The Aerie
Today's pics are from our visit to Nuremburg, or Nurnberg. I've got the upload process speeding up, but I still don't have enough battery time on my laptop to comment the pictures.
The first batch are our host family's children and their cat. They depart for our home in Minnesota in a few hours, so it was nice that our kids could spend time with them. These folks are wonderful people and we've really enjoyed getting to know them.
We worked on driving skills today - I drove from home to the train station and back without using the GPS. The train was an adventure, it took me a longer time than it ought to figure out how to buy the tickets.
We visited Nurnberg, where an annual festival was underway. There were street performers, of every quality from "amateur" to "superb" playing many kinds of music, including Celtic, Blues, German oom-pah, and a-capella 'Grease' medleys.
Much of the day was lost to logistics, driving, figuring out train schedules, etc., so it was kind of a short day of touring, but long on learning. At night we sat up again until midnight talking with our hosts and their very kind neighbors, so now it's 1:30 a.m. and time for me to get ready for tomorrow's adventures!
Hopefully I can take an hour or two tomorrow and add comments to these pictures. For tonight, however, I must sleep - 1:30 a.m. here! G'night!
Having a wonderful time in Germany, wish you were here.
Our host family is wonderful, very friendly and accomodating. We couldn't be luckier.
Issues with electrical power have slowed the addition of photos, but the first set is uploaded now. I brought two AC power adapters and two power strips: Yesterday my primary power strip shorted itself out somehow and took the AC adapter with it. The second AC adapter works poorly: when I plug the laptop into it, the laptop power adapter gives off an unnerving hissing buzz. Since the stores are closed today, Sunday, the onlY way to recharge the laptop was to use the car adapter that I only decided to bring at the very last second.
Add to this the difficulty of getting my pictures off the camera (a process I mistakenly thought I had working before we left) and, well, it took a while to get everything working.
But now it is! So here is our first set of photos, first of our hosts and later in the collection of Castle Wolfstein, which is the 'local, neighborhood' 13-th century castle. Our hostess used to play in the ruins as a child.
We're flying now over central Quebec at 600 miles per hour, moving opposite the planet's rotation so that our night will pass in a mere four or five hours rather than the customary eight of summer. This is a fitting metaphor for the whole of this summer, and the past year. Even life itself, if one wants to get maudlin.
Our air speed is 597 miles per hour, but our ground speed is 957 mph, suggesting that the earth is moving towards us at 360 mph, ignoring the question of the wind.
My music is set to random. I listened to Fastball's 'The Way,' something by Laura Love, and Natalie Merchant's 'Give 'em What They Want.' Then inevitably it pulled up one of my dozens of Michel Thomas German-language CDs. Of all the lessons it could have selected, it pulled up the one I have lately been working on.
When I took my aisle seat at the beginning of my flight, my neighbor said 'So are you affiliated with the Universalist Church?'
After enjoying my nonplussed confusion he nodded over my shoulder and said 'Your daughter's T-shirt.'
As it turns out, the fellow is not merely a Unitarian from Bismark, but he is acquainted with one of my colleagues in my own church.
What are the chances?
Well. we got thru security, and I'm blogging this on my cell while we wait for boarding to begin. The house was so clean when we left it that I walked around with the video camera and filmed it for posterity.
No real problems getting to the airport. Of course we watched the bus go by about ten seconds before we reached the corner, but no matter: we caught the next.
It had enough passengers that my family and our luggage had to take the front seats. Then, Murphy's Law, a handicapped passenger boarded one stop before we disembarked: ten minutes of luggage rearrangement followed. Then road construction added a block to our walk to the train, we should have just gotten off the bus when it stopped for the fellow in the electric cart.
The train to the airport was blessedly cool. Once at the station we managed to get lost due to poor signage and almost ended up walking a quarter mile to the gates.
But we got here. Security was no problem at all. Had time for a meal at Zing's
Well we're in the final countdown to launch. Months of preparation have gone into the upcoming vacation. We've remodeled the house, juggled our finances, and purged our home of more crap and junk than I am able to believe. Along the way we've studied a little German, researched a little travel, and worked together to figure out what we're doing and where we're going. All in all a good experience in and of itself.
