The Color of Hell

The apartment is coming together, slowly. While shedding the cloud of stuff that had orbited me in Pittsburgh was an almost religiously therapeutic experience which I would recommend wholeheartedly to all, it turns out that clothes irons, cooking pots, and mops are all kind of useful. So I'm picking up needful things one tramload and Saturday afternoon shopping trip at a time. Next up: Sihlcity. Again.

The first thing I did on moving in though, and I think by far the most productive in terms of return on effort, was applying faux wood grain shelf paper to the shelves in my built-in bedroom closets. The maniacal application of shelf paper - Schrankpapier should you need to buy any in Zürich without resorting to interpretive dance, in which the concept of shelf paper is difficult to express; I speak from experience - to each and every horizontal surface is one of those thankfully lost arts practiced only by our grandmothers, so there could be only one reason beyond some sort of misguided transgenerational cultural exchange for me to instruct myself in its dark secrets: that whatever the shelf paper was pressed into service to cover was far, far worse.

So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you the former appearance of my bedroom shelves, a pattern which can only accurately be described as the Color of Hell.

(And now, in the interests of maintaining some sort of universal balance between good and evil, here is a cute picture of a duck)