Yesterday I had an ingrown toenail removed and the nail bed deadened on the left side of the big toe on my left foot for the FIFTH time.  And every time I have the procedure done, I’m promised again and again that this time the procedure will work and it won’t come back again.  Well, if it does, I have figured out the final solution.  I’ll make dang certain that that toenail never comes back again.

That effing ingrown toenail will never come back again, because there won’t be a toe for it to come back on.  I’ve been looking for a use for my Sawzall ever since I bought it.  The metal-cutting blade should work, right?  While I’m waiting to determine if I will need to self-amputate my toe, I’m dealing with the results of yet another $300 visit to the podiatrist which is insurance doesn’t cover because my insurance sucks the giant ogre wankie of doom.  I’ve got an open wound on my toe where a giant boil/callus used to be, I’m spending my retirement fund on epsom salts, and lurching around the complex like Gimpy McGimperson while I am “walking” the dog—all the while wishing that I had a Hoveround.

(No, but seriously.  How much do you wish that you could just ride a mobility scooter around all day?  Not because you had to, but because you could?  That would be awesome.)

You may have noticed that I’m not writing as much lately in my blog as I have in the past.  There is, in fact, a reason for this that has absolutely nothing to do with an Obese Matt™ riding a Hoveround down the sidewalk in blue fuzzy slippers.  I haven’t written in my blog because I’ve been busy writing a book.  I started this book project back in September or October, I don’t remember exactly.  Last Sunday, I finished the first draft of the book.  Right now, it’s sitting at about 440 pages and 105,000 words.  I’m in the middle of editing the book right now, but when I edit things, I tend to make them longer. (“Hmmm.  I wasn’t very clear here.  Let me remove that one sentence and replace it with 12 paragraphs that say the same thing, but in more detail.”)

Once my edit is done, I think I’m going to ship the 593 pages of manuscript to a professional editor to make it presentable.  Then I am going to self-publish (at least initially) while I attempt to shop it to publishing houses.  I will, of course, also record the audiobook version of the title, and sell it through Open Book Audio.  I’ve had several people ask me if they could read it, and the answer is: not yet.  Right now, the structure is a complete and total train wreck.  I’ll get that fixed and do a quick once-over on proofreading, and then I’ll let select folks read it.

It was actually quite fun writing a book.  Memoirs, in general, aren’t as exciting as fiction.  But I can actually say that I have written a book.  Yay for crossing off one of my Bucket List items.  And maybe, after a lot of work, this book will actually be good enough to not be a complete and total embarrassment to all of the people in my life who tried (and failed) to teach me to be at least remotely literate and not write really long run on sentences that don’t really have much important to say.

In other news (I’m piling a bunch of unrelated stuff into a single blog post because I’ve not written anything in such a long time), I have purchased a new domain name.  Some douche nozzle has been sitting on the mattarmstrong.com domain name for years and years.  They want $1700 to sell it.  I will buy that domain name someday when money is no longer an issue for me, but not yet.  In the meantime, I purchased mattarmstrong.net and mattarmstrong.me.  Over the next several months, I’m going to be moving my entire site (including this blog) to the new addresses.  This mattarmstrongmusic.com domain will still work for a good long while, but since I’m doing so much more than music these days (and so little of that) I wanted to get a more generic domain.  Besides, when my book becomes a New York Times Bestseller, I want people to be able to find my blog more easily to partake in even more of my clever witticisms.

And except for these things, I haven’t been doing much…except orchestrating and recording a medley of Frank Wildhorn songs for a friend’s high school theater competition, transcribing the chords from a new song I discovered that I want to record, prepping a couple of new books for the Open Book Audio catalog, working a full-time job, cooking up a storm (I made Preztel Rolls the other day, and they changed my life), and crocheting two new afghans. Oh, and I’m just finishing up the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix, and I’m trying to get in about 9-12 miles on the Elliptical each week.  (I refuse to buy bigger pants.  I will give up on life and wear sweatpants to work everyday before I move up to a 36” waist.)  Oh yeah, and I got a bug to start re-learning the guitar again that will probably only last a week or two.  And I’m playing Skyrim.

Geez.  I seriously need to learn how to relax.

My little sister is about seven months pregnant with her second child—a little boy.  I have heard it said that as a woman gets close to the end of her pregnancy, she begins nesting: she experiences an almost overwhelming desire to clean, decorate, and fix up the house.  I don’t know if that happens with all people, but I do know that in speaking with my sister in the past, she has been doing a bit of nesting lately.

I have too.  I don’t know if it’s the weather, or the fact that I just signed a new lease, or a completely overwhelming desire to never see a white wall again for the rest of my life, or perhaps because I’m feeling sympathetic nesting vibes from my sister, but I have been pretty desperate to fix up my apartment and have a much nicer-looking abode.

It started a couple of weeks ago when I signed my lease.  My lease was set to expire at the end of November, and I had just discovered that my rent was going to go up by $235 a month, which is a bit out of my price range.  Fortunately, I waited about a week, and the rent fell by $110, which is still more than I’d like to pay, but it is within my payable budget.  (It just means that I have to save $110 less every month.  Boo.)  Once I signed the lease, I realized that this would be the start of my third year in the same apartment…something I have never done ever in my life since I moved out of my parent’s house to go to college.  I’ve been in Seattle for a little over four and a half years (!), but I’ve lived in three different apartments during that time.

So, now that I knew I was going to be sticking around for a while, I figured it was time to invest a bit in my living space, and make it feel a bit more like a home, and less like a sterile, white-walled monstrosity with really awful cabinets.  So, I went to Home Depot, got a bunch of paint chips and a few of those color book fans, and set about picking a color palette.  I decided on a dark chocolate brown, a very pale robin’s egg blue, a celery green, and a pale yellow color to help brighten up the space.  I went and bought a sample can of each color, put them on the walls, and realized that it looked as though I was trying to decorate a baby boy’s nursery.  Way too pastel, way too cutsey, and not at all my style. 