But now we're off. Off to complete one of my goals as a parent, which is to expose my kids to the world beyond the United States borders. To show them that we are not the omphalos of existence, but merely a brash young upstart of a nation trying in many cases to teach its elders to suck eggs. I'm looking forward to explaining to the kids that this building right here, this building was old when Ben Franklin was still in a bassinet. This business was established at about the same time that the Pilgrim's landed. And this humble morticed wall was built at about the same time as he Roman Colliseum, while the natives in America hunted the plains blissfully unaware of the future.
I'm not worried about the trip, and I'm not "excited" about the trip so much as I am "eager" for it. There's a bumper sticker that reads, "Inside every old person is a young person saying 'What the hell happened?'" That's where I am. I look around and realized that despite my best intentions I settled down. And to my surprise I settled down right out of high school, really. Graduated, moved to Minneapolis, and with brief interruptions mostly just lived here ever since.
Didn't plan that. Didn't even notice it happening, really. First this was simply where college was. Then it was simply where I worked. Then it was where I was raising my kids. Alluvasudden a quarter-century goes by and it's pretty plain that I settled down a long time ago. Suddenly I'm old and I'm pudgy and what the hell happened?
But there are compensations. I have my family, who make it all worthwhile. I'm in okay shape for a pudgy middle aged white guy, could be better, could be a lot worse. And I've still got great hair. The hair helps. It allows me to forget sometimes that I'm getting older. If I grow it long enough I can maybe drag it around in front of the gray in my beard. And we've got enough money, at least for now. Can't tell in the future if the economy goes flooey, but for the time being we're doing okay.
So I'm old and settled down, but we're going on an adventure! A month in Germany isn't exactly eating bugs in South Asia or stalking wildebeast in Africa, but it's a good starter adventure. If this home-swap thing works out, maybe we'll get to visit other places around the world, a bit more challenging than a place whose language is close cousin to our own.
So we're into last-minute preparations and the making of final lists. Then we'll cram everything into a few bags, catch the bus to the light rail to the airport, and very shortly land in the Land of Chocolate!
Okay, by "shortly" I mean 11 hours later, but still.
It all started last night when The Boy launched himself onto the couch in the manner that teenaged boys are wont to do: completely without regard for the couch. There was a crack, and the couch broke again.
It had broken in this place once before - where the right side of the couch seat frame connects to the back support. Now, this couch arrived in our home under a bit of a cloud, so this is more of the same.
Anyway I woke up this morning knowing that before I got to the Big List of Stuff that needed doing before The Big Trip, I had to fix the couch.
Now, really, I told myself I was lucky. My first "fix" of the couch was a complete botch, as evidenced by its falling apart under the onslaught of Teen. Since we're swapping homes as part of The Big Trip 2006, I was happier to be fixing the couch BEFORE the trip, rather than getting an upset call or e-mail from our guests complaining that the baby fell into the couch and they can't get the baby back out.
I stood the couch on end, took off the bottom panel, ran off to the hardware store, drilled and bolted the couch back together. Much more robust repair, highlighted by two-count-'em-two completely blind parallel drill-hole alignments. What this means is, I had to slip two 4" bolts through holes drilled in two boards (the back and seat supports), but my drill bit was not long enough to reach through both boards. So I had to drill one hole, then go around the opposite side of the other board and drill a hole directly across from and in-line-with the first hole. I didn't just do this once, I did this twice.
Go me.
I refastened the base panel, put the legs back on, and around 11:00 a.m. I put the couch back on the floor. Finished! And now I could get on to the day's work of packing for the Big Trip. Sure it was a full day's work, but I had only lost a few hours and it was good that I got the couch repai...
Hey. What the hell is this water coming out from under the fridge?
Yes, that's right. Less than five minutes after I finished fixing the couch, I discovered that the hose that supplies the ice maker with water was leaking.
