The Aerie
So as I mentioned, we saw the anti-abortion plane on my way up to my mother's 70th birthday. My first thought was "Man do these guys have a ton of money." I have a lot of things I believe in: I which I could fly an airplane over the city in order to persuade the public of my views. Just imagine what the money for that plane could have done to feed starving children...
At my sister's I was surprised to discover that the festivities began with a Catholic mass - apparently this was on the invitation, which I never saw. Yet another Catholic mass with my family, well, that's tolerable. We've frequently had Catholic masses in various homes, in part because my aunt the onetime nun has friends who are priests. Invite a priest to a party, and a mass breaks out every time!
But this time my atheist-Unitarian kids were impressed into service...
Maybe "impressed" is the wrong word, because they certainly weren't. Two of them will be fifteen in about a month, and the other one is eleven. This is not an age range that enjoys standing up in front of standing up in front of agéd relatives as part of an unfamiliar religious service. Unfortunately there was no time to discuss the process, and I was forced to fall back on "Just do it and we'll talk about it later" in a tone that brooks no disagreement.
In my sister's defense, she was up to her ears. Apparently she took a full week of vacation to organize this party, and as push was coming to shove she was running in circles getting everything ready. And of course, it's a sweet sentiment, having her grandchildren read blessings for their grandmother.
But on the other hand, a surprise party is not the ideal setting in which to couch a Catholic Mass, because of the really strong emphasis on being there at the beginning. Part of the fun for the guests is the "surprise" moment, but when you send an invitation that includes Catholic Mass, then your non-Catholic guests have to choose between the "surprise" and standing around for an hour in somebody else's religious service. Some other kind of party, you could start with Mass and guests from other faiths would be free to show up an hour late.
Anyway the kids read their blessings and gave their yellow roses to their grandma and it was very sweet. The priest managed to somehow pass around two goblets of wine and a palate of wafers without anything being spilled. Then something weird happened.
Now, when I was a kid in Catholic school and church, we stood, we knelt, and we sat. That was it. Somewhere when I was a teen they came up with this newfangled "sign of peace" where we shook hands with everybody around us: that was outrageous enough! Eventually it started turning into the "kiss of peace" which was right over the top.
Now on my occasional involuntary Catholic mass attendances, including the one last weekend, people are waving their hands all over the place. Sometimes they hold their arms out, forward and low, palms up, as if everyone were holding giant invisible God-reflectors for even holy tanning. Sometimes arms are held overhead as if God were about to jump into a giant mosh pit. But this service was the first time I ever saw everybody point their hands at someone, my Mother in this case, as if beaming holy-rays at her.
I was raised by nuns with rulers at ready to still any hands that might stray towards one's nose during service: Sister Maureen Judge would have snapped her ruler in half during this crazy Sunday service. The priest called for blessings for my mother, and suddenly it was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Okay, it wasn't THAT bad - people did not screech bug-eyed and open-mouthed. But they held out their hands, open, palm down, and some closed their eyes as if concentrating really hard on the holy rays would intensify them.
That struck me as a little creepy, and that's from within the cultural context of my Catholic upbringing, not speaking as an atheist.
The surprise party was a big success, and everyone loved the audiovisual presentation my daughter helped me put together. But the combination of anti-abortion airplanes, followed by surprise masses featuring magical mystical juju just made me feel like I'd fallen down a rabbit hole...
So the big event that I couldn't hint about was my mother's surprise 70th birthday party. I recently hooked her up with a laptop computer (something which I expected to do just AFTER finishing that snowman in Hell), so I figured if I made any careless mention or hint of the event, my mother would choose the next hour to try out this google-whatisit and see if her son had one of those blog-thingies...
The event was very successful, due in no small part to my sister's deep neuroses which led her to devote who-knows-how-many hours to making every detail perfect.
For my part of the perfection, my sister asked me to put together an audiovisual slideshow of my mother's life. This was to be based on photographs that my sister obtained by sneaking into our mother's house and stealing photographs from her albums while she was at work. (See, I'm not using the word "neuroses" here lightly.) Due in no small portion to my own neuroses, I ended up dedicating most of last week to getting the thing put together - and that was with the more than able assistance of my dear daughter, without whom the slideshow would have involved a casette tape playing "Memories" while Irfanview walked through the photo directory.
