Even though I'm fascinated by the concept of wall paint, I'm still a little afraid of it. Even after years in stark-white dormitory housing, my mind is still shaped by the sixteen years spent in a house whose walls consisted of wood paneling.

Walls were brown, with vertical stripes of darker brown. Walls weren't colors. The color palette in my formative years was a simple one; a house whose walls were not brown paneling would have white paint on them.I'm sure in a few years I'll look back and mutter about my Excessive Colour Period while slapping coats of delicate colors onto the walls, but for now, I'm taking out an adolescence's worth of frustration with brown-on-brown. The guest bedroom is now a lovely leafy - ahem, tree ferny - green. The guest bath, currently a dark but muted gray-blue wallpaper, is being repainted in a rich, deep blue with hints of green that, for some unknown reason, I've started calling "Fishtank."

It's okay. I don't understand it either. It comes from the same part of the brain that causes me to give Tenzing new nicknames every other day or so. (He's currently 'Triangle Head Cat.' Luckily, he doesn't seem to mind.)

In a vain attempt to avoid perpetrating utter destruction on a room shortly before vanishing to Atlanta for a weekend, I'm doing the room a section at a time. Strip the wallpaper, patch any holes or uneven bits, and then paint fully before moving on to the next section.

It'll take me longer to do the room this way, but it'll be usable the entire time. Just a little schizophrenic.

I won't lie, though; I promised Jeff that I'd get the guest bathroom fixed before zeroing in on my next victim: the master bathroom. According to twisted AmyLogic, if my urge to trowel vivid color onto wall spaces isn't slaked by the time I'm done contorting a) around the toilet and b) while on a ladder balanced precariously in a bathtub - then I think I can safely start making plans to rip down that green-and-white striped wallpaper in the bathroom.

Oh, I know. Yes, I don't mind the wallpaper all that much, but if we have to cut into the sheetrock to make a repair to the shower (which we do) I can't see any reason not to eliminate yet another house legacy from the previous owners. Especially since we don't have any replacement wallpaper to patch the repaired area with.

Nevertheless, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I've stood many a time in that overly-large, overly-bright master bathroom and thought, "Baby, you'd look great in burgundy."

You know the color. A rich, deep burgundy or cherry red; the kind of color that, when you touch it, you almost half-expect to feel velvety even though you know it's just paint. It's the difference between functional room and a sumptuous one.

I'll be back in the Fishtank tomorrow, working on the next section of the wallpaper-to-paint conversion, thoroughly hating the work but still fascinated by the fact that I can actually paint a room in my favorite color.

I wonder…what color does one paint a computer room, anyway?