So... back to the hardware store for plastic tubing, then I had to turn off the water for the entire house while I fixed the leak. Of course, since I had to move the fridge it was necessary to clean up the fridge-schmutz that grows beneath there. And I got The Boy to vacuum the dust out of the fridge parts as well.
(Two asides on that paragraph. First, what the heck is it with the plastic plumbing these days? When I got the ice maker working, I was a bit tenative about the plastic hose supplying the water - with good reason, as it turns out. So what did the contractors use to build our new bathroom? All plastic tubing. I look at the feeds heading up from the basement to the second floor and I worry.
(Second aside: Why the heck do they put the heat exchanger coils on the BOTTOM of a fridge? Heat rises, so it immediately tries to get back into the fridge! Stupid design.)
Anyway, I replaced the tubing and restored the fridge to working order, finishing up around 1:30.
As I dragged myself up the stairs to shower the couch lint, refridgerator schmutz, and wood chips (from drilling) off myself, I mused about how lucky I was. I mean, really. The tube COULD have leaked while we were on our trip. We could have returned home to extensive household damage. At least that's what I told myself emphatically as I went down the basement to turn the household water pressure back on, and then crawled back up to the attic to take my shower.
Then we had a visit from some folks from Great Britain with whom we might swap homes in the future (they're in town on a home swap with another person). Then we gave the twins their belated early-birthday presents. Then I took the twins back to the stores so they could exchange most of their gifts (in order CompUSA, Target, and Barnes and Noble). And then I came home and grilled salmon for dinner.
So it was about 7:30 or so, and FINALLY, finally, I was ready to get to work on the day's worth of cleaning!
*thud*
The family plus our friend Debbie went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to watch our friend Ellis in concert. It was an excellent time, despite the fact that the museum saw fit to position the artist in a corner underneath a staircase. I guess they didn't want the performance to interfere with anyone's deep and introspectful review of the art in the lobby. She performed for a long time, two hour-long sets, and the music was as always excellent, a mix of new songs with her classics. According to her spouse Terry, Ellis has been talking to HBO about being the lead in an upcoming HBO movie, but that deal is currently only in the "idea" phase I guess and could evaporate at any time. Sounds exciting though: I had no idea Ellis was interested in acting.
Afterward we had lunch at "Rainbow Chinese" which I found disappointingly bland. My default meal at a new Asian joint is always the "hot and spicy chicken" or its equivalent, by which I take measure of the food. This was more like "bland and salty chicken."
On the way back to the car I found yet another cache of discarded music. The last time I found a folio of CDs lying open beside the Mississippi River. This time I spotted four CDs scattered in the sparse hedging between the sidewalk on Nicollet Avenue and a parking lot.
The CDs are an extremely eclectic mix. Right now I'm ripping "Pianissimo II" by Suzanne Ciani, to our household music server. I played it in the van on the trip home; breathy piano music, but it was certainly relaxing enough for driving: my levels of road rage rarely clmbed above "murderous".
The second disk is a DVD labelled "An Introduction to ODYSSEY: Features and Functionality" by Honda. It's an audiovideo training guide presumably for use with a new vehicle. I hope nobody tried to learn to use their Odyssey while watching the rear-seat DVD player... Interestingly it includes movie clips from Aladdin, Home on the Range, Miracle, and Pirates of the Caribbean, presumably to entertain the kids while the salesperson leaned on the folks.
Third is "Nu Hon: Thiet Tha" by Loan Chau. Its music varies between Lite Pop and Jazz, and is easy to imagine playing on an easy-listening station in Viet Nam. Whatever you might say about the music, Loan Chau is certainly easy on the eyes. Here she is pictured nursing a young Muppet.
The final CD is, let me get this correct: "Vong Tay Giu Tron An Tinh. Doi Song Ca: Tuan Vu, Thien Trang" If I am guessing correctly (and based on the two voices featured in the music) Tuan Vu and Thien Trang are the artists. This is much more traditional-sounding Vietnamese music, in fact listening to it made me hungry through Pavlovian association. However for all I know they're singing the instructions to the assembly of the world's largest digging machine.
