Today I am not working out. I have a morning mammogram appointment. Remember ladies, no lotions, perfumes or deodorants in the breast area that morning! My mom had pre-menopausal breast cancer at age 49, so I have been going for annual mammograms since I was 25 or 27. I can’t remember… It’s not a bad thing, and if you’re not PMSed, it doesn’t hurt (at least, not me). And if you are 35 or over I encourage you to go!

And don’t even get me started on self breast exams. Everyone I know who has had breast cancer did not have the lump foundfor them by a doctor. It was themselves or their husband. How hard is it to play with your boobs once a month in the shower and once a month lying in bed? I can’t think of a more fun responsibility to be asked to do!

My mom's 60th, I was the fortune teller

(By the way, my mom is 11 years in the clear! She was lucky to have one isolated lump not near the lymph nodes, only radiation – no chemo. But her breasts are massive, so she gets watched very carefully. It’s hard to feel a lump in a 38H.)

This week my daughters are out of town and I’ve been using some evening down time to paint. My younger daughter wants to redo her bedroom in aqua and purple. She has an old wooden chair I painted purple and I put an aqua patch on the wall waiting for her approval when she comes home. Her sister also has some purple in her room, so I repainted some of the periwinkle accents in their bathroom purple with leftover paint from the chair. Now that side of the house has some flow.

But my other painting didn’t work out so well. Our kitchen is mostly white. White cabinets, white marble backsplash, white tile floor, white paint on the wall. I didn’t design it – it was there when we moved in. But one wall that you can see from the family room is white on top, then there is a chair rail and wainscoting painted deep blue. Almost navy. We did that a few years ago.

Lately it’s been bugging me – for 2 reasons. 1) The family room has since been painted yellow, and seeing navy by the yellow is weird. 2) I’d rather add vibrancy and choose a bright yummy food color. We love food, we eat pretty healthy, and we enjoy trying lots of recipes and hardly ever go out to eat. So I thought an orange color – perhaps the color of a nectarine or sherbet – would add vibrancy and juiciness to the kitchen. If we repaint the wainscoting orange, and then echo the color up above the fridge/cabinets in that one foot of dead space that just has dusty tchotchkes… andmy friend had extra leftover orange paint from her house last week. So – free paint! The color I had been contemplating for months!

I put a patch on the wall, it seemed the right color, Brian helped find primer and remove some cabinet doors, and I painted. I had to climb on top of the fridge, which was scary! But when I was done and so excited, Brian HATED it. He said the color agitated him and grated on him. He said it was too salmon. He said white and orange don’t match (?).

Now we still had these blue accents around the room that match the blue wall, so I thought maybe seeing the blue near the orange was throwing him off. I took down the window treatment and swapped out the wall art for something with a big green tree frog on a large orange plant - a hand painted apron a friend gave me that is cool and fun and bright. So now he hates it less. It’s not what he wants, but it doesn’t totally suck. In the meantime, I need to do a 2nd coat, so I really just want him to make up his mind so I can simply get the paint cans and drop cloth out of the kitchen and stop walking around them all evening. But such is the compromise of marriage. (We’re thinking perhaps painting the top of the wall with the orange and the bottom of the wall a darker shade of orange pulled from the apron, now.)

And deep down I know if a paint color is our biggest disagreement all year, then I am one heck of a lucky woman!

So raise your smoothie glass, ladies - here’s to healthy boobies, even if they do get smashed in an x-ray machine, and here’s to healthy marriage – knowing we don’t all have the same creative vision but can still get along. AND here’s to having the kids out of town for a brief respite from day-to-day life! Drink up! L’chaim!