Interestingly, I found myself putting my laptop to full, even clichéd use. On Thursday afternoon I sat on the bus home from work, and imported all the scanned, enhanced, and cropped photos into Windows Movie Maker (which is to Apple's iMovie what Frankenstein is to Adam, but it got the job done). On Saturday morning I started converting the final version of the movie to DVD format while my laptop was hooked up to the second monitor in my office. I switched it to single monitor mode, carried it out to the car, plugged it into the power adapter in the lighter socket, and drove most of the way up to my sister's while the video conversion process kept running, and the computer didn't crash once. A-mazing.
While the computer chugged away on car power on the way up to my sister's place, we spotted an airplane overhead towing a lovely banner entitled "10 Week Abortion." Lovely. What a day-brightener that was. I wondered how many starving kids in Africa could have been fed on the money being used to fly that banner around and change nobody's mind.
When we arrived at my sister's place no plan survived contact with the enemy - in this case, technology. The DVD's that worked fine in my crappy old DVD player at home would not read in my sister's crappy new DVD players. Apparently one advantage to buying cutting-edge DVD technology was getting all sorts of features for cheap, like the ability to read Windows-formatted filesystems. As the technology improved, DVD manufacturers apparently began to save money by pulling features like that out of the DVD players while keeping the price the same. I tried it in her downstairs DVD player, I tried it in her upstairs DVD player - no luck. And I knew my sister's home computer was going to be no help whatsoever when it displayed the "Windows 98" banner upon bootup. May as well try to play a WMV file on an abacus.
Fortunately the laptop saved the day again - I plugged her desktop monitor and speakers into the Vaio and ended up with a functional presentation medium. I PROBABLY could have attached the laptop directly to her wide-screen TV, but the altar was set up in front of it and got in the way of testing.
Yeah, the altar. More on that tomorrow.
The contractors are apparently 99.9% done. They're done to the point where we can make almost full use of the new bathroom, including showering and bathing. The only things we can't do is pull toilet paper off the roll (not up yet), hang towers on the towel bar (not up yet), or pull the shower curtain closed (ditto). Still, that's pretty good, and I'm lookiing forward to heading home from work to see the improvements. Maybe even take a bath!
Otherwise this weekend includes a thing-I-can't-mention. It's unmentionable because the chances of the person involved learning of it here are one in a zillion agaist, yet should I mention it then Murphy's Law declares that this person would, in fact, look here. But preparations for the something are underway and a full report will follow.
Otherwise we will continue to repopulate the upper floors of our home, even as we continue preparations to take our trip to Germany. Speaking of which, I really need to continue to work on my German language tapes... "Ich verstaen zie nict. Ich verstahe Sie nicht..."
Not so long ago I wrote a blog entry about Japan's Hayabusa probe, which attempted to land on an asteroid, sample it, and return to Earth. This probe ran into some trouble, but ground control seems to be getting a grip on things and may be able to resume operations. The fact that this mission can even possibly recover from such a serious problem is a testament to the skill and engineering genius behind its design and operation.
But my concern voiced last November has not been addressed. The world needs to consider what it will mean when we can routinely land robotic probes on asteroids. An article posted on Space.com today explores one idea, which is to use such asteroids to deflect other asteroids.
French scientists want to land a robotic probe on an asteroid and maneuver it out to a Lagrange point, one of the locations in space where the pull of the Earth is balanced by the pull of the sun, so that something placed there will follow the Earth in its orbit without a lot of perturbation. Then if a threat is detected, Lagrange asteroids could be moved into position to shatter or deflect the threatening body.
The author (and presumably the French) see this idea as the possible solution to the infinitesimal threat of an asteroid striking the Earth during our particular sliver of the historical record. What nobody seems to see is that it's much more likely that the ability to maneuver an asteroid would be used to imperil the Earth, rather than save it.
We're at the bottom of a very deep well, and people are talking about sending robots up out of the well to start shoving rocks around. How long until somebody tries getting a robot to shove one of those rocks INTO the well where we are all standing?
The next arms race could be a Japanese or French robot guiding a rock into a precision de-orbit over anyplace. The next arms race could be every space-capable or nearly-capable country launching robots to seize control of the nearest asteroids, lest somone else do so.
I don't have any answers, but all these excited "triumph of science" articles seem to be overlooking this dangerous possibility. Given that the US treats its space program like the redheaded bastard child, we could find ourselves in a very vulnerable position. It's not too much to imagine China, Japan, Russia, even France, having the capability to launch robotic probes to nearby asteroids, and then positioning them to threaten anyplace on Earth.
Even the United States.
In a world that emphasizes the flashiest weapons, it would be good to remember that the first weapons were probably rocks. And dropped from outer space, rocks would be even more deadly than a penny dropped off the Empire State Building... and a lot more likely than a natural asteroid hitting the Earth anytime during this historical epoch.
