The Itchy Finger

Project Home Reno is a go. We’ve sucessfully stripped every scrap of wallpaper from our apartment, Xander has sanded the door/window frames and I am in the process of painting them white. Soon there will be no more pink!! I just sit in the livingroom now, looking at the door frame leading to the hall and it’s a nice clean white rather than old dirty purplish pink. It makes me so happy! I really am starting to get that “This is my home!” feeling, now that we are making our own mark on it!

As most people who know me are aware, I have Eczema. It’s a skin disorder that is really pretty common, but it hasn’t been much of a problem for me over the past few years. As a child I had it very badly, as a teenager it was worse. Luckily it usually was on places like the back of my knees, the bend of my elbow, my back, etc. Places I could easily hide from my schoolmates, so unless I told them they would never really know I had it. It’s not contageous and can be extremely uncomfortable and painful at times of flare ups. As I got older I learned more about it, how to care for it, and what to avoid.. so thankfully it’s not a day to day issue for me anymore.

UNTIL RECENTLY!

For some reason, so far during our entire renovation project, I’ve had this incredibly itchy/sore spot on my first finger between the nail and the first knuckle. It’s driving me insane! Each night I wash it, put cream on it and care for it.. then the next day as soon as I’m doing something it flares up again. It doesn’t matter if I wear gloves, or a bandaid.. it still happens. I don’t have any problems with the rest of my hands or anywhere else on my body just this one pea-sized spot that is making me want to chop my whole finger off.

Last night at about 1:30am I was woken up because it was so itchy and sore, so I had to get up and coat it with cream, then I sat and pinched my hand to distract myself from the brain cracking irritation of that one finger until I fell asleep. How on earth did I deal with this in mass amounts when I was younger?! Christ..

The above pic is of the color we’ve chosen for the walls of our livingroom/diningroom and hallway. I biked to the shop yesterday and bought a small can just to test, after which I went through the house making small splotches on different walls to see how it looked in different lights. Then after getting Xander’s approval we went and got a whopping sized white tub of the same color so we can get cracking on getting those walls painted. I think it will look nice with the white trim. So warm and cozy..

We’ve decided to cut a few things out of our plans, to have money for other areas.

• Not getting the fiberglass textured wallpaper, we’re going to paint the walls as they are.
• Not putting the kitchen in the diningroom and changing kitchen to bathroom
• Keeping our current fridge rather than getting cool built in cupboard fridge with our new kitchen
• Possibly keeping our current stove rather than getting a built in stove/oven. This one is under discussion

One thing we want to splurge on when it’s all done is a hugeass aquarium. We were looking at corner aquariums at our local pet shop and there is a beautiful 190 liter one there that would look great in the corner of our livingroom. I’ve always loved fish but you can never get the REALLY cool fish in the smaller aquariums.. It’s a lot of care though, so we’ll have to think about if we’re up to it.

The weather was beautiful yesterday! It went up into the high teens here in Rotterdam and was so sunny… It was one of those days where you want to open all the windows, put a bandana on your head and do some cleaning (or painting in my case) and that’s just what I did!

Err… of course, that means I skipped my first day of classes this term. So much for my “make my attendance better” pledge… to be honest, I never even believed that myself.

I absolutely must go today, but the mental games I go through to get myself up, ready and on my way to school are ridiculous. I was just telling a friend about it and realized how truly strange I really am. I actually think things to myself like:

If you go to school, you’ll get to see who passed exams and who didn’t!
Maybe some people you didn’t like got booted to another group!
If you go to school, you can stop and pick up your Rotterdam pass on the way home! 40% off at the movies!
Then you can make Xander take you to Miss Congeniality 2!
If you go to school … Shit I’m out of ideas.