Category — DYDT

The discussion of shoes on-or-off in the house brought up an idea that was repeated again and again: sometimes when people ask others to remove their shoes upon entering the house, they provided them with slippers.  Some people mentioned that they leave slippers at houses they visit often, but more than one person mentioned the idea of having a basket of slippers for the taking.

This brought up my own bias: I hate wearing other people’s shoes.  Even for a few minutes.

I will gladly buy second-hand clothes without thought, but I would never buy second-hand shoes.  I don’t like going to the bowling alley and having to rent bowling shoes.  I don’t like it when someone tells me my shoes are so cute and could they try them on for a second. (The one exception is the ChickieNob — she always clomps around in my shoes and for whatever reason, it doesn’t bother me.)  I don’t like it when someone asks if they can borrow my shoes, nor do I ever want to borrow their shoes.  There is a scene in Measure of Love, where Rachel talks about wanting to borrow someone else’s shoes, and I cringed writing it.  I don’t care how uncomfortable my shoes are; I don’t like wearing someone else’s shoes.

I obviously know that the shoes I own have probably been tried on by others in the store before I bought them, and yet… I’m still weirded out by putting my foot into someone else’s shoes.  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about bare skin inside a pair of high heels or socked feet going into sneakers — there is no level of barrier between myself and the shoe that would make me put them on without thinking about how much it bothers me to wear someone else’s shoes or slippers.

So I don’t think I could borrow slippers from a communal slipper basket.  It doesn’t bother me to walk around in just socks in someone’s house, but I wonder if it would be rude to decline the slippers (and remain in just socks) if the slippers are offered.

Am I the only person who has different feelings about second-hand clothes vs. second-hand shoes?  Where do you come down on wearing other people’s shoes (or slippers) or having someone else wear yours?

Backtracking in our “do you do this” discussion (or, as I now affectionately call this string of posts in my head DYDT), I may not decorate at all, but my house is very clean. (Josh likes to follow after me and my bleach bottle chanting clean, clean, clean three times.)  I don’t like people tracking dirt into the house, so we’ve always asked people to take off their shoes when they come inside.

Actually, it wasn’t always like that.  In our old apartment, we wore our shoes inside, and after a while, mud and such got tracked onto the carpet.  And when we moved into this house and got all new carpets, I decided that we would never wear shoes inside again.  So we take them off at the door, and then walk around in our socks (or sometimes, slippers).  Our floors are very clean (return to the first paragraph where I wrote about my ever-present bleach bottle), so my socks never look dingy from doing this, which is what other people mentioned during the DYDT when we talked about socks on or off in bed.

We ask that everyone take off their shoes in the house.  There are times when a kid puts on his shoes because he’s about to leave, and then doubles back into the carpeted living room for something he forgot — and that sort of thing never bothers me.  But in general, we ask that everyone remove their shoes when they’re walking around inside.  Almost no one has complained about this.  Actually, a few have.  Or they comment on it enough to let me know that they think it’s odd.  But for the most part, people recognize that there are whole cultures out there that request all people entering the house remove their shoes, and they comply.

I like the way shoes-off keeps the carpets neat.  Back when the twins were crawling, it made me feel as if less dirt was being tracked onto the floor where they were putting their hands.  Shoes on the tiled floors doesn’t bother me, but I like them off when people are stepping onto carpets.  Perhaps it’s because dirt remains on the surface with a tiled floor, but it falls between the pile on a carpet.  I may have watched too many carpet cleaning commercials in the ’80s.

The only people exempt from the shoes-off rule are workpeople.  I’m too shy to ask them to take off their shoes, and they’re usually going in and out of the house to get tools from their trucks.  I vacuum well after they leave — when we had our windows replaced over the course of 4 days, I vacuumed after each work day — but I never ask them to take off their shoes while they’re here.

Do you have a shoes on or off home?

So take all the craziness I just brought to talking about colour and kick it up a notch, and you now have how I feel about fonts.