According to my spouse the commode is actually in working order. The commode has no seat, so as far as I know it has not been "broken in" yet, so I'll have to go pick one up this evening and take care of that detail. A full report will follow, with photos...
Seriously, this will be a welcome improvement if it has finally happened. I've waited up to 45 minutes waiting for every other member of my family to leave the bathroom available. This isn't with me standing knock-kneed at the door, just when I was in another room with a mind to visit, and noticing that the room was continuously occupied for that long.
Yes, we're almost finished up there. The closet and bathroom need doors, they need to put a mirror over the sink if they haven't already. And the tiling around the tub must be finished before the tub can be set: that's been the big holdup, the tiling is taking forever. And then it's all over but the paying... which will NEVER end, ack!
Okay, you know you're showing your age as a nerd when you can take offense at a Saturday Morning Cartoon. But, seriously, I caught an episode of this when I woke up this morning and it is dreadful.
I never knew imagination could be a zero-sum game, but this cartoon makes me think that somewhere in Hollywood a writer went into the supply closet, lifted the lid off the jar of "Imagination," and only found the dusty scoop inside. So he went back to the drawing board and started pasting together this show from the scraps on his desk
It's basically a bastard grandchild abandoned by its parents. Its grandparents are the X-Men, the Teen Titans, the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Warner Bros. 'Looney Tunes' cast, who were held down and DNA-sampled against their will.
The X-Men is the source upon which many of the demonstrated Super Powers are based, including Ace Bunny's optical blasts from Cyclops, Lexi Bunny's telepathic powers from Jean Grey, and Nightcrawler is still hunting Danger Duck to get his teleportation back. Heck, I just realized that the Tasmanian Devil is simply the X-Men's 'Beast,' right down to the color. The Teen Titans were the original builders of the towering superhero dwelling in which the Lunatics reside. At least, it looks like the "T" shaped Titan building after 771 years of dessication and neglect.
The dialog was lifted directly from the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, right down to the tiresome and incessant pizza jokes. And of course the characters have a creepy Looney Tunes heritage: a glance at the characters provides a semi-recognition akin to spotting your second grade teacher atop a drag-queen float at the Pride Parade.
Daffy Duck is the truest character to form: egotistical, vain, and not terribly bright.
Bugs, or "Ace", is off somehow: in the first episode they trot out the "Duck season/Rabbit season" joke in an homage to the original, but it doesn't work.
"We WILL take over your world!" says the Mighty Morphin Power Viking villian.
"No you won't!" says Bugs, er, "Ace."
"Will!" "Won't!" "Won't!" "Will!" "Won't!" "Okay, have it your way!" Yeah, heh. Heh.
Hrm.
The most disturbing characters are Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. As a kid, I always found the British-accented speaking version of Wile E. rather disturbing. Even as a child I understood that the whole POINT of the cartoon was the pantomime. So when Wile E. started talking in a fruity British accent, well, the old teacher-on-the-float metaphor comes to mind.
He's the same here, without the accent, but even worse is the Road Runner, transformed into a high-speed babbling kid with ADHD.
In the Sixties a politically-correct Hanna-Barbera introduced a bastardized version of Tom and Jerry. The two formerly-murderous foes (upon whom Matt Groening based the bloodthirsty "Itchy and Scratchy") began strolling about in synch with each other, smiling vacantly and engaging in Good Deeds. As a child I was concerned that they had been lobotomized with a brace-and-bit. A tech-talking Wile E. Coyote teamed up with a moronic Road Runner, well, it's like the whole world is turned upside down...
I watched this caffeine-and-saccharine program, and I pictured Bugs. He would quietly watch these flying, blaster-shooting crazypeople, gnawing on his carrot, tracking the action. Then he'd peel a banana, toss the skin on the street, and the villain would go down with a crash, landing in a vat of quick-hardening cement. Bugs would walk up to the creatures head, poking up out of the block and say, "What's up, Doc?" No fuss. No need to get stressed out. No need for blasters.
Sigh. Is nothing sacred anymore?
Okay, that was a long walk.
Yesterday I left work a little early because, well, because there wasn't really any reason to stay. My 3:00-4:00 meeting had wrapped up at 3:30, with most of the members commenting to me at one time or another "Who schedules a meeting at 3:00 on a Friday?" Of course, that was the only reason I was able to schedule them, because despite getting nothing done most of the time, my coworkers keep their schedules packed full of meetings.
