50 shades of WHY DOES MY SKIN HURT?

My fever is spiking but my hands are freezing. My skin hurts but OH MY GOD DID YOU HEAR ME WHY THE HELL DOES MY SKIN HURT. My eyes ache in places I didn’t even know I have eyes.

But! I am soldiering on with my WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY SKIN and my frozen thumb that makes typing on my phone as fun and productive as running through Jell-O to provide you, my beloved readers, with a vital update on painting my bedroom:

I have recently been persuaded by a decorator more color-savvy than I that there is no shade of dark blue on this or any other planet that will match the rich reds and golds and blacks in my rug, and that a deep gray is really my only viable option if I want dark, masculine, devastatingly handsome walls. I had time to get gray paint chips from only one store before I got sick—and we all know that the time-honored 10 Steps/ridiculous-numbers-of-stores rule applies doubly to picking paint colors, right?—so I don’t yet have the requisite 50 shades (ahem) to pick from. But I feel like I do have some viable options here, though I have a fever and freezing hands AT THE SAME TIME so what the hell do I know?

And while all your paint-chip-color votes are always greatly appreciated, even in my fevered haze I can see that these gray paint chips look vastly different in this picture than they do in real life. Which means that this photo is mostly just a record of the fact that I didn’t have the strength to stand up and get a new cold compress. Thankfully, my cold, gray corpse hands have helped immeasurably in making my forehead feel less on fire. So I’ve found at least one gray that works for me.