Well, let's see if my guess is right. I'll just google these names and, yep, looks like Truan Vu is a pretty famous fellow. Let me click over to Google Images and see what he.. Oh my word! Oy. Well. He may be a great singer, but he certainly has a, um, singularly-qualified makeup artist. Heavens.
And that's pretty much the whole day! Came back, told myself I had a lot of stuff to do, ran one load of laundry and blogged this. A nice break from the recent hectic schedule, but tomorrow it's back to planning for the Big Trip...
On the right side of my home page (link provided for LiveJournal readers) you may notice the new "My Photo Gallery" entry. This is the result of a decision made on Friday around 11 a.m. and realized at about 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning: should I keep working with my craptacular old slideshow scripting program, or write something new?
In neither case was the program entirely new. Both programs are modifications of PHP SlideShow, a fine free slideshow viewer from the brain boys at Zinkwazi.com. My old script was pre-historic, and I had extensively modified it. It would display each image in a uniform size, clicking upon which would launch a separate full-sized browser window for viewing. It could display a link to movie files. And the first time you ran it, you could add comments which would then be saved for posterity, the idea being that the photo's author (presumably me) would do that promptly. In practice that was often not the case.
The new PHP Slideshow has many neat features, chief of which is that it uses an external template file for styling, allowing for an almost infinite variety of presentations. Unfortunately it lacked my movie-display and comment features.
So I had a choice: do I try to fix up my old craptacular software for The Big Trip, or do I undertake to re-add my features to the new, entirely rewritten version of PHP SlideShow?
I decided to dig into it, starting with comments. I discovered that the new software could show something called "EXIF" comments, which as it turns out are comments saved inside the image file. This was great, since once I added them the comments would STAY with the photo: if I sent someone a photo, the comment would be inside, ready to be retrieved. So to get that to work I needed a way to add EXIF comments to existing images, and since I plan on using this on the upcoming Big Trip, I needed both Windows and Linux methods.
For Windows I found a program called EXIFer that worked, although like most Windows programs it doesn't understand interface design. Just starting the program takes several mouse clicks, you can't drag image files to open them, and once you have hunted up a file, the comment editor is buried on a menu bar. However, a few tests confirmed that both it and the PHP SlideShow software worked together to put EXIF comments on the screen, so that's better than nothing!
For Linux I finally located EXIV2, which provided a nifty command-line utility for reading and writing comment fields, among other things.
Now this is a sweet solution, because once the comments are added to the image, they stay with the image. The same can be done with the thumbnails, and as soon as I figure out that bit I'm going to change the script to use EXIF thumbnails. But for now regular thumbnails will do.
I also stumbled into bash scripting, which I had never worked with before. I know, I know, this is like saying "Hey, I just got this thing called Cable Television - ever heard of it? It has many channels." But frankly I stay out of unwinnable battles like PC vs Mac or Coke vs Pepsi, and the mid-90's were all "Whose Shell Is Better", with sh-vs.-ksh-vs.-csh-vs.-bash and frankly I wanted no part of it. I knew sh and csh, and I decided ot wait for the rest of the Shell Wars to settle out. (Apologies to those of you who are not Unix geeks.)
But bash turned out to have tools to make do-looped scripts, something I've never gotten the hang of in other shell languages. I've done it, I've written loops, but afterwards I can never retain the knowledge of how I did it, like McCoy sewing Spock's Brain back into his head with the help of alien teaching machines.
Nevertheless a few minutes of prodding, and I had a quick-and-dirty method of adding comments to all the images in a directory:
for i in *.jpg do comment=`/usr/bin/exiv2 -p c $i` if [ -z "$comment" ] then echo Add comment for $i read comment /usr/bin/exiv2 -c "$comment" $i echo Added $i:$comment else echo $i comment is $comment fi done |
It looks for an existing comment, and if there isn't one asks for input and adds the comment.
I tried adding a feature to the script to put this functionality into PHPSlidesShow, but with no native routines for writing EXIF comments, I didn't want to start executing shell commands. That just opens up too many security holes for my taste, and besides I had other things to do.
