (Ross?) took issue with this and sued the credit card companies on behalf of the card holders.

See, when you use your credit card in another country, the credit card “converts” the purchase in say, Euros or pesos, into U.S. dollars, and it charges you a certain percentage for the privilege. Most travelers choose to do it that way rather than convert dollars to another currency before leaving on the trip because the bank charges even higher (more reasonable? more outrageous?) fees for that.

Like anything having to do with banks nowadays, they get you coming and going.

At the time, I was traveling internationally on a monthly basis and I spent a lot of  personal funds on cool jewelry, funky clothes, strange snacks, mind-expanding entertainment and foreign reading material (I was reimbursed for hotel, meals and taxis, so I didn’t get to claim that). I was made aware of this lawsuit and invited to submit documentation, so about four years ago, I did. I claimed I spent somewhere along the lines of $6,617.37 over the course of eight years on various meaningless trinkets on which the credit card companies charged 1% to 3% in conversion fees.

That was four years ago. The folder of my documentation is so old it was in the very back of my file drawer.

The settlement check was for the tidy sum of …

$32.76.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It took more than four years, a solid afternoon of my time, 10 million claims from other card holders, two separate lawsuits (this represents the results of only 1) and 11 appeals by the credit card companies to get this check.

Oooh, we really stuck it to the Big Banks, didn’t we?

That’s the part that makes me laugh.

The second lawsuit, if I read this right, is about to be settled. Nearly $50 million in claims have been submitted by members of the 99% like me, and attorneys have been awarded $13.875 million plus the costs of notice and administration of the settlement.

Now that’s a check: $13,875,000.

So the banks overcharge their customers, and a law firm gets millions of dollars for representing the customers. And it takes the American legal system nearly five years to sort the whole mess out. That’s the part that makes me want to cry.

So, I have this check for $32.76. How should I spend it? Should I invest in more cool jewelry and funky clothes? Or buy a tent and a picket sign?

Well, while I ponder it, I think I’ll deposit it.

In a bank.

Normally, I don’t even open the sports pages during the winter because I care about baseball, and the “hot stove league” is boring; baseball writers are just filling news columns with speculation and in my neck of the woods, it’s speculation about Chicago teams.

Yawn.

But today, columnist Phil Rogers’ headline read: “Hometown hero now costly drag: Mauer’s huge, long-term contract hurting Twins more than it helps.”

Rogers’ point was this: Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau cost the Twins too much and can’t deliver, and he made a compelling case. He wrote, “It’s tough building a 25-man roster with two players getting 35 percent of the payroll.”

What I find interesting is that White Sox fans are watching the Twins so closely, even in wintry January. Is Rogers’ sour grapes attitude a reason to cheer for Twins fans?

Coincidentally, it reached 40 degrees this morning near Hampshire.

Warmer temps (however temporary) and Twins headlines in a Chicago newspaper whet my appetite for baseball and the clean slate of a new season.

Only 39 days to the first game of spring training. Ahh.

Well, well, well. This might be an interesting election season after all.

For those of you who ask, “Who’s Newt Gingrich?” or who ask, “Who cares about primary elections in South Carolina or anywhere else?” let’s discuss your role in a democracy.

In a democracy, you don’t run the country, but you elect who does. If you care about how your country works (or doesn’t), you ought to care about elections.

Primary elections come before general elections because in primaries, the voters for each party choose their candidates for the general election. This is important and newsworthy this year because it’s a presidential election year. Therefore, parties are choosing their candidates for president.

For Democrats, it’s easy: Since Obama is eligible to serve a second term, he’s the go-to choice for Democrats.

Republicans are looking for a good man (the choices now are all men) to beat Obama.

No one person has emerged as a clear choice which means Republican voters in upcoming primaries may actually cast meaningful votes. Unlike the general election which is Nov. 6, each state chooses when to have its primary or, alternatively, caucus. For Minnesota Transplant readers, the caucus in Minnesota is Feb. 7. In Illinois, the primary is March 20. In Texas, the primary is April 3.

