solarbird | A short list

Before I go to bed...

+0: I got ryoga rebuilt - but I guess I already mentioned that. The funny part is that my MacOS box still had three print jobs pending for it and dutifully printed them all. I think they were four months old. Yikes!

+1: Longestnight is the most meaningful religious thing I do all year, and this year was great. Rebecca was around for essentially all of it - she had to go look after a dog midway through, but came back - and Mimi shows us the extended edition of Two Towers. Plus, we opened the box of Lush bath goodies from

lyonesse (yay!) and

annathepiper wrote me a sonnet. I revealed that I'd finally(!) found a copy of Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee for the Gamecube again. Yay monster rampaging through Seattle!

+2: Today was mostly spent in a daze, like the day after usually is, but we did walk down to Candy Cane Lane and looked at all the lights. Pretty as usual, with - I think - full participation this year. People drive from all over town to look at it; the constant car queue would drive me insane, but they seem to deal - they've been doing it since 1949, after all.

+3: I am so pleased with how Din's kitchen is turning out. The bathroom's nice too, but it needed a lot less work - some wall recovery and painting, whereas the kitchen work was, ahem, rather more comprehensive. And it's looking so nice. I really kind of want to have a housewarming party there, once it's done. (Yes, there'll be pictures.) Most of the actual labour this time around is being done by a guy named Tony I've been hiring recently for paint-type work; I've done some skimcoating and some spackle work, but mostly have just been able to do too much of it myself. Still, this is good; it's getting done and I'm really pleased with how the wall paint and cabinet paint is looking. (I did expect the green cabinet box colour to stand out a little more than it does, but I'm okay with it not.)

+4: Total Changing Rooms moment: I found that the power which had once led to light sconces in the kitchen dining room nook were, in fact, still live! Surprise! So I'm putting fixtures in. But! There aren't any electrical boxes behind them, and putting in even shallow (pancake) boxes would result in problems from the boxes being deeper than the plaster. So: I'm elevating the surface of the wall around the boxes. This normally looks like, "Hey, looks like they needed to elevate the surface of the wall," but I came up with this idea of framing the entire fixture area out with trim that I made from other pieces of wood (including trim I'm custom milling down with a table saw) and I think it's going to be GORGEOUS. It's totally a Linda Barker moment.

(It is Linda who does that kind of thing, right? Or am I thinking of one of the other designers?)

Tony thought it was funny that I'm doing trim milling with a table saw, so I told him, "hey, when all you have is a table saw, everything looks like plywood" and he laughed. I think Handy Andy would approve. ^_^

+5: So. much. candy. for longestnight. So good! Mmmmmmm quality chocolate mmmmmmmm.

-6: So. much. candy. left. over. That part isn't so good. *^_^*;

+7: As Anna said, we went and saw Return of the King. They'd better give Peter Jackson an Oscar of some kind or there's a'gonna be a reckonin'.

+8: NINE - that's NINE - cards arrived in the mail today. Yay! ^_^ I love getting cards. I send out a zillion, too. People seem to have liked the sliver opaque ink on black envelopes thing, and there weren't any delivery issues, so I'll keep that sort of trick in mind for future years. Fun!

+9: Waffles are funny. They go IN your head, not ON it. ^_^

Bedtime! G'night!