Ethel's done most of the common areas now - only the parlor is awaiting her attention.

For most of the walls, she used the Ralph Lauren Suede textured paint and technique. This is basically a way of spending more money on paint, in order to create more work in slapping it on the walls. But it has a nice appearance, so long as nothing gets it wet, brushes up against it, or reflects too much light onto it.

It's rather satisfying - finishing up a bit of work like this and standing back and saying "You can do it. We can help" just like a Home Depot ad. I did get to help a good bit - she didn't actually allow me to do any of the suede-technique brushing and rolling, but she did let me do some simple painting out in the hall, and fetch and carry for her while she did the suede technique stuff.

This last weekend, we didn't actually do any painting at all - it's Football Season, which means that we watch football - but we only watch football when it's actually on TV. I've got a DVR recorder, but - except for old Bama games - I haven't yet found any real reason to record games and watch them later. That might work, if I could avoid the little banner at the bottom of the screen that keeps me updating on the scores of ongoing games and the final scores of games that are over, but so far I simply have been unable to avoid reading that information when it shows up.

(I've got the reading disease in the worst way - I'll read pretty much anything that is placed in front of me. I can't NOT read it; my brain goes right ahead and tells my eyes to scan and input that information, even if I try to exert my will to look my way. So there's little chance that I will miss "Auburn 3 - Miss State 2" scrolling across the bottom of the screen).

So we watch football, if it's on. If it's not, then we don't. And there wasn't any football on early Sunday morning, so we went climbing.

We hadn't been climbing in at least a couple of months, but the weather has finally broken (read: we have several days in a row now where the high temperature only has two digits) and Ethel consented to leaving the house. It was a very nice morning of climbing, but it sort of wore us out; I had a list of things that I was going to do on Sunday, but the only one that actually got done was "Go Climbing". The rest just sort of fell by the wayside.

Now we have this little problem - the parlor hasn't been painted, but football season has started. That means that either we give up our Sundays to paint, or the parlor doesn't get painted until mid-January.

I hope we like the color that it is now.