Listen to the colour of your dreams.

The dining room is summer. The living room is pale apple. The ceiling is alabaster.

Those are the names of the colors that Marla and Sutton have spent the last forty-eight hours laboriously applying to the walls of our home. If it were me -- and I've always wanted to be the guy who gets paid to think up names for new colors -- I'd say they look more like tomato bisque and asparagus bisque and, uh, parsnip bisque. Creamy, nourishing soup colors. The smell is something else entirely.

I don't have pictures yet, but when I do I'll insert them where this paragraph is now. Keep watching this space!

I've been mighty negligent with this Aperitif of mine, mainly for reasons having to do with the seasonally recurring depression that I've been enduring for most of my life, which is terrifying and loathsome to live through but just plain fucking boring to hear about. Lately, my end of conversations has been limited to fragments of socially acceptable phrases manipulated at what seems like a great distance, as a way of avoiding the alternative. The alternative is a dark, howling vortex of self-referential monologue. It's bad shit. Best not to go there, not even in a personal webjournal read by maybe three or four people. So that's why I've been away. Don't worry -- I've been through this before, and it passes eventually. Everyone's got some kind of crap to deal with; this is mine.

Anyway. The house is looking beautiful, in a spartan yet cuddly kind of way. The little one is more mercurial than ever, and ever more gorgeous and articulate when she isn't melting into a puddle of tears, mucus and outrage. Her most elaborate sentence to date, verbatim: "Those little red berries will give you a stomachache if you eat them accidentally." Two and a half years old, and she's pronouncing a five-syllable word and employing it correctly in context. I am so proud of her.