I already had c-shell alias for making jpg thumbnails. With my new bash tricks, I quickly turned that into a thumbnail looping script. Up til now I made thumbnails by running my alias in a hand-generated csh for-loop.
#!/bin/bash mkdir thumbs for i in *.jpg do djpeg $i | pnmscale -xysize 48 38 | cjpeg -opti -progr -qual '75%' > thumbs/$i echo $i processed done |
Now, I wasn't satisfied with the lame "this is a movie" generic thumbnail I'd created for my old scripting system (see beginning of today's entry). And I knew that my linux desktop displayed a thumbnail sample frame from within .mov files. So knowing it was possible, I soon cobbled together my own version based on what I already knew (my djpeg based thumbnailer) and what I learned about ffmpeg turning out .mov thumbnail gifs.
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.mov
do
j=${i/mov/jpg}
g=${i/mov/gif}
ffmpeg -i $i -f gif -t 0.001 $g
convert $g $j
djpeg $j | pnmscale -xysize 48 38 | cjpeg -opti -progr -qual 75% > thumbs/$j
rm -f $g
echo $j processed
done
|
It's a little clumsy because for some reason the ffmpeg on my computer doesn't want to turn out jpg files. Gifs it does, so I convert them to jpeg to make an image file, and then cough up a thumbnail. However kludgy, the result worked, and I had video thumbnail files.
Now I needed to sew them all together inside the PHPSlideShow program. Like most freeware php, it is a largely-inscrutable mass of sparsely-commented spaghetti code - worse this time because a new automatically-generate-thumbnails-over-FTP kludge has been recently installed. A little studying, and I found that the entire program culminated in one line:
echo $template; |
That being the case, I figured I could try just shoehorning my own code in right before this step.
// Strip off the extension $image_movie=substr($image_filename,0,strpos($image_filename,".")); |
One problem I encountered right off was that the program was written to deal with only one pair of files at a time: an image file, and an identically-named thumbnail file in a subdirectory. But I was introducing the concept of a third file which would have an entirely different extension, ".mov" for now (later ".mpg" or ".wmv" seem likely). So I had to figure out the "substr" trick up there in order to change "filename.jpg" or "filename.tiff" to "filename".
Then the appropriate ".mov" can be tagged on the end easily enough.
// Look for .mov extension of same filename
if( file_exists( "$path_to_images/$image_movie.mov" ) ) {
// Build size-of-movie string, first see if it's "X-many K" in size
$movie_size=sprintf("%.2f", filesize("$path_to_images/$image_movie.mov")/1024);
$movie_unit="K";
// then see if it's "X-many M" in size
if ( $movie_size > 1024 ) {
$movie_size = sprintf("%.2f",$movie_size/1024);
$movie_unit="M";
}
|
I thought I was rather clever to simply repeatedly divide by 1024, rather than trying to be smart and measuring the size, and then comparing it against 1024 for K or 1024^2 for M. Just keep dividing it! Presently image files aren't commonly in the Gigabyte range, so that didn't seem necessary: I'm sure readers from the distant future of 2010 are laughing at our tiny, grainy, low-resolution movies and mere-megabit-per-second bandwidth. Scoff if you will, but at least WE don't have to put up with the escaped clones of Bill Gates panhandling on every streetcorner. Yet.
// Link to open new window to show movie (would like to size to fit)
$template = str_replace(" |
Adding the movie size is a dead necessity, IMO. Nothing I hate worse than committing to download some arbitrarily large movie file.
Anyway, that's it: the script basically says "If a .jpg file has a corresponding .mov file, link to the .mov file and show its size."
Here's a link to the revised file, my code begins at line 340.
The script works by successively replacing tags in a template file, so I had to create a new <IMAGE_MOVIE> tag in the template file as well.
Anyway, after all that coding and having it actually work, i was ecstatic. I began life as a coder thirty years ago this September, and it's nice to see I can still kludge a script given enough time. But it was time to head home at that point, so I ran out to catch the bus, and as I got on board I noticed masking tape over the paybox - the day was so good, even my bus ride was free!