I can only write using certain fonts.  Everything having to do with Rachel Goldman is written in Garamond.  I can only write about her in Garamond, single-spaced (it only gets put into double space when it leaves my hands to go to the agent or publisher).  If computers ever stopped supporting the font Garamond, there would no longer be a Rachel Goldman.

The one exception is mapping for Rachel Goldman books (sketching out notes, scene by scene).  Those all have to be done in American Typewriter.

I recently started writing a new book — a paranormal romance — in Cambria.  It felt like a Cambria sort of book at first.  I got out the first thirty pages, and then decided to tweak the plotline, and with the tweak, I needed a new font.  I’ve tabled it for the time being until I finish Apart at the Seams, but picking a new font will need to take place before I continue writing it.

This blog — Stirrup Queens — is written in Georgia.  Georgia is totally fine, neither here nor there.  It’s like water to me.

I like serifed fonts.  I pretty much only like serifed fonts.  They make me feel as if the word is complete.  Sans-serifed fonts, such as Arial, make me feel as if the words are a little too naked.  Not a freeing sort of naked, but more like forgetting-to-put-on-your-pants-and-then-driving-to-work naked.  To me, it’s not an accident that sans-serifed fonts are sometimes called “grotesque” by typographers (fine, from “Grotesk”).  I find them grotesque.

Let me explain how important fonts are to me: I would rather write a book on a typewriter with a serifed font than write a book on a computer with a sans-serifed font.  I know part of the reason for the typewriter would also be that I like to hear clicks while I’m writing (I can’t use a “silent” keyboard).  But the much larger part would be the font.

I love thinking about fonts and dissecting fonts, and I subscribe to a bunch of blogs that talk about nothing but fonts.  I love words like spine and descender and crossbar.  A good font make me happy.  It’s like getting hot chocolate on a cold day: it invites you in.  A good font invites the reader into a word, and if the words link together well, it invites the reader into a world.

I really care about the fonts other people use too.  I like that most blog readers (such as Feedly), put all the posts into the same typeface.  But I appreciate good fonts so much that I will leave Feedly and read the post on your site, even if I know that I can’t comment because I’m on my phone, just so I can see your font.  A lot of times, I think of bloggers in terms of their font — part of how I process your personality comes from your font choice — and when you change your font, it throws me off.  Massively.

On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being “I never notice fonts… what the hell are you talking about?” and 10 being “I can name all of my favourite fonts too” where do you fall in terms of font-love?

As much as I said that I don’t decorate, colour is very important to me.  It matters… everywhere.  Not just in terms of house decoration.  For instance, with clothing, I cannot think in certain colours, so while I may wear them to a party, I would never wear them to write in. (I am very much like Beckett: “any colour, so long as it’s grey.”)  Even if all I am writing is a fluffy little blog post like this one.  I only like to wear black, grey, and navy blue.  I can sometimes handle wearing brown, but it’s really hit or miss.  Almost everything needs to be solid — one colour — except that I have a lot of comic book t-shirts.  I am never as productive wearing a comic book t-shirt as I am wearing a solid coloured shirt.

I picked a lot of the paint in the house mostly because I have big feelings about colours whereas Josh has normal feelings about colours.  Our living room is a deep red that Josh calls “the steakhouse.”  My desk is in the living room, and I like being surrounded by red walls.  My favourite red is #CC0000.  Yes, I know the hex code of all my favourite colours, and I have an app on my iPhone that allows me to point my phone at any object and get the hex code for its colour.  Yes, I’m well aware of how all this is making me sound.

My downstairs bathroom is orange.  Orange is my favourite colour, and I actually wanted the living room to be orange, but Josh put his foot down and told me that he could only handle a small amount of orange.  So it went in our bathroom.  My favourite shades of orange all have an undertone of brown for balance.  My brother refers to our downstairs bathroom as “peeing on the sun” because there is a heat vent next to the toilet, and combining it with the orange walls makes one feel as if they’ve entered a ring of fire.  This, by the way, is a perfect orange (#CD661D).

