(taken from here)

If you joined the circus, what act would you most want to perform?
Something trapeze-y.

Would you generally be overdressed or underdressed at a party?
For me, that’s not really a question. I’m usually always underdressed.

Do you feel that children should be sheltered from unhappiness?
No. That’s not to say that they should be confronted with every problem all the time, but if they are never confronted with unhappiness, they won’t know how to deal with it. And it’s completely unrealistic to think that they’ll never encounter unhappiness in their lives. When it happens, they at least should have the tools to handle that.

Imagine you’re packing a picnic lunch. What would be in your basket?
Does it have to be stuff I have at home, because then you’re out of luck, people. Then everything I could contribute would be packet soup and canned corn. If it could be anything, it would be fresh bread, good cheese, ham, coffee and grapes.

If your life were a weather vane, which direction would it be pointing right now?
Upwards?

What’s something that people do in traffic that really annoys you?
Driving really close behind me. I’m a rather fast driver, so when people still insist that I’m too slow and that the best way to let me know is to come as close as possible without hitting me, I immediately get the wish to step on the brakes. Hatehatehate.

If you could completely redecorate any room in your house at no expense to you, what room would you choose?
My living room. After an unfortunate clour accident [If you want the full story, it’s after the meme], the walls are the colour of raspberry ice cream. I’d paint over that, in the original earthy red I had planned. Then I’d buy like 3 more bookcases and a new sofa and a bigger TV, or better yet, a projector and a screen and a really great DVD player and sound system. Yay!

Which hour of the day do you feel goes the slowest?
Uni hours.

If your birthday could be in a different month of the year, when would you have it?
I actually like that my birthday’s in March. It’s a good time to get presents.

—

The Paint Story

So,  after my last flatmate moved out, my parents gave me the money to repaint the walls. I had planned to make my living room a nice, earthy red like this, my kitchen should get a blue-grey like this and my bedroom should be lilac like this, only softer. [You might have noticed that I like things to be colourful. Screw white walls.]

Anyways, this was my plan and as you can see, I knew exactly what I wanted. So, I went to the shop with my father, who said that we should buy white paint and concentrated colour because we could mix it ourselves. I trust my dad, so I said, “fine, if you say so…”

We hoisted litres of white paint onto our shopping cart. Then he added, “always go a shade or two lighter than the colour you actually want because it always looks darker on the wall than on the colour charts.” I trust my dad, so I said, “fine, if you say so…”

I spent some quality time with the colour charts and calculated how much colour we’d need to get the shade or two lighter than the colour I wanted and then I chose the concentrated paint – red for the living room, blue and black for the kitchen, blue and pink for the bedroom.

The next day, we got to my flat, prepared everything for the paintage and started to mix the colours. First was the living room. I had bought a little more red paint than absolutely necessary according to the colour chart. First we took the exact amount recommended. The white paint got completely pink. I said, “NO WAY am I going to have pink walls in my living room.” We added the rest of red paint. The white paint refused to get any redder. I said, “THIS is not going on my wall!” So, as it was sunday and the shops were closed, and we couldn’t do it another time, we added some of the black paint I had bought for the kitchen. The results were still pink, but a pink I could live with. Plus, there was nothing much I could do at that point anyway. So now the walls in my living room look like this:

Very earthy. Very… red. Yes.

Anyway, since we had used a lot of the black from the kitchen for the living room, the blue grey in the kitchen became more like a baby blue… So my kitchen now looks like this:

It looks greyer in this picture than it actually is… if this was the actual colour, I would be really happy.

In the bedroom, the colour would actually be fine, if only it was a shade or two darker than it actually is. And a little less blue. It looks like this:

When deadra visited me for the first time after I had repainted the whole thing (and after I had cried for hours on the phone, mostly about the colour in the living room), the first thing she said was, “I never thought that you would have a pastelly-girly flat.”

Way to rub salt into open wounds, deadra, way to rub…

Anyway, I guess the moral of this story is: Never trust your father talking about paint and always let the store mix the paint for you.