the ground nutmeg wall

did you know you could paint your walls in colors that have spice names? thanks to a little bit of boredom and some plain white walls, i was able to amuse myself the other day by painting a wall in my brother's apartment "ground nutmeg" (see photo). it's a dark orange color--slightly darker than texas orange. some might be scared if they showed up at home to find a single orange wall in their living room, but in the case of my brother's apartment, it turned out quite nicely. in fact, it looks downright trendy, and the guys like it a lot. the take home message from this experience? if you're not sure what to get your yuppie sibling (no offense) for christmas (or you just have some time on your hands because it's 18 degrees F outside), i recommend giving him or her an orange wall.

18 degrees, by the way, is a ridiculously low temperature that i had had the pleasure of not experiencing for several (if not more) years. on the upside of this though, at some point between the 50 and 18 degree weather i experienced while in nyc, the weather conditions afforded me the opportunity to see snow for the first time in several (if not more) years.

i am presently looking forward to being back in texas (gasp), but mostly just because it's supposed to be in the 70s this weekend...and i will be playing outside all day tomorrow (saturday 1/5) because i'm running the Bandera 50k (www.tejastrails.com/bandera.html). it is a trail race, and will be the first race of my 2008 season. i'm not sure how it will go though...i ran dallas a few weeks ago, and did the weird in-between-marathon-recovery-taper-buildup over the holidays. normally this would be fine, but i think i managed to put on a little bit of insulation to help protect me from the cold so this race will also serve as a run-myself-back-into-shape race before massive amounts of bike riding (in prepartion for texas 4000) and running (in preparation for Boston 2008) commence.