When I got home I was so energized by my little accomplishment that I undertook another project that had long been delayed: building a photo gallery of my best pictures. Sorting through ALL my online pictures, even very quickly, took me till 2:00 a.m., and bedtime was further delayed when a glitch in my thumbnail script (since resolved) kept duplicating the entire contents of my gallery image directory under sequentially-numbered identical names.
However my son was having his pre-Big Trip 15th birthday party with his friends, so it's not like I would have been sleeping anyway.
As I climbed happily into bed, the warm glow of my swanky new image gallery coursing through my brain, I remembered that I had a 7:00 a.m. appointment with Red Cross Apheresis...
I made it... but that's another story...
The wife and I attended YAIGC: Yet Another Indigo Girls Concert, last night. We have recently been doing quite well on the Indigo Girls fan front: a few years back I slipped us in backstage to meet Amy at a concert, and then last October we met Emily at a presentation she held with her father (for which photograph I just spent a futile hour searching). Then after their spring concert my wife and I waited by the bus and met both of them as they walked to their bus.
So aside from having them over for dinner, we've been pretty successful as fans. If by "successful" one means "obsessive and dorky."
Last night's performance was held at the Minnesota Zoo, which was a first for me. I wasn't sure what to expect - leopards leaping onto the stage during the performance? As it turned out the setting was wonderful, and for some reason the acoustics were ideal. The volume and clarity allowed us to really hear and understand the lyrics. A little breeze would have been nice: despite being out in the open air it was as hot and close as when we attended "Pirates of the Caribbean" last weekend in an un-air-conditioned theater. But we got to see herons, crows, and the stage was even visited by a bat (rather than a leopard).
The setlist is here, it was quite a lengthy concert. The two songs of which I am most tired, "Chickenman" (which I simply have never enjoyed) and "Galileo" (which is good but of which I am quite tired) were held for the encore, where they were quite tolerable.
For big Indigo Girls fans, here's a slideshow from the performance.
I updated and modified the excellent PHP Slideshow program from Zinkwazi.com to handle movies so that I could post my short clips recorded with my Olympus 2200 digital camera. More on that soon.
Ah, and here I am at 1:53 in the morning wondering why I'm not asleep.
I get insomnia occasionally. I used to think it was from anxiety, and maybe it was. When I was getting the business off the ground I certainly had enough stress. But nowadays, actually comparatively little stress. My job is easy, the money is good, the remodeling is done and it's over two weeks til we leave for the Big Trip, so that's still far enough away to be an abstraction... if only just far enough away.
Nonetheless I'm awake.
Maybe it's the humidity or the heat. All I know is that I start to doze off, fall about 90% asleep, and then something happens and I start awake. My internal sleep-counter seems to get reset to zero, and for a while my brain things "Well, I slept, and now I'm awake!" Then sleep is useless, and I can toss in turn in bed for an hour.
As the clock advances I start to worry. My minimum amount of sleep for surviving a workday is five hours. Anything less and my jaws get sore from yawning and I'm prone to nod off if I sit still for too long. Optimal sleep is about seven hours, and I can only do five hour nights one at a time - two in a row leaves me miserable on day three.
So I lay there and worry about falling asleep, which as you can guess does not help. Should I get up, I wonder, or will I by so doing condemn myself to another hour awake when maybe I'm about to fall asleep in ten minutes? Can I get anything done (like, I dunno, blogging?) if I get up, or will I sit and watch reruns of the evening news and the Tonight Show? Should I try to do something consructive, or should I play a video game, or would that just wake me up more?
Tonight I got up. Other nights I toss and turn.
This evening has been interesting, because as I sat typing this on my wife's computer an e-mail came in from the family with whom we will be exchanging houses - it's already morning there. So I had a chance to drop a note to our future hosts/guests.
But now I've been up for another half-hour, so I'll head back up and hope that my brain is ready to settle into sleep. If not, tomorrow will be a very long day at work...
