short stories

ok, so i slipped upstairs after doing the dishes to lounge on my loveseat by the window and read lorrie moore short stories...from a collection called birds of america.....i was distracted by thoughts of potential colors to paint the upstairs bathroom, now that the wallpaper is starting to lose it's grip on the walls....i suppose bathroom wallpaper is prone to that end......and so i prefer to paint the walls this time around arther than wrestle with paper on the irregular corners, the eaves.....the skinny strip between the doorframe and the wall......i could see if there is leftover paint in the basement...left by the after-fire painting crew.....or i could pick from one of the martha stewart color chips i found last weekend whilst sorting out my desk.....but i digress from short stories.....i found this collection to be tiresome when compared to her first effort...self-help......like she was trying too hard for the female characters to be at their quirkiest, and male counterparts to be just a bit more emotionally unavailable.....although, she does write about a woman who mourns her departed cat bertie as if the world were ending....curious from a writer that has written caustically about cats in the past......hmmmm.......i have 2 other collections to read at some point......maybe i was not in a fair mind to judge stories this afternoon.....mayhaps paint-chips and wallpaper, which represent significant labor on my part at some point in my future disrupted any pleasure on a short story afternoon in my here-and-now......