Anyway with an extra half-hour on my schedule I decided it would be a good day to try walking home from work.
I wanted to catch up on my exercise because twice this week meetings with the contractor in the morning have led to my needing a lift in order to get to work on time, meaning no bicycling. Then of course I went to see my doctor yesterday to get my meds refilled, and my weight hasn't gone down at all despite a couple of months of regular bicycling. (On the other hand, my blood pressure and cholesterol are stellar. Ah, modern pharmacology.)
Since it was a Friday I was wearing my sneakers at work, so this seemed like a good day to try walking home.
Honestly it wasn't TOO bad. Unbeknownst to me there was a storm front coming in, piling the heat and humidity ahead of it, so that it got hotter and muggier with every step. Fortunately I passed through two public parks with water fountains on my journey. It took me exactly 70 minutes, as measured by listening to Stephanie Miller. I subscribe to the podcast of the daily radio show, so I listened to the 40-minute Hour 2 and 30 minutes of Hour 3 before reaching home.
Seventy minutes of walking through the humid heat did add up though, and I was truly "footsore" by the time I slogged home. Fortunately the basement is nice and cool in any weather, so I headed downstairs to stand in front of my office fan: I was wiped out. I recovered enough by about 9 p.m. to carry my wife's desk back up to our remodeled bedroom with my son's help, but for a while after I got home all I could do was sit in my chair.
Meanwhile of course the remodeling continues. The tiling in the bathroom wasn't completed, so the fixtures couldn't be put in - despite promises that we would have the toilet and sink this weekend.
Back when we started this process in March I had imagined having a yard concert with Ellis sometime in late June or early July, long after the remodeling project was over in May, in order to have a kind of house-warming. Mentally I had scheduled it for June 23rd. Instead I'm hopeful that maybe the remodeling might be done by then.
If the remodeling is done by then, we'll have a full month to enjoy our new bathroom before leaving on our trip. Yep, that's right, it's only six weeks till departure!
No, that's lunch AND boogers, not "luncheon boogers." Isn't that better.
Lunch was nice, a stroll through the City Center's decimated "mall," and down Nicollette past the Farmer's Market.
>SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
In the mall I stopped in to Sam Goody, which used to be a music-and-electronics store, but which has now devolved into a near-perpetual "Going out of business" store. Honestly, it has been going out of business since March. I've saved hundreds of dollars on the discounted merchandise, mostly by not buying any.
>SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
I go in, I browse, I collect together a discounted batch of DVDs and CDs and video games. Then I look at it all and say "I don't need any of this, really," and put it all back. Added together, I've probably not-spent hundreds, even thousands of dollars.
Today it was tempting because the prices are marked down 80-90%. Of course, this is the stuff that wasn't purchased during the 50-70% markdown last week, the 40-60% markdown last month, or the 10-30% markdown during April. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* So the prices are very good on items such as the uncensorced, director's cut, alternate-ending edition of "Dickie Roberts", the subtitled version of "Mobile Suit Gundam 0083", or the soundtrack CD of Tom Green's "Road Trip". Only $3 or $4 apiece!
I gathered up a number of great selections that I just couldn't live without, then piled them in an empty wire-rack shelf ("For sale, $100, see manager") and headed out to the sunlight. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
The weather could not have been nicer outside, sunny and warm, breezy, not too muggy. I head out for lunch late so it wasn't very crowded. I wandered down to the Target North building on 10th street peering at the tables of fresh fruits and vegetables. SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* A street musician was playing "Tangled Up in Blue" on his guitar. I tossed a little change in his case before I realized he was faking it...
"I got a job at Rainbow foods,
Working as a cashier for a spell (>SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*)
But I didn't like it all that much
And one day the job went to hell."
Done well, that could work out clever... but it wasn't done well. He did sound a little Dylan-esque, however. And he had authentic early-Dylan hair...
Finally I saw the table I had not realized I was looking for. On the left was a table of fresh vegetables, glowing with nutritional goodness; on the right, fresh bread baked with grains hand picked this morning and ground by virgins using white marble pestles. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* In between: strawberries dipped in milk chocolate, tennis-ball-sized macaroons, pretzels dipped in caramel and then dipped in mini chocolate chips. I want to work this farm!
"What's that?" I asked, pointing.
"That's a layer of dark chocolate, then a layer of cocoanut, then another layer of dark chocolate, then a layer of roast almosts, and then another layer of dark chocolate." >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
"You had me at 'cocoanut'."