At this point, there for four main Republican presidential candidates:

• Mitt Romney, a former governor from Massachusetts with lots of hair and money.
• Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House with lots of hot air and ex-wives.
• Rick Santorum, a former congressman who claims to be a “true conservative” with lots of kids.
• Ron Paul, a former ob/gyn and current congressman who has delivered lots of babies and refuses to participate in the congressional pension system.

Now that the clown brigade of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have dropped out of the race, the Republicans have some interesting choices.

I would love to see Newt Gingrich emerge victorious if only for one reason: The presidential debates would be the best reality TV in years.

To see two fine speakers with diametrically opposed philosophies go head to head in a series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates is a poli-sci major’s dream.

Oops, have I lost you? Back in 1858, Abraham Lincoln (who later became president) was running against Stephen Douglas for U.S. Senate. The two lively speakers engaged in a series of debates around Illinois that have become icons of the political debates in that they place high value on logic, ethical values and philosophy.

Anyway, to see Obama and Gingrich go at it on important topics like the economy, Washington politics and foreign policy would be fascinating. Both men can speak intelligently without a bunch of puppeteers pulling the strings.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Gingrich may still flame out, leaving us with Mitt Romney.

More than a decade ago, a good-looking salesman joined the team at my place of employment. He looked good and sounded even better, but over time, it became apparent he was all flash, no substance. A colleague (who, by the way, wasn’t nearly as handsome) called him an “empty suit.” I fear that’s what Mitt Romney is. An empty suit.

Gingrich, on the other hand, is popping his buttons, he’s so full of substance. By his own account, “I think grandiose thoughts.”

In any case, I would prefer a president with a big head over one in an empty suit. And in the short term, Gingrich would make the coming months leading up to the November election a lot more interesting than Romney would. And interesting candidates are conducive to engaging the populace.

Here’s to well-informed voters. Be one.

On today’s episode, we install a remote control curtain system in the master bedroom.

When we honeymooned, we stayed one night at the Venetian in Las Vegas, where we were impressed with the remote control blinds and curtains in our hotel room. “We should have those at home,” we thought.

We should have room service, too, I think, but remote control curtains might be a reasonable place to start.

Key word: Might.

We acquired this system from eBay. Beyond that, the origin of this system is unknown. For a few clues, let’s look at the instruction manual which includes “Table of Content” (is there an “s” missing?) and the instruction to “Hand the curtain properly.”

Perhaps they mean “hang,” do you think?

Let’s see what you need to install this system: “The tools required for the installation of this product are electrical drill with 6mm diameters drill bit, fiber measuring tape, cross head screw driver, hand saw, a pair of pliers and a wrench. The wrench comes with the package.”

All righty then.

Fortunately, we have a garage full of tools.

Let’s see here, let’s install the transmission box.

“e.2. Pulling the red pad then can draw out the transmission box, as show in figure 8.”

Huh? Where’s figure 8?

Is figure 8 upside down?

I think figure 8 is upside down.

Moving on. Maybe we should just adjust the tension of the wire:

If the motor cannot stop in 2 seconds when the curtain is fully opened/closed even the hexagon bolt has been adjusted to the top end position. You have to release the hexagon bolt anti-clockwise to the lowest position, do not loose out the bolt from the base track, then loosen the big head screw on carrier ‘A’ on half way as shown in figure 1, and pull the wire until it is taut and fasten the screw on carrier ‘A’ again.

What?

These instructions look like English. But they make no sense.

OK, we’re going to have to call in our Chinglish translator for this one.

Honey, if we can’t get these to work, can we return them?

Let’s check the owner’s manual:

This warranty does not apply where:

1. Repairs have been made by others
2. Repairs have been attempted by others
3. Repairs are required due to normal wear and tear.
4. The product has been misused.
5. The product has been improper installed or installed by force.

Uh-oh. Did you say “force”?

OK folks, now’s a good time for a commercial break. When we come back, we’ll find out if “hammer” should have been included in the list of tools required for installation.