all in the name of orange.

I love orange. Anything orange, I'll take it. I'll put it on a high shelf and worship it in my orange shrine. I'll surround it with other happy little orange things, so it can feel the joy of the orange community. Hence, it's taken me a while to show any real interest in redesigning my (quite orange, you will note) website. I dread deserting Blogger; I so rarely find a company with such a nice orange logo. The only colors that come close to making me as happy as orange are taxicab yellow and sportscar red.

Years ago, when the time came to decorate a particularly beige bathroom in a peculiarly vanilla apartment, my mind naturally drifted to orange. Trouble was, there were no orange towels to be found. Anywhere! Really, try it sometime. Go to a store, any store with a linens department, and scan the racks... no orange! Melon, maybe. Seashell, to be sure. Coral? Of course. But never, never orange.

Until Ikea. A few days before the big move, we paid a preventative visit to Ikea. It was with a nod toward furnishing the apartment we'd seen but once, with dimensions we'd neglected to note, and a color scheme we'd never seen while blinded by the sheer giganticism of the place. We searched couches (blech.), beds (bah.), and dining decor (don't think so.), and concluded we'd outgrown the Scandanavian ways of our youth. Until we entered the cursed Marketplace, and began loading up the giant plastic bag with items of varying utility.

And then! In the corner! There! they! were!

At long last, my orange towels. With a pleading glance at Marc (more of a mauve man, truth be told), I rushed toward them. They were a little rougher than I'd hoped, with a ribby surface instead of the plush finish I'd imagined, but they were unabashedly, unapologetically, undeniably orange. Almost orange and a half. 110% orange, at least.

Which was a good thing, because they have proceeded to spew lint over half of the apartment. I've already washed them several times, and yet it continues. In fact, just now, in a mistake of creative laundry sorting, they managed to take the lives of both of my favorite wool mittens. A matching set, once of powder blue with cute hand-knotted red yarn bows, they now have an overfuzz of reddish orange that will have to be hand-picked away. Such is the price we pay for the ass-kick-orange bathroom I've always wanted.