I had to head back to the office at that point because pressing issues regarding the Endless Home Remodelling Project demanded my attention. We're coming down to the final details, which means it should wrap up in only two or three weeks. Or four. Maybe five. But DEFINITELY not six. No way. Not a chance. Well, unless something comes up, but what's the chance of THAT happening?
>SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
Oh, and you may have been wondering about the green text. Well, for reasons I can't fathom, both my cubemate AND my neighbor in the cube next to my right shoulder have decided to form a booger-snorfing band. Pretty much every minute or two one of them snorfs their boogers. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* In fact ,while I was typing that last sentence, they went off in series, first the guy two feet to my left, then the guy two feet to my right. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*
This is a guy thing. >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* It must be some kind of instinctive territorial call that has set them off like this. Still, wouldn't one get sick snorfing all day long? I don't know, I don't do that. On those occasions when snorfing might be an option, I use this amazing invention called Kleenex - a product so successful that the owners of the trademark have nothing better to do than complain that people use their product name to define the entire product category. We should all have such problems.
>SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*I have no idea why one would prefer to snorf instead of simply blowing one's nose.
Since I love this job (and despite the snorfing I do indeed love this job which is paying me to blog this afternoon) I thought I would try, with these >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle* green snorf-gurgles, to convey to you, the reader, some measure of the joy I experience in a given afternoon. Shopping, strolling, listening to music, and buying hilariously expensive home-made Almond Joy bars... these factors help balance out the >SNNNNNORRFF< *gurgle*, even as I continue to bill by the hour.
And a good thing, too. Otherwise I know a couple of guys who would be getting frequent slaps upside the head with a box of Kleenex.
Well I got my acceptance letter from the University's College of Continuing Education, so now I have about a month to decide if I actually want to resume college and finish my degree.
It's a hard choice. On the one hand it would be good to have my degree, because realistically if I'm going to try to move up the career ladder into management it will be needed.
On the other hand, I've been doing this for thirty years now, and maybe I want to do something else. Granted I've got seven more years till all the kids are out of the house, and eleven or twelve until they're all through college (or at least, until I no longer feel any responsibility for helping them through college!) Realistically I'm going to need to keep working in the soul-parching confines of the technology field for that time.
On the third hand, if I go to school will I be able to write any of the books I'm working on? I'm really interested in getting one or more of these stupid things finished. I'd really like to move from the world of the cubicle-gopher to something more creative and fulfilling.
On the fourth hand, what kind of example am I setting if I don't face the challenge? My kids are going to be heading off to college, and I've already told my daughter that a girl who gets straight A's has no business trying to back out of an advanced history course. So should I back down from resuming my college education?
On the fifth hand I hated college. I have all these unreasolved issues around whether or not I have a learning disability or if I'm just a lousy student or what.
On the sixth hand what kind of example does THAT establish, running from the question of whether or not it's me or the system that doesn't work? Don't I owe it to myself to work through this? If I have some kind of disability, fine, if I don't, stop whining about it.
On the seventh hand, maybe the past is the past, and I should just accept that I'm not college material and continue to do what I've been doing, what ever that could be called...
On the eighth hand, if I give up on my career and stagnate at the current place I'm at, I'm very economically vulnerable. Only fierce determination has kept me employed all these years - if I slack off then my whole family is vulnerable to poverty. I must keep myself moving forward professionally, because the moment I stop I will be overrun by the young bucks who just entered the business, and I might never recover.
Sigh. I've got as many hands as Kali, and I feel just about as sane. Would somebody please send me a winning multimilliondollar lottery ticket so I can just retire? Thanks...
Back a zillion years ago when I started this blog (back before the gawdawful word 'blog' was coined in fact), I cited a number of people as inspiration for what was, then, a somewhat novel idea: an online diary. James Lileks (who still posts every day), Sei Shonagon (who hasn't posted an update in years), and Dack Ragus (with who I worked at the time,) and Ana Voog (who apparently still lives with multiple webcams running in her apartment 24/7.) All of them were pioneers in this blog thing.
But the other person I credited was Asia Carrera who at the time was not only a hardcore pr0nstar, but was also and continues to be a thorough computer geek. I didn't stumble across her site looking for H0t action - I stumbled across her site when researching what kind of computer equipment to buy. I mean, it's not like the pictures drove me away or anything.
Over the years I followed Asia as she went from one bad relationship to another, as she built one "buttkicking supercomputer" after another, as well as doing all her website work and online sales herself. She was proud of her investments and the fact that unlike other pr0nstars she was saving money in mutual funds and wasn't using drugs.