So, next I decided I’d start with fabric rather than paint.  I went to Joann Fabrics and found this really great fabric for $20 a yard and 40% off.  I bought nine yards, and bought the blackout lining as well, and decided to sew my own curtains.  The only problem?  I don’t own a sewing machine.  I borrowed one from some friends only to find out that it was broken.  Nobody else I knew in the area owned a sewing machine, so I finally broke down and bought one.

This is the model I eventually ended up going with.  Now, I learned to sew when I was about seven or eight years old on my mom’s 50’s-era Singer sewing machine (which, coincidentally, still works and she still has.) It weighs a blue ton, has very few special features, and is all manual.  My new sewing machine has 60 some-odd new stitches, a drop-in bobbin, and will thread the needle for me.  This may not be very special for people who sew a lot, but it was a revelation for me.

So, having not sewn in something like 15 years, I proceeded to make my curtains.  Now granted, curtains are pretty darn easy to sew.  It’s just a flat panel of fabric with a liner.  It’s not like I went all Schmuel the Tailor on them.  (Bonus points to anyone who knows that reference without having to look it up.)  And they turned out well.

Then, once I had the curtains up, I was finally able to choose more accurate colors.  I started with the safest color (the brown) and the easiest room (the dining room).  I spent all of Friday evening last weekend taping and painting the dining room a nice café au lait color.  Again, I believe it turned out quite nicely.  Especially when I dressed it all up and made it look like someone with class lived in my apartment, instead of someone who cooks pizza rolls on tin foil and then eats it on the floor of the living room because he doesn’t want to get the dishes dirty.

I still need some artwork for the wall to the right of the dining room area, and if I were a bit more adventurous, and had a ton of extra money to spend, I would get a small chandelier to hang in the dining room instead of the single (crappy) pot light that is there, but I don’t want to go to that much effort.  So, instead, I brought my brushed nickel teardrop lamps out of the bedroom where they were languishing (since I never spend time in my bedroom) and put them out in the dining room. 

Then, I basically spent the rest of the next week (this last week) wishing that I had something else to sew.  I couldn’t afford another couple of hundred dollars for fabric to make curtains for the dining room or my bedroom.  So I decided I would try my hand at sewing clothing.  Now, the last time I tried making clothes was when I was working on the cruise ship back in 2000.  I was buying all of my fabric in shops in Denmark or Sweden, and buying all of my patterns there too.  And most of the patterns didn’t have any instructions in English.  And I couldn’t really ask for advice from the people there.  Suffice it to say, the results were less than ideal.

My first apparel project was the green hooded sweatshirt you see me donning in the picture to the left.  Yes, in case you are wondering, I did actually take a picture of myself in the bathroom mirror.  I know, I know.  It’s tacky.  Just deal with it.  I didn’t want to set up my real camera gear.  The fact is that a) I made a piece of clothing from scratch and b) it actually looks fairly well-made and I would be able to wear it out into public.  There’s supposed to be a drawstring around the bottom of the sweatshirt, although I haven’t been able to find one in the right color.  I suppose it’s all for the best though, because putting a drawstring on the bottom of a sweatshirt doesn’t make any sense to me.  It would just make me look like a green pumpkin with legs.

After a harrowing week at work, I also decided that I was going to take a much-needed day off from work to just relax.  I lounged around the house for most of the day, then when my cleaning lady came, I went to get a burger for lunch, get my oil changed, and get a sample can of the new green color that I’m going to be painting my living room.  This evening, after a dinner of homemade waffles with caramel sauce and sea salt (drool), I pulled out my paintbrush and started putting the color on the wall.  I actually like it a lot. 

It looks a little more blue in this photo than it does on the wall, but again, this is just a quick snapshot with my phone.  I am pretty sure this will be my color.  It’s light, and just a shade away from being a neutral green, so it’s not too wild.  And it brightens up my dark apartment (especially on cloudy/rainy days) a lot.  I’ll let it try overnight, and then I’ll go get the full gallon of it tomorrow, and paint tomorrow night.  This room will be quite a bit trickier for a few reasons.  First, there’s a butt-ton of electrical equipment in it, so that will have to be dismantled and moved.  Meaning that I won’t be able to easily listen to music while I’m working, which may drive me to violence.  (I hate doing work like this without music, podcasts, audiobooks, or the TV on in the background.)  Second, I have surround sound speakers on the back wall and ceiling and a cable conduit that runs along the entire ceiling.  That conduit has to come down, and it’s pretty ugly, so I don’t want to put it back up if I don’t have to.  I may need to find another options for my surround sound speakers.  (I feel like I need a #FirstWorldProblems hashtag here.) Finally, there will be a LOT of taping in this room.  I hate taping a cutting in.  My least favorite part of painting.

Next, I have picked out the color for the kitchen, but I haven’t convinced myself that I really want to paint the kitchen anyway.  There isn’t a lot of paintable space, but I’m not really in the mood to move or paint around all those appliances.  After that, I have to take a break until after the first of the year.  I need to get all this done soon because with Halloween upon us, it’s almost time for me to start decorating for Christmas.  Also, my savings account needs a breather to recover.  I haven’t spent a TON of money on my new nesting habit (maybe $500 total), but I’m on a very tight budget these days, and I hate to dip into my savings account for something that’s not a necessity. I spend most of my time in these rooms anyway.

I’m not sure why the nesting bug hit me so hard and so quickly, but I really hope that nobody else I know is planning on getting pregnant anytime soon.