Well it's finally done. The two-month remodeling project is finally complete after only five months. And the total cost was only 20% over estimate! Yay! :-P
We're very pleased to be done with it, what with the Big Trip less than three weeks away. I knew when I scheduled the remodeling this year I had to leave plenty of time for it to run long, but even I am a little astonished at how long it ended up taking and how close to departure the final date would be. The only thing left is for the final inspection sometime this week, but all work by the contractor is done, and I've even done most of my bits. All I've got left to do is paint a shelf and cut two other shelves and the upstairs will be completely finished. Well, until the shower curtain issue can be resolved...
We got a ton of work done on this job. New kitchen cabinets were installed in March, in April the boys' bedroom was painted and flooring was installed for the first time since we tore up the carpet for the last remodeling.
In May the infrastructure for the new bathroom and office went into place, then in June we had to empty the entire upstairs of possessions, and the room was painted and carpeted and trim was installed around the windows. Finally in June and July the bathroom was tiled and the fixtures installed.
So this is wrapping up just in time for our trip. Thankfully!
Well, this is the shortest week of the year: one day between the-Sunday-before-the-Fourth-of-July, and the-Fourth-of-July. I'm at work, which today is a particular waste of time. My boss is browsing the web, which I can tell because she's sending to our group links to web pages which I have previously sent to her, and which she then bookmarked and forgot until she went through them today.
The wife and I made our list of things-to-do before the Big Trip (not to be mistaken with the the Big Trip of 2000 - this trip is twice as long and three times as far) which cast me into a state of anxiety. I addressed the anxiety by making myself do some of the biggest jobs. Yesterday's candidate was Repainting the Bathroom Shower.
The bathroom shower was in bad shape due to mold and mildew, both resulting from the weird architecture of the shower. That is, for some reason a partition wall desceneds about 18 inches down from the ceiling above the shower doors, leaving only about a 10-inch gap for steamy shower air to exit. Maybe that's deliberate, maybe there's some reason to keep it from spreading across the whole ceiling (like, maybe, a whole ceiling full of mildew). In any event the trouble has been literally growing for a while now, but I wanted to hold off dealing with it until the new bathroom was in.
But the new bathroom is working, and I was fraught with anxiety over the gigantic to-do list for this month, so yesterday I took bleach and sandpaper and paintbrush in hand, stood the stepladder upon the uncertain surface of the bathtub, and attacked.
I climbed the ladder and scrubbed off the mildew with a too-strong mixture of bleach and water, grateful several times that I was wearing glasses (but too lazy to go get my goggles). I rinsed the walls with the removable showerhead and dried them down with a towel, allowing them to air-dry a bit as well.
While it was drying I decided to see how effective bleachwater was on getting out the soapscum on the bottom of the shower. Despite my having nearly killed myself scrubbing it not too long ago, it was once again gray with sticky soapscum. Interestingly the bleachwater seemed to work and before attacking the ceiling again I scrubbed out the tub so that it too was nice and white. That was a chore I was going to pay my kids to do, so a bit of money saved.
Then I got out the sandpaper and sanded out the worst of the stains, as well as the loose paint. Some of it didn't give way, so I got out the scraper and was soon covered in five-year-old peelings of anti-mildew paint. A little more sanding and everything was ready for the first coat.
First I decided to save myself some cleanup trouble by laying the classifieds over the tub's surfaces. Then I got up with the paintbrush and put down the first coat. It didn't take too long, but in that enclosed space my brain started to get a little mildew-resistanty with fumes. It was 5:00 and the can suggested waiting two hours for the second coat, so as the rest of the family headed off to a movie, I climbed down and sat on the couch to rest.
Two hours later I snapped awake. The house was silent, it was 7:00 on the nose. I climbed back up on the stepstool and as I dipped the brush into the can for the second coat, the family arrived home from the movie - for me it was as if the intervening two hours never happened.
I finished the second coat and started cleaning up the newspapers when I discovered a tiny miscalculation. While the classifieds had kept a little bit of paint off the tub's interior, the tub had been damp: the classifieds were now imprinted on the tub in reverse. Another ten minutes of scrubbing ensued.
Finally I got the room cleaned up, except for rebuilding the shower doors. Getting those scrubbed clean is yet another item on my endless to-do list, so I've left those out for another day... We can't use the shower till Wednesday anyway...