She went out with first one guy and then another, finally spending a lot of her emotional energy on a British lad. When push came to shove, however, the pair broke up, and a heartbroken Asia poured out her feelings on her blog.
Then she met and fell in love with Don Lemmon. They married and Asia retired from porn. They moved to Hawaii and found out that landlords don't like renting to ex-pornstars, and that life in Hawaii is nice, but expensive. Then they moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, and Asia announced they were pregnant.
Their daughter Catty was born and Asia was as happy as she had ever been online. As Catty got older, Asia and Don mulled over whether to have more children, and I e-mailed her urging her to dive in again, because kids are so great. They decided to have another child, and eight months ago Asia announced on her journal that they were pregnant with their second child. Sonograms revealed a boy, who they named Devin.
Yesterday Don Lemmon rolled his car on his way home from a business meeting in Las Vegas and died at the scene, leaving Asia eight months pregnant and with a child on her hip.
As she has done for ten years now, Asia posted the news to her blog. Another friend who reads Asia's blog sent me an e-mail to let me know.
I've never met her, and probably never will, but I feel terrible for her nonetheless. By all reports she had a hard, abusive childhood that led her to pr0nography as a career. Regardless of the industry and its foibles, she conducted herself with intelligence and character, and where many participants in that trade flame out and succumb to drugs or crime, she persevered and came out the other side in better shape than when she entered. And then just when she has found happiness and is ready to settle down, this tragedy.
It's just wrong.
So I figure, it's almost bedtime, let's blog a little something before turning in.
And I'm just sitting down to type when the side of my left knee itches, just a little bit.
So I reach down to scratch it, and my fingers come away all sticky.
I look down, and my knee is bleeding. I have this inch-long shallow cut oozing blood.
What the!? How the hell did I do THAT? I'm SITTING here at my DESK, and suddenly I have a cut?
Sigh. Blog tomorrow I guess. Off to get a band-aid!
Today's blog includes assigned reading. There will be a quiz.
A nice weekend just past. Saw too many movies. Saturday night I took daughter and younger son to see "Over the Hedge," which was just fine, very silly. It featured the unlikely pairing of William Shatner and Avril Lavigne voicing father and daughter possums.
Sunday our friend Debbie, who just got her Internet hooked up, suggested going to see "The DaVinci Code." Actress Audrey Tautou has threatened to quit acting reportedly due to the harsh criticism that the movie has been receiving. I thought the movie was just fine, and did a good job of capturing the flavor of the book. I think the some of the critics may be somewhat biased...
Between movies we visited the Lake Harriet Rose Garden after church. When we stopped for some bagels one of the women behind the counter at the Uptown Brueggers was one of the people at the downtown Brueggers that I visit regularly during the week. It was fun to be able to show off the family.
Aside from that I got a modest start on cleaning my office, and that's about it. Both Saturday and Sunday got eaten up pretty quickly. Hopefully I can get some more stuff accomplished during the week, although my experience is that I have the best intentions, but before I know it it's Saturday again.
Well, as free as I ever get. Nothing needs to be moved, as far as I am aware. The remodeling has (surprise!) encountered some delays, including the discovery that the attic drywall job I had done five years ago was a botch (surprise! -not). Turns out that at the end of the ceilings where they meet the walls, there was no stud underneath the drywall. So the contractors just taped the ends of the ceiling drywall to the tops of the wall drywall.
This is bad, since a good knock against one of these joins could snap the ceiling drywall off like, well like drywall.
So... BEFORE doing the painting (which was added on as an extra when we realized that we will never again have such an opportunity to paint this space), these drywall ends had to be cut off, studs inserted behind them, and then they had to be replaced, taped, and mudded. Basically this and the painting itself add up to over a week more delay in the project. And then there are all the access doors into the crawspaces, which were not included in the original planning. Can't leave those out, seeing as many of our possessions are IN those crawlspaces, so sealing them up would make retrieving the possessions a mite tricky.
So the remodeling continues to crawl forward or, in this case, backward. I got my application sent in to the U of MN, so that's off the plate. I think that this weekend I could actually do something of my own.
Cleaning my office will be job one: with all the moving and stuff the office has gotten quite messed up - never mind that all my clothes are hanging in the closet to boot. Somewhere in there the water company needed access to the meter... which is in the closet... so I had to pull out the shelves in the closet. It's just a mess.
I'd like to work on my book a bit, too - it's been too long since I've had any time for it. And then there's itinerary planning for the trip...
So I'm not busy this weekend... just busy!