By the way, every wall is coloured with paint.  I can’t stand wallpaper.  I can’t stand prints or designs or patterns on walls.  Just flat colour across the surface; matte finish.

Upstairs, we have morose shades of violet and pale blue in various rooms, all with a grey undertone.  It’s the only way I’ll allow a pastel colour anywhere near my life: it has to have a grey undertone.

Because pastels make me ill.  As does neon.  As do certain shades of yellow, except those with orange undertones.  Turquoise, aqua, a large chunk of the purple family except for plum.  Though there are exceptions to all those statements if the colour comes at a certain time and place, especially in relation to other surrounding colours.  For instance, I can’t stand the colour ultramarine (#120A8F), but I had an office that had an ultramarine carpet, and that carpet in that particular office made me so happy.  Though if you put that exact same carpet in a different space, I probably wouldn’t have liked it at all.

There are books I won’t buy simply because I don’t like the colours used on the cover. (I have been very lucky to work with publishers who work around my colour requests.)  The same goes for kitchen equipment: function doesn’t matter if the colour turns me off to cooking.  And a lot of my food phobias have to do with colour — namely, white.

Where do you fall on the colour-love spectrum, with 1 being indifference to colour and 10 bring excited/bothered by colours?  And, since I told you mine, what is your favourite colour?

Those discussions a few weeks ago were so enlightening.  I thought Josh and I were on the very cold end of the house heat spectrum, and we’re definitely not.  I had a feeling the world contained sock-wearers and sock-endurers just because I knew that if I loved socks, chances were that there were people out there who couldn’t stand them.  But who knew the breakdown?  The specifics?

So I have more curiosity for you raised by these discussions of what is going on in our individual worlds.  Once again, this one comes from our home renovations.  Our next task is to redo the kitchen.  We were given the advice by more than one person to take our time with the decisions.  Go visit other people’s kitchens and take notes.  Clip out pictures from magazines.  Get a lot of estimates.  Spend time in various kitchen cabinetry stores.  What did we want in our dream kitchen?

We did not take said advice.  Mostly because I realized that we didn’t have a dream kitchen.  My dream kitchen is simply one with functioning appliances and nothing slowing me down or thwarting me.  I’d like some counter space.  I’d like a very good air filtering system.  I want people to hang out in the room.  Other than that, I don’t have strong feelings on anything.

We feel that way about most rooms in our house.  We don’t have a dream house in mind, unless you count the dream apartments that are all chosen due to location.  We have no strong desire to change our house around to make it our “dream house.”  We like things to be comfortable.  Pretty much nothing matches.  The decorations are almost exclusively provided by the kids.  I’m more concerned about things being neat and clean than being pretty. (A friend commented recently that my kitchen was awfully white and bleachy.)

We don’t decorate for holidays.  As much as we look at other people’s spaces and think they look great, we’d never hire an interior designer to provide some… design… to our space.  Everything is about function and comfort.  And while the two are not mutually exclusive — you can have function that is also very pretty and put-together — we’ve opted to only focus on the function.  So our house is very functional and comfortable.  But it isn’t stylish.

And our beds are unmade.

Part of me would like a house that looks put together, but I know that I wouldn’t really want it for myself but instead to appear stylish to other people.  I wouldn’t really be fooling anyone.  Plus I really hate the idea of wasting furniture or leaving it in storage.  If we own it, I want to use it, even if it doesn’t go together well.  And, again, there is that comfort thing.  I wanted a sofa that people could plop down on.

There is obviously a wide range of non-decorating to decorating, but if “one” is mismatched furniture and no art on the walls and “ten” is used an interior designer (or you are one yourself), where do you fall on the decorating/not decorating scale?  How much do you try to make things look put together and stylish?  And do you change the decorations to reflect the seasons/holidays?